The Enchantress (Book 1 of The Enchantress Saga) Read Online Free PDF

and many small carts piled high with goods and children were already on the move. The roads in northern England were bad and the gypsies travelled mainly on foot or by horse, steadying the narrow carts which contained their tents and other worldly possessions. He threw the man another shilling and ran towards the gypsy settlement.
    Those who were left gazed with interest at this tall elegant gentleman, with the fair hair curling over his ears and fine clothes, looking about him. It was very seldom you saw such a person coming among gypsies.
    Brent stared at the faces gazing impassively at him, dark, canny gypsy faces. An invisible implacable wall separated them from him. What was he doing searching for a strange gypsy girl anyway. What would he do when he found her? For the first time the ludicrousness of the situation struck Brent – what a wild, madcap thing for him to do! This was why his brother George thought him such a fool. If he knew about it he would say how like Brent it was, running after a woman he’d lusted for as he’d straddled her body on the forest floor in the moonlight. How like Brent to put the needs of the flesh before anything else – his inheritance, his grandfather’s death, his very existence in this uncertain world. Brent turned away back towards the town.
    ‘Are you looking for someone, sir?’
    A tiny dark-haired creature gazed up at him out of great brown solemn eyes set in an elfin face. He was no more than ten or eleven years old.
    Brent smiled at him kindly. ‘Do you know Brewster Driver, lad?’
    The boy nodded. ‘Everyone knows Brewster Driver, sir.’
    ‘And is he here?’
    Brent’s heart beat faster again; the boy was pointing. Brent followed the direction of his finger.
    ‘Where, boy? Where?’
    ‘That was where his tent was, sir, there in that spot. They loaded the horses and moved out early this morning.’
    Brent’s eyes fixed on a long empty space between two other tents whose occupants were on the point of moving too. Brewster Driver had gone.
    Analee walked alongside the cart as the small procession made its slow way along the road from Appleby to Penrith, some thirteen miles distant. The small children ran after the riders in front, and Brewster Driver strode at the head of the horse that pulled the cart. His elder sons rode on the horses they had kept from a previous night’s forage to Delamain Castle.
    To one side of them was a river and far away in the distance the dim outline of Lakeland hills; but immediately to the east were the Pennines over which Analee had come. Sometimes a low bank of cumulus cloud made the mountain range seem very high, and at others the sky was clear and the ridge of purple-topped hills, some of them still capped with snow, was so clear that even the sheep grazing on them could be seen.
    They had camped overnight by the side of the River Eamont which wove its way towards Penrith, sometimes narrow and sometimes broad. Nearby was the huge redstone castle of Brougham, surrounded by a moat and heavily fortified. The gypsies took care to keep well out of sight of the castle and its inhabitants, caring little for the thought of the dungeons which lay below the water level.
    The second day on the road dawned fine and warm and Brewster Driver and his family set off early, while the birds were chirruping their early morning songs, to creep past the castle before the owner and his guards were awake. Sometimes wandering gypsies disappeared altogether, captured by some robber baron who slaughtered the men, raped the women and turned the children into slaves ... or so the fearful stories told around camp fires went.
    Analee felt light at heart and a little song came spontaneously to her lips. The flat, green valley through which they walked was interspersed with hillocks and copses. Well cultivated fields were watered by little streams which ran from the high ground to feed the Eamont.
    The sun came up and warmed her back bringing her a feeling of luxury