Read Online Band of Angel by Julia Gregson - Free Book Online

twirling and twirling in a sea of organza and lace and satin, of being wound tighter and tighter in choking, confining dresses, utterly panicked and absolutely convinced she was needed elsewhere.
    The row, when it came, exploded unexpectedly. It was a mild summer evening and the air from open windows smelled of night-scented stock and new-mown hay. Father was exhausted so they’d gone to bed as soon as it began to grow dark. About ten o’clock, the dogs started barking, at first rhythmically, then hysterically, their noise taken up by a whole circle of dogs around the peninsula. Then she’d heard the thunder of cattle on the move, and the drover’s cry of Hip Hop Tro. It was such an odd cry, not like a song or a greeting or a shout, but a statement of approach and right of way, a determination to exist, as simple and elemental as birdsong. She’d lain on her bed listening in the half light, tears pouring down her cheeks. She’d never felt so lost. It was the wrong time for Aunt Gwynneth, who had moved into the spare bedroom next door, to walk in.
    “Catherine, my dear,” she said, walking toward the window. “Shut that window at once, what a
noise.
”
    She grimaced in agony.
    “
So
inconsiderate of the persons next door.” She leaned over Catherine, with a faint smell of face cream and mothballs.
    “Don’t close the window, Aunt,” she said, raising herself on her pillow. “I like it open. Thank you.”
    “Oh no, no, no.” (Her aunt pronounced it noo, noo, noo.) “It is not a matter of thank you, or what we want always, it is a matter”—she had to shout now over the noise of the cattle—“of what all of us want in the house.”
    “Leave my window open. Leave me alone.” Catherine’s voice was bloody and screaming with rage. She got on her knees and pounded her fists into the pillow.
    Aunt Gwynneth stood over her with her arm raised and her teeth bared.
    “Nobody speaks to me like that, My Lady.”
    Then Father ran into the room.
    “I was trying to help,” said Gwynneth, clutching the bosom of her nightdress and bursting into tears. “I am trying to help and she shouts at me.”
    Father looked at Catherine and Catherine looked back with a calmness bordering on insolence. He slapped her once across the cheek, making a livid mark.
    And then he hit her again.
    Gwynneth began to shriek, “Oh no! Poor child!”
    He stood at the door, glaring at both of them. “I do what I like in my own blasted house,” he said.
    Gwynneth, lopsided and crying, left the room. Father slammed the door behind him. The dogs had stopped barking outside and Catherine lay in the dark with her mouth open, breathing heavily. The indignity of being slapped was unbearable. She felt like a small, soiled, wounded animal, with no pride and nowhere left to run. She wanted to scream, a terrible scream that would make them all dash back into her room and pay attention. To hurt him as he had hurt her. “She was too young to die,” she would have told him. “And you and I killed her.”
    * * *
    The next morning there was a timid knock on the door. She shuddered in case it was Gwynneth, but it was Eliza.
    “I’ve brought you some bread and some jam and some beef tea,” said her sister in the grown-up sensible voice she used whenever she felt a fuss could be averted. She put the tray down and seeing her sister’s swollen eyes said, “Oh dear. What happened?”
    Eliza flung her arms around her sister’s neck. They hugged each other tight and Catherine, feeling herself in danger of a flood of tears that would never stop, pushed her gently away and gestured toward the tray. “You are kind.”
    “Gwynneth made the tea and Father sent me up with it. He wants to see you after breakfast. Why is he looking so unhappy?”
    Catherine squeezed her hand and said in a tiny voice. “I can’t live like this, Eliza. . . . It’s so—I’m so—I shall end up in Clytha.” Clytha was the local lunatic asylum.
    “Catherine.” Eliza’s