The Blood List Read Online Free PDF Page B

said. ‘Without you I would have been motherless.’
    ‘Do not judge her so harshly,’ Agnes whispered. ‘She couldn’t accept the truth. She believed the changeling child to be her own and loved it as her own.’ Her bird
chest rose in a sigh. ‘My one regret is that I could not save your brother.’
    Barnaby wiped away his tears away and smiled. ‘Oh, Aggie,’ he said, ‘Abel is no changeling. He’s the spit of my mother’s kin.’
    She pulled him close and glanced furtively around. The other visitors, including Henry, were now speaking in low tones to one another. Seemingly satisfied they wouldn’t be overheard Agnes
breathed, ‘He is the image of the other child: the one the fairies took when they returned you. Besides,’ she lowered her voice until it was barely audible, ‘only a changeling
could be so odious.’
    Barnaby gave a snuffling laugh. Conversations broke off and all eyes turned on him reproachfully.
    ‘Watch him,’ Agnes continued quietly when the low chatter had resumed. ‘Bitterness and envy have blackened his heart.’
    ‘And what could such a puling weakling do to me?’ Barnaby smiled, adding, ‘besides hit me over the head with a Bible?’
    When Agnes smiled her eyes twinkled as brightly as they always had. As a child he had been afraid of her sharpness but soon enough he had learned how to soften her edges.
    ‘Now,’ she said, ‘be off with you.’
    He would not have abandoned her but now that she had given him leave he could not wait to escape the thick air of the room. She held him a moment, her fingers gripping his wrist. He held her
gaze until the blood rushed in his head, then finally she closed her eyes and her hand slipped from his.
    He was pushed back as more people crowded in to say their farewells. He hovered for a few moments until the death rattle began. It sounded oddly comical. The sort of grunting snore his father
gave after he’d eaten and drunk too much and fallen asleep in a chair. But then Father Nicholas shuffled out of the shadows and spread his black wings over Agnes’s frail body like a
crow over carrion, and Barnaby fled.
    The funeral feast was to be held in her nephew’s barn. His mother and Abel did not wish to attend; which was fine with Barnaby. Though Agnes had defended Frances, Barnaby
knew full well there had never been any love lost between the two women. As far back as he could remember the atmosphere in the house had turned to ice every time Agnes arrived, with her
characteristic five sharp raps on the door, which made Barnaby’s heart swell with happiness, and sent Abel into a wild tantrum of howling and kicking. Once he had blackened their
mother’s eye as she tried to restrain him and for that he had received a beating from Henry, despite the fact that he had only been four at the time. Even as a five-year-old Barnaby had
considered this harsh. But that was when he had loved his brother and still enjoyed trying to teach him to catch a ball and say
Please
and
Thank you
and
Juliet smells
. At the
time Juliet’s mother was their maid and Juliet and Barnaby, being almost the same age, would play in the meadows at the back of the house while her mother worked. On the few occasions Frances
allowed it they would bring Abel along with them, and Barnaby vividly remembered the moment he came to dislike his brother. Frances had given Juliet a shawl of fine silk, brought back from Arabia
by one of Henry’s business associates, and she had let Abel play with it, tossing it up into the air and letting it fall on his face so that the sunlight was diffused through its rich
colours. For a moment the two older children became distracted, trying to see who could make the most alarming screech by blowing along a stem of grass threaded through their forefingers and
thumbs. When they looked up Abel was gone. Too small to see above the tall grass they ran blindly, crying out his name but with no response. Eventually they were forced to stop catch