The Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

along with his fiction. James helped her up into the carriage and she took up the reins and nodded to Stephen to let go of the horses' heads.
    He climbed up beside her. 'Would you wish me to drive, my lady?'
    ‘ No thank you, Stephen. You will have quite enough to do keeping lookout and manning the guns.'
    ‘ I beg your pardon, my lady?'
    ‘Never mind it. Au revoir, husband.'
    ‘ Bon voyage, wife. Give my love to Tharshish. Bring me back ivory and apes and peacocks.'
    ‘ And spices, horses and mules,' she agreed. She shook the reins. Allons, enfants,' she suggested to the ponies.

    *
    The cottages of White and Cobbey were close by each other, low, single-storey oblongs of daub and timber, with thatched roofs and tiny, tightly-closed windows, like most of the houses in the village. They were in Back Lane, which curved round the churchyard and the bell-field, in the centre of which was still the deep hollow where Great Paul, the tenor bell, had been cast some four hundred years ago – the gift of a long- ago Morland. It was good, Héloïse   thought as she drove past, to live in the heart of your own history like this.
    Inside the cottages were dark and rather damp. The earthen floor was a foot or so below the level of the road, and there was a large fireplace in which a fire was kept going all year, on which the cooking was done. Furniture was sparse and functional – a table for all purposes, with a bench and a couple of stools, a bed in the corner, and perhaps a cupboard. Where there were children, they slept on mattresses in the half-attic.
    The labouring poor lived in a plain enough manner, and their diet was monotonous in the extreme: bread, potatoes and beer for the most part, enlivened now and then with an onion, a bit of cheese, perhaps a little bacon on Sunday, occasionally tea, and in the summer cabbage and beans when they could be had.
    That was when times were good. Hunger was a reality they were all accustomed to, and when times were bad, starvation shuffled up to the door, and sometimes stepped in over the threshold. Sickness, injury, unemployment, old age – these were the crises which beckoned the Spectre closer. 'Misfor tunes', they were called, with the wry understatement Héloïse had come to expect from the English common man. Visiting the ‘misfortunates' was one of her duties as Mistress of Morland Place; seeing them in happier times was one of her pleasures.
    For stark their lives were, but not entirely bleak. Even the Cobbeys, tottering on the very brink of starvation, had a few possessions of which they were proud – a patchwork quilt, a set of pewter plates, an embroidered cushion given them on their wedding-day by Jemima Morland, whom they called ‘the old mistress'. They set a stool at the best place before the fire for Héloïse when she called. They had worked for the Morlands all their lives, and had wonderful stories to tell her. Mrs Cobbey remembered the day they had all gone up to the Big House to have Jemima presented to them as the heiress,after her older brothers had died 'of the plague'.
    ‘ She were ten year old, my lady – I were just a year and a month younger. I remember my Da lifted me up so I could see over the crowd, and he said to me, "One day tha'll work for her, Molly – she'll be tha mistress,"' Mrs Cobbey smiled and shook her head at the memory. 'I thought she were the Queen of England, my lady. It were years before I got that sorted in ma mind!’
    And Cobbey remembered when Morland men had gone off to fight for the Young Chevalier. 'Ah, they were better days then, my lady, when men spoke out, like, for what they believed in. We brought up our bairns to stand up straight and fight for what was right. But now – well, my lady, I don't know what the world's coming too, straight I don't. Young men today – why, it's all soft collars and trousers and slang, my lady. It were never like that in ma day.’
    That was the plaint of all the older people; but Héloïse