Free Touch Not The Cat by Mary Stewart

standing out in the yard. Come in now, do."
    He stood back in the doorway to let me through. I went into the kitchen where, it was obvious, he had just been about to cook his supper. There was a place set for one at the table, and beside the stove were a pack of sausages and some tomatoes, with a packet of peas defrosting in the warmth.
    I checked. "I'm afraid I've come at a bad time."
    He went past me and threw a couple of billets of wood on the fire, then hooked a foot round the leg of a chair and hitched it forward.
    "You haven't at all. I've got your bike here for you; it's not in the barn; I brought it into the scullery.
    And I got a can of petrol for it. It'll not take a minute to fill up and get it ready. But look, why don't you stay a bit first? I was just making a bite of supper, and you're welcome to have some. There's plenty. It's only sausages, dead easy if it suits you."
    Since I had obviously interrupted his cooking, and just as obviously he wanted his meal before he started getting the bike ready for me, I accepted. "I'd love that. Look, I'll cook while you set for me, shall I?"
    "O.K. Want some chips with it?"
    "Yes, please."
    Mrs. Henderson had left her apron hanging behind the door. I put it on, and busied myself at the stove. I got the grill going, and laid the sausages and tomatoes to cook while Rob took things from drawers and cupboards, and, neat-handed as a sailor for all his size, laid the extra place and sliced some bread and tipped another helping of frozen chips into the frying basket. There was no question of looking out the best china for Miss Bryony; I had been an intimate of the Granger household all my life, and had taken things just as they came. Fish and chips straight from the newspaper, and yellow shop cakes with marshmallow cream, had been the "tea at Mrs. Granger's" treat of my childhood. I watched Rob set the knife and fork and find an extra plate to heat, and I felt the blackness of the yew walk, the loss and disappointment, recede from sight. Here, with the bright fire and the tick of the cheap alarm clock, the hiss of frying chips and the smell of sausages, was yet another welcome that Ashley was holding out to me. This, too, was home.
    Rob glanced up and caught the tail end of the look, but gave no sign that he understood it.
    He was a tall young man, big-boned, with big hands and feet and the deceptively slow movements of the countryman. He was very dark, brown as a gipsy, with black hair, and eyes so dark that it was hard to tell iris from pupil, and harder still to read the expression in them. His speech, too, was slow, but the soft country voice and his habit of silent pauses masked a fair intelligence which should have had a better chance to develop. His mother had been the village schoolteacher, a gentle, lonely girl who had fallen for good looks and what she thought of as simple ways, and had married Matt Granger, a handsome lout who first of all neglected, and then frankly ill-used her and her child. I myself as a child had never realized why little Robbie, as he was called then, had sometimes stayed off school, or sometimes come with bruises as if he had been fighting. But when Matt Granger tumbled drunk into the Overflow one night and was drowned, Rob took on his father's job of running the home farm with no emotion apparent other than deep satisfaction and relief; and though she said nothing at all, Mrs. Granger, quiet as ever, seemed happier. She died some two years later of a neglected cancer, soon after Rob, for all his struggles, had had to admit defeat over the farm, which his father had run into the ground and deep into debt. My father, having sold the land, invited Rob to stay on as caretaker and man-of-all-work around the Court. It was something of a surprise to everyone when Rob, who understandably enough had never been devoted to Ashley, and who might have done better for himself elsewhere, accepted and stayed.
    He came to my elbow, watching as I turned the