Eliza’s Daughter Read Free Page B

but most dearly I wished to explore it, both inside and out. If Biddy Wellcome had charge of the Squire’s baby, I foresaw there might be comings and goings between the village and the Hall, there might be errands and messages to run and a chance to get past the great iron gates. This was my hope.
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    I cannot now remember for how many weeks or months I had the extraordinary joy and privilege of accompanying Mr Bill and Mr Sam on their rambles and explorations. I believe that the space of time might have extended over as much as a year. The memory of my first meeting with the two men remains sharp and clear, like a picture in my mind, but later events blend together in a gilded haze. I was not – by any means – invariably successful in my efforts to escape and join the two strangers on their walks. Nor could I always find them. Their houses lay some distance apart, and they did not go out together all the time. Mr Sam had a wife and babe, Mr Bill, a sister. Sometimes the weather proved my enemy and northerly gales lashed the coast and kept me housebound. Sometimes Dr Moultrie was exigent. But, despite these hazards, it seems to me that I succeeded in accompanying the two men on at least seven or eight occasions, and these were long excursions – for both men were prodigious walkers – along the coast to Hurlhoe, or over the moor to Folworthy, or up the twisting Ashe Valley to Ottermill. Both friends doted upon rivers and brooks and cascades; they would at any time go substantially out of their way if beguiled by the sound of falling waters, and were always ready to sit or stand for hours together gazing at spouts or sheets or spirts of spray. Indeed our very first walk – which I do remember clearly because it was the first – took us along the steep wooded cliffs for several miles to a little lonely church, St Lucy’s of Godsend, where I would never have ventured to visit alone as it was reputed to be haunted. And such a tale was easy enough to credit, for the church stood at a most solitary spot, in a deep coign of precipitous and forest-covered hillside, with tall oaks all around it, and a stream which splashed down between high and fern-fringed banks to empty itself into a narrow cove, far, far down below. Because of the trees, the sea was not visible, and yet its restless presence could be felt; the sough of the tide like a heart-beat, and, from time to time, a deep and threatening boom or thud as a larger wave than usual cast its weight upon the rocks at the cliff foot.
    â€˜A fearsome place,’ said Mr Sam, when the two men, removing their hats, had stepped inside the tiny church (I have heard said that it is the smallest in the whole kingdom) and come out again to admire the saw-toothed shadow which it flung, in the noonday sun, across its cramped little graveyard.
    â€˜Here there would be no need to pray,’ said Mr Bill. ‘The sound of water would say it all.’
    â€˜But at night,’ I objected, ‘the sound of the brook would be drowned by the voice of Wailing Sal.’
    â€˜And who, pray, is Wailing Sal?’
    â€˜She was a girl that used to meet her sweetheart here in the graveyard. But her father forbade her. And why? Because, unbeknownst to her, her sweetheart were the Wicked One. But she met him none the less, and gave him three drops of blood from her finger, and that made her his for all time. But after she done that, he never came to see her no more and she pined and dwined away. So they buried her under gravel, and they buried her under sand, but still her ghost comes out, lonesome for her lover and bitter angry with her father because he forbade her. So, ’tis said, her ghost is moving slowly up the hill, back to her father’s farm, at the rate of one cock’s stride every year.’
    â€˜Merciful creator!’ said Mr Sam, pulling out his notebook. ‘One cock’s stride every year? And what happens when she gets to