Cuckoo Song Read Online Free PDF

and awkward hills, the railway could be brought to Ellchester.
Everybody called the bridges ‘a miracle of engineering’. They had changed everything and brought money to the city, and now his was one of the best-known and most popular names in
Ellchester.
    Triss never saw the Three Maidens hove into view without feeling a surge of pride. As the Sunbeam turned on to the broad highway that ran alongside the gleaming expanse of the Ell towards the
hunchbacked, grey-tiled mass of Ellchester, she craned forward until she could see the river-bridge’s arch. Today, however, the surge of warmth was followed by a bitter aftertaste, as she
remembered the overheard conversation and the newspaper article. If somebody
was
trying to frighten her father, did it have anything to do with his work?
    Triss’s father did not steer into the busy, hillocky heart of Ellchester, with its maze of bridges and zigzag steps. Instead he drove into the quieter districts, where grand three-storey
houses were arranged in squares, each with a little park in the centre. The Sunbeam pulled up in one such square in front of one such house, and on the back seat Triss let out her breath slowly.
Home.
    As she followed the rest of her family through the front door Triss felt her heart sink. She had expected everything to click back into place once she was home. The crowded hatstand, the waxed
parquet floor and the twilight-yellow Chinese-style wallpaper were familiar, or felt as if they should be, but the click did not come.
    ‘Oh, now, who did that?’ Triss’s mother pointed at at some little flakes of earth on the smooth, clean floor. ‘Which one of you forgot to brush their feet?
Pen?’
    ‘Why are you looking at me?’ exploded Pen. Her glance of incandescent rage, however, was darted at Triss, not her mother. ‘Why does everybody always think it’s me?’
She thundered away up the stairs and a door could be heard slamming with shattering force.
    Their mother sighed. ‘Because it always is, Pen,’ she muttered wearily, pinching at the bridge of her nose.
    ‘Margaret will take care of the floors when she comes in tomorrow,’ said her husband, placing a reassuring hand on his wife’s shoulder. Margaret was the ‘woman who
did’ for the Crescents, coming in to clean for a few hours each morning.
    ‘Oh – I must warn Margaret that we have returned early,’ their mother said with an exhausted air. ‘And find Cook and tell her that we are home after all and will need
her. I had told her that she could take a few days off while we were away – if she has gone to see her sister in Chesterfield, I do not know
what
we will do. I must make sure that
Donovan girl has moved out, and send letters to the recruitment agency, asking them for another governess. And if I do not send word to the butcher and baker, there will be no deliveries
tomorrow.’
    Triss’s recollections stirred. The ‘Donovan girl’ was Miss Donovan, the Crescent daughters’ last governess, who had just been turned away for being ‘flighty’.
Triss’s mother had given previous governesses notice for ‘dumb insolence’, for being ‘too confident’ or for taking the girls out to museums or parks where Triss might
catch a chill. Triss no longer bothered much with the governesses. If she let herself like them, or care about their lessons, it was a wrench when they left.
    ‘Celeste,’ Triss’s father murmured in a quiet and deliberately even voice, ‘perhaps first of all you could look to see whether any new letters arrived for us while we
were away.’
    Triss’s mother cast a puzzled look towards the empty basket where the family’s post was always kept, and then realization seemed to dawn in her spring-blue eyes. She wet her lips,
then turned to Triss with a warm, soft smile.
    ‘Darling, why don’t you run upstairs, unpack your things and then lie down for a while?’
    The very picture of meekness, Triss nodded and headed up the stairs. As she stepped