Havisham: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

always do at the locks until the barge has nudged its way through. On horseback, galloping bareback across a plain under high sea clouds. In pattens, picking a path over cobbles to reach a friend’s door, while the air of the town fills with pealing bells, and with a commotion of birds like a squall.
    Until I remembered where I was – because embers were falling with a little rush into the grate, and rooks circled over the cherry trees outside, and the cathedral bells summoned for vespers, and because the room had grown colder around me.
    *   *   *
    I had been sent off for a few weeks over Christmastime, to a cousin of my father’s, who lived a good way off in Berkshire.
    While I was away, and during that one quiet time in the year for the brewery when work almost stopped, my father took ill. Vessels burst in his heart. That same evening he’d eaten and drunk too much at a festive dinner, and it was thought that his untypical indulgence and similarly untypical walk home in the cold air must have caused the attack.
    However it came about, he fell down in the frosty street. The first to see was Sally’s mother; she had my father taken into a cottage and best positioned to restore his circulation. She’d run off to fetch the doctor herself.
    I wasn’t to be told, but Sally wrote to me nevertheless. I left Windsor at once, pretending on my return that I’d been on my way back anyway. I found Sally’s mother tending to the patient; and Sally running errands for my father, whatever he requested her to do.
    Sally’s readmission to Satis House came about for all the wrong reasons. But I was glad: firstly that my father was mending, and secondly that I had my good friend to hand, to confide my worries to, and – after my shock and double relief – to let me cry, quite literally, on her steady shoulder.
    *   *   *
    My father was up on his feet a fortnight later. He was able to walk, if slowly for the moment, and to talk down what had taken place, telling everyone he would be back to work as usual before too long.
    *   *   *
    With Sally, it was like old times; there might not have been that two-year hiatus.
    I knew that she forgave my father, merely because she never rose to my bait and offered any criticisms of him.
    She had cut that wilful plumery, her copper hair, and she showed fewer of those carefree sun-freckles on her face. Now she was under one of the redoubtable, granite-featured housekeepers who organised domestic life in Minor Canon Row, in this case in the residence of that oily archdeacon and his astringent mother and dry-as-dust wife. Sally was worked hard, because every penny spent in that household was required to offer its full value in time and labour.
    But Sally kept cheerful. Her own mother was pleased for her, and so – I claimed – was I.
    ‘But now,’ I said, ‘you have to be my confidante as well. That’s two jobs of work, I reckon.’
    ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Whenever I can.’
    ‘I’ll be very disappointed if you’re ever not able.’
    I wondered if it could be quite the same as it used to be. We each had rules and responsibilities that were becoming clearer to us. We had little say in those; but we could surely try to stake other claims for ourselves, obeying our instincts only, about whom we called our consœurs and best friends.

S EVEN
    For my thirteenth birthday and those following, my father gave me a painted porcelain Easter egg. Each egg was valuable in itself, but the surprise lay inside. There I would find, cushioned by a velvet lining, an item of jewellery: a fire-opal pendant, a bracelet of amethysts, a pearl halter, a gold rope necklace hung with rubies, white and pink diamond earrings, a rare yellow diamond on a ring.
    In addition he passed over to me, item by item, my mother’s jewels. Those had older-fashioned settings than my birthday presents. He arranged to have a topaz necklace reset, because I had taken such a fancy to the blue markings of the