Read Online Long Live the King by Fay Weldon - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Fay Weldon
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next village for help.
One way and another it was a full hour before engines from Lacock and Bath arrived. By then most of the able-bodied males of Yatbury were there with hoses, buckets and axes, doing what they could to save church and barn, but to no avail. No one thought to make sure that those in the Rectory had been alerted to danger: it was a surprise to everyone when flames leapt from the barn roof to run down the Rectory walls, devouring dead ivy on the way, to catch the window sills of the ground floor, crack the windows, suck out the heavy velvet curtains, belch them back in again, in flames, and let in a funnel of air to turn the wide central staircase into a furnace and pour heavy smoke into adjacent rooms.
And where was the family? The firemen checked the master bedroom with its big curtained double bed and, finding it empty, assumed the occupants had escaped: no one had told them there was a child, or indeed a maid. The firemen turned their attention back to the barn: the hoses ran dry: the wind howled. Rain did not fall, but ill-fitting hoses had turned hard ground to sucking mud. Confusion reigned. There seemed to be no one in charge. Putting out flames was one matter: seeking out and imposing their will on the Rev. Hedleigh’s life, even to save it, seemed too complex a matter to undertake.
It was fortunate for Adela that Ivy and George came running up to the house when they did: one quick look showed Ivy both that the house was alight and that the family had not escaped to the garden. She hustled George round to the back of the house, and pointed out Adela’s window on the first floor, above the back stairs to the kitchen annexe. Flames were flickering round the back door of the annexe and the handle was already hot. George seized it and turned it nevertheless; but the door was locked. He shouldered it open with one powerful thrust and crashed through to the corridor. Flames followed him down the passage; he looked back to find them leaping after him up the stairs like hounds determined to follow their master, come what might. He outran them.
Ivy directed firemen to the two small attic bedrooms where the Hedleigh parents slept, two separate rooms for two hard, narrow beds, and two single horsehair mattresses. The rescuers had to find ladders and manoeuvre them into position in slippery mud and sudden driving rain. It all took time which the Rev. and Elise, alas, did not have.
The Rescue of Adela
Adela slept: her dreams were troubled, sometimes of fairy princes, sometimes of monsters, often the one melding into the other. She had been reading The Blue Fairy Book in bed, and fallen asleep reading, a silly thing to do. She needed to stay awake, in case she heard her mother’s foot on the creaking stair, first one from the bottom, which gave Adela time to push the book under the mattress and pretend to be asleep. Not that the book had been specifically forbidden but Ivy had given it to her the Christmas before last, spoils from her own mother’s market stall, and one look at the curly blue swirls and slender, waiting maiden of the cover, and Adela had hidden it at once. It would put ideas in her head, it would lead her astray, whatever astray was. She knew the book by heart by now, every illustration, the lineaments of every fabulous dragon, monster, pretty maiden, cruel stepmother and damsel in distress, as delivered in pen and ink by Henry Justice Ford. She was the beautiful miller’s daughter, tormented by the hideous goblin, Rumpelstiltskin. Perhaps she was the goose girl, once a princess until her maid betrayed her, waiting for the prophecy to come true: that she would bear the queen’s daughter. However one worked that out. Snow White and Rose Red, bear and dragon, came and went in her half-waking dreams, and tonight more than ever. She was hungry. Ivy had forgotten the cream, and the sugar: she, Adela, thank you very much, might as well go hungry as eat dry bread. Come to think of it she would
One way and another it was a full hour before engines from Lacock and Bath arrived. By then most of the able-bodied males of Yatbury were there with hoses, buckets and axes, doing what they could to save church and barn, but to no avail. No one thought to make sure that those in the Rectory had been alerted to danger: it was a surprise to everyone when flames leapt from the barn roof to run down the Rectory walls, devouring dead ivy on the way, to catch the window sills of the ground floor, crack the windows, suck out the heavy velvet curtains, belch them back in again, in flames, and let in a funnel of air to turn the wide central staircase into a furnace and pour heavy smoke into adjacent rooms.
And where was the family? The firemen checked the master bedroom with its big curtained double bed and, finding it empty, assumed the occupants had escaped: no one had told them there was a child, or indeed a maid. The firemen turned their attention back to the barn: the hoses ran dry: the wind howled. Rain did not fall, but ill-fitting hoses had turned hard ground to sucking mud. Confusion reigned. There seemed to be no one in charge. Putting out flames was one matter: seeking out and imposing their will on the Rev. Hedleigh’s life, even to save it, seemed too complex a matter to undertake.
It was fortunate for Adela that Ivy and George came running up to the house when they did: one quick look showed Ivy both that the house was alight and that the family had not escaped to the garden. She hustled George round to the back of the house, and pointed out Adela’s window on the first floor, above the back stairs to the kitchen annexe. Flames were flickering round the back door of the annexe and the handle was already hot. George seized it and turned it nevertheless; but the door was locked. He shouldered it open with one powerful thrust and crashed through to the corridor. Flames followed him down the passage; he looked back to find them leaping after him up the stairs like hounds determined to follow their master, come what might. He outran them.
Ivy directed firemen to the two small attic bedrooms where the Hedleigh parents slept, two separate rooms for two hard, narrow beds, and two single horsehair mattresses. The rescuers had to find ladders and manoeuvre them into position in slippery mud and sudden driving rain. It all took time which the Rev. and Elise, alas, did not have.
The Rescue of Adela
Adela slept: her dreams were troubled, sometimes of fairy princes, sometimes of monsters, often the one melding into the other. She had been reading The Blue Fairy Book in bed, and fallen asleep reading, a silly thing to do. She needed to stay awake, in case she heard her mother’s foot on the creaking stair, first one from the bottom, which gave Adela time to push the book under the mattress and pretend to be asleep. Not that the book had been specifically forbidden but Ivy had given it to her the Christmas before last, spoils from her own mother’s market stall, and one look at the curly blue swirls and slender, waiting maiden of the cover, and Adela had hidden it at once. It would put ideas in her head, it would lead her astray, whatever astray was. She knew the book by heart by now, every illustration, the lineaments of every fabulous dragon, monster, pretty maiden, cruel stepmother and damsel in distress, as delivered in pen and ink by Henry Justice Ford. She was the beautiful miller’s daughter, tormented by the hideous goblin, Rumpelstiltskin. Perhaps she was the goose girl, once a princess until her maid betrayed her, waiting for the prophecy to come true: that she would bear the queen’s daughter. However one worked that out. Snow White and Rose Red, bear and dragon, came and went in her half-waking dreams, and tonight more than ever. She was hungry. Ivy had forgotten the cream, and the sugar: she, Adela, thank you very much, might as well go hungry as eat dry bread. Come to think of it she would
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