Читать книгу The Girl from Galloway: A stunning historical novel of love, family and overcoming the odds - Anne Doughty, Anne Doughty - Страница 14

The children were unlucky. They were almost home when the next heavy shower caught them as they turned off the main track along the lakeside and hurried up the steep, rocky track towards the open door where their mother stood waiting.

‘Come in. Come in,’ she said, looking at their rain-spattered clothes, ‘and take off your wet things.’ She handed each of them a warm towel to dry their faces and hair. ‘Are your shirts wet through?’

‘No, that’s why we ran,’ said Rose, breathlessly, as Hannah looked them over.

‘We have a message for you from Daniel,’ Sam mumbled, his head now enveloped in his towel. ‘He said we were to give it to you right away,’ he added urgently, as he emerged, his damp red hair sticking out in tufts, his face even paler than usual from the final race up the track.

‘Well, you can give it to me as soon as you’ve dried yourselves. Are your shoes wet?’

They agreed that they were, and took them off, placing them to dry well back from the fire so that the leather would not be damaged. The other children at school didn’t have shoes, but Rose and Sam had shoes for wintertime. When the weather got warmer they would be put away and they would pick their steps gingerly down the track until their feet hardened again and they could run without having to look out for every piece of projecting stone.

‘Well then, what about this message?’ she asked, as they took it in turns to comb their damp hair.

She tried not to smile as Sam drew himself up to his full height and repeated exactly what Daniel had asked him to say. Rose then made her equally well-rehearsed addition.

‘Well, then,’ Hannah said, ‘if you have some tea, I’ll go and ask Sophie if you can stay with her till I come back. Could you take a book and read to her? You know she likes that.’ She brought bread and butter to the table and poured their tea, her mind already fully occupied with what they had just said.

Sophie O’Donovan, her elderly neighbour, lived with her son a very short distance away. Jamsey was one of the younger men who had gone to Scotland with Patrick, and Hannah had assured him before he went that she would ‘keep an eye’ on the older woman. As she expected, Sophie was glad to have the prospect of company, though Hannah knew she’d have been even happier if instead of their storybooks, the children had been able to read the newspapers, which came to Sophie by various means. She loved reading the news and the fact that the newspapers were usually weeks, if not months old, troubled her not at all; it was only the smallness of the print that defeated her elderly eyes but had not dimmed her fascination with the doings in the wider world.