The White Wolf's Son Read Online Free Page A

and curved downwards into the village. It was the shortest way and roughly paralleled
     the main paved road which passed our house above. For us it could often seem just as quick to go down that back road than
     to take the car and try to find a parking space in the village.
    The encounter had unsettled me. I was getting flashes of those old, bad dreams. Nothing specific. Not even a tangible image.
     It was also possible I had eaten somethingwhich disagreed with me. Standing on the riverbank, I tried my phone again. It still wasn’t working, although now I got a
     buzzing, like the sound of distant bees. I decided it was time to go home.
    I wasn’t used to feeling the shivers on the sunlit commons of Ingleton during a golden summer afternoon.
    I scrambled up the grassy bank, reached the path, then ran up through the green hillocks over the common, past Beesley’s,
     until I got to the back gate of our house. Mrs. Hawthornthwaite was hanging white linens up to dry on a line stretched beside
     part of our vegetable garden. She insisted it was the best place for laundry, since the linens especially were refreshed by
     the growing carrots and brussels sprouts. As a girl she had read the tip in
Woman’s Weekly,
and always applied it. Her whites glittered, reflecting the bright sunshine. Starched or unstarched, they blossomed in the
     breeze like the sails of fairy ships.
    The main walled garden was to the front of the house, still landscaped much as it had been in the seventeenth century, with
     junipers, cedars and poplars surrounding what was mostly smooth lawn arranged in terraces. The lawn was not good for much
     except looking at, since there was such a slope on it. When we wanted to play cricket or some other game, we had a flattened
     area out of sight behind the row of poplars and willows on the far side of the tiny stream which dropped underground long
     before it reached the main river. You could just see down to the back road from there.
    I was half-tempted to check if the stranger was still on the path, but he would probably have reached the village by now.
     Something about him continued to bother me. His heavy, menacing masculinity had made its way into my head.
    “You feeling hungry, dear?” Mrs. Hawthornthwaite was surprised to see me back. She looked at her watch as if wondering why
     I would be home so early on such a beautiful sunny day.
    “A bit,” I said. “Is Mum home yet?’ I knew the answer.
    “Not yet, dear. They were going to wait for the fresh fish to be landed in Morecombe, remember? They might have gone to the
     pictures, but there wasn’t much on in Lancaster.” She frowned. “Are you all right?”
    “Yes, thanks,” I said. “It’s just that I saw a man on the back road. He scared me a bit.”
    She grew alert. “He didn’t—”
    “He didn’t do anything except ask me the way to Ingleton and if I knew some foreign visitor,” I told her. “Then he went on
     to Ingleton. I suggested he ask about his friend at the Bridge. It’s okay. I just thought I’d come home. For some reason my
     phone’s not working.”
    She accepted this. Mrs. Hawthornthwaite had a way of trusting our instincts, just as we trusted hers.
    I went into the big, warm living room which looked out towards Morecombe. It got the western sun from two sets of windows.
     Through them you could see the roofs of the village below. I took the binoculars from the shelf and focused them on the little
     bit of the back road that was visible. All I saw was the vicar’s wife, coasting her bike down the track. As usual, Mrs. Handforth
     had her big orange cat, Jerico, in the front basket. They both seemed to be enjoying the ride. Nobody else was about. I went
     up to my own room, planning to plug the phone in and recharge it, but when I got it out it was working perfectly. I wondered
     if the weather had something to do with the problem. Sunspots? I had only the vaguest idea of what sunspots were.
    A bit later I had some