The Colour by Rose Tremain Page A

shall see the Blackstones as soon as there is a melt”. So I was not wrong, except that you came alone.’
    She went to the door, then, and began calling to the maid: ‘Janet! Janet!’ then turned to Harriet and whispered: ‘Her name is Jane, but we never call her that. It is very peculiar of us.’
    Harriet smiled at Dorothy. Then she allowed herself to look round the large room. In its degree of spaciousness and comfort, it reminded her of places where she’d worked as a governess, places which she had never expected to see again once she’d set sail for New Zealand. She wondered how long it had taken the Orchards to create a room like this, with heavy curtains at the windows and a fine gilt mirror above the fireplace and newspapers folded in a rack.
    â€˜Now,’ said Dorothy to Janet, who had come silently in, ‘bring some brandy wine and three glasses, and some milk for Edwin, then make up a bed for Mrs Blackstone, and . . . what are we to eat for supper?’
    â€˜Pigeon pie,’ said Janet.
    â€˜Very well. Make sure there is enough for us all.’ Then she turned to Harriet as Janet slipped away. ‘Troublesome to shoot, the pigeon,’ she said. ‘Flight like a spinning top. But Toby could shoot a flea. Sit down, Mrs Blackstone. Put your feet on this little stool and warm them.’
    The pie was large and cumbersome. A whole flock of large pigeons seemed to fill it up, clustering together in a red gravy.
    Harriet, yawning with hunger, noticed that Toby Orchard’s enormous hands cut the pastry with surprising delicacy, as though he knew he had been put on earth to be the steward of everything physical in the world, whether these things were flying about, or growing at a creek’s edge, or dead in a pie. She watched him as he cut the first triangle of pastry and laid it on top of the pie and scooped up the spicy meat with a heavy spoon, then transferred the pastry to the brimming plate that he handed her. Compared to Joseph, Toby Orchard was a giant. His hair and beard were yellow and wild and his face had a high colour, as though he had just run a race or fought with a tiger. His clothes were noisy as he moved inside them.
    When he had served out all the portions of pigeon and mumbled a grace, he fell triumphantly upon his food. He tore bread in his hands and drenched it with gravy and swallowed everything down – pigeon flesh, pastry, potatoes, sauce and bread – so fast that the pattern of roses on the plate seemed hardly to have been covered up before it appeared again, shiny and clean. And Harriet understood that while Toby was in this first euphoria of his eating, he expected no one to talk to him. Dorothy smiled benevolently upon him between her own meagre mouthfuls. Edwin quietly recited to his mother a poem he had made up that day; it was about a hippopotamus. Harriet savoured the food and the fire in the room and waited to tell her story of the death of Beauty in the snow.
    When she began her tale, the three faces stared at her as though at a waterfall, wondering at its downward precipitation. She supposed they were trying to imagine what kind of ignorant people could put a rug on a cow. Edwin’s eyes were sorrowful as he asked: ‘Why did you not put Beauty in her shed?’
    â€˜Because there is no shed,’ said Harriet.
    â€˜That was the trouble,’ said Dorothy gently, ‘as it is with sheep when a southerly blows like that. There is never enough shelter.’
    Toby Orchard began slapping crumbs from his coat-front. He did this impatiently, tidying himself up before beginning to speak.
    â€˜When we began here on the run,’ he said at last, ‘we lost livestock with every southerly gale. Sheep can be blown clean off a hill or they can cough till their hearts burst or cluster under the river-banks and drown. But what I said to Dorothy then, and what I say to you now, is never give up . Keep