Honey's Farm Read Online Free PDF Page A

the sea.’
    â€˜If it wasn’t for William Davies coming like a hero and bringing you out, you would have been a goner.’ Carys sighed. ‘So romantic, it was.’
    Eline glanced down into her mug, watching the swirling brown liquid as she raised it to her lips.
    â€˜When you getting married, soon is it?’ Carys asked innocently.
    Eline shook back a stray curl of hair. ‘He’s so stubborn,’ she found herself saying. ‘He wants to be rich before he makes me his wife – as if I care about that.’
    Carys looked at her with clear eyes. ‘Let him have his way,’ she said softly. ‘Otherwise he might blame you for the rest of his life; that’s the way men are.’
    She might be right, Eline thought. If Will failed to make himself the rich man he so wanted to be, would he feel Eline had held him back?
    â€˜You’re very wise, Carys,’ she said softly. She placed her mug on the table, noticing it had made a brown ring on the white surface.
    â€˜
Duw
, not wise, at all, just lived a bit longer than you have, that’s all.’
    There was silence in the small kitchen save for the droning of a bee in the fragrant roses growing around the cottage doorway. Eline realized quite suddenly that Carys might sometimes feel just as alone as she did. Carys had only her cleaning job at the gallery to occupy her during the summer months. And now, with no baby to fill her time, she must find the hours long and tedious.
    As if reading her thoughts, Carys spoke. ‘
Duw
, I’ll be glad when the oyster fishing starts,’ she said quietly, her eyes moist with tears. ‘The devil finds work for idle hands, or at least wicked thoughts to fill the mind.’ Carys swallowed hard. ‘I sometimes find myself blaming the Good Lord for letting my son die, forgetting that He who gives sometimes sees fit to take away.’
    She looked appealingly at Eline. ‘But I
was
a good mother, wasn’t I?’
    â€˜Of course you were!’ Eline said at once. ‘It was the poor conditions, the lack of food and medicine, that was to blame, not you.’ She reached out and touched Carys’ hand, feeling the roughness of her skin with a sense of shock. How quickly, Eline thought, she had become used to the niceties of life. Living in comfort as she did, doing little hard labour, she had become soft and perhaps more vulnerable. If hard times came again, would she be able to survive them? She shuddered a little.
    â€˜There now, I’ve depressed you,’ Carys reproached herself. She picked up the mugs, took them to the big stone sink and dropped them in with a clatter.
    â€˜What do you think of little Irfonwy Parks then?’ she said, changing the subject with a forced brightness of tone. ‘Nina Parks’ youngest, married to that handsome man from up at Honey’s Farm? Lucky girl, mind.’
    â€˜I heard,’ Eline said, trying to shake off the feeling of gloom that had settled over her. ‘She’s got her hands full, with a young child to look after as well as a husband and a fully working farm.’
    â€˜Aye, from there, weren’t you?’ Carys said, turning to look at Eline. ‘Hard work farming, mind, I spects.’
    â€˜Hard indeed,’ Eline agreed. ‘Picking potatoes in spring and summer, and gathering the harvest in the autumn, and then the fodder for the creatures to be baled and kept in the barn until winter as well as a hundred and one other chores. It’s hard, all right.’
    â€˜I spects they got help,’ Carys said. ‘Labourers to work the fields and that sort of thing.’
    â€˜Perhaps one or two at the busiest times,’ Eline said, ‘though most of the year a small farmer can’t afford help.’
    She rose to her feet, suddenly overcome with memories of Honey’s Farm, of her childhood spent in the meadows, where poppies grew brightly and where her days had