Read Online Land Girls by Angela Huth - Free Book Online Page B

the cup, returned to his chair. For peace, he thought, he may as well.
    ‘There’s the small one,’ he said.
    ‘Name?’
    ‘Prudence, they call her.’ He judged it not worth referring to her as Prue, as the others did. The implications of a nickname would be bound to set Edith’s fears alight.
    ‘Huh!’ She was easily offended by mere names. Her indignation came as no surprise. ‘What’s she like?’
    What was she like? Ratty asked himself. Prudence was the one with a face like the girls photographed in newspapers on the first day of spring. Small, but frightening. He wouldn’t fancy time alone with her.
    ‘As I said, not large. Nothing to write home about.’
    Ratty had intended to say something more definite about her, to assure his wife that the girl, young enough to be their granddaughter, was no threat of any kind. But he feared that silent cogitation, striving for the right description, might itself inspire further suspicion. He need not have worried. For some reason Edith was not interested in the idea of Prue.
    ‘And the others?’
    ‘There’s the medium one, the one I took to Hinton in the cart with the milk. Not much experience in harnessing up.’
    No point in saying she’d been mighty quick to learn, that one. He’d shown her what to do his side of Noble: she copied quick as a flash on her side. And lovely manners. All polite remarks about the countryside, on their way to the village, and doing more than her fair share of unloading the churns. Nice face, too. He liked her.
    ‘Name?’
    ‘Stella.’
    ‘Nothing like Cousin Stella?’
    Ratty shook his head. Edith’s Cousin Stella was the nearest to a witch he knew. No comparison with this girl. He smiled at the thought, knowing his wife, in her quick glance, would misunderstand his expression.
    ‘You lay your hands on a Stella and it would be incest ,’ snapped Edith in the furious voice she used for her most illogical remarks.
    ‘No fear of that.’
    ‘And the last one?’
    She was suspicious, here, Ratty could tell. How could she be suspicious? He cursed her instincts.
    ‘The tall one. Agatha. Ag, they call her.’
    ‘Much taller than you?’
    ‘Good foot,’ he said, permitting himself the exaggeration of an inch or so.
    Edith contained a sigh of relief. ‘You’ve never liked a tall girl.’
    ‘No.’
    Foxed her! Ag was the one he liked even more than Stella. He’d studied her for a long time from his unseen position in the barn. There was something about her kind, private face that had struck him. He had been intrigued by the way her short hair had blown apart while she was sweeping, so he had had glimpses of white scalp. Reminded him of watching a blackbird in a wind, feathers parting to show white skin of breast. If he’d met someone like Ag when he was a lad, Lord knows, he’d have done something about it.
    ‘Blonde?’
    ‘Dark.’
    ‘You’ve never liked dark hair, neither.’ Edith briefly touched her own white fuzz of thinning curls.
    ‘I haven’t, neither.’
    He saw the tension in Edith’s body slacken. She held the darned sock away from her, admiring the woven patch she had accomplished with such speed and skill. It would go unacknowledged by Ratty, like all the darns she had held up over the years. It wasn’t that he lacked appreciation, but words to express it froze before he could utter them. Hence the constant disappointment he caused her.
    ‘And what did they make of you?’
    Ratty sucked on his empty pipe. Although he had anticipated this one, no firm answer had come to mind.
    ‘We chattered nineteen to the dozen, all very friendly,’ he heard himself say. Reflecting on this lie, he considered it permissible, after so much partial truth.
    Edith sniffed. ‘You be careful what you say.’
    ‘You can trust me.’
    ‘You were all sweet words when you were young.’
    Ratty shifted. This was the nearest to a compliment Edith had paid him in three decades. It made him uneasy. He could never confront her with