Read Online Turning the Stones by Debra Daley - Free Book Online Page B

bolted past the Sutton house with my head down and fetched up outside the haberdashery, from where I directed a furtive look back along the thoroughfare. To my relief the master had vanished. As I recovered my breath, I noticed that my shoes had suffered a sorry loss of allure, marred by mud and water-splash.
    In her customary manner the haberdasher, Mrs Ladykirk, was roosting at her counter under a feathered cap with two winged protuberances above the ears that suggested a hen surprised on its nest. She regarded me with indifference as I stirred boxes of hairpins and false flowers, flipped through cards of trims and tickled bouquets of plumes dyed violet and madder. In the awful stillness of the shop, with its flaxy odour of the linen-press, cabinets scaled the walls nearly as far as the ceiling, their innumerable drawers and compartments containing multitudes of miniature items, pins, needles, threads, thimbles, bobbins, buttons, hooks, measures, scissors, in relentlessly ongoing allocations. The cabinets lorded it over sectioned tables, where ribbons, ruchings, fringes, flounces, nettings and knots vied for attention.
    I had left the door open and I could hear the rustle of waves across the way subsiding dreamily upon the shore. Spotting at last a spool of velvet ribbon that answered to Mrs Waterland’s instructions, and a frill of Belgian lace, I bought the trims in a silent transaction.
    I set off along a dark border of damp sand above the receding tide, wending my way among the shrimp boats beached on the shingle and the fishermen repairing their nets and their pots. Curlews and oystercatchers feinted at the waves and the breeze buffeted my hat and bloated my mantle. Mrs Waterland makes pretty things out of pretty things and I scanned the sand for some little treasure, an intriguing shell or a hank of shapely seaweed, in an effort to please her. Although I searched the shore with extreme intent, I came all the way back to the precinct of the beer-house without finding a single item that might pique her interest.
    I looked up with a sigh and, Lord love me, but there was the master again.
    He stood stiff-necked with his head pulled in like a buzzard’s and one hand on his hip, the other resting on the knob of a tall cane that he had planted in the streaky green sea-mud. The long-legged spaniels were romping in the shallows, but he did not pay them any attention. He was looking out to sea in the direction of a laden barge. It was attempting to meet a punt that was coming out from the slip below the beer-house to offload the cargo. I was shy of the master, not only out of the deference natural to a gentleman of his standing, but because he always struck me as a sort of harrowed figure.
    In fact, I found it quite painful even to be in his presence. Have you ever had such a sensation in proximity to another person? I mean where you simply cannot abide to be near them, because they depress your spirits so.
    Downes, of course, inspires such melancholy in me, and Mrs Ladykirk in the haberdashery, too, and – who else? I have a strong aversion to Sutton, although I have hardly anythingto do with him. It is as though they press on my soul until it is bruised and smarting. Or perhaps it is only that I do not like these people because they do not like me and I reach for an overly abstract explanation to cover up the hurt I feel at that rejection. The master, for instance, has always held an antipathy for me despite my efforts never to cause offence.
    At any event, in order to avoid him, I skirted around the back of the crowd of transit passengers who had gathered on the strand to watch the barge strive against the tide. I intended to climb up to the beer-house and set out on the path home, but the way was barred by a tall man swathed in a cloak, who was in conversation with one of the fishermen. He wore a three-cornered hat low on his head – it was a chestnut colour, I think – and boots of a style that we did not see in