The Country Gentleman by Fiona Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

ma’am—”
    Over the girl’s heartfelt protestations she continued,“Thank you, Lizzie. Pray go down and ask them to bring my chocolate now.”
    Lizzie hurried from the room convinced a bolt of lightning would fry them all before evening.
    In the event, the rain was a far greater hindrance than Anne could have imagined. Curricle or carriage made little difference: One of the pair attached to the former stumbled and injured a foreleg, one of the wheels of the latter hit a rock in the deep mud and needed mending on the road. Time and again the ladies were obliged to get out and stand at the wooded roadside—under torrents of rain and once within yards of lightning striking the ground—while the men hoisted one vehicle or the other out of two feet of mud. In no time the seats and floors of the coaches were awash in squelching rainwater. The only thing that could be said in defence of the day was that it was not cold—and that was little enough, since it was so unpleasantly hot one felt one had stumbled into a Turkish bath.
    They came within view of Middlewich amidst a steady downpour, at about six in the evening. The prudent thing to do would have been to stop the night at the Rose and Crown, where they ate dinner; but being prudent did not make it affordable, as Anne remarked to Maria, and so they set forth again. The last leg of their journey, the good innkeeper assured them, would keep them on the road no longer than an hour. They had only to put the town at their backs, keep a good sharp eye out for Jack Gant’s farm (which they couldn’t possibly miss), and then mind they took the left fork up at the big elm…Anne listened with half an ear to the parade of dreary landmarks which, she supposed, would soon become as familiar to her as Pall Mall and Hanover Square. “Then drive up the road a bit to a great cunning ant-hill, you’ll know it theminute you see it,” she murmured sarcastically to Maria, “and after that, you’ll see a place where three oak leaves are turning red early…”
    The carriages rolled back out through the narrow streets of the town, its damp walls brought oppressively together by the gloomy aspect of the darkening sky. Neither Miss Guilfoyle nor Maria Insel had ever been to Middlewich. Still they could muster but little interest in it now. They were soon out of the town again and slogging over a sodden road that ran between fields dotted with cottages and interrupted by stretches of dense, dark forest. The landscape was softened and obscured by the rain, which had slowed now to a fine mizzle. Under other circumstances (say, a day’s excursion from London for a pic-nic) the ladies might have found the country quite beautiful, with its gentle swells and muted colours; but as they faced simultaneously with it the prospect of living, will they nill they, constantly surrounded by it, they viewed it with sinking rather than cheerful hearts.
    Which was a shame, because as it happened they were to see a monstrous great deal of it that very evening, and later that night to travel quite up and down it, though scarcely seeing it at all. Not to put too fine a point upon it, they got horribly lost—first one carriage, then the other, then both severally, and again (coming at one another near ten o’clock, each with the joyful idea the other carried a local citizen who could point the way) together. Whether or not one could possibly miss Jack Gant’s farm, as the sanguine keeper of the Rose and Crown had put it, they did; and so began one of the most uncomfortable, vexatious evenings any of the travellers could recall. For it had begun to rain again in earnest, so that even to move in the wrong direction they had often to stop and emergefrom the carriages, as during the afternoon, till the wheels were unstuck. In the end Anne went and helped the men pull—it was better, she said, than standing like a clod of mud oneself, getting muddier and more cloddish by the minute.
    At about ten-thirty she