The Birds of the Innocent Wood Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘What happened to it?’
    ‘It’s my fault,’ he said sadly. There was a rat in the shed outside and it was eating the meal, so I set a trap to catch it. But this morning when the door was open the bird flew in and ate the food I had set. The trap caught her on the wing. I hope she comes all right.’ He peered in anxiously at the bird in the box, and as Jane stood up to allow him space to look more closely, she glimpsed a shadow at the scullery window.
    ‘Who’s that?’ she asked James. He turned and looked.
    ‘Oh, that’s Gerald,’ he said vaguely. ‘He’s the farm hand. We only hired him a few months ago.’ He dropped his voice. ‘What with Daddy getting on a bit I thought we could do with the help.’ He turned his attention again to the robin, but when he straightened up some moments later, Jane was still looking out of the window at the farm hand.
    Afterwards, they went back to the dingy parlour, and when they heard the outer door close behind James’s father, James put his arm around her waist and pulled her to him. Jane leanedagainst his shoulder, conscious of the musty smell in the room and thought, ‘I’ll change those curtains: brown velvet’s too much in here.’ She could hear the ticking of the clock in the hall; but she felt that she was caught in a space and a stillness which was beyond time, so that every tick was not another second, but the same second repeated, and repeated. She kissed him, drew away, kissed him again, and then rested her face upon his shoulder.
    She could hear the wild birds clearly as they cried out over the water.

CHAPTER TWO
    She can hear the wild birds clearly as they cry out over the water.
    It is early afternoon on the feast of the Epiphany, and Catherine and Sarah are in the parlour, dismantling the Christmas tree and putting away the decorations for another year. Catherine, rather, busies herself with the tree while her twin has by now moved over to the window, where she stands idle. She made her contribution by collecting all the sprays of holly from behind the picture frames and mirrors and then burning them in the fire which Catherine had stoked up earlier.
    It is now little over a month since the cold, wet day when Sarah gathered the holly, a day recorded in her diary with a little inked star. She remembers how she hacked it from the hedge. The leaves had been glossy and dark and the fleshy berries plump and rich and as bright as blood; but now the leaves are dry and have faded in colour to olive-drab; the berries have become shrivelled by the heat of the house. As she pressed the branches down into the flames she felt sad to watch the pale dead branches burn, and the dry leaves crackle and blister and blacken, and so she turned from the fire and crossed to the window where she now stands, looking out from the warm, untidy room into the cold landscape.
    A few days after Christmas, heavy snow had fallen. Its first effect had been magical, for it fell straight down on a windless night and covered everything, absolutely everything down to the smallest leaf with a crust of airy snow which held the light and sparkled. Late on the last day of December more snow had fallen. Sarah dreaded the start of the new year, and shortly before midnight she had gone out across the farmyard and had leaned back against the gate to look up at the sky.
    January began while she was looking up at the snowflakes,and admiring them as they silently fell in the moonlight, cold, countless, beautiful. It reminded her of summer when the mayflies swarmed. The nights then were warm and dear and the little grey flies formed a living grey snow which was not silent and which did not fall, but hummed horribly and trapped her as if in a pillar of cloud. The mayflies were like one of the plagues with which the God of Israel cursed Egypt, and as she thought of summer she looked up even more ardently at the snowflakes drifting noiselessly in the cold air, and she told herself, ‘Cherish this.’
    It