Mrs De Winter Read Free

house heard a clock strike three, and was still wide awake and only glad to be so, grateful for the tranquillity around me, and the coolness of that silent garden, the sweetness of the air. I knew, even though I was ashamed of it, deep contentment, great peace.
    I had not moved for almost another hour, not until Maxim turned suddenly, flailing his arms about abruptly and muttering something incoherent, and then I had closed the window against the chill that had crept into the room, and slipped back to my bed. Though first I had straightened the covers around him and smoothed his face, settled him as one would settle a restless child.
    He did not wake, and just before dawn, I too, had slept.
     
    In the morning, the instant I awoke, it was the light I was so aware of, how very different it was and how welcome and familiar. I had gone again to the window and looked out at the pale sky, blue slightly filmed over, and the dawn that was strengthening over the frost touched garden. I could have been nowhere else in the world but here and I had almost wept then at that early light, at its clarity and subtlety and softness.
    As we had set off for the church there had been skeins of mist weaving in and out of the trees, dissolved by the sun even as we watched, as the frost was melted by it, and I had instinctively looked over to where I knew that, miles away,
     
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    the sea lay. When we had arrived at Dover on the previous evening it had already been dark, and coming across the channel the sea had simply been dull, grey and heaving about outside the ship’s windows, so that in a curious way, I had no real sense of its being the sea at all: and then the car had sped us away, and on to the long road.
    In spite of all that it had meant to us for ill, all the harm it had caused, I had missed the sea while we had been abroad, missed the slow drag of it up the beach, the hiss and suck over the pebbles, the crash of it, smacking down on to the shore of the cove — the fact that it was always there, sensed even through the densest fog that muffled every sound, and that whenever I wanted to I had been able to go down and simply look at it, watch its movement, the play of the light upon it, see it change, the shadows shift, the surface roughen. I had often dreamed of it, dreamed that I had gone there at night when it was calm and still and gazed from some place above down upon the moonlit water. The sea we had lived close to and walked beside at times during our exile was a tideless, glittering sea, translucent, brilliantly blue, violet, emerald green, a seductive, painted sea, quite unreal.
    Climbing into the black car that morning, I had paused, turned and strained my eyes and ears, willing myself to have some greater sense of it. But there was nothing, it was too far away, and even if it had been there, at the end of the garden, Maxim would have shrunk from any awareness of it.
    I had turned and climbed into the car beside him.
    The men in black had reached the church porch and paused there to shift their burden slightly, settling its weight between them. We stood uncertainly behind, and suddenly a
     
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    robin flitted into the dark hollow of the porch and out again, and the sight of it lifted my heart, I felt that we were people in a play, waiting in the wings to go on to a stage, the lighted open space ahead of us. We were very few. But as we began to move under the arch I saw that the church itself was full. They rose as they heard us. I supposed they were all old neighbours, old friends - though I did not think that by now I would recognise many of them.
    ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life saith the Lord. Whosoever believeth in me, though he should die, yet shall he live …’
    We stepped inside and the heavy wooden door was closed behind us, shutting out the autumn day, the sunlight and the turned fields, the man ploughing and the larks spiralling upwards and the robin singing from the holly branch, the ragged, black