Justine and the Midnight Catechism by Ruth Hay

I had recently come from a small village which gave me access to countryside, but that made me an object of intense local interest. I treasured the extraordinary mental capacities that allowed me to be special, different, and valued by certain others of my acquaintance. I needed peace and solitude, much like others need noise and movement around them. Friends preferred to leave me to my solitary existence. Companions could not fathom their impact on me. I knew my psychic abilities were fragile in their way. It was better, and safer by far, to be ready to run from danger and not be hampered by objects that only weighed one down. But then, possessions were not all that important to me. One smallish receptacle was not much to show for a life that had taken me to some far corners of the world. I shivered with the memory and drew my familiar knitted blanket around my shoulders.Īll my possessions were in a case at my feet. In truth, I was not sure if my mother was alive or dead. Words were exchanged between us in anger that I wish had not been spoken. Her constant fear was that the house would catch on fire while we slept and we would burn to death in our beds. I remembered my mother, Estelle, building up big fires of dried branches from the trees in the wood that was all that stood between us, and the wild Atlantic weather outside. There was little chance that the old place still stood against the winds of winter that drove through its flimsy walls and chilled every part of the place and every person who dared to live there. I thought of the old cottage on the clifftop where my earliest memories were, but that was far in my past life and this was to be a new start. It was a way to distract myself from a deep longing for a certain Siamese cat who, I suspected, would be forever in my heart. I had made no real preparations for my change of location.Īs I rode the two trains from Scotland to Cornwall, I began to wonder where I should choose to stay.

Justine and the Midnight Catechism by Ruth Hay