The House with Blue Shutters Read Online Free PDF

pair of baggy white
     pyjamas, holding an Emma Bridgewater coffee mug with a pattern of fig leaves and staring into space.
    ‘Morning,’ said Aisling tightly. ‘Sorry, do you mind putting that out?’
    Claudia started, rather guiltily, caught out. ‘God, Aisling, I’m so sorry,’ she rushed, stubbing the end into a saucer and
     ineffectually waving her hand at the smoke, as smokers do. ‘Look, it won’t happen again. I’m really sorry. So rude of me.’
    She looked genuinely distressed. ‘It’s all right,’ said Aisling, and surprised herself by adding, ‘I used to smoke myself.
     But Jonathan hated it.’
    ‘Alex, too,’ said Claudia, with a hint of conspiratorial smile.
    Aisling disliked her even more. ‘I’ve got to get on, actually,’ she said in a brisk, housekeeper tone. ‘All the breakfast
     things are under the cloth on the side terrace. The boys can show you. Perhaps you might like a swim?’
    ‘Is there anything I can do to help? You seem awfully busy.’
    ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
    ‘Well, I’ll go and get dressed, then.’
    Aisling retrieved the exercise book from beneath three large aubergines in the vegetable basket, which brimmed at one end
     of the long oak work table. She wrote ‘Tartlets not a success (too tart?!). Mrs Laws said we have lovely home, but didn’t
     we miss England, I said this is home. Awful, really.’ On a new page, she added, ‘Welcome dinner. Froggett Family. Aperitif
     PG white with ratatouille toasts. Prawns with aioli. Poussin with citrus sauce, haricots verts, almond rice. Brouilly chilled.
     Cheese, salad.’ If she used some of the hard, sharp ewe’s cheese, she could drizzle it with the excellent local chestnut honey.
     But the Froggetts would expect a proper pudding. Aisling scribbled, ‘Baked peaches with rosewater crème fraîche.’ She could
     pick the fruit up while the boys were riding. That would have to do.

MAY 1934
    The new road into Castroux had been built in Napoleon’s time. It had been planned to pass through the village and follow the
     crest of the hill above the Landine river, through the hamlet of Saintonge, and on another fifty kilometres to the departmental
     capital of Monguèriac. The road came to Castroux and never left, a quibble in a sub-prefecture, a favour unreturned, an intractable
     landowner; no one remembered why, but it had never been finished, so the road stopped short at the corner of the church, opposite
     the optimistically classical facade of the
Mairie
. The new road formed a branch of the ‘Y’ shape of the village, with the church sitting in the crook, the old road dipping
     to the bridge across the river, and the track to Saintonge rising obliquely to the left. Aside from the
Mairie
, the new road had changed nothing in the aspect of the village, which staggered up the eastern side of the hill as it had
     done since the convent had been burned to the ground in the forgotten intensity of the Cathar persecutions. Comingup from the river, the walled garden of the nuns, bowed out with ancient, ligneous apple trees, was the first sign of the
     village. The ingenious irrigation channels of the garden had been diverted to the wash-house, which now faced the gateway,
     but herbs grew there still, great humps of sage and rosemary, full of butterflies in summertime. Though the walks had vanished
     long ago, the grass was rich, and this enclosed half-acre retained – without the quotidian business of the village-proper
     where trees that did not yield were good only for burning – an air of tapestried enchantment, as though unicorns might still
     lie down there.
    If the ghost of a hollow-eyed, white-draped nun were still to walk in Castroux, it was unlikely she would be sighted near
     the church itself, which was of a later and altogether more prosaic date. The Madonna in the Lady Chapel, a snug wooden personage
     of the early seventeenth century, was convincingly matronly, almost rotund, and though the brightness of her