Free The Rich Are with You Always by Malcolm Macdonald Page B

days of his life. With the help of two field men hired from the farmer below, who naturally had no work for them, he had to dig out the driveway up to the brow of the hill. Then Nora made them clear a trotting circle around the paddock, where she could see it from her bedroom window (and where Willet could never be certain if she were watching or not), and finish the day with a two-hour trot with all four horses and Winifred's pony, Pendle. He brought them in cool and rubbed them down. Before he was finished, another heavy fall of snow began.
      Young John and Winifred were delighted. It put another three feet on the previous fall and completely blanked out the windows on the ground floor, so that, even when the sun came out at noon, they walked from room to room in a frosty, opalescent twilight.
      Because of the cold, Nora let them stay in the winter parlour and paste in their scrapbooks or play with the acorns, chestnuts, and bits of wood that Young John called "my sojers." Cox and the servants were kept busy digging away the snow before the windows. Every hour, they carried pans of boiling water up to the loft to pour into the two big slate cisterns and prevent them from icing over. It was all the water they had, for the pipe from the well had frozen and the handpump would not even turn.
      Having less snow to dig, Willet and company finished soon after midday dinner, thinking themselves set for a less strenuous afternoon. But Nora sent him up to the ridge of the roof with a rope yoked to a broomhead. One farmhand stood on either side of the house, each with a hold on the rope, and together they swept the snow down, before it could melt and freeze and pry apart the tiles. Indoors the children followed their progress from room to room and cheered as each sunlit avalanche fell upon the men below. Nora, looking up and down the vale, saw with pride that the Old Manor was the first to clear its roof. That night another eighteen inches fell.
      By noon the following day, the roads were cleared enough for letter mails at least to come through, and Nora heard from John that he would go straight from Warrington to Exeter and then to France. This bland announcement annoyed her, though it was plainly foolish for him even to think of returning to Yorkshire in such weather. She envied him the itinerant freedom of his work; and then she disliked herself for that envy.
      The trouble was that John had exactly the sort of freedom she was denied: to do precisely those things he was good at. Her skill, she knew—she knew —was to handle money with a flair that few others could equal. In fact, to be quite honest, no one could equal it.
      Once, at a dinner of the York & Ainsty hunt, she had overheard a retired general talking about a new book on Caesar's wars in which, he maintained, some of the diagrams were wrong. What had impressed Nora was the general's claim that as soon as he had cut the pages, before he read any of the text and even before he looked to see which particular campaign or battle was being described, he knew they were wrong. The wrongness of the supposed dispositions of legions and cohorts leaped at him from the page. There was no conceivable set of circumstances that could have led a commander of Caesar's stature to put men in such-and-such order. Nora could see that the general's listeners were politely skeptical, thinking that anything so complex could never be so immediately apparent as to "spring off the page," and she had longed to join in and say, "Yes, yes, it is so; it can be so; I know it." For that was precisely how she could now "see" anything to do with money.
      But it remained no more than a party trick. Like the game Hudson played with her of figures-in-the-head. If she had been born a man, she would have parlayed that skill into a fortune. If she were allowed to own property, even, or to have money that was inalienably her own, she could have gone some way in that direction. But all the