The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [60]
‘I’m feeling dull today,’ he said, swishing his stick again, in a tone that suggested he might tell her anything, that he was honest and unconcealed.‘I must admit it. First of all, I’ve finished the book I was reading. It wasn’t terribly interesting in the first place.’
‘My father has a library. I’m sure he’d give you use of it. And I have quite a few books.’
‘Well, that’s kind of you.Your father stocks a library for all of us, but it tends rather to the devotional.’ He tapped his stick against his boots as though taking guard to play cricket. ‘To be brutally honest, I’m not a great consumer of literature. I think some distraction is all I’m looking for.’
‘We could go for a walk.’ He looked up at her and immediately she added, to dissipate the effect,‘At some time.’
‘I trust you don’t go walking with any old lunatic? I’m not mad, you know.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Hmm. You are bored as well, aren’t you?’
‘I . . .’
‘Good afternoon. Well met.’ Her father’s voice. She was discovered. And with her father was the young man Rawnsley.
Charles answered for both of them.‘Good afternoon to you. I’m Charles Seymour,’ he said, extending his hand to Rawnsley.
‘Thomas Rawnsley.’
Matthew Allen smiled at the three of them, his child and the wealthy feudal relic, who’d been too stupid to invest in the Pyroglyph, greeting the energetic industrialist. Rawnsley bowed to Hannah. She felt him trying to hold her gaze as he did so. There was a heaviness of meaning in his look, of questioning. She didn’t know what it meant and wondered if the others had noticed, but they gave no sign of it. Charles Seymour continued the conversation.
‘Your daughter just suggested to me . . .’ Her heart bumped. ‘. . . that you might be kind enough to allow me use of your library. I could do with the entertainment. ’
Matthew Allen thought that typical. ‘Entertainment, no doubt,’ he answered, ‘and instruction. It would be my pleasure.’
The exact same weight of dark.
It was a source. Out of it flowed that time. He himself flowed out of it, a youth, a child really, as he had been when he had woken in this exact dark.
He walked out back then, into that time, a lad under stars with the excitement beating inside him. Come gentle Spring, ethereal mildness come. He stumbled as a cart rut gripped his boot. He had a headache but without pain; the fierce expectation made his head bones light, his skull noticeable under thin skin. He wanted to cry out and sing, but had to be secret.
In the darkness of the stables the horses whinged and shifted. John spoke softly to them. He kept a calming hand flowing over their flanks as he walked around them, then soothed their heads towards him to throw over and fit the halters. The horses had to be out early this time of year to graze themselves full before the flies woke to torment their eyes and twitching skin.
He led them out, stumbling quietly behind him. They pulled against him, then obeyed as he led them to a different field where the other boy earned his halfpennies watching two other horses. As he unfastened the halters John called to the other boy in the dark.
‘Over here,’ he answered.
John jogged over, handed Tom the halters.
‘And what you promised.’
John had them ready in his handkerchief, separate from the rest. ‘One penny for watching them and one for not telling.’
‘Where’re you going?’
‘I’ll be back before they have to go back.’
‘But where?’
‘Stamford. Doesn’t matter.’
‘To a shop, is it? Buying ribbons for a girl, is it?’
Hearing the horses already cropping the grass, John set off towards the town. Come gentle Spring, ethereal mildness come. And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veiled in a