Hero is a Four Letter Word Read Online Free PDF

What’s up? Just want a chat?”
    “Yes. And sorry.”
    “Never you mind. You needed your time. But oh, what you’ve missed.” Jennet spends an hour hearing all about the toddler’s favorite new words (“bloody bugger piss!”) and the teenager’s sky-high mobile phone bills. It feels normal, boring, and it helps Jen find her centre again.
    “Can’t believe you have a teenager,” Jen sighs as Karen winds down.
    “I can’t believe it either. Wasn’t it just last week when we were teenagers?” Karen says, and somewhere in the background something makes a smashing sound. “Oh, for god’s sake!” Karen bawls. “Matthew, that’s it! I’m selling you to your auntie Jennet!”
    Jen laughs. “I don’t want him,” she says when Karen comes back on the line.
    “Need an heir yet, don’t you?” Karen asks, and the question is casual, but the real concern is there.
    “I don’t want to talk about that,” Jen says, softly.
    “Okay. Okay, Jen, I know … but it’s been five months since your Da, and you not being … well, with it all …”
    “That’s over, it’s done,” Jen says. “I don’t want to talk about that. I just … it’s too soon, I can’t think about that, okay? And now I’ve got this damned bed and breakfast, all this work, the paperwork, the house is always noisy and I just feel like I can’t get any rest .”
    “Okay, Jennie, okay,” Karen says. “Never you mind then. Hey, come down to ours for dinner this week?”
    “I’d like that,” Jen says.
    “Good, good, I’ll text you when later.” Another smash in the background. “ Heaven preserve you Matthew Simmons Junior! ” She yells. “I need to ring off. Sure you don’t want to buy him? Even a trade? I’ll take that handsome new gardener of yours, the one I saw wandering down by the woods? Never you mind, gotta go. Mattie —! ”
    Karen hands up before Jen can tell her that she hasn’t hired a new gardener.

    Jennet waves off the Americans as Mr. Coldwell drives them into Selkirk for their dinner reservations, then puts on her wellies and her good thick pea coat. It’s early in autumn yet, but it rained that morning and the forest is always damp and chill after a storm. And a pallid frost has been laddering up her spine since the phone call, a sense of apprehension that she just can’t to shake out of her vertebrae.
    She tours the grounds first, and doesn’t see anything out of sorts with the ornamental garden, or the kitchen patch. Mrs. MacDonald, when asked, suggests that the young man Karen saw lurking around the grounds might be the new maid Brandy’s boyfriend, a young musician named Alex. Brandy says Alex hates nature, would never go wandering in the woods if he could help it, and has only ever been up to Carterhaugh to pick her up from work.
    Jen remembers the sound of his motorbike, the voices by the back entrance, the glimpse of riding leather and dark hair sticking out of a helmet. No, he didn’t seem the type to just take a walk through someone else’s property to pass the time.
    Crossing the plain, Jennet avoids stepping on the milk-white scars in the earth that her predecessors had named fairy-circles. Not because she fears them, or even really believes in them, but because it was just respectful. Habit. Her Da had always walked around them, so Jennet does too.
    So too would her heirs if she ever … goddamn it .
    Stepping into Carterhaugh woods is like stepping through a mirror. Or, at least, it is what Jennet thinks Alice must have experienced, how she had imagined it when she’d read Through the Looking Glass . The air is suddenly chillier; the colours are a bit more muted, a bit bluer; the world is lined with silver and diamonds where a good, hearty Scottish mist clings to the ground brush, and dew and moisture sparkle on the flat leaves.
    Her breath plumes between her lips, and a frisson of something else slides across her skin, tries to get up under her cuffs and collar. Her Da had told her so