The Keys of the Kingdom Read Online Free Page B

stem her fears. ‘ I wouldn’t wonder if he’d forgotten all about us. He’s the most heedless man.’ She paused. ‘We’ll give him five minutes. Another cup, Aunt Polly?’
    But tea was over and could not be prolonged. There was an unhappy silence. What had happened to him? … Would he never, never come? Sick with anxiety, Elizabeth could restrain herself no longer. With a last glance, charged with open foreboding, towards the marble timepiece, she rose. ‘ You’ll excuse me, Aunt Polly. I’ll have to run down, and see what’s keeping him. I’ll not be long.’
    Francis had suffered through these moments of suspense – haunted by the terror of a narrow wynd, heavy with darkness and surging faces and confusion, his father penned . . fighting … falling under the crowd … the sickening crunch of his head upon the cobblestones. Unaccountably he found himself trembling. ‘Let me go Mother,’ he said.
    ‘Nonsense, boy.’ She smiled palely. ‘You stay and entertain our visitors.’
    Surprisingly, Aunt Polly shook her head. Hitherto she had betrayed no perception of the growing stress. Nor did she now. But with a penetrating staidness she remarked: ‘Take the boy with you, Elizabeth. Nora and I can manage fine.’
    There was a pause during which Francis pleaded with his eyes.
    ‘All right … you can come.’
    His mother wrapped him in his thick coat; then, bundling into her plaid cape, she took his hand and stepped out of the warm bright room.
    It was a streaming, pitch-black night. The rain lathered the cobblestones, foamed down the gutters of the deserted streets. As they struggled up the Mercat Wynd past the distant Square and the blurred illumination of the Burgess Hall, new fear reached at Francis from the gusty blackness. He tried to combat it, setting his lips, matching his mother’s increased pace with quivering determination.
    Ten minutes later they crossed the river by the Border Bridge and picked their way along the waterlogged quay to Bothy No.3. Here his mother halted, dismayed. The bothy was locked, deserted. She turned indecisively, then suddenly observed a faint beacon, vaporous in the rainy darkness, a mile up-river: Bothy No.5, where Sam Mirlees, the underwatcher, made his lodging. Though Mirlees was an aimless, tippling fellow, he could surely give them news. She started off again, firmly plodding across the sodden meadows, stumbling over unseen tussocks, fences, ditches. Francis, close at her side, could sense her apprehension, mounting with every step.
    At last they reached the other bothy, a wooden shanty of tarred boards, stoutly planted on the riverbank, behind the high stone butt and a swathe of hanging nets. Francis could bear it no longer. Darting forward with throbbing breast, he threw open the door. Then, at the consummation of his daylong fear, he cried aloud in choking anguish, his pupils wide with shock. His father was there with Sam Mirlees, stretched on a bench, his face pale and bloodied, one arm bound up roughly in a sling, a great purple weal across his brow. Both men were in their jerseys and hip-boots, glasses and a mutchkin jar on the near-by table, a dirty crimsoned sponge beside the turbid water dipper, the hurricane swing lamp throwing a haggard yellow beam upon them, while beyond the indigo shadows crept, wavered in the mysterious corners and under the drumming roof.
    His mother rushed forward, flung herself on her knees beside the bench. ‘Alex … Alex … are ye hurt?’
    Though his eyes were muddled he smiled, or tried to, with his blenched and battered lips.
    ‘No worse nor some that tried to hurt me, woman.’
    Tears sprang to her eyes, born of his wilfulness and her love for him, tears of rage against those who had brought him to this pass.
    ‘When he came in he was near done,’ Mirlees interposed with a hazy gesture. ‘But I’ve stiffened him up with a dram or two.’
    She threw a blazing look at the other man: fuddled, as usual on Saturday night. She