A World Apart Read Online Free Page B

be a blessing for him when, God willing, his new wife has a child. He’ll find fatherhood such a joy.’
    The midwife took it upon herself to name Charlotte’s child Eliza, after a sister of the dead woman who had herself died of fever a few years before. The name was cheerfully embraced by Hannah, the youngest of Charlotte’s sisters, who volunteered to raise her little orphan niece. Hannah had married Joseph Hodgkins, the viscount’s head gamekeeper, some years before. Joseph, a man older than his bride by twenty years, occupied the solid, well maintained gamekeeper’s cottage in the grounds of the Great House.
    Joseph’s fine cottage was a perquisite very visible to the young women of the village. Hannah had earned her place in it when, as a pert sixteen-year-old working in the kitchen of the Great House, she caught Joseph’s eye. It was the custom, when the viscount called him to discuss such weighty affairs as badger baiting and the breeding of hounds, for Joseph to wait below stairs. There he would be fussed over by Hannah until the master pulled the bellrope to summon his gamekeeper to the library. While Joseph was being thus entertained, he found his taciturnity thawed by the effervescent, pretty young woman who brought him cups of the special coffee kept only for the master.
    Within two years of their wedding, Hannah had borne two children, a boy and a girl. When the infants were taken from her by a typhus epidemic, she plunged into a fit of melancholy no one seemed able to cure. Her rheumaticky husband Joseph, who might have been expected to give his bereaved wife more children to settle her grief, could not. Cook, who had lasting affection for her able little kitchenmaid, persuaded Hannah to return to the kitchen, giving her the duties of assistant cook when the viscount held his hunting parties.
    But the bereaved Hannah had lost her art. The cakes she baked were hard and lumpy when she neglected to cream the butter to the right consistency. They might burn to a cinder while she sat in a daydream beside the oven. Hannah’s moping forced Cook to set her favourite to the job of pot scrubbing, the only activity she could be trusted to fulfil without disrupting the busy kitchen. After a few weeks, Hannah found even this task beyond her, and retired behind the walls of her cottage. It was remote enough from the village, and close enough to the intimidating bulk of the Great House, to discourage visits from her former friends.
    Then, without notice, Eliza, an orphan not a day old, was thrust into her arms. The village folk murmured amongst themselves that the little orphan was a gift sent by God directly to Hannah — the only possible cure for her unremitting sickness of soul. They marvelled that she so soon roused herself from her melancholia and took to mothering. Mother she did, eager to pour her pent-up reservoir of maternal love onto the pretty child. Even when she was newborn, Eliza had a head of golden curls.
    â€˜A beautiful child,’ Mother Turlington said when she bent to look into the carriage that Hannah paraded through the village. ‘But don’t expect her to take after her mother. I fancy her hair will darken soon. Why, my own hair was fair till I was three, and my sister’s too. And sad to say, I fear the curls will disappear too. Then she’ll look more like poor dead Silas, you’ll see.’
    As Eliza grew into a winsome three-year-old, Martin Townsend was often seen engaging her in playful moments after Sunday morning chapel. Then he asked her foster-mother if the pair of them might pay regular visits to his library.
    â€˜It be Vicar’s notion to teach you to read, Eliza,’ Hannah told her. It seems as he saw you peering into a bible after chapel. He took me aside. Told me as he thought you were very clever. So we will visit him, sit in his library with him, and have him teach you. Every Thursday afternoon.’
    That weekly event