Eliza’s Daughter Read Free Page A

although I always hoped that the hare would get away, it was the sport of theirs that most pleased me, because I could outrun nearly all of them. At a steady jog, over the moors, I could outlast all, even the biggest ones.
    â€˜I won’t pester or ask questions, truly I won’t. Dr Moultrie won’t have that,’ I offered. ‘It’s just, sirs, that your talk do be so interesting to I. ’Tis better far than looking at pictures.’
    â€˜Whose heart could remain unmelted at that?’ said Mr Sam, laughing. So they let me follow.
    And indeed it was true that their talk – specially that of Mr Sam – was like nothing I had ever heard before, or have since, up to this very day. So many subjects were covered – Nightingales, Poetry, Metaphysics, Dreams, Nightmares, the Sense of Touch, the difference between Will and Volition, between Imagination and Fancy – on, on, flowed the talk of Mr Sam the black-haired stranger, in a scintillating torrent of only half-comprehensible words. Sometimes his companion, Mr Bill, would put in a rejoinder; his contributions were always very pithy and shrewd. And sometimes they would be tossing back and forth some project that they were hatching between them – a plan for a tale of a ship, it seemed to be, and a ghostly voyage.
    Now and then, for a change, they asked me questions.
    â€˜Is it true, child, that in these parts hares are thought to be witches?’
    â€˜Oh yes, for sure, sir; why, everybody knows that. Only last August the boys coursed and caught a black hare over there on Wildersmouth Head; and that very same week they found old Granny Pollard stiff and dead in her cottage with her dog howling alongside of her; she’d been the hare, don’t you see?’
    â€˜Hmn,’ said Mr Bill. ‘It seems odd that a woman who spent half her time as a hare would keep a dog; don’t you think so?’
    â€˜I don’t see that, sir; every witch has her familiar. So why not a dog, just as well as a cat?’
    Mr Sam asked me about changelings. ‘In a village where so many children lack parents, is it not supposed that one or another might be a fairy’s child – yourself, for example?’
    I answered readily enough. ‘Nobody would take me for a fairy’s child, sir, because I am so ugly, my hair being so red, and because of my hands – you see.’ I spread them out, and both men nodded gravely. ‘But yes, Squire Vexford as lives in the Great House up on Growly Head – ’tis thought his granny was a changeling.’
    And I told the tale, well known in Othery, of how the nurse, all those years ago, had been giving suck to the Squire’s new-born daughter, when a fine lady came into her cottage carrying a babe all wrapped and swaddled in green silk. ‘Give my pretty thing to suck also!’ says the lady, and when the nurse does so, she vanishes clean away leaving the child behind. And the two infants were brought up as twins, and when one of ’em pined and dwined away, no one knew whether ’twas the human baby or the elf-child that was left lonesome. But from that day to this in the Vexford family, each generation there’s allus been a girl-child that’s frail and pale, fair-haired and puny, unlike the rest of ’em that are dark-haired and high-complexioned, like the Squire hisself.
    â€˜That is a bonny tale, my hinny,’ said Mr Bill. ‘And is there such a girl-child in the Squire’s family at present?’
    â€˜No, sir, but Lady Hariot is increasing, and they do say, because she carries it low, that the child will be a girl.’
    Mrs Wellcome’s daughter Biddy was also with child, and I knew it was hoped by both women that the honour of rearing the Squire’s baby would be theirs; and I hoped so too. The Squire’s great house, Kinn Hall, up on Growly Head, with its gardens and paddocks and yards and stables, was forbidden ground,