Read Online Stone Cradle by Louise Doughty - Free Book Online Page B

again, so I will go back awhile.
    *
    Dadus and I made out all right for some years after we lost Dei but I can’t say as I remember it as a good time. Dadus hawked his kitchen goods but without the talent he had had for it before, for Dei had been behind him, suggesting all the time. And I rememberthings being hard, going from place to place. And our only joy in all this time was Lijah.
    We even went so far as to try and settle once, on Lijah’s account. We found a site over at Paston, where a large group of Lees had managed to buy a bit of land off a farmer, Lord knows how. So they were making their own little kingdom, these Lees, and they were a bit high and mighty with it but we thought we’d give it a go on account of trying to get some schooling for Lijah. I had never forgiven the vicar at Werrington for killing my mother, but I had come to the conclusion that if Lijah was going to get ahead in life when he was grow’d then a bit of heducation, as Dadus called it, was maybe no bad thing.
    We asked around a bit and found what looked like the perfect place for him. I didn’t know a right lot about schools, having never set foot in one in my life, but I was rather taken by this big old building in the middle of a field, with a church attached, just a couple of miles from the site. It was organised by nuns and I had to go and speak to them first. They were like big crows – big crows who had starch for breakfast every morning. I liked the look of them.
They’ll put ’im right,
I thought.
    First morning, I had him up nice and early and into the clothes I’d pressed the night before. He wasn’t going to let me down, I told him, or he’d catch it from me, good and proper. He was small for his age, was Lijah, with black hair and heavy brows. He often had a fierce look, for he was not the sort of child who was inclined to smile unless he knew there was something in it for him. I saw the way that people looked at him sometimes, wary like, as if he was a terrier, and I always wanted to say to them,
but you should see him when he’s sleepy, when he clamps his arm around my neck like a vice and won’t leave go, and I have to lie beside him until he’s sound asleep and if I try and move too early he cries out and pulls me closer.
    I knew nobody else saw what I saw in my Lijah, the small boy who cried out, so I worked hard to make him look as sweet aspossible that morning, so that the nuns might find him appealing and not be hard on him. I brushed and oiled his hair, and for good measure I took a comb and gave him a kiss-curl in the middle of his forehead. I do swear it was the first time in his life that boy had looked angelic.
    Before we left, I gave him a sugar sandwich wrapped in brown paper for his dinner, and a lovely little
lolli pobble,
a red apple, which I’d polished to a shine. The apple was for break time, I told him, and he was to go into a quiet corner to eat it. He wasn’t to show it to none of the other children he’d be associating with. They were only the children of the local peasants round here and they’d probably never seen such a lovely little apple and would have it off ’im soon as look at it. I was proud of that red apple, as you can probably tell, which was my undoing as it turned out.
    Anyroad, we walked over there at a brisk pace, him holding my hand and trotting to keep up, and I was that keen not to be late that we were early and had to hang around and he kept getting the apple out and looking at it and I said put it in your pocket and leave it there. Eventually, one of the nuns came to open the place up, a tall woman with a long nose, not one of the ones I’d met. She looked down the length of the nose at us and smiled. ‘My, we are punctual,’ she said, and I didn’t much like the tone in which she said it, to be frank.
    Lijah was looking at the ground, so I poked him on the shoulder and he lifted his head and said, ‘Morning, Miss.’
    ‘Sister!’ I hissed at him.
    ‘Morning,