Luckpenny Land Read Online Free PDF Page A

You and your games.’ Meg flung the spotted shirts and sheets back into the basket, hard put to keep the tears out of her eyes. It had taken hours to soak, scrub and starch them all. Now she’d have to start all over again.
    ‘I didn’t hear you.’
    ‘You didn’t listen. You only hear what you want to hear, you great lump.’ She thrust the basket into his arms and pushed him towards the kitchen door. ‘Did you fill the log basket like I asked?’ She knew, of course, that he hadn’t. It still stood in the middle of the slate floor where she had set it hours ago, waiting to trip up any unwary passer-by.
    She spent the next two hours scrubbing the mud spots off the washing and setting it to dry on the wooden rack that hung suspended from the ceiling in front of the fire. Steam filled the small kitchen in no time, making her short curls cling damply to her rosy cheeks.  
    Then Dan came in, reminding her to take his boots to the menders and presenting her with a whole wad of socks to darn that had somehow got collected up in the bottom of his drawer. Meg bundled them in to her sewing basket, telling him tartly to take his own boots to the menders.
    ‘You go to town more often than I do.’
    ‘Well, it’s not my job to darn socks.’
    Meg bit back the desire to tell him just what he could do with his tatty socks.
    She brought the logs in herself, Charlie having disappeared off the face of the earth, and by the time she had finished all the usual chores, and prepared liver and onions for the dinner, she was almost too exhausted to think straight. But she’d go out this afternoon, come what may. A breath of fresh air would do her good.
     
    The wind had chased the rain away and a fickle sun had come out when Katherine Ellis saddled her pony to ride over to Broombank early that afternoon. There was an ethereal radiance to the light that turned droplets of water into sparkling diamonds on the newly sprouting fern heads, their tightly furled croziers like miniature shepherd’s crooks. The air was rich with the resonance of damp earth and new grass, and that feeling of hope that is peculiarly discernible when spring comes to Lakeland, as if to celebrate having survived a hard winter.
    ‘Come on, Bonnie,’ she urged, ‘stop blowing, then I can pull this damn girth strap tight.’ Bonnie, being a slightly overweight fell pony of mature years, was not really Katherine’s idea of a good mount. She would have preferred an Arab stallion or a fine roan. One who pranced and whinnied with excitement when she took her out, not stand on three legs with eyes closed, or drop her head to the grass verge at every opportunity, resisting any threat of exercise.
    But Bonnie was an old friend and thus not easily discarded. Kath revelled in the freedom the pony gave her, even managing to stir Bonnie to a gentle trot if she squeezed her thighs against the pony’s plump sides hard enough, though it might make her back and leg muscles ache.
    She leaned forward and let the wind skim through her hair, knowing she should have worn a hat. Mummy was for ever telling her so. Just as she told her to wear a coat on a damp evening, or to take a torch and a whistle if she went over Kentmere. But Kath rarely listened to these words of wisdom. Where was the fun in life if you always did what was safe and proper?  
    Her mother was holding open the gate for her now, quite unnecessarily, at the end of the long drive that wound between jutting rocks to Larkrigg Hall where Kath had been born and in which she had been cosseted ever since as the unexpectedly late child of elderly parents.
    The fine old house had once belonged to her mother’s quarry owning forebears. Larkrigg Fell was pitted with the remains of a dozen old quarries, once worked for the blue-grey slate of the Silurian beds formed many thousands of years ago when Lakeland was young. The entire landmass had been pushed upwards by volcanic disturbance, fold upon fold of rock and earth with the