Read Some Kind of Fairy Tale for Free Online Page B

HESTERTON
    W e’ve never been back here since you went away.”
    “No,” said Tara. “Mum and Dad said you stopped coming. But I still love this place.”
    Peter shook his head. “It was too painful to come here.”
    The Outwoods is a hundred acres of oak, rowan, and birch, of holly and yew, trembling on the lip of an ancient volcanic crater and peering out over the Soar Valley, a timeless pocket of English woodland inside the boundaries of Charnwood Forest. Its rock formations contain the oldest of fossils. In its mineral soil rare plants flourish. The inspirational red-and-white-spotted fly agaric mushrooms spore and fatten around the gleaming silver birches, sucking sugars from the roots and feeding back minerals and water. The trees conduct and transfer energy around the woods. The land is a mysterious freak, where the air is charged with an eerie electrical quality, alternately disturbing and relaxing. The earth echoes underfoot.
    It is a place to go, Tara would always say, when there is a fire in your head.
    Or all of this is just fanciful talk and the Outwoods is just anordinary stretch of ancient woodland. But even the most unimaginative visitor would have to be overwhelmed at one particular season of the year, because thrilling are the bluebell woods in May.
    “Did you never come back to see the bluebells?”
    “No,” said Peter.
    They were walking with the two hounds, just Tara and Peter. Genevieve had decided for Peter that she wouldn’t join them but would instead spend New Year’s Day at the cottage with the children.
    Tara wore a long woolen coat that Peter thought familiar, and a ridiculously long multicolored scarf that he had never forgotten. He was right: it turned out that Mary had kept all Tara’s clothes, wrapped in polyethylene, in the attic. Untouched, all these years. A polyethylene shrine in a dark and silent place. Peter would have burned them all.
    The Peruvian hat with its earflaps and tassels, though, was new. “Do anything special,” she asked him, “for New Year’s Eve?”
    “Stayed at home.”
    “Really?”
    “Quiet night in. Opened the doors at midnight. Brought the coal and a penny inside. Job done.”
    “Not like you. Last year you were out whooping it up. You didn’t come home for three days. Three days!”
    He stopped. “Last year?”
    She stopped in her tracks. Her mouth opened and then she quickly looked away. “I meant last time.” She picked up a stick and flung it for the dogs to chase. It went spinning through the air and cracked into a birch tree.
    “Well,” he said, “when you have four kids and a menagerie to think about, it changes things.”
    “Yes.”
    Peter watched her carefully, trying not to make it obvious. He pretended to look away when she glanced at him, noting that she wasn’t making a lot of eye contact from behind her dark glasses. She was carrying some guilty secret, he knew it.
    But the extraordinary thing about Tara was how her looks seemed to change under different light. Genevieve had remarked how young she looked; and it was true. Under soft lights she couldalmost pass for his daughter’s age, or someone in her late teens. Then again the direct sunlight might reveal care lines about the mouth, laughter lines around the eyes. Her complexion seemed unnaturally young, and her delicate and graceful hands seemed never to have done a day’s work. At least not when compared to the ruined, scarred hands of a working farrier.
    Something in Tara’s frame, something in her delicacy, had always made Peter want to protect her. More than once he’d wondered if they had different fathers. He had a large, lumbering physique, a gentle giant, slow-witted, according to his own assessment; she, by contrast, was mercurial, slender-boned, and sharp-tongued. He was earthly; she was aerial. He was made of clay and iron; she was made of fire and dreaming.
    Richie had fallen for her big-time. Peter saw it happening from far off, the way you might see a