Free The Hamiltons of Ballydown by Anne Doughty Page B

other mornings she knew, but she felt a sudden sharp disappointment for today she’d needed to talk to her.
    ‘Oh well, it can wait,’ she said briskly, as she carried a small, finely made writing table from under the window to sit facing the fireplace. ‘May as well make a virtue out of an extra morning,’ she added. ‘Besides, it’s a pity not to enjoy such a lovely fire.’
    It was a good opportunity to catch up on overdue correspondence. It was not that she disliked writing letters, personal ones or those she wrote as secretary to one of the committees run by the Monthly Meeting, it was more a case of such tasks being left aside when more pressing ones presented themselves.
    She worked steadily, grateful for the warmth of the fire on her knees, ignoring as best she could thebacks of her legs which were growing colder and colder. As the morning hours passed slowly, the small pile of sealed envelopes grew. A little after noon she got to her feet, the backs of her legs now quite numb, her shoulders aching from concentration. She walked round the room briskly, replaced her table under the window and stood with her back to the fire, her skirts hitched up. When her legs thawed out she crossed to one of the tall, large-paned windows and ran her eyes over the white blanket spread out over the familiar features of the cobbled yard, the outbuildings and the garden beyond.
    Snow always made ordinary things extraordinary, she reflected. The wall beyond the stable, topped last night with the ragged remnants of grass and weeds, was now smoothed to uniformity, not a trace of the fragments of campanula escaped from the flowerbeds or the ragwort blown in from the nearby meadows. The stable itself had a hefty covering, the tracks of the brougham long since covered. The snow still fell, creating a vast silence, a silence which drove humans indoors to seek warmth and shelter like the wild creatures themselves.
    She turned to the fire, thrust into its orange heart a well-seasoned log from the basket on the hearth. It crackled immediately, as the tinder dry outer skin caught fire. The smell of apple wood rose towards her, overwhelming the hour and the day in a flood of unbidden memory.
    The lines of apple trees marched up and down the hills of her grandfather’s farm. On the slopes of Fruit Hill near Loughgall, in the midst of the Armagh apple-country, trimmings were burnt in autumn bonfires and seasoned logs from previous years were saved for the sitting room fire at Christmas. Long ago now, but the memories of her grandfather had never faded, the old man who had made her and James so welcome throughout their childhood.
    He had lost both wife and daughter. Sons he had, both near and far, well-loved enough, but of his only daughter, his beloved Hester, her children were all that was left to him. Both James Sinton and their step-mother understood his need and the Pearson farm was always a part of young James and Elizabeth’s life, a happy place, still active and busy, despite the old man’s loss.
    His bristly moustache and thick mass of white hair often intimidated those who didn’t know him, children and adults alike, but his brown face and sun-burnt hands were what Elizabeth remembered most vividly. She and James had never feared him, though being much younger, Hugh had found him a formidable figure. He loved them all, cherishing them as he did the apple trees he had planted with his own hands, row upon row of them, throwing well-ordered orchards like a woven mantle across the swelling folds of the little hills on which his farmland lay.
    It was at Grandfather Pearson’s bedside that Elizabeth had met Charles Cooper, a young man from Armagh, newly qualified at medical school in Edinburgh.
    She sat down abruptly and stared at the blazing log. She was twenty-two when he’d been able to ask her to marry him. Now she was thirty-eight. How could it be she still felt such grief after all this time? So many wise words had been poured