Du Maurier, Daphne Read Online Free PDF Page B

bed.
    “My father was hanged at Exeter—he had a brawl with a fellow and killed him. My granddad had his ears cut for thieving; he was sent out to a convict settlement and died raving mad from a snake bite in the tropics. I’m the eldest of three brothers, all of us born under the shadow of Kilmar, away yonder above Twelve Men’s Moor. You walk out over there across the East Moor till you come to Rushyford, and you’ll see a great crag of granite like a devil’s hand sticking up into the sky. That’s Kilmar. If you’d been born under its shadow you’d take to drink, same as I did. My brother Matthew, he was drowned in Trewartha Marsh. We thought he’d gone for a sailor, and had no news of him, and then in the summer there was a drought, and no rain fell for seven months, and there was Matthew sticking up in the bog, with his hands above his head, and the curlews flying round him. My brother Jem, damn him, he was the baby. Hanging onto mother’s skirts when Matt and I were grown men. I never did see eye to eye with Jem. Too smart he is, too sharp with his tongue. Oh, they’ll catch him in time and hang him, same as they did my father.”
    He fell silent a moment, gazing at his empty glass. He picked it up and put it down again. “No,” he said, “I’ve said enough. I’ll have no more tonight. Go up to bed, Mary, before I wring your neck. Here’s your candle. You’ll find your room over the porch.”
    Mary took the candlestick without speaking and was about to pass him when he seized hold of her shoulder and twisted her round.
    “There’ll be nights sometimes when you’ll hear wheels on the road,” he said, “and those wheels will not pass on, but they’ll stop outside Jamaica Inn. And you’ll hear footsteps in the yard, and voices beneath your window. When that happens, you’ll stay in your bed, Mary Yellan, and cover your head with the blankets. Do you understand?”
    “Yes, Uncle.”
    “Very well. Now get out, and if you ever ask me a question again I’ll break every bone in your body.”
    She went out of the room and into the dark passage, bumping against the settle in the hall, and so upstairs, feeling her way with her hands, judging her whereabouts by turning round and facing the stairs again. Her uncle had told her the room over the porch, and she crept across the dark landing, which was unlit, pass two doors on either side—guest rooms, she imagined, waiting for those travellers who never came nowadays nor sought shelter beneath the roof of Jamaica Inn—and then stumbled against another door and turned the handle, and saw by the flickering flame of her candle that this was her room, for her trunk lay on the floor.
    The walls were rough and unpapered, and the floor boards bare. A box turned upside down served as a dressing table, with a cracked looking-glass on top. There was no jug or basin; she supposed she would wash in the kitchen. The bed creaked when she leant upon it, and the two thin blankets felt damp to her hand. She decided she would not undress, but would lie down upon it in her travelling clothes, dusty as they were, with her cloak wrapped round her. She went to the window and looked out. The wind had dropped, but it was still raining—a thin wretched drizzle that trickled down the side of the house and smeared the dirt on the windowpane.
    A noise came from the far end of the yard, a curious groaning sound like that of an animal in pain. It was too dark to see clearly, but she could make out a dark shape swinging gently to and fro. For one nightmare of a moment, her imagination on fire with the tales Joss Merlyn had told her, she thought it was a gibbet, and a dead man hanging. And then she realised it was the signboard of the inn, that somehow or other, through neglect, had become insecure upon its nails and now swung backwards, forwards, with the slightest breeze. Nothing but a poor battered board, that had once known prouder days in its first erection, but whose white