The Ivy Tree Read Free Page B

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.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜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 Winslow 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.’
    â€˜Yes, of course I see 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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜It’s a common name along the borders.’
    â€˜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—’
    â€˜Do you know when your people left England?’ he asked, not so much ignoring my red herring as oblivious of it. He seemed to be pursuing some very definite line of his own.
    â€˜I suppose in my great-grandfather’s time. Would that be somewhere about the middle of the last century? About then, anyway. The family settled first at a place called Antigonish, in Nova Scotia, but after my father married, he—’
    â€˜What brought you back to England?’ The singleness of purpose that seemed to be prompting his questions robbed the interruption of rudeness. Like an examiner, I thought, bringing the candidate back to the point . . . Certainly his questions seemed to be directed towards some definite end. They had never been quite idle, and now they were sharp with purpose.
    I said, perhaps a little warily: ‘What brings anyone over? My people are dead, and there was nothing to keep me at home, and I’d always wanted to see England. When I was little, Granny used to talk and talk about England. She’d never seen it, but she’d been brought up on her own mother’s stories of “home”. Oh yes, I heard all about “bonny Northumberland”, and what an exciting city Newcastle was – I almost expected to see the sailing ships lying along the wharves, and the horse trams in the streets, she’d made it all so vivid for me. And Hexham, and Sundays in the Abbey, and the market there on Tuesdays, and the road along the Tyne to Corbridge, and the Roman Wall with all those lovely names . . . Castle Nick and Boreovicium and Aesica and the Nine Nicks of Thirlwall . . . I read about it all, too. I’ve always liked history. I’d always promised myself that some