The Cuckoo's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

what are you doing out here, all alone on the moor?’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t mind being alone, and I simply felt like walking.’
    â€˜Did you, by Jove! Well, I can understand that, there’s nothing like it, up here, that’s what I was doing myself, but in the circumstances I think we’d better be getting you back. I can leg it to the house and get them to send the trap back for you if you don’t mind waiting.’
    â€˜That won’t be necessary, thank you.’
    â€˜Then may I offer you my arm?’
    â€˜Really, I’m quite all right.’ Her knee did feel a little bruised but she was not about to mention that. ‘I can actually walk better alone on this surface, thank you.’
    â€˜If you’re sure, Miss . . . ?’
    â€˜Harcourt,’ she said briskly. ‘Laura Harcourt.’ She held out her hand, and smiled.
    â€˜Tom Illingworth,’ he returned, taking her hand and looking so intently into her face, and for so long, that she began to blush. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Harcourt.’
    From the moment Tom Illingworth saw that smile, looked directly into the determined little heart-shaped face and those luminous hazel eyes, all the years he had been waiting suddenly seemed worth it.
    He apparently did not live at Farr Clough House, as she might have assumed from that proprietary ‘we’, but he had been born and bred in the valley, here in Wainthorpe. After qualifying as a railway engineer, he had gone out to South Africa to work on Cecil Rhodes’ proposed Cape to Cairo railway. Yes, she was quite right in thinking the outbreak of the second Boer War had put a stop to that ambitious project, but after the war was over he had stayed on for several years. He knew he was almost certainly talking too much about himself, but since her interested responses seemed to show she didn’t mind, he carried on, deliberately slowing his quick stride as he spoke, forcing them both to walk slowly. He had no wish to arrive at Farr Clough just yet. He was more than content at that moment to be up here, in a world inhabited only by himself and Laura Harcourt, the peewits and the wind.
    â€˜So, shall you be going back there?’
    â€˜No, I’ve had enough of South Africa. Well, it’s God’s own country, Miss Harcourt, for some, which was what it seemed to me, once. I fought there during the war, but afterwards . . . well, let’s just say, I stuck it for as long as I could, and then came home like the prodigal son. I was homesick, I hadn’t seen my mother for nine years and it seemed like a good idea.’
    This was neither the time nor the place to talk about his real reasons for abandoning his dream of settling out there in that ineffable country, with its boundless possibilities. The intention to free the blacks from the yoke of the Boer, and allow them to live under the more moderate British rule had seemed a lofty ideal, but during the war and after, the dream had turned sour. Disillusionment with the empire building of the powerful English-born diamond and gold magnate turned politician, Cecil Rhodes, and his avowed aim of planting the British flag in any country in which a Briton set foot; with conditions in the aftermath of the war; with the scorched earth policy the British army had employed, which had made refugees of Boer women and children; with the disgrace that was the concentration camps in which they were kept. He had become ashamed to be British in that country and could no longer stomach it.
    For all that and other, more personal, reasons he did not choose to think about now.
    â€˜And what will you do now?’
    â€˜For the moment, I’m looking around. This will always be home, the place I return to, but there’s plenty of opportunity for railway engineers all over the world. It won’t be difficult to find something.’ For the moment his face darkened, like a cloud