I Capture the Castle Read Online Free PDF Page B

Father and Mother at the front, Rose, Thomas and I at the back. It was all great fun because Father was in a splendid mood goodness knows he didn’t seem to have any iron in his soul then. But he certainly had a prejudice against all neighbors; we saw lots of nice houses in villages, but he wouldn’t even consider them.
    It was late autumn, very gentle and golden. I loved the quiet-colored fields of stubble and the hazy water meadows. Rose doesn’t like the flat country but I always did-flat country seems to give the sky such a chance. One evening when there was a lovely sunset, we got lost. Mother had the map and kept saying the country was upside down-and when she got it the right way up, the names on the map were upside down. Rose and I laughed a lot about it; we liked being lost. And Father was perfectly patient with Mother about the map.
    All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though Mother wasn’t enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very excited. Mother kept saying that Thomas would be up too late; he was asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.
    At last we came to a neglected signpost with To BELMOTTE AND THE CASTLE ONLY, on it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned in at once and we crawled along with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back-I remember thinking of the Prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so high and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards ahead of us; Mother kept saying we ought to back out before we got stuck and that the castle was probably miles away. Then suddenly we drove out into the open and there it was-but not the lonely tower on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in amazement.
    How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light! I can still recapture that first glimpse —see the sheer gray stone walls and towers against the pale yellow sky, the reflected castle stretching towards us on the brimming moat, the floating patches of emerald-green water-weed. No breath of wind ruffled the looking-glass water, no sound of any kind came to us. Our excited voices only made the castle seem more silent.
    Father pointed out the gatehouse-it had two round towers joined half-way up by a room with stone-mullioned windows. To the right of the gatehouse nothing remained but crumbling ruins, but on the left a stretch of high, battlemented walls joined it to a round corner tower. A bridge crossed the moat to the great nail-studded oak doors under the windows of the gatehouse room, and a little door cut in one of the big doors stood slightly ajar-the minute Father noticed this, he was off towards it. Mother said vague things about trespassing and tried to stop us following him, but in the end she let us go, while she stayed behind with Thomas who woke and wept a little.
    How well I remember that run through the stillness, the smell of wet stone and wet weeds as we crossed the bridge, the moment of excitement before we stepped in at the little door! Once through, we were in the cool dimness of the gatehouse passage. That was where I first felt the castle—it is the place where one is most conscious of the great weight of stone above and around one. I was too young to know much of history and the past, for me the castle was one in a fairy tale; and the queer heavy coldness was so spell-like that I clutched Rose hard. Together we ran through to the daylight; then stopped dead.
    On our left, instead of the gray walls and towers we had been expecting, was a long house of whitewashed plaster and herring-boned brick,