Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

was rather perplexed at her grandmother making such a commotion about such an ordinary happening. Perhaps she was annoyed about the numbers of the whist drive being upset.
    Grandmother Willoweed took a sip of port, and looked with her lizard-like eyes over her glass.
    “Well, my dear, a key wouldn’t have been much use in this case; this was a peculiar kind of nosebleed. It went on and on until the bed became filled with blood—at least that is what I heard—it went on and on and the mattress was soaked and the floor became crimson; it went on and on until Mrs. Hatt died.”
    She took another sip of port.
    “Yes, Mrs. Hatt is dead now.”
    She looked hopefully at Emma to see if she was sufficiently shocked and surprised.
    Emma remembered Mrs. Hatt’s comfortable figure and the brown plaits twisted round her head. She recalled helping her make marmalade last spring. Would all that marmalade be wasted now? People couldn’t eat dead people’s marmalade, surely—and the Christmas puddings hanging up in her kitchen? Doctor Hatt couldn’t very well have a merry Christmas eating his dead wife’s pudding while she was lying so cold in the churchyard. Emma saw her grandmother watching her, her trumpet already at her ear, waiting for the words of surprise and sorrow; so she did her best. But her grandmother looked disappointed.
    “You are a selfish girl, Emma, just like your mother. Other people’s sorrows mean nothing to you. I remember when the tom cat ate the salmon Cousin Tweed sent me from Scotland, your mother actually laughed—and another time when I burnt my lip on a hot chestnut …”
    But Emma had gone, so she finished her port and wandered off in the hope of finding someone who had not heard about Mrs. Hatt’s death.
    She eventually made for the potting shed, where she found Old Ives stewing a pigeon on his slow, but sure, combustion stove. Her audience was rather limited because for many years she had not left her own house and garden. She had an objection to walking or passing over ground that did not belong to her. For that reason she never visited the farms she owned. She would have had to pass through the village to reach them. Most of the village children had never seen her and she had become a terrifying figure in their minds. They thought she could hear everything they said with her ear trumpet, and that instead of a tongue she had two curling snakes in her ugly mouth. When the children grew up and some of them became maids in Willoweed House they were almost disappointed to discover she wasn’t so strange as they expected; but they told their friends how she had three freak moles all stuffed in her bedroom on a bamboo table, and that she had catgut laces in her corsets, and how they would often hear her whistling to herself in bed in the mornings when they took in her early morning tea—also that she used to eat black biscuits out of tins. They told these things in hushed whispers and they sounded sinister and dreadful. Then there were always stories to tell of the quantities of food she devoured and her raging tempers, and there were often bruises to be displayed.

- CHAPTER IV -
    O LD IVES sat in the potting shed weaving a wreath of roses and thyme for Mrs. Hatt’s grave—full bloom roses because she was a full blown woman, although she had never had a child. Ives liked to choose suitable flowers for his wreathes. He often planned the one he would make for Grandmother Willoweed:—thistles and hogswart and grey-green holly—sometimes he would grant her one yellow dandelion. Ebin was to have one of bindweed and tobacco plants. Quite often people would die when the flowers already chosen for them were not in season. Then he made a temporary wreath for them, and months later they received the real one. At this moment he could see the old woman pacing to and fro on the top path, and he laughed to himself because he knew what was worrying her.
    Grandmother Willoweed paced to and fro with her