Shining Threads Read Free Page B

dairymaid . . . oh, yes, I’ve seen you hanging about, both of you,
outside the dairy. Well, she won’t smile so sweetly at you then, will she? I can do anything you do and I don’t mean to sit at home next week and sew on my sampler whilst you
enjoy yourselves . . .’
    ‘ Sew! A sampler! You! Now that would be a sight worth seeing, don’t you agree, brother?’ Pearce stretched his growing body, throwing back his head in a shout of
laughter.
    ‘I would have to see it before I’d believe it.’ They were both laughing now, taunting her, for there was no finer sight than Tessa in a rage. They all had hot tempers, they
were the first to agree, especially themselves, snarling, knife-edged tempers which could flare in a minute from mere irritability to a rage from which the servants fled in alarm. Their Aunt Jenny,
who had them in her charge whilst their father was at Westminster, refused to become involved with what she called their childish squabbles.
    ‘Let them fight it out between them, preferably in the stable yard,’ she would say wearily, eyeing their bloody noses with distaste, her attitude perhaps the result of the accidents,
some of them leading to death, and the floggings she herself had witnessed as a young spinner in the mill she now managed. It had not been unknown for an overlooker to break a child’s arm
with his leather thong, and her nephews’ bruises inflicted on one another seemed petty indeed when compared to the suffering, the real suffering which had once prevailed. Her own brother
Charlie had taken such a beating when younger than they. It had almost killed him and he bore the scars on his back and face to this day.
    ‘I can do anything I have to, Pearce Greenwood,’ Tessa remarked loftily, ‘ anything , and that includes sewing a sampler if I put my mind to it, though I must admit
I’d rather fight a game-cock.’
    ‘Perhaps, little cousin, but you cannot beat me or Drew in a race to Greenacres. That little mare of yours is game but no match for my bay, or Drew’s.’
    ‘Fiddlesticks! I’m not talking about keeping to the tracks, you know. I mean whichever way any of us cares to take and if that frightens you then you have only to say so and we will
forget the whole thing.’
    ‘Now hold on, Tess. You cannot mean to gallop across the moorland. It’s as rough as hell out there and if one of the animals should put a foot in a rabbit hole or be faced with rocks
which . . .’
    ‘Well, of course, if you are not up to it . . .’
    ‘Of course we are, but . . .’
    ‘Then what are we waiting for?’
    Pearce shrugged, then turned to grin at Drew who leaned indolently against the rock, his eyes half-shut against the sun, seemingly oblivious to the wrangling between his brother and cousin. He
was well used to this throwing down of the gauntlet by one or the other of them – a challenge which must be taken up if the scorn of the others was not to be endured. They loved the friction
which set the blood tingling, the dare which must be accepted. Wild as young colts, all three of them, daring and reckless, they gave no thought to danger, to risk, beyond a care for their nervous,
high-stepping mounts, to anything which might smack of caution. The brothers, young as they were, defied all comers at school, fighting back to back for the sheer joy of risking their handsome
faces, their fine young bodies against boys older and heavier than they, often over nothing more serious than the sorry cut of a fellow’s jacket.
    ‘What d’you say, Drew? Will we take her on? I know it’s a shame to risk her mare against our bays, but if she’s mad enough to do it who are we to deny her?’
    The stretch of moorland from Badger’s Edge to Greenacres lay to the east of Crossfold and Edgeclough. It was rough terrain and uneven, about three miles mainly downhill and inhabited on
the ‘tops’ only by rabbit and stoat, curlew and magpie and wheatear. It was fit only for small animals and