Read Feathers in the Fire for Free Online

station, and all through Parson Hedley and his books.
    Davie knew they were all looking at him, their thoughts hard on him, but he continued to stare out of the window until Johnnie, Fred Geary’s eldest son, aged ten, came running down the road.
    As he knocked on the door the boy called, ‘Davie! Davie!’
    Slowly Davie moved a few paces towards the door, lifted the latch and looked down at the boy.
    ‘Master’s back, Davie, and askin’ for you. He says come to the office.’
    When Davie didn’t answer him, the boy repeated, ‘He’s askin’ for you now, the master.’
    ‘All right, all right.’ His voice was tight and thick. ‘I’ll be along.’ They nodded at each other; then Davie turned and looked at his people, all standing now.
    His mother said tentatively, ‘I’d put a clean smock on.’
    At this he tore off his soiled smock, threw it on the floor, then swung round from them and went out, banging the door behind him.
    As he walked down the dusty road in the direction of the farmyard his angry gaze lifted towards the house. He had always liked the farmhouse, the shape of it, the mellowness of it; it was the best of its kind for fifty miles in any direction you went. The old part of it dated back to 1699 and had three storeys. The lower floor was now the dining room; it was a very large room. Above it the same space was divided into a bedroom and two small rooms, one used as the master’s dressing room and one as a night water closet. Above these there had been two attics, but the dividing wall had been pulled down to form a large storeroom for all the odds and ends of the house.
    The new part of the farmhouse, which was built in 1794, had only two storeys, and the bedrooms were on a lower level than that of the old part. Four steps led down from the old house into the new and on to a fine big landing, as big as a room, with six bedrooms going off it. The house had been built for a family, and at one time these rooms had held seven sons and three daughters. This was because they had been lucky enough to be born and reared between the bad plagues. On the ground floor there was a fine sitting room, and at the end of a passage leading from the hall a room that had once been the breakfast room – the house had been styled on those of its betters – but now was the master’s office. The end of the passage gave access to the kitchen, and this room, like the old dining room at the opposite end, was stone-flagged, and held everything that a kitchen should hold, from a pepper mill to a row of twelve graded pewter pots hanging above the long mantelshelf, seeming to form a bridge between the great copper pans that gleamed, also in rotation of size, where they hung on wooden pegs down each side of the fireplace.
    If Davie had ever had a wild dream it hadn’t, up till now, been of sailing the seas and discovering new lands, as did the people he had read about, but of owning a house such as this with a kitchen where he could enter without scraping his feet, taking off his cap, or touching his forelock.
    He now scraped the dust off his feet on the scraper and then on the roped mat outside the kitchen door.
    He paused inside the door and there, at the long wooden trough sink, stood Molly Geary washing dishes. She turned her head quickly towards him, her hazel eyes narrowed, a faint smile on her face. ‘Hello, Davie,’ she said softly.
    He glared at her, then walking slowly to the edge of the sink he bent his shoulders slightly forward and said in a low voice, ‘You go to hell’s flames, Molly Geary, and as far beyont; and you can take that’ – he stabbed his finger down at her stomach – ‘along with you.’
    Her eyes stretching now, her mouth fell open and she turned her head quickly and looked towards the far door that led into the passage, as if she would run to it; but Davie was walking towards it. Before he went through he turned and looked at her again and, his voice still low and his words spaced, he