Black Marsden Read Online Free PDF Page B

child, Clive. And I want a child. I want a child I tell you .” She had become quite childish, even outrageous in her insistence on this, but I sensed an exertion of will on her part pitted against Marsden’s personality.
    “Would a child,” I said so softly it was doubtful whether she heard, “turn you into a real woman?”
    Jennifer may have been intrigued by the question for she appeared to fade a little—to lose something of a virtuous crescendo of blood in resisting Marsden’s clutches—his brainchild, his spirit-child in her. It was ironic that she appeared to fade when she should have blossomed in her own right. He (Marsden) was a phenomenal lover, I began dimly to sense, few men could dislodge even when they seemed most prosaically and realistically ascendant.

5
     
     
    Goodrich made his way from the Market Cross towards St. Giles, then past the old Parliament where a statue of Charles II trampled the grave of John Knox. Then along the Royal Mile past the house of Knox, past the site of the ancient Flodden Wall inscribed into the roadway. Many years had gone by since he first came this way—long years that stretched back to around 1950—long years before he won his fortune and settled in Edinburgh. Now it was interesting to look back to that first occasion when passing along this ancient roadway a grim spirit seemed to address him from the jumbled houses overhead and from each narrow wynd or close. And flags of suspicion fluttered it seemed to him then in the washing suspended from windows high overhead.
    The Royal Mile looked now quite different: almost mild, almost relaxed, almost genial. There were shops with wares and items from many parts of the world. An Indian woman passed him in a saree. Then a group of laughing young women, maxi-skirted, mini-skirted. And yet though exotic layers of Spring and Summer were here, and the threatening garb of Winter had been rubbed out, there remained a strange brooding mixture of presentness and pastness embracing all historical seasons inserted into the place.
    He came to the end of the Mile and Holyrood Palace. There was a bath house near the gate associated with Mary, Queen of Scots. Arthur’s Seat—the site of a long extinct volcano he believed —dominated the scene in the background.
    The impact the palace made on him was one of private and public spaces so rooted in history he was filled with a sensation of intense apparitions—naked apparitions in search of density and cover. How could one defend privacy at the heart of a crowded court or world or city except within enigmatic patterns of identity—scandal, intrigue—tabula rasa theatre? As though the very ground of besieged personality asserted itself under certain pressures in forms of intrigue and counter-intrigue. It was this assertion perhaps of secret resistances, secret alliances that compensated over-burdens and grew into the heart’s blood of desperate romance.
    He recalled now as he stood in the courtyard how on his way to the palace he had idled into a bookshop, opened a book by Flora Grierson on Edinburgh and read:
    “Here was a city swarming with life like a bee-hive, wherein class distinctions must emphasize themselves boldly, or completely disappear; where criminals could lie undetected, even outside the sanctuary provided by the Abbey, and men like Deacon Brodie carry on for years their double lives of respectability and crime without fear of discovery. Here every type of person lived cheek by jowl, using the same dark staircase for every kind of illicit purpose, coming and going by the same front door. Private houses had grown so rare that Mackenzie, looking back on his earlier years from the greater seclusion of the nineteenth century, felt justified in giving them a paragraph to themselves.”
     
    He flipped the pages and came to:
    “Twisted and tangled was medieval Edinburgh: modern Edinburgh should be straight and tidy. The old town had adapted itself to its site: the new town