Seven for a Secret Read Online Free PDF Page B

sixteenth century and the Bell House was just over a hundred years later.”
    “What about the St. Aubyn family?”
    “There are two children … well, children! Master Crispin wouldn’t like to be called that! He’ll be twenty at least. Very haughty gentleman. Then there’s the girl, Tamarisk. Unusual name. It’s a tree.
    Pretty feathery sort. Tamarisk is about your age. So you might get asked to tea. “
    “We never had tea with the people who bought Cedar Hall.”
     
    “That might have been due to your mother, dear.”
    “She despised them because they had shops.”
    “Poor Caroline. She always made a rod for her own back. Nobody cared that she hadn’t got what she once had … except herself. Well, the St. Aubyns are the important family. I suppose the Bell House people come next. Never worried me that I was brought up in Cedar Hall and now live in The Rowans.”
    The Rowans was the name of our house, so called3 because it had two rowan trees in the front one on either! side of the porch. I loved to hear Aunt Sophie talk about the village. There was the Reverend Hetherington who was ‘past it’, and I whose sermons rambled on interminably, and Miss Maud’ Hetherington, who kept the household in order, and the] rest of us as well. “Very forceful lady,” commented Aunt Sophie, ‘and;
    essential to the poor Rev. ” i I was fascinated by the group of stones which were a few miles from The Rowans. I first saw them when I rode by in Joe Jobbings’s dogcart with Aunt Sophie on the way to Salisbury to do some shopping which was unavailable in Harper’s Green.
    “Could we stop here for a moment, Joe?” asked Aunt Sophie, and Joe obligingly did so.
    When I stood among those ancient boulders I felt the past close in about me. I was excited and exhilarated, yet I was aware of a sense of dread.
    Aunt Sophie told me a little about them.
    “Nobody’s quite sure,” she told me.
    “Some think they were put there by the Druids about seventeen hundred years before Christ lived. I don’t know much else, except that it was a sort of temple. They worshipped the heavens in those days. The stones are laid out to catch the rising and the setting of the sun, they say.”
     
    1 took her arm and held it tightly. I was glad to be there with her, and 1 was very thoughtful as we got back into the dogcart and Joe Jobbings drove us home.
    I was so happy to be in this place, particularly when I looked back to the Middlemore days in the shadow of Cedar Hall.
    We went regularly to see my mother. She seemed comfortable but not quite sure what had happened to her or where she was.
    I felt sad when I left her; and, watching Aunt Sophie, I could not help feeling that, if my mother had been like her, how much happier we might have been.
    And Aunt Sophie was becoming dearer to me every day.
    There were many practical details to be arranged my education foremost among them.
    Aunt Sophie took a prominent part in the affairs of Harper’s Green.
    She had unbounded energy, and liked to direct. She kept the church choir together, organized the annual fete and bazaar and, although she and Miss Hetherington were not always in agreement, they were both too wise not to recognize the talents of the other.
    True, Aunt Sophie lived in a small house which could not be compared with St. Aubyn’s or the Bell House, but she had been brought up in a great house and knew the obligations of such and was well versed in the management of village life. I quickly realized that, though less affluent, we were in the same bracket as the gentry.
    Before I met the people who were to play an important part in my life, 1 learned something of them through Aunt Sophie’s descriptions. I knew that old Thomas, who spent his days on the seat looking over the duck pond had been a gardener up at St. Aubyn’s until the rheumatics ‘got to his legs’ and put an end to that. He still had his little cottage on the St. Aubyn estate which he used to tell anyone who was