Read The Storytellers for Free Online Page A

she had insisted on coming outside to see.
    â€˜Crumpets when we go back in, Harve,’ she’d offered up with relish. ‘A proper weekend treat!’ – which she was now leaving him in order to prepare.
    Local children were making the most of it. A snowball flew past his head, followed by a ‘sorry mister!’ barely meant. The gardens were small, yet treasured, the gift of a seventeenth century merchant.
    He’d read about the Askes, a Yorkshire family of high ideals. Robert worked for the East India Company, trading in raw silk, and had left a fortune of some £50 million in modern money to the Haberdashers, his trade guild or livery company. An almshouse for the poor was built and a school, all according to his instructions, and while the school still thrived, the gardens were all that remained of the almshouse. Care of the elderly and destitute was now the preserve of the state, not private charity, an advance even his mother endorsed, except when she was fretting about bureaucrats playing Lords Bountiful and feathering their own nests at her expense.
    Harvey’s visit to Longbridge had stirred unexpected emotions. That his work had been given such prominence, even if the headline was not his, pleased him greatly. When not in Buttesland Street, his home was The Sentinel . That was where his loyalty lay; to it and to its political attitude as George Gilder defined it. But the people he had been amongst did not strike him as evil, with the possible exception of the delegate from Cowley whose obvious intelligence he thought was being played like an instrument for his own gratification. Even the shop steward seemed more a prisoner of events than their conductor. What he had witnessed were men in the eye of a storm, seeking comfort in each other’s company and clinging to the only secure structure they knew.
    Robert Aske’s forebear – another Aske named Robert – hadfaced a similar dilemma. As a devout Catholic, he had been strongly opposed to the reforms of Henry VIII. Although a lawyer in London, he travelled north to join the many from Yorkshire, Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland and Westmorland in their protest against Henry’s pillaging of the monastic orders. He secured safe passage from the king’s representative to remonstrate with the monarch directly, but following their meeting, the revolt flared again and he was arrested. Rather than execute him at Tyburn, as befell other leaders of the protest, Henry had him hung in York, bound by chains to preserve his rotting body as a public example to his kinsmen.
    Harvey’s interest in history was one of uninvolved curiosity and mirrored his work. As a journalist, he reported. That was his job. He knew he was more concerned about his employer’s approval than with what he reported on. Only opera engaged his emotions, but that was within the safety of a story that could be picked up and put down, like a book. While he sat looking at the snow and the children playing in it, part of the scenery and observer both, Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken,’ came to mind, about the often illusory choices people face.
    When the world breaks apart, must you not attach yourself to one part or the other, and short of limbo, will you not choose that closest to your familiarity, which makes it not a choice at all? Frost’s traveller has the luxury of two paths to take, innocent of outcome. Only in hindsight can such a choice carry any resonance, save that being one traveller you cannot travel both. Harvey knew he was born working class. But there had been schools and universities to go to, free of charge. He had possessed some aptitude and a mother with ambition on his behalf. So had he chosen the path he was on? He hardly thought so. Brought up differently might he not have been Ray Gosling, the machinist worried how to pay his young family’s bills?
    Robert Aske the elder had been forced to choose