Читать книгу Mrs. Gailey онлайн

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"This lane is very old—all the valley lanes are old. That's why they're sunk so deep between the hedges." And damp even on a morning like this, thought Rosamund. "They've been trodden down by people using them for centuries to drive cattle from farm to farm. That's what makes them twist and turn so—cattle never walk straight." Nor some people either, thought Rosamund, as Lesley cannoned into her. "Oh, I'm sorry, but I was looking through that gate. The dew's still on the grass in there where the shadow lies. Are you fond of walking?"

"We-ell, I wouldn't know till I'd tried."

"I love it. I often take quite long walks—to Barnhorn or even to Sandlake. I go by the lanes, of course. The main roads are horrid. Now this cottage we're passing is supposed to be haunted"—hooray! it only wanted that—"but I've never seen the ghost, though I must have walked by dozens of times at night. There's supposed to be a ghost at Pookreed too. Pook is a sort of nature spirit, you know, and Pookreed's a very old farm. Most of the farms here date from the furnaces, but Pookreed's earlier than that. I do hope Cousin Nicholas will like my book—what I mean to say is, I hope he'll like me better because he likes the book. He's angry with me, because I haven't got local people at Waters Farm. He thinks that when the Boormans left at the end of the war I should have let the Homards have it. That's quite a common name round here—Homard, I mean. It's of Huguenot origin, of course. The house at Waters was built by Huguenot settlers in the eighteenth century, and of course it would be nice in some ways if their descendants had it now. But I simply couldn't have sat back and let just one family run the place when there are so many people without homes."