Читать книгу The Blind Man's House. A Quiet Story онлайн

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No. Julius was never a bore, but ...

She heard him move, push out his great chest as though he would drink in the sea air, put his hand to his hair. His blue eyes were wide open. He smiled.

She knew why she was frightened.

On the left of them now was the square, sturdy, solitary little church, Sizyn Church, that contained the wonderful window, the 'Hawthorn Window' that people came from miles to see. Julius had told her that when he was a child at Garth in Roselands it was almost the first thing that his mother had taken him to see. He described the window to her: the masses of hawthorn blossom, the two priests, the patient donkey with the silver bells, the inscription to the dead Prior of the Franciscans. (She had said 'Abbot' and Julius had corrected her. The Franciscans had Priors.)

This window had been placed in the church in the early years of Elizabeth. There had been a Trenchard in Garth House even then. That Tudor house had been burned down in the eighteenth century. She was thinking of all these things, trying to arrange them in her disorderly mind, when, with a consciousness of that guilt for something neglected that was always with her, she remembered how she had promised Julius to tell him when they were passing Sizyn Church.