Fair Weather by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

Author:Barbara Gaskell Denvil [Gaskell Denvil, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gaskell Publishing
Published: 2016-05-27T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty Five

I slept deeply without dreaming. It was very early the next morning, being the twenty seventh of October, that I was woken by something tapping on my bedroom window. At first I could not remember who I was or what world I was in. Then I decided I was Molly and that my life was a gentler, safer life and I could risk getting up to see what had disturbed my silences.

I expected Bertie sometime later in the day but he had his own key and certainly wasn’t agile enough to climb up the wisteria outside up as far as my attic. Thomas Cambio might be a wandering spirit which made him ageless but he inhabited a seventy year old body and I didn’t believe it could be him either. I hoped it might just be an early rising magpie. I got up and shuffled over to the window. The tapping continued without pause.

My window was a double casement and opened outwards into the last dewy chestnut leaves and the pale graspers of the leafless wisteria. The sky was still dark and starless now though the moon in my modern times was slowly approaching climax and shone smooth. There was no one outside at all. No one had climbed my tree, no one was trying to attract my attention. I sat on the padded window seat, shivered and peered out. The autumn damp slunk into my room and filled up the corners. I closed the window and went back to bed. The tapping had stopped. I decided it must have been a loose branch, twigs in the wind, fronds of climbing greenery. I pulled the quilt around my ears and tried to gain back all the warmth I had lost. Then the whispering came directly into my ear. The voices intermingled but I heard every soft inflection. I lay in a sweat of ice and could not escape because I had opened my home to them and now they were in my head.

“I will turn the cards for you,” whispered the woman. “First you must cut the pack.” I did not recognise her voice and I saw no one. I saw only shifting darkness in my room and squeezing my eyes tight shut made no difference. The voice repeated, “You must first cut the pack.”

“I can’t see you,” I whispered back. “I can’t see the cards. I don’t want my future told.”

“Oh, this is not your future I foretell,” said the voice, “it is your past.”

“You mean Tilda?” I pleaded. “Please, she’s suffered enough. Please leave her alone.”

“You must cut the pack,” said the voice.

I curled up tight, my knees beneath my chin, my head under the covers; a petrified child. Then another voice interrupted the woman’s sibilance. The new voice was as soft and malicious as a frosted breeze over low grass and I recognised it at once. “I will cut for her,” said Vespasian.

“You have no right. She has not appointed you,” said the woman.

“I took that right,” said Vespasian.

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