Luckpenny Land Read Free

all cut off? Then I’d look like a boy too.’ She tossed back the wayward locks with a defiant twist of her lovely head.
    ‘I’d prefer thee to act with proper decency.’
    ‘If that is the only way to make you see me as a real person, and not simply as your serving wench then so be it.’  
    Snatching up the shearing scissors from the dresser Meg pulled her tangled hair down over one shoulder and began to hack recklessly with the sharp blades. Glittering golden tresses rained upon the scrubbed table top, curling and bouncing about with a life of their own.
    Joe Turner reached for the shears but she danced away, evading him, and continued with her relentless massacre, forcing him to remain a helpless onlooker.
    She might have continued on this self-desecration had he not slammed those same fists down upon the table, seeming to make the whole room quake.
    ‘Enough! What would thy mother say if she saw thee acting so wantonly?’
    Meg froze, tears brimming over at last from her clear grey eyes, making the room swim dizzily before her. What had she done? She stared at the bright curls falling away in her hand. He’d driven her to it. It was his fault. But she wouldn’t let him see her distress. Against the greater tragedy of a desolate life, ruined hair seemed of small importance.
    Meg gathered up the cut tendrils into her palm, and tossed them into the fire where they crackled and fired up. A lump came into her throat. She couldn’t go to the supper looking like this, with half her hair cut off. What would Jack think of her now?
    ‘Now thee will have to stop in,’ Joe said with satisfaction, clearly reading her thoughts, and walked, spine rigid, from the room, his whole bearing making it clear that he’d had his say and won. As was only right and proper.
     
    It took Meg the best part of an hour in her distress to finish the washing up, tidy the room and replenish the fire which had sulked itself black. When she had done, she refilled the big black kettle and set it back on the hob, so there’d be hot water for a mug of strong tea for her brothers when they got in. Then she took off her floral apron and hung it on the peg behind the pantry door before climbing dejectedly up the stairs to her room.
    Hardly bigger than a cupboard tucked beneath the eaves right at the top of the house, it was at least her own. The only place where she could be sure of privacy.
    Ashlea had been built some time during the early part of the eighteenth century. New by Lakeland standards, it was a typical, unprepossessing yeoman type building of grey stone with a slate roof and the traditional cylindrical chimneys. For all its plainness it had
    seemed warm and alive when her mother had lived in it, its homely rooms muddled and untidy with Annie’s tapestry work, bottles for the lambs, and the usual boots and buckets of farming life.
    Once the house had smelled of beeswax and lavender, overlaid by the strong tones of woodsmoke from the fire that burned constantly in the kitchen range. But Meg found she did not have the heart to reach these same standards. She could never rid her mouth of the taste of dust and unhappiness, as she coped with the cleaning of the five bedroom house all alone, and the endless washing, ironing and cooking for four people.
    It wasn’t that she didn’t try. Meg longed to recapture the scents of those lovingly remembered days. Of home-baked bread, the sharpness of bilberry jam and the tangy aroma of her mother’s blackberry and apple pie. But her own efforts seemed poor by comparison.
    So she loved her tiny hideway high in the attic, the only place where no demands were made and she could be herself. From the window cut in the farmhouse roof she could see right over the stand of ash and rowan behind the farm to the heather-carpeted turf of the high fell, clotted with broom and juniper and punctuated with the grey rocks that resolutely burst out of the thin soil at every opportunity.
    Now the rain and wind robbed