Ellis Peters - George Felse 03 - Flight Of A Witch Read Free

lawn, a tangle of trees too big for a garden, but beautiful. Why should he care that the leaves would be a nuisance, tread into a decaying mush all over the paths, and silt down into a rotten cement in the guttering? He wouldn’t have to maintain the place; all he would have to do would be live in it and enjoy it. He imagined the summer here, and he was enchanted. Even the name wasn’t an affectation, there was a fair ford only fifty yards on, where the river poured in a smooth silvery sheet above clear beds of amber and agate pebbles, bright as jewels in the sun. The masonry of the original cottages looked – how old? – three centuries at least. The place had probably been Fairford ever since the advance guard of the Danes clawed a toehold on the Welsh bank of the river here, only to be rolled back fifty miles into England, and never thrust so far again.
    He was almost sure then that he would come and lodge here; but some instinct of caution and perversity turned him back from opening the gate then and advancing to the massy door. He parked the car by the open grass along the riverside instead, and went for a long walk up the flank of the hill until it was time to drive back into Comerbourne.
    ‘Not bad,’ he said to Jane, in the common-room during the next free period they shared, ‘but I don’t know. All right in the summer, but a bit back-of-beyond for a bad winter, I should say. You could get snowed-up there for weeks.’
    ‘They ought to charge you extra for that as an amenity,’ said Jane, bitterly contemplating some gem in the homework of Four B, who were not her brightest form. ‘Imagine having a cast-iron alibi for contracting out of this madhouse for weeks at a time! But don’t kid yourself, my boy. They kept that road open even in 1947. The Wastfield tractors see to that. Snow or no snow, nobody gets away with anything around here.’
    She didn’t ask him what he thought of doing, or he might, even then, have gone off in the opposite direction, sure that everybody has an angle, and she couldn’t be totally disinterested. She lived in Comerford herself, he knew that, and hadn’t failed to allow for one obvious possibility. But she showed no personal interest in him; and even if she was biding her time she wouldn’t find him easy to keep tabs on, with her family’s cottage a quarter of a mile this side the village, and Fairford well out on the opposite side. He’d had plenty of practice in evading girls he didn’t want to see, as well as in cornering those he did. No, he needn’t worry about Jane.
    So he went back to Fairford on the Saturday afternoon. The westering sun smiled on him all the way along that journey back into pre-history, confirming his will to stay. By the time he drove back the dusk had closed on the Hallowmount, and black clouds covered the hills of Wales; a chill wind drove up the valley, crying in the new plantation. And he might have changed his mind, even then, if he hadn’t been already lost from the moment when he rattled the knocker at Fairford, and listened to the rapid, light footsteps within as someone came to open the door to him.
    He was lost, then and for ever; because it was Annet who opened the door.
     
    There is a kind of beauty that produces wolf-whistles, and another kind of beauty that creates silence all about it, taking the voices out of men’s mouths and the breath out of their throats. Nobody but Annet had ever struck Tom Kenyon dumb. He lived in the same house with her, he’d been rubbing shoulders with her now almost daily for half a term, and still he went softly for awe of her, and the words that would have come to him so glibly with a girl who meant nothing to him ebbed away clean out of mind when he was face to face with this girl. And yet why? She was flesh and blood like anyone else. Wasn’t she?
    (But why, why should she be climbing the Hallowmount in the rain and the murk in a dank October twilight? Distant and strange and elusive as she