Deborah Crombie - Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James 11 - Water Like A Stone

leave the dogs.”

“My dad doesn’t like dogs in the house,” Lally explained, jumping up. “Let’s get our coats. If we hurry, we can get the best seats.”

And Kit, who never willingly left his little terrier, trailed after her without a word.

He discovered the pleasure of cruelty at eight. His mother had promised him a special treat, an afternoon on their own, the pictures, then an ice cream. But at the last minute a friend had rung and invited her out, and she had gone with nothing more than a murmured apology and a brush of her hand against his hair.

He’d felt ill with fury at first. He’d screamed and kicked at the wall in his room, but the pain quickly stopped him. It was not himself he wanted to hurt.

Nor was there anyone to hear him. His mother would have asked their neighbor Mrs. Buckham to look in on him and give him his tea, but for the moment he had the house to himself. He straightened up and wiped his runny nose on his sleeve.

Slowly, he made his way to his mother’s room. Her scent lingered, a combination of perfume and hair spray and something in-definably female. The casual clothes she’d donned for her afternoon with him lay tossed across the bed, discarded in favor of something

more elegant. Her face powder had spilled, and fanned across the glass of her vanity table like pale pink sand. He wrote “bitch” in the dust, then smeared the word away— even then, he had known that crudity brought less than satisfying results. And he had seen something else. Her pearl necklace, a favorite gift from his father, had slipped to the floor in a luminous tumble. He lifted it, running the smooth spheres through his fingers, then rubbing them against his cheek, feeling an unexpected and pleasurable physical stirring. With his pulse quickening, he glanced round the room. His gaze settled on just what he needed— the hammer left behind after his mother’s recent bout of tacking up pictures.

First he took the pearls in both hands and jerked. The string snapped with a satisfying pop that flung the beads to the carpet in a random cascade. Then he lifted the hammer and carefully, thoroughly, smashed every pearl into a splash of luminescent dust.

A gleam caught his eye— two had escaped and were nestled against the leg of the vanity, as if hiding. He raised the hammer, then stopped, struck by a sudden impulse, and scooped the pearls into his pocket. They felt cool and solid to his touch. He would keep them as souvenirs. Only later would he learn that such things were called mementos.

The satisfaction that coursed through him after his act of de-struction was unlike anything else he’d ever known, but that had been only the beginning. He awaited discovery, trembling with dread and excitement. His mother came home and went upstairs, but there had been no explosion of anger. Instead, she locked herself in her room, complaining of a headache. It wasn’t until the next morning, when he’d faced her across the breakfast table, that he’d seen the fear in her eyes.

Chapter Six

“I’m too big for riding in laps.” Toby squirmed half off Gemma’s knee, but she hooked her arm round his middle and pulled him firmly back.

“You’ll just have to make the best of it, won’t you?” she said, taking the opportunity to nuzzle his silky hair, something it seemed she seldom managed these days. “And what about my poor knee, having to put up with such a big boy on it? Do you hear it complaining?”

She bounced him and he giggled, relaxing against her.

“Knees don’t talk, Mummy,” Toby said with assurance.

“Mine do,” Rosemary chimed in from the front passenger seat.

“Especially when I’ve spent all day in the garden.”

Hugh Kincaid’s old Vauxhall estate car could theoretically have held seven comfortably, but the third seat had been filled with cartons of books. Hugh had managed to shift them so that Kit could squeeze in the back, leaving Sam, Lally, Toby, and Gemma to jam into the center seat as best they could.

It had begun to snow again, and the car was cold in spite of the number of bodies. “We’ll soon get the heater going,” Hugh said cheerfully as he turned up the blower. The blast of frigid air made

Gemma even colder and she hugged Toby to her until he wriggled like a hooked fi sh.

For Gemma, already disoriented by the unfamiliar terrain and her limited vision from the rear seat, the journey into town merged into a swarm of onrushing white flakes, punctuated by the yellow glare of the occasional sodium lamp and the wet gleam of black road. Ordinarily preferring to drive, she disliked the sensation of things being out of her control, and she felt a little queasy from the motion of the car.

Then, as they passed beneath a dark arch, Sam said, “Look. There’s the aqueduct. The canal goes over the road.”

“You mean the boats go overhead? ” asked Kit, sounding in-trigued.

“Can we see?” added Toby.

“Not tonight,” said Rosemary. “But maybe tomorrow, if the weather clears.”

There were houses now, crowding in on either side, and Sam continued his narration. “This is Welsh Row, where the Welsh would march in to kill the English. And not far from here were the brine works, where the Romans made salt. The ‘wich’ in Nantwich means salt, you know.”

“Who appointed you tour guide, Sam?” Lally said waspishly.

“I’m sure they’re perfectly happy not knowing.” Lally and Kit had been talking as they left the house, and Gemma wondered if Lally was cross over having had to sit beside her brother rather than her new friend. At any rate, Gemma was glad to see Kit overcoming his shyness with his cousins.

Toby tilted his head back until he could whisper in Gemma’s ear.

“Who are the Welsh, Mummy? Do they still kill the English?”

Gemma stifled a laugh. “The Welsh are perfectly nice people who live in Wales, lovey. And no, they don’t kill the English. You’re quite safe.” Wanting to encourage Sam, who had subsided into hurt silence, she peered out the window at the classical fronts of the buildings.

“From what Duncan’s said, I thought Nantwich was Tudor, but these buildings look Georgian.”

“Most of Welsh Row is Georgian,” Hugh answered, and although Sam jiggled with impatience, he didn’t interrupt as his grandfather went on. “But the town center has an exceptional number of intact Tudor buildings. It was built all of a piece, after the fire of , a good bit of it with monies contributed by Elizabeth the First, who wasn’t known for her generosity. It’s thought that she feared the Spanish would invade through Ireland, and Nantwich was the last important stop that provisioned the soldiers garrisoned at Chester.”

Gemma could easily see where Sam had got his interest in local history.

“There’s no access to the town square by car,” Hugh added as he stopped at a traffic light, “but I’d be glad to take you for a little tour after dinner, if you’d like. We can walk easily from Juliet’s, and of course we’ll be going to the church.”

“There may not be time before mass,” put in Rosemary, sounding a little anxious. The box of punch ingredients clinked as she adjusted it on her knees.

“Well, if it’s possible, I’d like that very much,” Gemma told Hugh.

They were passing along a very ordinary shopping precinct now, and glimpsing a Boots and a Somerfield’s supermarket among the nonde-script postwar shop fronts, she felt unexpectedly disappointed.

Hugh made a quick right turn, causing Rosemary to clutch her box a bit tighter, then another, and then he was pulling up in a quiet cul-de-sac. To one side, Gemma saw ordinary redbrick terraced houses, their porches sprinkled with colored fairy lights, their postage-stamp lawns and common green muffled with snow. On the other side of the street stood a high garden wall with a wrought-iron gate at one end, and it was towards this that Hugh