Tess Read Online Free PDF

bear to know, she wanted most of all to punish herself. It was as if she wanted so badly to punish someone for this unthinkable – unbearably foul – impossible – act, that she’d thrash the daylights out of me for want of anyone else in the vicinity.
    And she nearly did. She held the stick high above her head. No, I won’t forget. Nothing compares with the anger of a mother. (Even if, as I was to discover later, the anger was really turned against herself.)
    The crime of your grandmother – my sister – has reverberated, as it must until the chain is sundered. The chain of passion, betrayal and revenge goes on – and your mother has abandoned you here, as unthinking as any mother who has had no mother of her own to teach her how to care for you. If she comes for you, she won’t stay long. She’s restless, your poor mother, and she can’t settle, as the swans do, year after year in the same place.
    After all, her mother was a murderess.
    But this is a sad lullaby, for a newcomer to the world. So, while I tell you that my mother poked the body again, and I went right up to it and saw the blood ooze up under the shirt, I’ll tell you as well about the swannery, and how my father loved it so much that he spent all his time there, away from the ship’s chandler’s office in Bridport, and how my mother came to hate the place, almost as if she were jealous of the swans and thought my father loved them more than he loved her (which he did, of course).
    Abbotsbury Swannery is unique in that it concentrates on mute swans: nowhere else do they breed colonially, as they do here in Dorset.
    A colony was first recorded here in 1393. The swans nest on the northern side of the saline Fleet, which is a seven-and-a-quarter-mile stretch of water – as you know, between the mainland and Chesil Bank, and itself unique in the British Isles.
    Ella walks up to me. It’s a warm, late summer day that I’ve chosen to sit on the shingle bank and tell my sister Tess’s baby granddaughter how her history goes, and Ella, still refusing school – the cut bus service only aiding and abetting her in her wish to have nothing to do with lessons which have themselves been brutally cut and oversimplified – cares little for Nature. She likes crime, romance, treachery – like you see it on TV. She says:
    â€“ What happened to that man you were telling us about, Liza-Lu? The man you said they’d find buried under the stones one fine day?
    â€“ Let me finish, I say. The main oddness, in a place as steeped in the unusual as Abbotsbury Swannery, is the colonial persistence of the swans. Most of this species nest apart from others of their kind, whereas those at Abbotsbury, nesting close to each other, then proceed to drown each other’s cygnets as soon as they take to the water. So, while there would normally be strong selective pressure to nest further apart and prevent such internecine slaughter, this pressure is mysteriously missing from our colony of mutes at the Fleet.
    Our world is overcrowded and dying.
    If you interfere with Nature, my great-great-grandmother (shewho ran a School of Witches, at Rodden) would say, Nature will come one day and strike back at you.
    â€“ So, Ella says, interested at last (probably by the tale of drowning cygnets), are the swans meant by Nature to die like that?
    And if they are, why?
    And what is the body of a man doing there, anyway?
    I’ll try to explain, Ella, but first I must tell you that a man does – and did – interfere with Nature. He was my father, John Hewitt, and he and his forefathers have been swanherds at Abbotsbury for as long as our foremothers were going on their knees up to St Catherine’s Chapel on the hill and praying to the patron saint of spinsters.
    He interferes from motives of kindness – and economy, of course.
    The procedure is to save a certain number of cygnets each year (about one