Free The Legacy by Katherine Webb Page B

blow right through your soul, but it has to be better than haunting that house. On the work bench I find a trug and some secateurs, and I head out toward the woods.
    I walk in a loop via the dew pond. I do this most days. I can’t seem to stay away. Standing on the steep edge of it, kicking over chalk and flints. Hints of something return to me when I stand here. Wherever I stand around Storton Manor, hints return to me—little snapshots that go with a view, or a smell, or a room. A ribbon tied behind a bed. Yellow flowers stitched on a pillowcase. Every step is an aide-memoire. Here at the pond there is something I should remember , something more than playing, than swimming, than the thrill of the forbidden. I shut my eyes and crouch down, hug my knees. I concentrate on the smell of the water and the ground, on the sound of the trees overhead. I can hear a dog barking, a long way off, in the village perhaps. There is definitely something , something I am trying to know. I put blind fingers forward until they touch the surface. The water bites, cold to the bone. I picture it thickening, ice crystals spinning hard threads through it. For one second I feel the old fear of being sucked down into it. For if water could come up from the bottom of it, from nowhere, like magic, then surely things could go the other way as well? A giant plughole. I would think this when I swam, sometimes. A delicious frisson, like swimming in the sea and suddenly thinking of sharks.
    At the edge of the downs, where the trees disappear, the ground drops into a steep, round hollow. A giant scooping out of the earth, packed with hawthorn, blackthorn and elder, all bound up with old man’s beard. The frost sets deeper here, lasts longer. I set my sights on a holly bush, right in the center of it all, its bright berries like jewels in the colorless tangle, but I don’t get far. I descend, slipping on the tussocky grass, and when I reach the thicket I can see no way in. The air is still, noticeably colder. My breath steams in front of my face as I make my way around, looking for a way in. No view but the slope up and away, the lip where it meets the sky. One attempt to force a way through and I retreat, badly scratched.
    I head back into the woods, nothing in my trug so far but some tendrils of stripy ivy from the garden. These aren’t public woods; they aren’t managed, or criss-crossed with paths. The estate’s pasture land is all leased or sold to local farmers these days, and I wonder if any of them ever come in here—take wood, raise pheasants, snare rabbits. I can see no sign of anything like that. The ground is choked with leaf fall and brambles, splintered logs mouldering into nothing. Unseen things move away from me with small rustling sounds and no other trace. Acorns, beech masts; around one tree a carpet of tiny yellow apples, rotting. I have to watch my feet to keep from stumbling and there are no birds singing above my head. Just a quiet breathing sound, as the wind sneaks through the naked branches.
    I’m not watching where I’m going and I nearly step on a crouching person. I yelp in surprise. A young man with long dreadlocks and bright, mismatched clothes.
    “Sorry! Hello,” I gasp. He stands up, far taller than me, and I see a large bracket fungus by his feet. Yellow and ugly. He was examining it, his nose virtually touching it. “I . . . I don’t think you can eat those,” I add, smiling briefly. The man faces me and says nothing. He is lean and rangy. His arms just hang by his sides as he stands there, watching me, and I feel the pull of unease towing me away from him. Some instinct, perhaps, or something missing from behind his eyes, tells me that all is not as it should be. I take a step back and turn left. He steps to his right to block me. I turn the other way and he follows. My heart beats harder. His silence is unsettling, he is somehow threatening even though he makes no move to reach out for me. He has a spicy