The Inheritance Read Online Free Page B

truly call hers.  Years ago her father
had succumbed and let her decorate it the way she wanted.  It had evolved over
the years.  It’d morphed from a candy-coloured little girl’s room that was so
saccharine you could almost taste sugar when you were inside it, into a trendy
teenager’s room with its walls covered in posters that she’d refused to remove
for years even after they were peeling away from the wall.  Now it was
tastefully decorated with soft muted colours of pale cornflower blue and stone
and a light-coloured buff carpet.  Beautiful pine furniture that Emma had
rescued from a friend who was going to throw it out lined the walls. 
    She switched on her music – her
choice was Alanis Morissette ‘You Oughta Know’ which Emma thought was quite apt
for how she was feeling – turned it up loud and went to have a shower, ignoring
the calls from her sister somewhere downstairs to turn it down.  Kate was such
a killjoy; it was as if she’d been born miserable.  Emma began singing along to
the music as she scrubbed herself in the shower.  There was a hammering on the
bathroom door.
    ‘Emma!’  It was her father. 
‘Emma!  Get out of the bathroom now and turn your music off.  Your sister’s
trying to make an important phone call and you’re drowning her out.’
    ‘Hang on.  I’ve got soap all over
me; I need to rinse myself off.  Why can’t you turn it off yourself?’
    ‘It’s your music.  You turn it
off.  Honestly, Emma, when will you grow up?  You’re not thirteen anymore. 
Hurry up.’
    By the time Emma emerged from the
shower, her father had disappeared.  There was no sign of her sister either. 
So why the urgency in turning my music off?  she wondered.  They’d obviously
gone back to their tedious jobs.  Of course, they didn’t see their work on the
farm that way – they both loved it.  Kate and her father were constantly trying
to persuade her to help out on the farm.  They would tell her she’d enjoy the
work once she got stuck into it.  But Emma wasn’t convinced. 
    Turning her music off, she threw
open her wardrobe door and searched for something suitable to wear tonight. 
She tossed garment after garment over her shoulder on to the floor.  How is it
that I can have so many clothes, yet nothing to wear? she grumbled to herself
and thought glumly how it’d been a long time since she’d been to a proper
shopping centre. 
    But she still managed to be ready
by five to seven that evening and lingered in the hallway, checking her makeup
in the large gilt mirror on the wall.  It’d been Meredith’s purchase and Emma’s
father had always hated it.  For that reason, Emma suspected.  The sound of the
taxi’s horn in the farmyard jolted her and she rushed outside, slamming the
front door behind her so that its knocker rattled.  Her heels almost caught in
the gravel as she made her way to the waiting taxi.
    ‘Glad you could make it,’ Natalie
said as she climbed in.
    ‘Well they can’t stop me doing
every last thing I want to,’ Emma replied pulling a face.
    They sat in silence for a moment as
the taxi pulled out of the driveway and on to the mostly gravel track that led
from the farmhouse to the nearest road.  Emma knew that Kate and her father
thought she was extravagant by going out so much, but technically Emma paid the
largest part for her trips out.  They were funded by her occasional work in the
bar at the local pub. 
    ‘Why do you let Kate get to you?’
Natalie asked suddenly.  Emma was surprised at the question and didn’t say
anything for a moment as she pondered her response.
    ‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said
finally.  ‘But it’s difficult not to when she’s always on at me to help more on
the farm.  And Dad’s as bad.  They just expect me to be the same as them, to
want to run the farm for the rest of my life.’  She paused and gazed out of the
window at the beautiful golden sunset, brooding.  ‘I can’t think of