Read Online Funeral Music by Morag Joss - Free Book Online

for this evening and for trying to get her going again. It was not his fault that she did not feel any further forward. And tomorrow might even be a nice day, she thought, switching off her bedside light at midnight and, in the dark of her room, enjoying for a moment the silence that followed the stopping of the rain.

CHAPTER 3
    ON SATURDAY WHEN Sara got up just after seven o’clock the day was bright, although clouds were gathering in the west over Wing-o’-the-Hill. She left the cottage when the morning shadows were still long and walked into the aftermath of a botanic bloodbath. It had rained again in the night, and at dawn an unseasonable wind had swept through the valley, striking the massive crimson heads of all the late peonies in the garden with the swiftness of a cat’s paw. Their petals lay across the paths like scattered feathers. Sara made her way up the garden, kicking the flurries of petals, inflicting upon herself the pain of a closer inspection. Almost every one had been wrecked. The blossoms would only have had another week or so to go anyway, but the knowledge did not lessen her sense of violation.
    She cruised into town in ten minutes, left the car in Manvers Street and was at the doors of the Roman Baths on the dot of nine o’clock, just as George, the chief security attendant, was unlocking them. He grinned at her.
    ‘Whoah, glutton for punishment, you are. Can’t you get enough? Last out, first in, I don’t know. What’s your problem?’
    Sara pretended offence, a necessary part of the game she had to play with George, as she explained her errand. She had met George several times in the course of rehearsing last night’s programme, since the Pump Room acoustics were atrociously difficult and James arranged a couple of sessions after hours, during which they had been able to work at getting a good balance. George had been asked to listen and report back from different points in the room, and in his new role as sound advisor he had become outspoken and pally to the point of banter.
    ‘Leaving all your clothes behind, is it? I see. I ’spect it’ll be in the office, then, but it’s locked on Saturdays. Yes, I’ve got the key. Look, I was on till late last night and I’m a little bit behind this morning. Can you give me ten minutes till I’ve opened up below?’
    ‘Sure,’ Sara said. ‘You go on. Don’t hurry. I wouldn’t mind a wander round anyway. I’ll come and find you a bit later, shall I?’
    George strode on ahead of her, unlocking doors, switching on lights and whistling good-naturedly as if (as it effectively was out of hours) the Roman Baths were all his, but that he did not mind a bit letting other people have a look-see. Sara hung back until, the whistling fainter and George out of sight, she had the place almost to herself. Three Japanese girls with backpacks lingered happily on the terrace above the Great Bath to take endless photographs of one another beside the life-sized stone statues. Sara hung over the stone balustrade, marvelling at the steamy green pool beneath, and then strolled on into the half dark of the museum below. As she descended closer to the spring, the warm, humid air rose around her. She felt none of the cynical unease that she had felt round the Great Bath the night before. It was good to be in town so early. She might have coffee afterwards in the Pump Room and she would stay in town a little longer to do her shopping. She might go off for a run when she got home, just a couple of miles, or she might go out to Fortune Park for a workout and swim instead. She made her way through the museum, enjoying a desultory reading of the earnestly informative wallboards.
    She came to the part devoted to burials and stood looking down over a row of rough stone coffins whose engraved lids had become the biographies of long-dead people’s lives. The carved stones told the stories of lost soldiers, mourned wives and the slave’s little baby, who was ‘freed’ by