HartsLove Read Free Page B

through Charles’s hand. It galloped straight back down the drive, with only Garth between itself and the road.
    Garth knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to step smartly aside and let the animal gallop through the gate, right back to Liverpool and into the sea if it damned well wanted. What did it matter? Four hundred guineas were already lost. He forced himself to watch with steely unconcern as the reins swung between the colt’s front legs. ‘Trip over. Slip on the ice. Break a leg,’ he muttered, blocking his ears against his father’s shouted alarm and stepping out of the horse’s way as it swished past. ‘That’s right. Get lost.’
    But at the gate, the animal hesitated. Which way to go? Two long chestnut ears flipped in different directions.Two smoky nostrils flared. A tremor shuddered down its back legs and Garth could see where the pebble had made a small cut in its ungainly hindquarters. It turned, and two large, childishly expectant eyes peeped through a straggly forelock. The ears reversed their flip, then reversed again. Before it could make up its mind as to its next move, Charles ran past and it was recaptured. ‘Thank God!’ Charles said, unable to disguise the reproach in his voice.
    â€˜Too scared to catch him yourself, Master Garth?’ Skelton, following close behind, knew just how to rile. It was something he practised with pleasure. Garth growled, glared, then fled up the castle drive, over the drawbridge lying aross the old moat, under the archway, across the courtyard and through the antique doorway into the Hartslove hall, where he stopped in front of a boy as furious as himself. ‘I hate everyone! I hate everything!’ he cried, though he got no answer, the Furious Boy being one of many pale life-sized statues brought to Hartslove by a previous de Granville from a Grand Tour of Europe. Garth turned right and ran into the dining room. A trestle from the servants’ hall had taken the place of the original dining table, but the oak sideboard was still under the Landseer portrait of his mother and on it, between two stubby candles, was a bottle of brandy his father had left. With only the smallest hesitation Garth reached for it, pulled off the stopper and drank the contents. He gasped.The taste was vile, but a fire ignited in his belly. His eyes narrowed.
    Nursing the fire, he lit a lamp and, skirting the wooden lift that plied a creaky trade between the dining room and the kitchen directly below, he ran down stone steps, past the kitchen door, then down another flight of steps until he reached the old dungeons, now used as larders. He shivered. Even in high summer it was corpse-cold down here, and during the winter it was colder than the ice house. Spectral light seeped through the tiny, crusted windows, as though some very old animal was blinking. He bumped his head on a dead hare hanging in stiff splendour from one of the many bloodstained hooks. His heart banged but the brandy kept him going.
    At the far end of the dungeons was a small door with a huge key poking from the lock. The key was superfluous since the door was never fastened. Nevertheless, Garth had only been through the door once before; this was his father’s private territory. The door groaned open at Garth’s push. He stepped inside. The air was so thick his footsteps were smothered in the gloom. To his right he could just make out a stone slab. He held his lamp up. Fuzzily revealed was an Aladdin’s cave of bottles, all neatly laid between ancient round arches dating from the castle’s earliest days.
    The door swung closed behind him and his lamp flickered, but Garth did not retreat. Instead, putting thelamp down, he went to the wine section first, pulled out a bottle and with sudden, furious force, hurled it against the wall. The glass split and the neck of the bottle, still corked, rolled sideways, coming to rest in a dent in the floor. The