The Well Read Online Free PDF Page B

the property since I was a small child. It must be one of the most isolated places.’ She smiled as if remembering something. ‘If I recall properly,’ she said, ‘it is quite pleasing there, a lovely old woolshed, a stable, sheep pens and a poultry yard. I’m wondering what sort of condition it’s in.’
    The stone cottage had four rooms with little windows looking out in four directions. There was a verandah on one side and a little porch by the yard door. The only way to approach it, apart from the rough ride over the paddocks, was by a long winding track which curved sharply immediately before coming to the yard of the cottage. The saltbush on both sides of the track, they discovered when they walked a little way along it, had grown over in places but it looked as if it would be possible to drive through.
    â€˜We’ll go back by the track to find out,’ Hester announced. ‘The Toyota,’ she added, ‘can get through anything.’
    All the windows of the cottage were broken and the verandah was rotten but Hester declared it was all worth fixing. The landscape was stark, ugly even in its bareness. Near the boundary fence there were, at intervals, groups of trees making thin patches of shade.
    Hester explained that a corner of Mr Borden’s land came down to this corner of her land. ‘To get to his place,’ she said, ‘would take a couple of hours – but not if you head straight across the paddocks.’ Katherine, who wanted to have another look inside the cottage, was not concerned about Borden’s land. ‘Just another quick look Miss Harper, dear. I just love the place. I could just see us sitting here at the back door. We’d make a little garden – ever so pretty.’ Hester was amused, as usual, to hear a slightly different accent. She never corrected Katherine’s idiom realizing that possibly life in an orphanage, a convent orphanage, might require a person to adopt a little method of defence. An accent was certainly that.
    â€˜See here, Miss Harper, dear,’ Katherine was scraping at the earth, ‘there’s been a garden here once, you can see the edging stones.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Hester said, ‘and over there is an orchard.’ She shaded her eyes to look across the yard at some gnarled almond trees. ‘I think some of them are apricots,’ she said, ‘and the one nearest is an apple and right behind look like pears and quinces.’ An ancient and faithful legacy, she thought, the trees might still blossom and bear fruit. It gave her pleasure to think of the planting done by an honest and hard-working shepherd who wanted to grow fruit in the time spared from tending his flocks.
    Hester, looking again at the line of big trees in their groups along the boundary fence, remembered her father explaining to her once that trees growing like that suggested that there was water flowing under the earth, probably over a rock face a long way down. These old trees, he said, more than likely had their feet deep in sweet water. He said this and other things so often that Hester, long ago, stopped listening, though today she told Katherine about the trees reaching water that was often beyond the reach of men.
    Across the yard at the side of the substantial shearing and woolshed was a well. It had been dry for years and was partly covered with a lid made of sections of corrugated iron fastened on to timber. The well was very wide and was built up with a coping of hand-hewn stone. The coping wall was a comfortable height for anyone wishing to sit down and rest.
    Hester and Kathy sat in the sun on the wall of the well and ate their lunch and agreed readily with each other about moving out from the farmhouse and into the shepherd’s cottage. They talked happily imagining how they would make a little garden, a border each with bright flowers and attractive weeds. It would be possible, they thought, to coax a