Free The Land of Summer by Charlotte Bingham

not just a drab female from across the Atlantic. She was the future Mrs Julius Aubrey, and never would she allow herself to look as the company at dinner the previous evening had looked, eccentric and strange, worn and careless.
    Nevertheless, despite the fact that she had formed a resolve not to accept without reservation whatever was given to her, now she was finally travelling towards her new home she fell back to wondering where she had actually landed herself.
    The more she thought about it the more she became convinced that Julius’s odd behaviour over the previous days was due to the magnitude of the task he had undertaken at Hartley Abbey, on behalf of his business. It had to be this that had made him seem so aloof, when in fact he was obviously merely preoccupied. She imagined the responsibility and weight of the work was distressing in the extreme, with the result that he was unable to concentrate on his own life and the fact that he had promised to marry her. There could be no other explanation for his erratic behaviour, for his seeming neglect, for a more different man from the one she had danced with that first night could not, surely, be found. Once she had accepted this idea she found she could relax a little, and she tried to enjoy her carriage ride through the quiet countryside. The sky, she noticed, was a soft mix of blue and grey – a mix that someone like Julius would do well to emulate. Everything was so small compared to America, as if England had been shrunk by some unseen process. She tried to imagine the Romans in their chariots coming out to their villas, making their way along the long straight roads they had so stylishly hewed – the very roads along which her own carriage was now travelling. She tried to imagine the sound of the horses’ harnesses clinking, the sight of the morning sunlight catching the tops of the Romans’ helmets, their eyes perhaps watching out for the fierce island people whose land they had invaded, who they knew might still be waiting in the forests to attack them.
    The beauty of the scene, however, proved to be ephemeral, for she had hardly begun her long journey when the sun came out and a thaw started to set in, turning the countryside that had only an hour before been so picturesquely whitened into a damp and saddened sight, so that all too soon the view on either side of the carriage was only of dripping hedgerows and flooding roads. With this turn in the weather, Emmaline’s previously buoyed-up spirits started to sink. Supposing, despite his attempts to reassure her, Julius’s house was as damp and unwelcoming as the house that she had just left behind? The all too possible prospect did little to raise the morale of the young woman whose driver was even now being forced to slow his two horses down to a walk in order to try to negotiate the increasingly bad conditions.
    Eventually, after what seemed like days, not just hours, Emmaline arrived safely at her destination late in the afternoon. The light had already begun to fade and the lamplighter was at work on streets ankle-deep in melted snow, where passers-by picked their way through the lumps of half-frozen slush that lay on the pavements while trying to avoid the mire thrown up by the passing traffic. From what Emmaline could see from the window of her carriage the part of town they were passing through had some fine stone-built houses, albeit lining steep streets, but of course they seemed too close to each other and surprisingly narrow after her own home town with its broad and generous thoroughfares.
    She peered out into the increasing gloom as her carriage slowed at a road junction, and her eye was caught by a large sign above what was obviously a works entrance. Immediately above the main doorway, lit by a large lamp, she could make out the words
Julius Aubrey Ltd
. It seemed the board had been newly painted, for a sign writer was just descending his ladder, while the smaller plate at eye level in