Read Online Some Old Lover's Ghost by Judith Lennox - Free Book Online

impending death of the old squire hung like a pall over the village. There was a stillness in the air, a sense of nervous expectation. Though the de Paveleys’ property had diminished during the decade and a half since the end of the Great War, Edward de Paveley still owned a row of cottages in Southam and many of the fields that surrounded it. Though to Tilda the squire and his daughter were no more than faces glimpsed in a passing car, she, too, sensedthe unease that had become a part of the heat and dust of high summer.
    To Daragh, Tilda confided her ambition to be a nurse; and he in turn told her of his plans to buy a little bit of land – his own, no-one else’s, not rented, but bought. To Tilda, and only Tilda, he spoke of his last difficult months in Ireland – the mess he had made of his life there, his decision to leave, and to start again.
    Aunt Sarah recovered only slowly. Returning to Long Cottage after a stolen half-hour with Daragh, Tilda found her aunt waiting at the door, still in her nightdress, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders.
    ‘Is he gone yet?’ said Aunt Sarah.
    Tilda stood motionless, her heart pounding. Words darted around her head as she searched for a way to make her aunt understand what Daragh meant to her. Before she could answer, Sarah Greenlees spoke again.
    ‘Have they put the black up?’
    A moment’s panicking incomprehension, and then Tilda understood, and shook her head.
    ‘There’s no mourning in the shop window. Mr de Paveley must still be alive.’ Relief mingled with astonishment that Sarah, who had never taken the slightest interest in village affairs, should appear to care about the ailing old squire. Tilda tried to take her aunt’s hand and lead her back into the house, but Sarah shook her off. When Tilda went out to the garden to pick beans for their supper, she found that she was trembling, so she lay on the grass, letting the warm sunlight wash over her. The rooms of the cottage had seemed small and dark, and Aunt Sarah had become, for a fraction of a second, someone unfamiliar and disturbing.
    When Edward de Paveley died on the last day of July, Sarah Greenlees took the witches’ bottle from its hiding place beneath the floorboards, and kissed it. Then she went to bed and slept for twelve consecutive hours, her first uninterrupted night’s sleep since she had returned to Southam.
    Waking the next day, listening to the church bell tollingfifty-four times – the age of the dead man – Sarah felt as though a heavy load had fallen from her shoulders. She had not realized how much it would hurt her to return to her birthplace. She had come back for Deborah. And for justice. Sarah believed in justice. Not conventionally religious, she nevertheless saw that there was a natural order in the world, an order which, imperilled, could distort the future as well as the past. Once, when she was a little girl, Sarah had knocked over a bottle of elderberry wine on the draining board, and that bottle had felled its neighbour, and that the one beside it, until half a dozen bottles had crashed to the floor, the child watching aghast. Sarah knew that what Edward de Paveley had done was like that, that its consequences were not yet finished with, they would echo through generations.
    Pinning a flat black hat, slightly greenish with age, to her hair the next morning, Sarah called Tilda in from the yard, and told her that they were going to church. To Tilda’s amazed protests, she made no response. They were going to church to attend Mr de Paveley’s funeral, and that was that.
    In church, Sarah led Tilda boldly down the aisle. The villagers stared at them, wide-eyed and foolish, some of them the same people who hadn’t lifted a finger to help Deborah all those years ago. Sarah sat three pews from the front, behind the publican and his wife. She disliked churches. God was outside in the skies and the seas and the meadows, not imprisoned in a dark, cold stone building. She sat up