Pastworld Read Online Free PDF Page B

reporting his sighting of her now and letting the message travel up the chain of command or he could walk back to the place where he had first seen her. He knew that there was a good chance that there he might find the secondary prize, her guardian.
    It was a cold day and he shivered as he walked, his wet rags hanging heavy on his frame. He was lucky that at the moment his tattered boots were still just watertight. If he caught sight of the guardian too, it would surely mean a reward. Not the first prize but something substantial. She had been outside all on her own and that must mean that the guardian would be trying to find her, or at least have raised some sort of alarm. Better still, there was always the chance that she might come back. In which case, he would be able to take her and him together, there and then. Simple.
    The pie seller’s pitch was not far from the red postbox where he had first seen her. He made his way back there. He felt bitter at the way she had been taken from him after he had been so close, and by a dirty conjuring trick too. He would know that conjuror anywhere, and if he ever saw him again he would finish him. When he finally reached the postbox he saw that it was half hidden under a fall of fresh snow.
    Opposite was a row of dark shops, some with bowed window fronts, and all with beautifully lettered fascias in gold script, or decorated capitals. The row of shops offered everything from groceries and ironmongery to ladies’ fine hats. There were modest lodgings and rooms above the shops. Their hipped roofs and red chimney pots peeped out in patches under the settling snow. The street looked like a Christmas card, which is just how it had been planned. The beggar set himself to wait. He stood as still as he could, shivering. His feet were numb, and his hands looked blue-white under his half-mittens. He did not have to wait for very long.
    An agitated-looking man wearing spectacles and carrying a white stick soon appeared at the top of the short flight of steps from the lodgings entrance beside the grocer’s shop. The man was untidily dressed. He wore no overcoat, just a woollen scarf around his throat and a tweed jacket. The ragged man watched the figure struggle down the icy steps of the lodging house, one hand firmly on the iron rail, the other probing with the white stick. The man’s head jerked from side to side as he looked up and down the still busy street. The ragged man watched him until he had reached the middle of the pavement, then he moved away from the postbox and fell in step, shuffling through the snow at a safe distance behind the blind man. The beggar watched as the blind man stopped people in the street, asked them something and then moved on. Finally the blind man reached the public house on the corner, the Buckland Arms, and went inside.
    The door of the public house was firmly closed. The ragged man could smell sour, vinegary beer fumes and the winter warmer, Buckland punch. The glass panel on the door had etched and engraved patterns all over it, protecting the privacy of the Gawkers. There were slivers and gaps in the pattern, little bevels and edges of clear glass. The ragged man put his reddened eye to one of the clear sections and looked in. The bar was crowded with Gawkers, men in bowler hats and checked tweed jackets, men in cloth caps and white muffler scarves, women sitting laughing together at round marble-topped tables, all red-faced and fiercely jolly in the warm amber-lit interior. The ragged man shivered, and pulled his dirty scarf tighter about his neck. The blind man went from person to person, from table to table, all along the side of the saloon bar, even talking through the little hinged and bevelled windows that opened into the public bar on the other side. He asked his question. With each answer came a shake of a head. Finally the blind man turned away from the bar, making as if to leave. The ragged man dodged back from the heavy doors. His excitement