The Evil Seed Read Free

pale blur
of a face over some kind of a pale dress ballooning out around her, hollows for
eyes, every feature a blur, as if she were already a ghost.
    ‘Hey!’ I called, and I
saw her head tilt into the rushing water like a tired child’s into a pillow.
No call, no wave, nothing. For an instant, I thought I’d imagined her, so
unreal was the apparition. Then the realization hit me that this was no
accident, no dream, but some poor desperate woman half a minute from muddy
death, with only me to save her. And so I came running, as she knew I would,
stripping off coat and jacket and shoes as I ran along the bank, my glasses
slipping from my nose, panting and shouting; ‘Wait! Hey! Miss! Young lady!’
without drawing even a glance from her. I jumped in close to the bank, a few
yards downstream from her as she drifted slowly towards me, bracing myself for
the shock of the cold water. My bare feet touched mud at the bed of the river,
but at least I was not out of my depth. I reached for her. My hands brushed her
dress and clenched like a vice. The flimsy fabric ripped, but by then I had a
good grip on the girl, who seemed to be only half-conscious, and with all my
strength I held on to her as I tried to fight my way back to the bridge. I don’t
know how long it took me, or how I managed to do it; I was never a man of
action, but I suppose that in those days I had youth and ignorance on my side,
and somehow I managed to use the uneven brick shoring of the river-bank to pull
us both towards safe, still water. I hauled her out first and myself after her
and for a while I had to lie on the bank, my breath coming in great, tearing
gasps and my nose bleeding a little. She was lying as I had left her, her head
thrown back and her arms flung wide, but her eyelids fluttered and her
breathing was regular. My first thought was that she must be cold, and I
retrieved my coat, the first in a line of garments discarded along the
river-bank, and wrapped it clumsily around her shoulders, somehow embarrassed
to touch her now that she was out, of immediate danger, as if she might be
angry at my familiarity.
    My second thought, quite
simply, was amazement at how lovely she was.
    There was no lack of
beautiful women in Cambridge in those days; you saw them at parties or at the
theatre or at balls, walking arm-in-arm with their young men in the gardens or
punting on the Cam. But this one, as soon as I saw her, seemed from another
century. She was slim, and translucent, like very fine china, pale and tragic
and delicate. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full, her features small and
childlike. Her hair, I guessed, would be red when dry. But her beauty was not
really any of these things. It was lambent, ardent, arrogant, as if it had
looked upon ugliness only to become still more beautiful. She was one of those
women, I knew it then, who are at their most lovely in rags; maybe King
Cophetua had thought that too, the first time he looked upon the beggar maid.
Then her eyes opened, a deep grey, almost lavender, blank at first, then fixing
on my face with a wildness which wrenched at my heart.
    ‘I’m not dead?’ she
whispered.
    ‘No, you’re not,’ I
said, foolishly. ‘Everything will be all right.’
    Well, of course, I didn’t
know it then. I said it simply to comfort her. But things were far from being
all right. That day, or ever again.

 
     
     
     
     
    Two
     
     
    THE TABBY JUMPED ON TO ALICE’S KNEE, AS IF
TO REMIND her that she had been sitting in that chair doing nothing for nearly
half an hour and that it might be time to do some work. Sighing, she kissed Cat’s
furry head before she put her down on the floor.
    Cat mewed and rolled
over to play, paws frantically kicking the air. Alice grinned and glanced at
her sketchpad, which showed the lively outline of a sleeping cat, firm pencil
strokes for the body and paws, details half filled-in with brown ink.
    Not a bad one, that, she
thought, especially as it took no less than a