Read Online Florence and Giles by John Harding - Free Book Online Page B

plants suddened me an inspiration. Of course, there was more than one plant! I was at the wrong pot. I blindmanned my hands before me and felt about and came upon another pot, the twin of my first encounter, and sure enough, there were my candle and matches. I paused and put my hand to my brow, which was slick with sweat, even though the night was cold and my feet frozen on the bare boards.
    I struck a match and lit the candle, found the door to Mrs Grouse’s sitting room and swifted inside, closing the door quietly behind me. I stood and lofted the candle, surveying the room, to check it was empty, for my mind half expected to find Mrs Grouse sitting there, waiting and watching to catch me out, canny old fowl that she was. There was no one.
    I overed to the desk, set my candle down carefully on top of it and sat in its owner’s chair. The brass handle of the left drawer was cold and forbidding to my touch. My big fear was that Mrs Grouse would have discovered its unlockery and locked it again. For I had no idea what she stored in there or how often she opened it. Why did she keep it locked in the first place? Perhaps because the household money was kept there. And if so, what if she had needed some today to pay a tradesman or the servants? I deep-breathed and pulled. The drawer yielded, although very stiff and unwilling. I slid it out slowly, gritting my teeth at its complaining rasp, feeling sure the whole household must be woken by it. But I could not wait to listen, for inside I saw a single object, a large,leather-bound book, its layer of dust testifying to its long undisturbery.
    I swallowed and gingerlied it out, as if it were some holy relic, some saint’s bones that, roughly handled, might turn to dust. I placed the book on the desk and opened it and saw at once what it was, an album of photographs, such as the one Mary had once showed me, of all her family, going back years.
    The first page held but one picture, a man in a business suit standing in front of Blithe House. I instanted who it was, for it was the same face as the painting on the turn of the stairs: my uncle. He had the same bold stare, the same slight play of amusement about his lips. I turned the page. Here he was again, but this time pictured in some photographer’s studio, next to a potted plant. Beside him stood a woman in a white dress, a beautiful woman, her arm linked in his, smiling too, but with a free and easy happiness, not at all like the man, who, looking again, I saw was pleased with himself, like an angler prouding it alongside some big fish he has landed.
    I turned the page and found another picture of my uncle, again with a woman, but whether or not it was the same woman, I could not tell, for the photograph had been cut, a ragged square hole where the woman’s head should have been. This shivered me in the silent night and I over-my-shouldered, suddening a feeling of a man standing there with a knife as if to do to me what had been done to the woman in the picture. There was no one there, though already I began to see shapes in the shadowy corners of the room. I looked again at the photograph, at the decapitated woman, and calmed me a little, telling myself it was quite understandable, that someone had removed her head to place it in a locketor some such. It did not sinister in the least. Then I turned back to the first photograph and then once more to the second. The women were not the same person, for the first woman was taller, much taller than this one, which I could see despite the absence of the second’s head. She must have been shorter by half a foot.
    I turned the page again. Once again my uncle and the second woman, and again she had no head. Then a third picture, this time with the woman holding a baby, a small baby by the look of it, swaddled and swamped in a long white shawl. Again the woman’s face had been cruelly cut. I turned the next page and there was another picture, the same as the last, except that now a