Down the Garden Path Read Online Free PDF

blouses I held them against my face for a moment before putting them down and picking up the note which I knew was underneath. Dad had repeated its message accurately, and indeed I already knew it by heart.
    It was the lettering I studied now. Did it slope backwards because written left-handed by a normally right-handed person? The paper was a pale mauve and still faintly Devon violet-scented. Fergy considered “smelly paper” horribly common, something my mother could never be—so was this another ruse to mislead, or was there some hidden meaning? Dad would not have minded if I kept the letter but I wanted it to stay in Mum’s drawer.
    When I was putting it back I remembered something else. Reaching under a pile of petticoats I pulled out the little hot water bottle which had kept me snug and warm in my basket. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding it in my hands, I felt comforted again; not only because of its associations but because there was something jolly about it. A small stone flask, not more than six inches long, shaped like a monk—a tubby, smiling-faced monk, one eye closed in a wink.
    “You’d help me if you could,” I said, patting his bald pate, and we huddled together on the floor until the shadows took over the room and Fergy called me down to tea.
    Often, until I went away to boarding school, I would go up and talk to my friend the monk, and I never quite forgot him even after I found a more substantial friend—one who argued more, was given at times to daunting criticism of my behaviour, but who was almost as good a listener. Harry.
    Harry Harkness lived with his widowed mother, Vera, at the other end of Vicarage Lane. And if that makes him sound like a knock-kneed bookkeeper and her a grey-haired old lady complete with rocking chair, nothing could be further from the truth. Vera was a chestnut-haired vamp, who had buried two husbands and divorced a third. Harry, son of number two, was a gorgeous chestnut-haired vampire. Ten years older than I, he had an evil reputation for sucking the breath and guts out of everything female within a twenty-mile radius.
    We met when I was twelve, home for the holidays. My dog, Slobber, ran off one afternoon while taking me for a walk. Slobber was doing the drawing room scene that summer. On this occasion he entered the Harknesses’ drawing room through their French windows with me in hot and muddy pursuit. Vera wasn’t present, but Harry was entertaining a lady who, from the various items of her clothing scattered around the sofa, suffered from the heat.
    A squeal and a flurry of cushions blotted out my horrified mumbled apology. The lady fled the room and, moments later, the house. I never saw her again. Harry told me afterwards that she’d moved to the Outer Hebrides. He may have been joking. That was part of his charm for me—I never quite knew when he was being serious or what he was thinking. He was also a superb host. Minutes later Vera came in and, while she chatted to me, Harry rustled up a splendid tea of sausages, bread and butter, and rock buns. Having sat in a tin and been forgotten those buns certainly lived up to their name, but dunked in mugs of steaming tea they were really quite good.
    That afternoon stands out as one of the happiest days of my childhood after Mum’s death. I found myself telling Vera and Harry about her and about my birth mother. (Increasingly, the latter was becoming a fantasy figure to me, endowed with beauty, brilliance, and charm of international proportions. In this I was spurred on by my schoolfellows who now thought my foundling history at once deliciously romantic and pathetic.)
    My special friendship with the Harknesses, mother and son, had begun. Harry, of course, was more than a friend. He was my hero, the stuff of which schoolgirl dreams are made. And as time went on, hiding my monumental crush from him, under a mask of a tomboyish younger sister, took more and more doing.
    At last I decided that perhaps what