Eliza’s Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

I reached the cliff top and looked back, the house itself was not visible. Then it seemed huge and menacing, with two great twisted brick chimneys like wolves’ ears, and all its windows glaring at the sea.
    On the footway I was not trespassing, I knew, yet the spread of those wide, watchful windows gave me, as always, a prickle on my shoulder blades. I sped round a corner of the path. Here it led steeply, through a cleft in the cliff, down to the shore. But I turned westwards and made my way farther along the cliff top until I reached a kind of den, or nest, where I had been used to come after the departure of Mr Sam and Mr Bill. In this sheltered nook, among thistles and dried grass, and sloe and bramble-bushes, I could with luck spend hours peacefully doing nothing but watch the comings and goings of the tide.
    And the tide here was worthy of attention. A track led along the shore from Ashett, but natives of the place took it only with discretion and a number of incautious strangers were drowned every season, despite being warned. For the shore here, beyond the point, was treacherous, formed not of sand, but from curious strips of flat striated rock running in mazy patterns, many of them so regular that they appeared to be the work of man, others so irregular that they seemed like the distracted jottings of some giant pencil. Mr Sam had loved to study them from the cliff top and try to describe them in his notebook. Among these rock ledges it was all too easy to be caught by the incoming tide, for it rushed into the bay very fast, and the channels between the strips of rock varied greatly in depth and the water gushed through them in wayward spurts and torrents.
    Down below the spot where I sat, the rock strips ran in huge concentric curves like the markings on a giant oyster. Blue crescents of water showed where the tide was turning; gulls and oyster-catchers whirled and swooped and cried and paddled, feasting on the mussels and whelks and barnacles before they should be covered by the incoming water.
    . . . I sat and longed for the company of Mr Bill and Mr Sam. I remembered those words – ‘long and lank and brown, as is the ribbed sea-sand’. Perhaps Mr Bill had been looking at this very beach when they came into his mind; the curved formations could easily be the ribs of some great beast. Over the next headland a great pale lopsided hunter’s moon sailed upwards, and I remembered how dearly Mr Sam loved the moon. ‘She is the only friend,’ he said, ‘who can accompany you without walking.’
    When I am grown, I vowed, I will go in search of those two men. When I am a woman and have money of my own, I will travel, I will find them. And I made great plans for earning money; I would write plays and tales and verses, as the two men did; I would have my tales published and make a fine name for myself. And besides that, I would be very beautiful, so that people would love me and never notice my hands.
    So I sat and dreamed. And the afternoon floated by like a wisp of cloud, like the soaring moon. As for the boys and the fair, I never gave them another thought, although before I had felt no little pain at being obliged to refuse Hoby’s offer and hurt his feelings. Sometimes he came here to Growly Head with me, and when we were alone together he seemed like a different person. Yet he would soon forget his offer and my refusal, I knew, and simply dismiss me from his mind as a queer little body, full of wayward fancies.
    â€˜Child! How still you sit!’ said a voice above me. ‘I have been watching you these two hours and you have never shifted a single inch, I do believe, during the whole of that time!’
    I gave a violent start of surprise, almost, in my confusion, tipping myself over the edge of the cliff.
    â€˜Oh, ma’am! How you startled me!’
    â€˜Hola!’ she said, laughing. ‘Don’t fall down on to the rocks! Now I am sorry that I took you