A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Author:Patrick Gale
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2015-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Troels arrived exactly when he said he would. ‘The Devil come to claim a soul,’ Jørgensen muttered as, alerted by the dog’s barking, they gathered in the yard to watch his approach. The new apprentice looked little more than a schoolboy and made Harry feel gratifyingly labour-toughened by comparison, something Troels seemed to notice, for he grinned as he jumped down from the cart and shook Jørgensen and Harry’s hands and said, ‘You made a man of him.’

‘Stay a few more months,’ Jørgensen growled under his breath, as Troels went on to embrace the women, ‘I might do the same for you.’

Harry knew he didn’t need to go with Troels. He knew he could find his own way to a piece of land and make an entirely independent start for himself. But in a country so vast, offering so many options, it was surely as well to exploit an informed traveller’s recommendation.

‘He’ll take advantage of your trust,’ Jørgensen warned, but it was hard to see what advantage there could be for Troels in helping him. For obvious, unvoiceable reasons of his own, he would dearly have liked to see Troels on to the train in Moose Jaw and then go his own way. Unable to sleep because of a full moon, he had passed much of the night before Troels’ return picturing scenes of trite but satisfactory revenge in which he did just that, or, better yet, contrived to leave him behind as the train pulled away, literally to leave him standing while he rode away to dizzying freedom and anonymity. And then he slept and had confusing, shaming dreams about welcoming his tormentor.

Troels was no sooner off the cart and standing before him again, unchanged except for a small scar on one temple, just as tall and remorseless as Harry remembered, than Harry found time spun savagely back and himself abruptly unmanned again. With Troels there, he felt his will and new skills ebb away and he was once again the English innocent who would go meekly where he was told, as though the man were his whip-clutching master and he his dog.

After a year of the modest, homely Jørgensens and their limited conversation, however, a year of dung and cows, of fence posts and ditches, Troels, with his height and worldliness and well-cut clothes and piercing stare, had all the glamour of a cruel god, and his smile, when he bestowed it, felt like sunshine after sodden February.

The new boy climbed down. He had only a small canvas rucksack for his belongings. ‘You travel lighter than I managed to,’ Harry told him, and the boy stared back rudely, saying nothing. Harry was surprised to find he could shrug and turn aside where he would once have felt bound to flounder on politely.

He returned to his room to finish packing. Half the possessions in his trunk had never left it. Now he found two neat piles of freshly laundered clothes into which Mrs Jørgensen had discreetly added a few extra items her husband could spare.

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