Stone in a Landslide Read Online Free PDF

talking, stroke my hair as if I were a little girl and decide that there was something he needed to do. Just having him present wasn’t enough for me. I wanted satisfaction, to work out his secrets and all that I believed he only half explained, but there was no time for us to be alone. There was always some work to be done, there was always someone to see. Maybe he didn’t feel this way, but I didn’t dare ask him in case he laughed at my worries as silly.
    Sometimes I spoke to Delina about it. Our friendship continued despite the fact that her parents had fallen out with my aunt and uncle about when to water the Fontnova vegetable garden. Delina saw things very differently to me. She believed that all men are the same, that when they have a wife safe and secure at home, they forget her. That the illusion of love only lasts two days and there’s no need to make it more complicated. I didn’t see it like that, but I didn’t know how to explain myself, how to argue againsther. I only wondered how she could be so sure of herself if she didn’t even have a sweetheart. She seemed to hold a grudge against men because they hadn’t realized what she was: a woman from head to toe, clever, hard-working and more or less as poor as everyone else. She had a point.
    But with me, Jaume had made me somebody, and I felt gratitude mixed in with my love for him. Other people often annoyed me, even the children sometimes. Work, yes, it made me feel alive, stopped me complaining and left me unable to think. But when Elvira awoke crying in the night and I’d calmed her, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I would lie thinking, going from my earliest memories as a child in Ermita to Jaume’s face smiling at me for the first time in Montsent from his father’s cart, with the following day’s work passing in and out of my thoughts, muddled and messy. And just when I felt I was dropping off, Tia would wake me, surprised that I hadn’t yet lit the fire.
     

     
     
    Our neighbours on one side were the strangest people in the village. The family was made up of a father, more or less Oncle’s age, two daughters and a son-in-law. Soledat was already middle-aged , and Tereseta had married poor Lluís two winters before Jaume and I got married. The mother had long since died, before I came to live with my aunt and uncle. Her name was Trinitat, and while she was alive her husband was as timid as a mouse. People said that she had been a woman of few words and it was even rumoured that she was a witch. She never went outside and she was only ever glimpsed spying from a corner of one of the windows, or from the open balcony when the weather was fine. People were afraid of her, but in desperate cases they’d ask her advice. She would recommend potions and say prayers. Those who had been up the very long staircase to the first floor didn’t want to say anything whenthey came back out. A good friend of Tia’s had told her that it was as dirty as a farmyard up there – dried herbs hanging everywhere, and when she left she’d seen a raven’s claw stuck to the door that made her blood run cold.
    But once Trinitat was dead, the husband began to tell all the people who had nothing to do in the plaza, the old people like him and the children, that his daughters, starting with the eldest, had a claim to the throne of England. You can imagine how this news spread through the village, completely mixed-up, because to begin with few people had the faintest idea where he meant. Instead of accepting that he was mad, his daughters followed their father in everything he did and became furious when children openly mocked Soledat as Queen Soledat. Tereseta, who was one step further away from the crown than her sister, didn’t become quite so angry but tried to set her husband on Soledat’s tormentors, shouting herself hoarse from the street for him to come. This provoked even more riotous mocking. Poor Lluís would suddenly become as deaf as a post and when his