Awakening Read Online Free

boys are all over seventeen and baptised,’ Loveday says, smiling. She receives Anna’s asperities with comfortable serenity. ‘And – consider – they are getting older by the moment. I must admit that Mr Elias and I were sceptical. But, as I reminded him, how old was our Saviour when he lectured the elders in the Temple? Two years younger than Mr Spurgeon when he set out on his great work. And you know, we do need an Awakening! It’s been too long.’
    The Eliases often chat in Welsh together and with Mr Anwyl; there are so many Welshmen in Wiltshire that their homeland must be depopulated. Ministers in Wales don’t have two pennies to rub together, so it’s hardly surprising that sixty pounds a year in England is a magnet. Still, Beatrice is fond of Loveday; can’t help warming to her scatterbrained sincerity. Loveday can be quiet at the heart of a storm: a storm she has herself awoken in the form of five little sinners she and Mr Elias have called into the world and permitted to thunder barefoot over the tilting wooden floors while the piano plays a mazurka and unused mops rattle in pails and they all fall into bed at night innocent of soap and water.
    â€˜Babes and sucklings have their place,’ observes Anna. ‘In cribs, on reins.’
    *
    And still you are smitten, Anna thinks, with the quivering expectation that Papa will appear up there in the high pulpit; he’s been hiding, round some twist in time and space. The mind tricks itself into thinking that if it waits long enough, the beloved will come home and set us all to rights. He’ll calm my tumults with a ‘Peace, be still . ’ Oh, you are such a coward, Anna goads herself, forever on the run from reality. Your father will never come again. You’ll never see his face on this side of the grave, any more than you’ll see Lore’s. Accept it. The arrow speeds into the soft tissue of her belly; it lodges there and the venom it carries spreads. Pain radiates, she’ll faint, she perspires, she’s unwholesome: what if Anna soils herself in front of the congregation? Better to make Jocelyn take her home while there’s still time.
    The chapel reeks of rotten lilies or is that Anna’s own smell?
    The doors close behind her. Folk crowd the back of the chapel and gallery. Leaving the wheeled chair at the door, Joss supports his invalid sister to her place. Seated between Beatrice and Loveday and catching her breath, Anna is penetrated by birdsong from beyond the arched pane of plain glass. A yellowhammer surely, calling ‘A-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese!’ She’d like to be out there in the freedom of the open air. Joss with a small cough excuses himself and sidles off to sit amongst the servants. Anna hopes Beatrice will not notice and have her outing marred. She probably will. If there’s something negative to see, Beatrice’s eye will register it and darken. The dear fellow hasn’t even been baptised: never quite got round to it.
    Joss, who never came up to scratch, was an embarrassment to Papa but he always hoped for his son’s improvement. Joss tried his best and Papa, a just and charitable man for all his hellfire Calvinist theology, acknowledged the boy’s good heart while he lamented his flabby will. As for Anna, he indulged his younger daughter; denied her nothing and praised her even for ruffianly behaviour, which he called ‘spirit’. Down on the dappled grass Jacob Pentecost cast himself to snort like a pony, bucking while she rode him under the apple trees, whipping his horsy flanks with a switch of twigs. His silver hair was a mane she pulled or stroked. Paternal displeasure, which Anna rarely felt, was the end of the world to her.
    He was curiously innocent, she thinks. So interested in the antiquities at Sarum and Avebury, he never allowed questions of geological time to touch his faith. Never, that is, until the last couple of