Read Online Turning the Stones by Debra Daley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Debra Daley
Tags: Fiction, Historical
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landlubberly nature, as if yearning to be other than what it is.
I followed the road past the pawnshop and its embarrassment of riches – the casualties of slack air are always having to give over their valuables for the price of another night at the inn – past the fishermen’s carts piled with sacks of shellfish. Parkgate’s shops and merchants’ houses form a barricade between the sea and the hinterland. The buildings are tall and high-shouldered as though tensed for an onslaught that must arrive sooner or later. Which, of course, it does. In bad weather waves charge up on a high tide, hurl themselves across the road and pound at doors and windows.
The thoroughfare hugs the shore as far south as Moorside Lane and the herring house. There tend to be excited gannets and terns down at that extreme, flapping around after scraps, and straggly girls hoping for work gutting and salting the fish. At the customs house, where they register imports, the road heads inland, but I do not like that turn-off. A gibbet stands there. Last summer Eliza asked Mr Otty to take her to watch the remains of a wretch being cut down, hanged for robbing the customs house. He was a local lad, too. But Mrs Waterland would not allow her to be seen gawping.
All at once I came to an abrupt halt. Some half-dozen yards ahead a familiar figure was emerging from a doorway. There was no mistaking the shape of the master. He is as longitudinal as a pair of tongs. He was wearing a coat the colour of snuff, his breeches tied over his knees in a countryman’s style above black stockings, and that repugnant wool wig that Mrs Waterland used to beg him to leave off. He would always defend it, saying it was durable and a roof against the wet. He had come out of the shop that Theo Sutton kept beneath his house then. Folks said that Sutton sold goods under the counter that hadbeen confiscated by the customs man, rum and suchlike, and hair powder and soap, but I can’t imagine that the master ever had any interest in those things. He has never been a man for luxuries or jaunting. He is a very separate kind of person. I don’t believe he likes human company at all unless you count a murderously prolific wildfowler from Burton called Georgy Bird with whom he used to go out hunting.
His boisterous gun dogs, two liver-and-white springer spaniels, were jumping around on the edge of the strand dismaying the birds. He adjusted the grip on his cane, shoved his hat under his arm in that twitchy manner he has, called the dogs and began grimly to walk in my direction. I could picture the fierce gaze under the shaggy balcony of his eyebrows, and the working of his mouth, which he tightens like a person biting a lemon or someone trying to suppress a bout of weeping.
I retreated along a weint – that is, one of the narrow lanes that run between the big houses and lead to the maze of backstreets where the sea-folk live – and found myself in a noisome clearing. The sea breeze that drives the worst of the herring-house stink from the parade does not reach the jumble of shoddy cottages in the hindquarters of the town, their half-bald, mostly rotten thatch adding its own note of decay to the general stench. Dingy barefoot children in flitters sprawled at every door and a couple of hungry-looking curs crept towards me with their ears back and haunches up. The faces of the children were wild and sharp and the older ones leaped up and grinned at me with a sly glint. I fancied that they took me for an opportunity on which they were prepared to pounce.
Someone threw a stone. It hurtled from a dark aperture inthe scaly wall of one of the hovels and banged against a herring barrel. Stifled laughter sounded from inside the hovel and then a chute of grey water, a pail emptied by an unseen hand, shot from a door and landed splat at my feet like a challenge. I fled the way I had come, one of the mongrels snarling at my heels, until a squawk-voiced fisher-child called it off. I
I followed the road past the pawnshop and its embarrassment of riches – the casualties of slack air are always having to give over their valuables for the price of another night at the inn – past the fishermen’s carts piled with sacks of shellfish. Parkgate’s shops and merchants’ houses form a barricade between the sea and the hinterland. The buildings are tall and high-shouldered as though tensed for an onslaught that must arrive sooner or later. Which, of course, it does. In bad weather waves charge up on a high tide, hurl themselves across the road and pound at doors and windows.
The thoroughfare hugs the shore as far south as Moorside Lane and the herring house. There tend to be excited gannets and terns down at that extreme, flapping around after scraps, and straggly girls hoping for work gutting and salting the fish. At the customs house, where they register imports, the road heads inland, but I do not like that turn-off. A gibbet stands there. Last summer Eliza asked Mr Otty to take her to watch the remains of a wretch being cut down, hanged for robbing the customs house. He was a local lad, too. But Mrs Waterland would not allow her to be seen gawping.
All at once I came to an abrupt halt. Some half-dozen yards ahead a familiar figure was emerging from a doorway. There was no mistaking the shape of the master. He is as longitudinal as a pair of tongs. He was wearing a coat the colour of snuff, his breeches tied over his knees in a countryman’s style above black stockings, and that repugnant wool wig that Mrs Waterland used to beg him to leave off. He would always defend it, saying it was durable and a roof against the wet. He had come out of the shop that Theo Sutton kept beneath his house then. Folks said that Sutton sold goods under the counter that hadbeen confiscated by the customs man, rum and suchlike, and hair powder and soap, but I can’t imagine that the master ever had any interest in those things. He has never been a man for luxuries or jaunting. He is a very separate kind of person. I don’t believe he likes human company at all unless you count a murderously prolific wildfowler from Burton called Georgy Bird with whom he used to go out hunting.
His boisterous gun dogs, two liver-and-white springer spaniels, were jumping around on the edge of the strand dismaying the birds. He adjusted the grip on his cane, shoved his hat under his arm in that twitchy manner he has, called the dogs and began grimly to walk in my direction. I could picture the fierce gaze under the shaggy balcony of his eyebrows, and the working of his mouth, which he tightens like a person biting a lemon or someone trying to suppress a bout of weeping.
I retreated along a weint – that is, one of the narrow lanes that run between the big houses and lead to the maze of backstreets where the sea-folk live – and found myself in a noisome clearing. The sea breeze that drives the worst of the herring-house stink from the parade does not reach the jumble of shoddy cottages in the hindquarters of the town, their half-bald, mostly rotten thatch adding its own note of decay to the general stench. Dingy barefoot children in flitters sprawled at every door and a couple of hungry-looking curs crept towards me with their ears back and haunches up. The faces of the children were wild and sharp and the older ones leaped up and grinned at me with a sly glint. I fancied that they took me for an opportunity on which they were prepared to pounce.
Someone threw a stone. It hurtled from a dark aperture inthe scaly wall of one of the hovels and banged against a herring barrel. Stifled laughter sounded from inside the hovel and then a chute of grey water, a pail emptied by an unseen hand, shot from a door and landed splat at my feet like a challenge. I fled the way I had come, one of the mongrels snarling at my heels, until a squawk-voiced fisher-child called it off. I
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