The Wilding Read Online Free PDF

good night’s sleep during which I did not once see the ghostly figure of Robin Dymond beckoning from the road.
    I smiled to myself, being well satisfied with the letter, which had cost me some pain to compose. Seemingly simple, it was a masterpiece (I thought) of cunning: it conveyed everything I needed my parents to know and gave the impression that they had approved my visit, yet there was nothing my aunt could interpret as sying.
    A maid brought in rolls warm from the oven. At the scent of them the spit rose in my mouth; I reached for one and ate eagerly.
    My aunt stared at me. ‘Don’t gulp hot bread like that, you’ll get a bellyache! Didn’t your mother teach you?’
    ‘We don’t have anything like these at home.’
    ‘What do you have for breakfast, then?’

    ‘Stale bread, fried up.’
    My aunt was pacified.
    ‘You must understand letter-writing very well, Aunt.’ I already knew, from her talk at dinner the day before, that her education was among her favourite topics. ‘Did my grandfather teach you?’
    ‘My father was a learned man,’ she said as if this was news to me. ‘My grandfather couldn’t keep him at home, but he had him schooled and sent to the university, and found him a place as tutor to Sir John Roseholm when Sir John was a boy. It lasted until the Roseholm family moved to France; my father was unwilling to leave England, so that was the end of that. He then went to tutor the sons of a rich merchant and was most handsomely paid. They wanted him for his blood, but he was also –’
    ‘For his blood ?’
    ‘My father was the natural son of a gentleman. That’s why he couldn’t be kept at home,’ she explained as if to an idiot.
    ‘My parents never spoke of it,’ I said lamely.
    ‘Oh – well –’ she dismissed them with a wave; they were not of noble blood. She had at last told me something new, and interesting in its way; I could now trace her pride back to its roots.
    ‘Yes, my father taught me,’ she went on, returning to my question. ‘He wished for a son to breed up and send to some nobleman’s house where he too could have an opening in life, but it wasn’t to be, so he taught me instead. He said I had as much mother-wit as any boy.’
    ‘Did he teach you everything?’ I asked. ‘Latin, Greek?’
    ‘A little. Mostly he gave me learning suited to a woman.’
    I wondered whether she ever used this learning; as far as I had been able to see during the short time I had been in the house, she did nothing herself but left it all to the servants. Perhaps she meant music and French rather than the household arts.

    My aunt was still engaged in the contemplation of her own glories. ‘He called me his little Amazon, said I was born to be a lad, and had I been, I’d have beaten most of them from the field. Whereas my sister –’
    She stopped.
    I had never heard of this sister before. ‘Wasn’t she as clever as you, Aunt?’
    ‘She was a foolish, pitiful creature.’ Aunt Harriet frowned as if to end the talk, but my curiosity was aroused.
    ‘Was she? What did she do?’
    ‘She died,’ my aunt answered, as if that were proof of her sister’s folly. My thoughtless question must have distressed her, for she rose from table.
    ‘Forgive me,’ I murmured, but too late; without further ado she left the room. I dared not follow and sat, angry with myself, drumming my fingers.
    After a while I looked up to see the maid standing awkwardly opposite me, as if unsure how to proceed. Concluding that she was a new servant, as yet unpractised, I gestured to her to take the things away.
    I had not, before this, paid the girl much attention – she had been nothing but a curtseying form behind a dish of rolls – but now, as she gathered up plates in the crook of her arm, I was able to study her. She was nothing like our maid at home. Alice was a stout, familiar creature whose solid presence gave promise of comfort. This girl was wiry and so straight in her bearing you might