Crossing To Paradise Read Free Page A

don’t.”
    â€œI know what,” said Gatty. Then she untied the violet ribbon she wore day and night round her waist, the one Arthur had bought for her with his last farthing at Ludlow Fair. She doubled it, tore at it with her teeth and bit it in half.
    â€œReally!” said Oliver, wrinkling his nose.
    â€œHalf for him, half for me,” said Gatty.
    So Oliver rolled up the little piece of parchment and Gatty secured it with the violet ribbon.
    Gatty took a deep breath, and noisily blew out her pink, freckled cheeks. “There!” she exclaimed. “Writing and all!”
    She smiled brightly at Oliver and then she wound her half of the violet ribbon round and round her left wrist.

3
    Oliver was ringing the church bell as Gatty rode out of Caldicot and she wondered why. Steady and unhurried, neither eager nor forlorn, the bell rang and rang, and it never once occurred to her that Oliver was ringing it especially for her.
    For a long while, Gatty and Macsen rode side by side in silence and then Gatty gave a heartfelt sigh.
    â€œYou all right, girl?” Macsen asked.
    Gatty was not all right. Her strength was bleeding out of her as she left the only landscape she knew. She couldn’t get the strange idea out of her head that the Marches and her body were one: This earth was her mother, and she was mother-earth.
    When at noon they reached the Great Dyke, Gatty and Macsen entered a no-man’s-land. A hovering grey mist blotted out the sun, turned trees into roaming spirits and one-legged giants brandishing clubs, and lay on the land on either side of the Great Dyke like a vast wraith-ocean.
    For three days Gatty and Macsen rode north, and when at last they turned east the hazy sun blessed them. Down they rode from the high fields and farms, with their huge flocks of sheep and yapping sheepdogs, down into a sopping forest, and somehow their two horses sensed the journey was almost over. They raised their tucked heads; they whisked their tails.
    Gatty stared ahead. Nothing but trunks, some silver, some grey-green, some ivied, some carbuncled, nothing but a prison of tree trunks stretching to the end of the world. But then there was something.
    A handsome high wall, brown as an eggshell and speckled, with teeth along the top. Five peephole windows, four of them slits but one round as the full moon.
    Side by side, Gatty and Macsen rode across the drawbridge. They dismounted and walked up to the huge ribbed oak door.
    Gatty stepped into the hall, and she caught her breath.
    She saw Lady Gwyneth at once, standing at the far end of the hall, very tall and slender and fair, with a girl on her right and a big man on her left, but in that same first long moment she saw the kind tapestries hanging on the walls and the soft honey-light of dozens and dozens of candles, she smelt scents sweeter and thicker than Fallow Field in June, she heard a cascade of notes, more notes than a climbing lark sings in May, and saw a man plucking an instrument with a forest of strings.
    Then Gatty let go of her breath again, and Lady Gwyneth turned to her, took two steps towards her, and inclined her head.
    Had Gatty been able to look at herself through Lady Gwyneth’s eyes, what would she have seen?
    A grubby parcel of sackcloth and, sticking out of the top, a freckled and dirt-streaked face; large river eyes, set quite wide apart; and a storm of curls, now in the candlelight more silver than gold.
    Gatty shuffled towards Lady Gwyneth, and grinned.
    â€œGod’s bones!” she exclaimed. “I never knew there was no place like this.”
    Lady Gwyneth looked, unblinking, at this creature standing before her.
    â€œGatty!” she said. “It is Gatty, isn’t it?”
    â€œMe,” Gatty agreed, and as she nodded each of her curls seemed to have a life of its own.
    Lady Gwyneth of Ewloe tilted her head slightly to the right. A smile hovered around the corners of her mouth. “Yes,” she