Free On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) by Bruce Chatwin Page A

hissed in the grey air and Miss Nancy Bickerton rode up on a black hunter. They hid behind a tree-trunk, and peered around. She rode so close they saw the mesh of her hairnet over her golden bun. Then the mist closed over the horse’s haunches, and all they found was a pile of steaming dung in the withered grass.
    Benjamin often wondered why Jim smelled so nasty and finally plucked up courage to say, ‘Trouble with you is you stink.’
    ‘Be not I as stinks,’ said Jim, adding mysteriously, ‘another!’ He led the twins up the loft ladder, rummaged in the straw and took hold of a sack with something wriggling inside. He untied the string and a little pink nose popped out.
    ‘Me ferret,’ he said.
    They promised to keep the ferret a secret and, at half-term, when Amos and Mary were at market, all three stole off to net a warren at Lower Brechfa. By the time they had caught three rabbits, they were far too excited to notice the black clouds roiling over the hill. The storm broke, and pelted hailstones. Soaked and shivering, the boys ran home and sat by the fireside.
    ‘Idiots!’ said Mary when she came in and saw their wet clothes. She dosed them with gruel and Dover’s powders, and packed them off to bed.
    Around midnight, she lit a candle and crept into the children’s room. Little Rebecca was asleep with a doll on her pillow and thumb in mouth. In the bigger bed, the boys were snoring in perfect time.
    ‘Are the youngsters fine?’ Amos rolled over, as she climbed back in beside him.
    ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘They’re all fine.’
    But in the morning Benjamin looked feverish and complained of pains in his chest.
    By evening the pains were worse. Next day, he had convulsions and coughed up bits of hard, rusty-coloured mucus. Pale as a communion wafer, and with hectic spots on his cheekbones, he lay on the lumpy bed, listening only for the swish of his mother’s skirt, or the tread of his twin on the stair: it was the first time the two had slept apart.
    Dr Bulmer came and diagnosed pneumonia.
    For two weeks Mary hardly left the bedside. She ladled liquorice and elderberry down his throat and, at the least sign of a rally, she fed him spoonfuls of egg-custard and slips of buttered toast.
    He would cry out, ‘When am I going to die, Mama?’
    ‘I’ll tell you when,’ she’d say. ‘And it’ll be a long while yet.’
    ‘Yes, Mama,’ he’d murmur, and drift off to sleep.
    Sometimes, Old Sam came up and pleaded to be allowed to die instead.
    Then, without warning, on December 1st, Benjamin sat up and said he was very, very hungry. By Christmas he had come back to life – though not without a change in his personality.
    ‘Oh, we know Benjamin,’ the neighbours would say. ‘The one as looks so poor.’ For his shoulders had slumped, his ribs stuck out like a concertina, and there were dark rings under his eyes. He fainted twice in church. He was obsessed by death.
    With the warmer weather he would tour the hedgerows, picking up dead birds and animals to give them a Christian burial. He made a miniature cemetery on the far side of the cabbage patch, and marked each grave with a cross of twigs.
    He preferred now not to walk beside Lewis, but one step behind; to tread in his footsteps, to breathe the air that he had breathed. On days when he was too sick for school he would lie on Lewis’s half of the mattress, laying his head on the imprint left by Lewis on the pillow.
    One drizzly morning, the house was unusually quiet and, when Mary heard the creak of a floorboard overhead, she went upstairs. Opening the door of her bedroom, she saw her favourite son, up to his armpits in her green velvet skirt, her wedding hat half-covering his face.
    ‘Psst! For Heaven’s sake,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let your father see you!’ She had heard the sound of hobnails on the kitchen floor. ‘Take them off! Quickly now!’ – and with a sponge and water, she washed off the smell of cologne.
    ‘Promise you’ll