Cloner A Sci-Fi Novel About Human Clonin - By Emma Lorant Page 0,1
stained the drive a bloody red, a darker liquid oozing out as the Audi’s tyres crushed them. Alec had arranged for the landscape gardeners to uproot the unsightly hedge as soon as possible.
‘You don’t want to cut they down,’ Rex had warned them, reverting to the vernacular, a curiously urgent tone edging his voice. ‘Them be a good safeguard.’
‘Safeguard?’
Rex, remembering himself, had looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s only an old saying,’ he’d muttered. ‘Now these here drains…’
‘A safeguard against what?’
He’d shrugged broad shoulders. ‘Witches,’ he’d mumbled. ‘Spells and suchlike. As I were saying – ’
‘But I thought the Witch Laws were repealed in 1954.’ Alec had smiled that rather condescending smirk Lisa could do without.
‘Witch Laws?’ Rex had repeated scornfully. ‘Which laws, more like. Laws don’t matter; you can’t never be sure what they get up to on the moor,’ he went on, looking glum. ‘There be a tarring and feathering in my old dad’s time,’ he said. ‘I don’t live on the moor, now. I live in Glastonbury.’
There was a feeling of a bygone age in the village. Lisa could sense it, hovering, like the white mist which often ghosted the Levels.
She giggled nervously, thinking back. Seb joined in with her, kicking his little legs. Lisa began to tire and eased him on to the low stone wall built on to a little hump-backed bridge. A sea of green to cross before they reached the next field. Grass pollen rose in clouds as they waded through. Nothing but sedgemoor stretching as far as the eye could see, and only Glastonbury Tor, crowned by St Michael’s tower, to break the flat landscape. All permanent pasture, the ancient wetlands drained by willow-fringed rhynes first dug around two hundred and fifty years ago. They edged the roads and skirted the fields, trickling their waters into wide straight drains, then on into the rivers. But the tougher sedge grasses had long gone, eradicated by modern weed killers.
Lisa coaxed her little boy on, walking him slowly, patiently, through the tall sweet-smelling grasses. Her hands idled through meadow foxtails, Yorkshire fog and the abundant velvet bent, all in full bloom. She flicked thumb and forefinger across the seed heads just beginning to form, enjoying the sensation of juicy kernels digging into delicate finger tips. Sow thistles speared yellow everywhere, and blue cornflowers glinted through the hazy brown-crimson of flowering knapweed heads. Frank Graftley was cherishing an old-fashioned sward, profuse with local wildflowers.
‘No fertilisers in t’home meadow,’ he’d told Alec earnestly when they’d first really got to know the Graftley family, early last year. ‘Not even organic ones. We be keeping this meadow just the way my old granddad kept un.’
‘Only one cut of hay,’ Meg had explained to Lisa. ‘Later, when the season’s getting on.’ The farmer’s wife had screwed perceptive eyes into her slow widening smile as she walked Lisa round her henhouse. ‘Here, have a dozen; we got that many.’
Meg kept the eggs from her special flock of Rhode Island Reds for her own family. ‘We give a few to neighbours,’ she’d told Lisa. ‘But we don’t sell they.’
Lisa had basked in the warm glow of friendship.
‘The wildflowers be really coming on,’ Meg had said. ‘And there’s that many butterflies.’
Lisa felt established here, walking her little boy through the Graftley meadow on a glorious late-summer day. She thought there could be no greater happiness in all the world: Sebastian’s first birthday, another baby on the way.
The peaceful drone of bees gathering nectar mingled with Seb’s little shouts of delight. ‘’Ut’er’y.’ Seb clapped his hands while a painted lady butterfly sailed serenely past his nose. ‘’Etty.’
The meadow was alive with the beautiful insects. Small tortoiseshells, settled on cornflowers, teetered drunk with nectar.
‘Butterfly, Seb.’ Lisa moved to the side of the meadow and sank thankfully on to a hummock at the edge, a sudden heaviness in her legs confirming her new pregnancy. She watched her first-born crawl, grasping ineffectually at two slow drifting scarlet admirals. Meg was quite right; the luxuriant growth was attracting masses of fluttering insects. A great flock of high brown fritillaries soared up as Seb stood and blundered further into the meadow. The butterflies seemed to be everywhere, flaps of warm umber speckled brown waving against the light, flying a halo around him. Enveloped in beauty, Lisa thought tenderly, eyes soft with love for her son. They hardened into surprise as she saw Seb standing up, his chubby fingers crumpling cinnamon wings.
‘’Utter’ly,’ Seb said.
The child balanced uncertainly on buckling legs, both hands now