The Girl Green as Elderflower Read Online Free

tiny voice, the faint reserve which never left her, there was something unearthly about Amabel. Mark addressed her as ‘Tinkerbell’.
    A wicked pack of cards
came floating into Clare’s mind as he stared down. On the left was the Hanged Man, looking quite happy. ‘I didn’t know they were still made.’
    ‘Marco got them in London,’ Lucy said. ‘They tell your fortune somehow.’
    ‘Crispin,’ said Amabel, in her Tinkerbell voice.
    ‘Hullo, my changeling.’
    ‘You made a mistake,’ said Amabel, ‘and there’s going to be trouble, but you’ll get out of it and be very happy. But you will need to be much bolder in love.’
    Truly astonished, ‘You are the most extraordinary kid,’ Clare exclaimed. But then all three children burst out laughing, and he understood why Amabel had been so preoccupied when he came in.
    ‘She’s practised it,’ Lucy let on. ‘She learned that one by heart, out of the little book.’
    ‘Are we going to do the other thing now?’ asked Mikey. ‘I’ll tell Marco.’ He scampered across the room and bawled up the stairs: ‘Crispin’s here.’
    A side door opened, and Alicia came in wheeling a trolley. ‘I thought so,’ she said at the sight of Clare. ‘How nice and punctual you are. Happy New Year.’ He hesitated, then gave her a peck on the cheek. Hardly acknowledging that, she stood examining the glowing hall. ‘Marco’s big blaze was a picturesque idea, but where is there to sit or to put things down?’
    ‘In the Middle Ages,’ Lucy said, ‘everything happened in the hall.’
    ‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised,’ said Alicia primly.
    The fire brought out red glints in her hair, which was arranged in what Clare took to be a pageboy style, at least a style recalling the Duc de Berry’s pageboys. The light suited her skin. She looked handsome and young. Suddenly she gave him the smile which she had absently forgotten, and Clare’s heart went out to her. She was still the ally who had amused him when, unhappy with strangeness of the country which was supposed to be his homeland, he had shivered in that house. ‘Amabel,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to use that table, I’m sorry. Oh, those beastly cards, I hate them. Did you know they’re still making them, Crispin?—or making them again. Marco says all that mad old ladies’ stuff is coming back.’
    ‘I should have thought they would interest you,’ Clare said. ‘Visually, I mean.’ He cut the stack which Amabel had put aside, and gazed upon the Devil. ‘Odd, that. I’ve never seen a chap in tights that had, as you might say, compartments.’
    ‘Marco’s idea,’ Alicia said, ‘was to inspire me to make money. He thought I might design a pack. He’s sure fortunes are going to be made out of anything that’s irrational.’
    Mark Clare, very tall, came down the narrow shadowed stairs into the light, his nineteen-year-old body seeming to be made up largely of blue denim legs. In his recent-schoolboy’s mumble, he said: ‘Happy birthday, Cris.’
    ‘Have you had a birthday since Christmas?’ said Alicia. ‘How does he know that when I don’t?’
    ‘In the summer,’ Mark said, ‘we were doing some astrology. Just fooling about, you know. Cris is complicated because he was born in the southern hemisphere. Good practice.’
    ‘If my father could hear his grandson—’ Alicia began.
    ‘He’d whip out my nuciform sac,’ Mark said, ‘the old horse-doctor. Intelligence is curiosity, Ma.’
    ‘Personally, I’d sooner be a cabbage,’ said Alicia, ‘than a crackpot. Cabbages have the respect of their neighbours.’
    ‘Did Marco say it’s your birthday?’ Mikey barged in.
    ‘Not today,’ Clare said. ‘The day before yesterday.’
    ‘How old are you?’ demanded the child, as if suspicious of that answer. He stood four-square in the baronial room, looking up with round blue eyes under his cap of straight, rope-coloured hair. Mikey could be intensely, bullyingly