This Other Eden Read Online Free PDF Page B

does
not"
     
    All
understood the terse prayer. One by one Jenny bade them goodnight. No one offered
to stay with her. They merely took their apprehension out into the night, the
last one closing the door behind him as though in an effort to contain the
misfortune which had this night descended upon one of the citizens of
Mortemouth.
     
    Alone,
Jenny looked helplessly about. It was impossible to catalogue the precise fury
in her brain. A good man had been run to ground. In the morning a young girl
would have to endure suffering and humiliation that would test a saint, a son
had been sent off on a wild-goose chase over black moors rife with highwaymen
to plead a lost cause to deaf ears. And there was nothing she could do, nothing
she could do about any of it.
     
    Her
body gave slightly, a mere bowing of the head at first, then the softest of
collapses at the side of the still grinning Hardow. In his face was the tense
expression of a man surviving in an alien element. For a moment she wished to
join him. But unfortunately her own mind felt solid, specialized, and as
polished as oak.
     
    She
remained bent over him for a moment, rebounding with waves of hope. But when he
looked up at her with haunted eyes, spittle drooling in an uncontrollable
stream down the side of his chin, and begged in childlike tones, "Fetch
Marianne," all hope vanished. She pressed her head against his heaving
chest and gave release to the grief within her.
     
    Staring
sideways through a residue of tears, she spied on the floor, in the shadows of
the room, something white.
     
    She
tried to look more closely with failing vision made doubly weak by her weeping.
What was it? She couldn't tell, although it lay only a few feet distant. Then
she saw. It was the small stuffed elephant, Marianne's calico pet, its back
broken open in the recent melee, spilling white cotton stuffing from the split
seam of its back.
     
    She
rose laboriously to her feet and scooped up the injured toy. Quickly she found
Marianne's sewing box. Drawing a chair close to the table, she bent over the
lantern light, surveying the damage. It could be mended. It must be mended.
     
    Seeing
that Hardow dozed, Jenny drew the chair even closer to the lantern. Like
something once dormant, but now moved out of death's way, she carefully
restored the stuffing through the crack in the spine.
     
    At
twenty-five, Russell Locke was normally a reliable eldest son. He was tall and
lean, displaying the small head and potentially large frame of his father. He
lacked only filling out and that would come in the middle years, and then he
would be an exact duplication of Hartlow Locke—in every respect save one.
     
    He
had left Mortemouth at seven on Dan Trigg's fastest horse, Daybreak, a powerful
tawny-colored stallion who could race the wind. He was keenly aware of the
importance of his mission, to ride to Exeter and to return with the excise men
who paid him handsomely to keep his eyes and ears opened and report to them any
illegal operations which took place off the rugged North Devon coast. He had
performed this questionable duty for three years, not through any sense of
moral outrage. On the contrary, those who wanted to buy his silence could do so
simply by leaving a six- or eight-gallon cask of rum behind the small cottage
at Mortemouth. But after the "run," if no gift was left, the names of
the offending parties were carried directly to Exeter to the excise men, and
the culprits mysteriously found themselves on their way to Plymouth to elect to
stand trial or join the Navy.
     
    There
was an enterprise to Russell which was respected in most quarters. He would
always be paid by one end or the other, a simple, workable way for a young man always
to have the assurance of guineas in his pocket.
     
    As
he urged Daybreak through the night, he felt almost overcome with excitement.
No small fisherman this. No petty seaman bringing in more than fish in his
nets. His target now was Lord Thomas