Wilberforce by H. S. Cross Page A

Emily storming off to her bedroom after shrill confrontation with their mother, packing a bundle, and Running Away.
    â€”Don’t bother coming after me! she’d cried over their mother’s protests.
    This had been when they lived in the country, in the cottage at Longmere, and he had a mental picture of his father returning home shortly afterwards (on a horse?), consoling their mother, and then departing on the horse (with Morgan and Uncle Charles?) to search for Emily. They found her in a glade nearby, and Father had sent Uncle Charles back with the horses while he stayed to Reason with Emily. Morgan had a memory of riding his father’s horse back to the cottage and announcing that Emily had been found! Safe and sound! Emily and Father returned, and their mother prepared a special tea with iced buns.
    His legs were not striding through the woods in search of a special tea. His mother was no longer making buns of any description, his father no longer rode horses, and Emily had gone and married Captain Cahill. His legs were striding through the woods in pursuit of something altogether undemonstrative and compulsory. His legs were striding for one reason only: to shore up his sanity.
    But how? The station lay in the opposite direction; what’s more, his money would take him only a few junctions down the line. Surely the body did not propose to trek on foot to their destination? He may have traversed the Cheviots at the age of nine and survived Dartmoor blizzards before that, but how many hungry miles would it take to escape Yorkshire? Were they headed for London? Home, as his father called it? Decidedly not. If Yorkshire held nothing for him, London held less than nothing.
    He hungered for somewhere distant, somewhere epic, somewhere full of valleys, mountain ponies, beacons, Brecons—Wales? Wales! Ancient Cambria, land of his father’s mother’s people! The body gave no acknowledgment, but Morgan knew he had discovered its secret. For Wales they were bound, though plainly they weren’t going to walk the whole way, not with three shillings sixpence in their pocket. The path would lead them to Fridaythorpe, but there was nothing in that village beyond a public house, a church, and a post-office shop, all in the middle of precisely nowhere.
    The post-office shop! He aha’ed to let the body know that he was onto it.
    â€”So that’s it, he said aloud. The post-office van!
    They were to hitch a ride in the back of the post-office van, like some self-mailing parcel, posting themselves on to the next destination, Doncaster perhaps, and proceeding thusly to their terminus beyond England’s western border. He smiled in triumph as they plunged deeper into Grindalythe Woods, later into the night, farther from the Academy and his friends, who had ejected him like so much rubbish from a life raft, farther from everything known—ten minutes out, a thousand paces out, half a mile out, out, out, and out.
    *   *   *
    The clock on the church was stuck at half past seven. Beneath the dial, words mocked, Time is short, eternity long . They made him want to punch someone again.
    The walk through the woods had warmed him, but it wouldn’t last. He tried the front and back doors of the Keys and found them locked. This he considered unfair. What possible reason could there be to lock anything in Fridaythorpe? The post-office shop he found similarly inaccessible, though the mailbag languished on the stoop awaiting early collection. How utterly typical. The post office they locked, but the mail they left unattended in the night. People everywhere were idiots.
    An unholy racket like the sound of a tin shed collapsing dispelled the quiet of the night. He ducked down a passage between the post office and the adjacent block of houses. Pressing his back against the damp wall, he rubbed his shoulder, now sore from being out of its wrappings. The noise grew louder, and he realized it was