Consequences Read Online Free Page B

achieved the vote, had sweated over the same patch of landscape and stared at the same sky. Now, the place stood empty, bar the mice and the black beetles and the spiders. Empty, and two pounds a month.
    Matt and Lorna stepped gingerly inside. The place smelled of damp, and two centuries of wood smoke, and a faint suggestion of the dead jackdaw that had fallen down the chimney and lay on the hearth, a brittle carcass. Matt picked it up and carried it out. He threw it into the hedge and stood for a moment, noting the view of the hills. He saw the roof of a house in the valley, with smoke curling up from a chimney; he saw stooked corn in a field: he saw the distant dotted shapes of sheep. He saw pattern and structure; pictures began to form in his head.
    He went back into the cottage and joined Lorna on a tour of inspection. There was one main room on the ground floor, into which the front door opened directly; an open fireplace with a blackened kitchen range, a stone sink. Another, smaller room led off this, with a window that looked out onto the long triangular garden. Shaggy grass, gooseberry bushes, apple trees, and a plot that remembered vegetable gardening, with some stumps of cabbage and a tangle of long-rotted beans.
    “It’s the Marie-Celeste,” said Matt. “Where did everybody go?” There was a built-in dresser in the main room, empty but for a cracked cup, a child’s rusted tin top, a moth-eaten tea cosy.
    A wooden staircase led to the upper floor. Two rooms and a landing. They stood at the window of the largest room and looked down toward the coast. A small ship perched on the silver streak of the sea. The fields were pale bleached stubble, or rich red plough; the hedges and woodland were darkest green.
    Lorna said, “This is our bedroom.”
    “Are you sure? This place means oil lamps, and candles, and water from the tap outside. You have never lived like that.”
    “Have you?”
    “Not quite.”
    “Then maybe it’s time we did.”
    Outside, there were two sheds. The smaller one, at the end of a short path from the back door, housed the privy. The other had a concrete floor, a window, and a long workbench all along one side.
    “Aha…” said Matt.
    There was a standpipe beside the door. Matt tried the tap: water gushed. “It’s from the stream, I suppose. We’ll need jugs, basins, a tin bath.”
    Beside the larger shed, a lean-to sheltered the remains of a log pile. Matt picked up chunks of wood, stacked them one upon another. “And a saw, and an axe, and a wedge. The village is over a mile away, do you realize?”
    “Bikes,” she said. “And one day, when you’re rich and famous, a little car.”
    “It is not always going to be a sunny afternoon in September. In the winter things will be very different.”
    “I didn’t know you had this pessimistic streak. What else am I going to discover today?”
    He put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t want you to be under any illusion about what it may be like here, that’s all. And what will you do all the time?”
    “Do?” she cried, “Do?” She flung out her hand. “When there’s all that out there? Explore. I’ve never seen the countryside except through the windows of Daddy’s car. And dig this garden. And clean up that range and learn how to cook.”
    And make a home, she wanted to say, but thought it mawkish. The first home that will be the way I want it, and a million miles from Brunswick Gardens.
    “We might find something in the village with running water and electricity.”
    “Not for two pounds a month. Not with a view of half Somerset.”
    They had arrived here by chance, luck, by a series of unconsidered movements. They had traveled, somehow, from the bench in the park to this implacable little building. Lorna thought: it has been waiting for us. Matt thought about tools, and a spade and a fork, and furniture, and, one day, a printing press.
    After the wedding, they had left London. A friend of Matt’s had offered a