Norman Invasions Read Online Free

drenched, smitten grass, the glistening stones of the walk. It must have been in a dream, as otherwise the poor thing, naked, and exposed to the elements, would have been half frozen. I had seen her before, I was sure, but only in dreams. In my earlier dreams, perhaps oddly enough, as they were the dreams of a young man, she, unlike the accommodating, sensuous maidens of many other dreams, had always been fully clothed, indeed, decorously, primly so, in Victorian propriety, in a starched, white shirtwaist, with a cameo brooch, with a long, black skirt to her ankles, with her yellow hair bound back behind her head. Her image in these recurring dreams was that of an upper-class scion from another era, one rather removed from ours, one more refined than our own, the image of a self-assured, self-possessed, proudly prudish, deliberately reserved, exquisitely formed, exquisitely feminine, exquisitely beautiful young lady, a lady as if of another time and place, a young lady well-bred, elegant, fashionable, proper, and genteel, very much so, aristocratic, self-satisfied, priggish, frosty and distant. She had always, in these dreams, had a look of smug, sheltered Victorian innocence, almost affectedly so, and of an almost contrivedly demure purity, and chastity, mingled with an expression of coldness and disdain. Sometimes this had excited my fury. How she regarded me. For something told me, in the dream you understand, that she, though this was unknown to her, belonged to me, that she, though at the time quite ignorant of the fact, was mine,
literally
. Sometimes, behind her, I had seen, briefly, the image of a great horse.
    I was awakened once later, in the night, by the return of the cat. Her fur was wet, so I conjectured she had left the house through the kitchen, where there was a cat flap. I toweled her down a bit, and soon, again, curled about herself, her tail wrapped neatly, delicately, about her small, golden body, she had purred herself asleep.
    In the meantime the rain had abated.
    I lay there for a time, and then, as I could not get back to sleep, rose, drew on boots, and some clothes, and, taking my torch, went downstairs. I left the house through the kitchen, quietly, in order not to awaken Mrs. Fraser, or any of her roomers. In the yard, under the window, I shone the light about.
    The grass had been muchly depressed by the night’s rain. The stones were wet, and reflected the light of the torch. There were puddles here and there, and, in places, narrow, arrested trickles of rain, like stilled, small rivers, arrested in their passage, shored by mud and pebbles. Though I had come down with trepidation, I soon felt a fool in the darkness, blazing the light about on the sodden grass, the stones, the bordering gravel. I am sure that, by then, I had slept off the fumes of alcohol, but I was undeniably agitated, even trembling. I was muchly unsettled in my thinking. Work on the article, too, had not been going well. I might well return to London, I thought, perhaps as soon as the morrow. Given the obscurities, the troubling oddities, of recent days, the hoax of the prints, the rumors, the uneasiness of villagers, I now found myself less loath than I would have been earlier to exchange the tranquility of the village, supposedly ideal for gathering together one’s thoughts, for the distractive bustle of Mayfair.
    I shall return to London, I thought.
    I have wondered, sometimes, if that would have been possible.
    I was about to return to the room when the beam of light fell upon a small patch of bare, damp ground, some feet within the wall, at the end of the yard. I focused the light on the ground. I looked up. I could see the window. The cat must have awakened, and noted my absence, for I could see her. She sat on the sill, within the panes, looking down at me. How silly she must think humans, I thought, to be prowling about so late, in a muddy yard, when they might be snug abed in a warm, dry room. I put the beam down