Tom Brown's Body

Tom Brown's Body Read Free Page B

Book: Tom Brown's Body Read Free
Author: Gladys Mitchell
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hearing us. Tell you what! Let's go through the town on to the bypass and use the cycle track as far as Belling cross-roads. Then we can cut across the moor– it's quite a good surface, I expect – and get back into the village by Double Corner. It's not so hilly that way, either.'
    The cycling track alongside the bypass brought the adventurers all too soon to the cross-roads at which they were obliged to turn eastwards. After the broad, well-lighted road, the little white track across the moor looked narrow, lonely, and frightening.
    'I say, I almost wish we'd gone the other way,' said Merrys. His knee, on the mudguard, had grown (he believed) a corn, and his foot, on the step, had gone to sleep. 'What about me pedalling now?'
    'Steady, you ass!' cried Skene, as his friend attempted to alleviate the discomfort of his position. 'You'll have us into the heather! Count 500 out loud, and then we'll change.'
    His friend obeyed; they stopped the bicycle, changed about, and the moor grew larger all round them. The road was eerily lonely, the night grew blacker and blacker, and the journey, which had become more and more uncomfortable, now seemed disagreeably long.
    'I should have thought we'd have been in sight of the village by now,' said Skene, at last.
    'Well, I don't know,' said Merrys, who (secretly) had been thinking the same thing for the past quarter of an hour. 'Come to think of it, you see, all the lights would be out by now. You know how early villagers go to bed. We won't know we're in the village until we get there. We shall suddenly come to the pub. That's the first building, going by this road.'
    'I suppose,' said Skene, 'we haven't missed Double Corner in the dark?'
    'Good Lord, no, of course not!' said the startled Merrys. 'How could we miss it, you ass?'
    'Easily, I should think,' said Job's comforter, now on the step. 'The trouble would be to see it. Except for our front lamp, it's as black as your hat all the way.'
    At the end of another quarter of an hour the horrid truth had to be faced. The Corner must lie some miles in the rear of the cyclists. These, however, were not free from the unreasonable human conviction that to go on is better than to go back.
    'We're sure to come to somewhere soon,' said Merrys. 'Ten to one, if we rode back, we'd only miss it again, and be no better off. We don't want to find ourselves back in that bally town.'
    It was at this point that they saw a light ahead of them. Both boys were greatly relieved. They took it for granted that they had come to the inn. Once through the village, a little over a mile would bring them to the gates of the School – or, rather, to where the gates had been. They had been seized for scrap, and the governors had not replaced them.
    The bicycle lamp, however, showed a broken fence painted in some dark colour, a ragged hedge, and a glimmering path between bushes.

2. Witches' Brew
    *
    Why are the Laws levell'd at us? – are we more dishonest than the rest of Mankind?
    IBID. ( Act 2, Scene 4 )
    M RS B EATRICE A DELA L ESTRANGE B RADLEY had long cherished the notion of writing an account of an ancestress of her own, one Mary Toadflax, who bore the early seventeenth-century reputation of having been a witch.
    Finding herself with some welcome leisure one summer, Mrs Bradley therefore had begun her researches into this fascinating history, and had progressed far enough to be able to pass the results on to a specialist in such matters.
    He was able, at the end of eighteen months of painstaking work, to direct her to the village of Spey, where, in the possession of an old woman named Lecky Harries, was a book of spells and charms which, he had reason to believe, might have been the property of Mary Toadflax in her heyday and which, for some unknown reason, had escaped the fire which consumed its owner.
    The details which he was able to supply tempted Mrs Bradley to leave her clinic in the care of her chief assistant, and travel north and east to the cottage

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