Read Online The Blood List by Sarah Naughton - Free Book Online Page A

– and this was only because the previous year he had choked on one of the bones. Though he was only ten, Barnaby had forced himself not to weep at this gross injustice and,
in the bitter darkness of that Christmas night, he vowed to harden his heart to his mother. From that day forth he had turned to the welcoming arms of his father. Henry had always seemed to have
the measure of Abel and was as cool with his second son as Frances was with her first.
    But a few days after Agnes’s funeral something unexpected happened.
    Barnaby and his father were breakfasting when his mother came down from Abel’s room, sat down stiffly at the table and sighed unhappily.
    ‘What’s the matter, my love?’ Henry said, looking up from his eggs.
    She did not answer him but turned to Barnaby. ‘Go and tell Juliet that she may tighten the bed-strings today.’
    Without protest Barnaby got up and went out to the kitchen, leaving the door ajar. Juliet looked up from the sink and opened her mouth to speak but he put his finger to his lips and leaned in to
listen at the gap.
    Frances sighed again and ran her fingers through her hair.
    ‘Oh I don’t know,’ she muttered. ‘I just wonder whether Abel’s interest in the Bible isn’t becoming rather . . .unhealthy.’
    ‘How can the Bible be unhealthy?’ his father spluttered, spattering the table with masticated egg white.
    ‘I just don’t like the message he takes from the texts,’ Frances murmured. ‘It is so harsh. So simplistic.’
    ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Henry said, patting her hand in a way that made her purse her lips. ‘It’s only a young boy’s imagination.’
    Frances seemed unsatisfied. ‘I might ask Father Nicholas to speak to him.’
    Barnaby thought about this as he munched his way through Juliet’s plum jam tarts out on the back step. His mother really must be worried if she was prepared to speak to Father Nick. Was
Abel’s halo slipping a little in his mother’s eyes?
    The following morning, when Abel had gone to church for his daily prayer session, Barnaby persuaded Juliet to lend him the key to his brother’s room, on the pretext of borrowing some
linen.
    He had not been into Abel’s bedchamber for at least three years, nor even seen inside, since their rooms had been moved to opposite ends of the house after Abel complained that
Barnaby’s snoring kept him awake.
    Abel’s was the only locked door in the house and for a split second, as he turned the key, Barnaby wondered if his brother had set a trap for interlopers. If so, it was bound to be the
nastiest, most mutilating trap his vile little mind could imagine.
    The door swung silently inwards revealing an interior as bare and white as a monk’s cell. It smelled faintly of beeswax. He knew his brother was scrupulously clean, but there was not even
the merest whisper of smelly feet or unwashed bedlinen. He walked across to the wardrobe and opened it. The clothes were arranged in order of colour: brown jackets at one end, white shirts at the
other, separated by a large gap, as if Abel feared cross-contamination.
    On the table beside the bed sat one of Abel’s many Bibles. Barnaby glanced at the open page.
    Now these are the judgments which thou shalt set before them. If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out
free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or
daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself . . .
    So that was Abel’s bedtime reading. What a strange person his brother was.
    Sitting on the bed in that dry, cold little room, Barnaby felt a fleeting pity. What did Abel have in his life that gave him pleasure? Not hunting nor fishing, good food nor fine clothes, not
friendship nor girls. There were no copies of the
Iliad
or
Odyssey
on the