Turning the Stones Read Online Free PDF Page A

of its routines and the everyday tasks whose banality once irked me so. I can see in my mind’s eye the little flock bed in the corner of Eliza’s dressing room, where I slept. How could I have ever found it cramped and uncomfortable?
    And I wonder whether I ever had any insight into Eliza at all.
    Is she really as blind as she seems to the distancing effect that she has on her mother? Or does she employ incognisance as a tactic to protect herself from rejection? Everyone at Sedge Court sees the gulf between Mrs Waterland and her daughter.Apparently it has been present since Eliza’s birth. Hester Hart, our parlourmaid, says that Mrs Waterland had been long foiled in her attempts to hatch another child to follow Johnny, the heir. It was ten years before she managed to bring a second infant to term and then she was sorely disappointed at the out-come of her travails. Hester says that Eliza came into the world as a bawling babe with a face as red as a tomato and a persistent case of colic. Her squalls succeeded very quickly in driving Mrs Waterland from the nursery. Eliza never did master the art of sweetness. I, on the other hand, divined from the day I passed through the portal of Sedge Court, that my presence must always be a boost to the company.
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    The wind has risen. I can hear it moaning on the upland to the north like some phantom that has lost its way. Now it is bothering the new hawthorns in the hedges and their white blossom is set swirling like a flurry of unseasonal snow. There are times when things like the movement of shadows through tall grasses or a grief-stricken gust of air seem so vivid to me, almost alive, that I could take them for the shades of longpassed souls roaming among us. Do you think it possible that we might continue to exist in the universe in some form after we have left our bodies?
    I wonder this, because it seems to me that I can sense you. I feel you flowing all around me. It is an apprehension that lifts my spirits and gives me a sudden desire to shake off my self-pity and to acknowledge that Sedge Court is not Eden any longer. It is likely, in fact, that the people of that house are waking this morning to their jeopardous situation. Were not the affairs of the Waterlands badly bungled? I amremembering now that the recent news was very bad. Exceedingly bad. I am scrabbling for the details, but they won’t yet quite come to mind. Is it a collapse of financial means, though? Perhaps the servants have already been sent away and the fires are dead in the grates and the pantry empty of its victuals. I seem to feel that it may be as bad as that. In which case I am not the only one who is stranded. My heart trembles for Eliza.
    Birds are in flight now against the skimming clouds and there is a feeling in the air that all things are shifting and changing. Soon labourers will be abroad, and other travellers.
    I swerve from the road and make my way towards a stand of woodland on the crest of a hill. On reaching its shelter, I crawl under the skirts of a wide shrub. I have just enough strength to suck dew from its leaves to quench my thirst, and then nothing, not the bellowing of my empty stomach or the shivers of cold, nor my anguish, can prevent me from plummeting like a stone into the well of sleep.
    I wake much later in the deep of the afternoon without any sense of being refreshed. My petticoat smacks of the gin that was spilled on me at the Saracen’s Head and my hair is horribly stale and my bruises ache. Just now a cowherd came to the field nearby, and when he was at its far end standing at piss I stole a slice of bread and a lump of cheese from the napkin that he had left tucked under a log away from the prying tongues of the cattle. I can only eat the food in tiny bites, because my throat is swollen; but that small amount of sustenance has lifted the fog from my brain and energised my legs. I will walk to the coast if I must. What can I do but see this course through to the end?
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