The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher

Author:Philip Hensher [Philip Hensher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007406821
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

4.

The housekeeper turned back without a comment, dropping Stokes’s proffered shillings gracelessly in her basket, and left him at the entrance to the house. Stokes stood there for a moment, with his horse. He tried, in his routine way, to begin the retelling in his head, to start to practise the anecdote he would tell at dinner. ‘I had an odd – no, an interesting – adventure today,’ he began, but then it obstinately halted. He had had an odd, no, an interesting adventure today, that was true, but what was it? He tried again; poor Bella Garraway, so changed, so dull, and once she had been … Well, what had she been? What, in truth, had he seen, now? What was there that could be told to Castleford and his dull sister and their dull guests? Something – some story, true – had been vouchsafed to him, and he knew that there was no betrayal like the telling of it to people he despised. People – he surprised himself – people unlike Bella. He had had an odd, no, an interesting adventure. There it was, undeniable, but behind him, and for once it would not become anecdote. No, he would not return.

The house was odd and ugly and indescribable, but it had opened its great gates to him, once, and closed them now behind him. Where the romance had been in the previous hour, he could not quite say, but there was a distinct whiff of the fairy tale about it. No stranger had walked through those gates for months – no stranger had been admitted by those gates, rather. He could feel it as if he had hacked his way through a hedge of roses. The house had opened, once, mysteriously, to him, and in there was something he had been shown, a riddle he had to solve. He felt that. He had left Bella no more than five minutes before, but now it seemed as if he were looking back at the end of a very long life, at a single pure memory; he felt as if now he could say that it had only been a quarter of an hour, but he had never forgotten it. The transformed girl, the fat girl lying in her panelled warren, buried deep within the dark house. What was she waiting for? What kept her here? The air, in those rooms, was thick with thought, but between him and Bella’s thoughts there was an absolute barrier. For a moment, he had been made to forget his breeches, his discomfort, his country boredom, and had felt like a hero. He had overcome the first tests his quest had presented, and had fallen at the last. Already Stokes wanted to return, but as he rode away, he felt inexplicably that that was something which the house would not permit. The house had appeared, before him, and offered its strange spectacle; if he returned, trying to enter for a second time, it seemed altogether plausible that the park, the palace, the moat, might have disappeared.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.