Free Seven for a Secret by Victoria Holt Page B

Sophie, how glad I am I came to you!”
    She looked pleased.
    “Well, I do my best to give you a happy time and, if we’re a bit short on prayers, I hope some fun will be there. What about Flora? As crazy as usual?”
    “She had a doll’s pram and a doll in it. She thinks it is Crispin St. Aubyn.”
    “That’s because she’s back in the past when she was his nurse. She still thinks she’s there. Poor Lucy has a lot to put up with. But Crispin St. Aubyn is very good to her. He calls on her now and then, I believe. Well, she was his nanny, and he didn’t get much love from his parents.”
     
    “She talked about the mulberry bush and there being nothing there.”
    “She’s full of fancies. Now, if I don’t get down to the shops there’ll be nothing for supper. Lily’s left it to me today. What about coming with me?”
    “Oh yes, please.”
    I held her arm as we walked down to the village shop.
    I was filled with joy because I was realizing what sad things can happen to children who lose their parents. There was Rachel who had had to go to the Bell House and live with her Uncle Dorian; Crispin and Tamarisk, who had had parents but they might have been orphans for all they had cared. Of course, I had had a father who went away and a mother who was more concerned with what she had missed than with the child she had. But I was the lucky one. Fortune had sent me to Aunt Sophie.
    Miss Lloyd and I were getting on very well together. I was far more interested in lessons than either of my fellow pupils. Miss Lloyd used to say: “We have history on our doorstep, girls, and how foolish we should be if we did not take advantage of it. Just think, more than two thousand years ago there were people here … in this very place which we now inhabit.”
    My responses delighted her and perhaps it was because of this that one day she decided that, instead of sitting at our lessons every morning, we should take what she called occasional educational rambles.
    One morning she took the trap and we drove across Salisbury Plain to Stonehenge. I was excited to stand there among those ancient stones while Miss Lloyd smiled at me approvingly.
    “Now, girls,” she said, ‘can you sense the mystery . the wonder of this link with the past? “
    “Oh yes,” I said.
     
    Rachel looked somewhat bewildered. Tamarisk contemptuous. What was all this fuss about a lot of stones just because they had been standing there for a long time? I could see that was what she was thinking.
    “Their age is assessed somewhere between 1800 and 1400 b.c. Think of that, girls! It was before Christ came that these stones were here.
    The arrangement of the stones, which are set in accordance with the rising and the setting of the sun, suggests that this was a place for the worship of the heavens. Just stand still and contemplate that.
    ”
     
    Miss Lloyd was smiling at me. She knew that I shared her feeling of wonder.
    After that I became very interested in the relics of ancient history which surrounded us. Miss Lloyd gave me some books to read. Aunt Sophie listened with approval when I told her of the fascination of Stonehenge, and that it was believed that the Druids had worshipped there.
    “They were learned people, you know. Aunt Sophie, those Druids,” I told her.
    “But they did offer up human sacrifices. They thought the soul never died but was passed from one person to another.”
    “I don’t much like the thought of that,” said Aunt Sophie.
    “And human sacrifices I like still less.”
    “Savages, I reckon,” said Lily, who had overheard.
    “They used to put people in cages which looked like images of their gods and they’d burn them alive,” I told them.
    “My patience me!” cried Lily.
    “I thought you went to school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, not about a lot of hooligans.”
    I laughed.
    “It’s all history. Lily.”
    “Well, it’s a good thing to know what those people were like,” added Aunt Sophie.
    “It