The White Wolf's Son Read Online Free Page B

bread and jam and a glass of milk in the kitchen. Now I was really bored. Mrs. Hawthornthwaite suggested
     I find a book and go outside again. I didn’t have a better idea. I took one of my mum’s favorite E. Nesbit books,
The House of Arden,
and went downstairs, out of the front door, through the yard, and crossed the paved road to Storrs Common.
    “Watch out for that chap!” she called as I left.
    Immediately opposite the house was a leveled spot, originally designed to provide parking space for visitors who planned to
     climb the mountain. Now, as I said, they had to park in the village. From that flat area the hill continued to rise up towards
     the distant peak of Ingle-borough. We always said living at Tower House developed strong calf muscles if nothing else. You
     were either straining to go up or bracing to go down. Whenever we found ourselves on flat ground we walked so rapidly nobody
     else could keep up with us.
    On the peak of the mountain were the remains of a Celtic hill fort. The story of the fort was that the last of the Iceni had
     gone there to make their stand against the Roman invaders. Armed to the teeth behind a heavy wall, they prepared for the attack.
     But the Romans had taken one look at them and decided to go round on their way to Lancaster and Carlisle. The Celts were nonplussed.
     After about fifty years of living in the wind and cold of the peak, the remains of the Iceni eventually came straggling down
     and got jobs on the docks at Lancaster.
    I had soon found one of my favorite spots in the common, a dip in the grass where it was impossible to be seen. Here, if it
     was windy, you could swiftly find yourself in a complete cone of silence. The common was full of such holes, where the ground
     had fallen in over thecave systems which riddled the entire area. Here and there were deeper, larger holes, where the rock was exposed and which
     seemed like the entrances of caves but never really led anywhere.
    Once below the level of the ground in the inverted cones, you couldn’t hear a thing. There was no better sense of isolation,
     and yet anyone who knew you could easily find you
and
you could be back at home within a few minutes.
    With a sense of pleasurable anticipation, I opened the covers of
The House of Arden,
a companion to another favorite,
Harding’s Luck.
It was all about time paradoxes and people meeting themselves. My earlier exertions must have tired me more than I thought,
     because I fell asleep in the middle of the first chapter. The next thing I remember is rolling over on my back and blinking
     up into the late-afternoon sun. As I yawned I saw some large, round object drifting across the sky, a thin plume of smoke
     coming from it, a bit like the vapor trail of a plane.
    Waking up rapidly, I recognized the aircraft as a hot-air balloon. A local group of enthusiasts took visitors up over the
     Dales during the summer, but they rarely came down this low. Nor, I realized, as the shadow of the basket fell across my hiding
     place, were they usually so big or so colorful. Next thing the balloon filled up my entire field of vision, and I could smell
     the smoke. The silk of the canopy blazed in the sun. Glittering scarlets, greens and golds dazzled me. From the rigging flew
     the cross of St. Andrew, the blue and white Scottish flag. I saw tongues of fire from the brazier in the basket and two very
     pale faces staring down at me. Then something whooshed past, and I heard a thump, a yell. As I scrambledup and out onto the common, there came the roaring sound of a powerful engine in high gear.
    On turning, the first object I saw was the big antique convertible. Not the Lexus containing my parents, as I had half hoped,
     but a great, dark green monster with massive mudguards and a huge radiator decorated with an ornamental “B,” a single blue-clad
     occupant, swinging off the road and onto the flat parking space. The driver’s dark goggles gave him the appearance of a huge,
     mad