The Flight of Swallows Read Online Free PDF Page A

move away. She looked so unutterably sad – was that the word? – as though she had a troubled mind and he knew that Ginger, who was older than Dottie and Floss, sensed it by the way she leaned against the girl’s leg. He glanced away to collect his thoughts, his very strange thoughts, and noticed, almost absently, great flocks of rooks and starlings down on the fields of Holly Farm and a pair of beautiful bullfinches in a hawthorn bush. Spring was coming, he thought absently. The gorse on the moorland just beyond the fields had been in blossom but the sharp frosts of the past week had nipped off the bloom. It had been a mild winter up to then and the hazel catkins were out. He saw this with the part of his mind that was not occupied with the drooping figure of the girl who had hurtled so precipitously across his path and who was beginning to make her slow way back towards the wood that led to the Mount.
    ‘Miss Drummond,’ he called out and she turned back to him.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Do you ride?’ he asked, astonishing himself.
    ‘No.’ She was astonished too. ‘My father won’t . . . we have no . . . No, Mr Drummond, none of us has been allowed to ride. My father does not believe in it. At least not for his children!’
    ‘You just walk, you and your brothers . . . in these woods, perhaps, or . . .’
    ‘I really must go, sir. I am pleased to have met you.’
    Her young dignity touched him in the way the tumble of her hair and the compelling colour of her eyes had done.
    ‘Then good-day, Miss Drummond.’
    He caught Max by the rein and gracefully mounted him then, without a backward glance, put him to the gallop back the way he had come. The last Charlotte heard of him was his voice.
    ‘Come, Ginger, come, Dottie . . . Floss.’
    Ginger glanced back at her then raced to catch up with the others and her master.
    She didn’t know why but she often found her thoughts returning to that day when she had met Mr Drummond at the edge of Seven Cows Wood. During the next few months she sometimes thought she heard his voice coming from downstairs when her father gave a dinner party, wondering why it should remain in her memory and still be so clear that she should recognise it. She and Robert, and sometimes James, would hang over the banister to watch Father’s guests arriving, noticing particularly one very pretty woman who seemed to appear frequently. She wore the most gorgeous evening gowns in pinks, blues, reds, a rich ruby which was a particular favourite in honour of the coming coronation. They were ‘two-piece’, with a skirt and bodice, the bodice neckline square-cut or round and low to show the tops of her splendid white breasts. They had transparent sleeves or what was known as an angel sleeve, a long square panel floating from the armhole and reaching almost to the ground. The bodice was decorated with beads, or spangles or artificial flowers, another gown with silvery lace and ribbons of silver tissue, all from Poiret in Paris, though Charlotte was not aware of it. Very expensive, she was sure and absolutely up to the minute. She had a tinkling laugh which was often heard above the polite conversation around the dinner table and once coming from a dark corridor that led to the back of the house and was seldom used since it gave access only to the gun room. It mingled, strangely, with that of their father. She was, so Kizzie told them, the daughter of a baronet.
    It was in April that she saw him again. She was walking with Robert in the little spinney that lay on the edge of Father’s property and through which ran a tiny stream, a particular favourite with the boys. There was a graceful willow covered all over with great golden catkins around which bees were humming busy gathering pollen, and stretching as far as the eye could see was a vast carpet of wild daffodils.
    ‘Look, Charlie,’ Robert called to her as she sat herself on a fallen tree trunk, dreaming of nothing in particular, ‘look