Ivy Tree Read Free Page A

what you mean." I smiled. "I stayed at home too long. I know that's not fashionable any more, but that's the way it happened."
    "You ought to have married."
    "Perhaps."
    "Horses, now. Do you ride?"
    The question was so sudden and seemingly irrelevant that I must have looked and sounded almost startled.
    "Horses? Good heavens, no! Why?"
    "Oh, just a hangover from your looking so like Annabel. That was her thing. She was a wizard, a witch I should say, with horses. She could whisper them."
    "She could what?"
    "You know, whisper to them like a gipsy, and then they'd do any blessed thing for her. If she'd been dark like me, instead of blonde, she'd have been taken for a horse-thieving gipsy's changeling."
    "Well," I said, "I do know one end of a horse from the other, and on principle I keep clear of both . . . You know, I wish you'd stop staring."
    "I'm sorry. But I—well, I can't leave it alone, this likeness of yours to Annabel. It's uncanny. I know you're not her; it was absurd anyway ever to think she might have come back . . if she'd been alive she'd have been here long since, she had too much to lose by staying away But what was I to think, seeing you sitting here, in the same place, with not a stone of it changed, and you only changed a little? It was like seeing the pages of a book turned back, or a film flashing back to where it was eight years ago."
    "Eight years is a long time."
    "Yes. She was nineteen when she ran away."
    A pause. He looked at me, so obviously expectant that I laughed. "All right You didn't ask ... quite. I'm twenty-seven. Nearly twenty-eight."
    I heard him take in his breath. "I told you it was uncanny. Even sitting as close to you as this, and talking to you; even with that accent of yours . . . it's not really an accent, just a sort of slur . . . rather nice. And she'd have changed, too, in eight years."
    "She might even have acquired the accent," I said cheerfully.
    "Yes. She might." Some quality in his voice made me look quickly at him. He said: "Am I still staring? I'm sorry. I was thinking. I—it's something one feels one ought not to let pass. As if it was . .. meant."
    "What do you mean?"
    "Nothing. Skip it. Tell me about yourself. You were just going to. Forget Annabel; I want to hear about you. You've told me you're Mary Grey, from Canada, with a job in Newcastle. I still want to know what brought you there, and then up here to the Wall, and why you were on that bus from Bellingham to Chollerford today, going within a stone's throw of the Wins-low land." He threw the butt of his cigarette over the cliff, and clasped both hands round the uplifted knee. All his movements had a grace that seemed a perfectly normal part of his physical beauty. "I'm not pretending I've any right to ask you. But you must see that it's an odd thing to accept, to say the least. I refuse to believe that such a likeness is pure chance. Or the fact that you came here. I think, under the circumstances, I'm entitled to be curious"—that swift and charming smile again—"if nothing else."
    "Yes, of course I sec that." I paused for a moment. "You know, you may be right; about this likeness not being chance, I mean. I don't know. My people did come from hereabouts, so my grandmother told me."
    "Did they now? From Whitescar?"
    I shook my head. "I never heard the name, that I remember. I was very little when Granny died, and she only knew what my great-grandmother told her, anyway. My own mother was never much interested in the past. But I know my family did originally come from somewhere in Northumberland, though I've never heard Granny mention the name Winslow. Hers was Armstrong."
    "It's a common name along the borders."
    "So she said, and not with a very savoury history, some of them! Wasn't there an Armstrong once who actually lived just here, in the Roman Fort at Housesteads? Wasn't he a horse thief? If I could only
    'whisper' horses like your cousin Annabel, you might suppose—"
    "Do you know when your people left