Free Distant Choices by Brenda Jagger

on the hurdle of those questions which could not be answered, those loose ends which even in her mother’s agile hands could not be tied.
    She bit her lip.
    â€˜I suppose you know …’ Kate said. ‘That – well – you and I? – I suppose you realize …?’
    â€˜No,’ Oriel said gently, raising her hand palm outwards to push the words away. ‘I know nothing about it. And neither do you. Much the best way.’
    â€˜Do you believe that?’
    â€˜Of course. I have to live in the world as I find it, Kate. And I am not in the least suited, you know, to travel by camel.’
    Kate grinned again. ‘So you will just have to make sure of a comfortable coach and horses – as best you can.’
    And this time Oriel did reach out, smiling as she placed the tips of her fingers on the tousled crown of Kate’s head, a butterfly touch, soon gone.
    Dear little sister. Dear little hurt, offended soul. Words she could never bring herself to speak. She knew that.
    â€˜Give me your skirt to mend,’ she murmured instead. ‘We can’t have you catching your heel and falling off your camel.’
    They had not said:
    â€˜My mother was a madwoman – or so they tell me – prowling the attic in a filthy artist’s smock and painting insulting portraits of my father, who hated her. Which means that I might go mad and be hated too. So they say. How that terrifies me.’
    Or: ‘I am the illegitimate child of a scheming woman who used me – and still uses me – to lay claim to your father. Which means – in this strait-laced, self-righteous world – there is no place for me. No man to marry me. Although my mother will offer me in turn to every man who approaches, as she once offered herself. How I dread that.’
    They had not said: ‘We are sisters, with more, perhaps, than a casual tie of blood between us.’ Yet, beyond all question, they were in no doubt that they had heard and accepted every word.

Chapter Three
    The Gore Valley was, for the most part, prone to some excitement the following spring, at the launching upon its sturdy scene of two new events, the rise of Mrs Evangeline Stangway to the head of local society and the arrival of that modern miracle the railway. The dazzling Mrs Stangway being welcomed by all it seemed, even by those hoping for the pleasure of seeing her fail; the railway causing far more serious and therefore even more diverting disagreement between those who wanted it – the industrialists and shopkeepers for instance – and those of a more traditional mind who did not.
    A time of harsh resentment – absolutely no less – by all those to whom the railway appeared in no way a blessing. By the owners of canals, for instance, who risked serious damage to their trade in the conveying of heavy goods from industrial centres to the sea. By the landlords of coaching-inns in remote situations who, without the stage-coaches and the mail-coaches, the constant demands of travellers for bed and board and fresh horses, would see their livelihood, like the roads themselves, fall into decay. By ‘landed gentlemen’who, ever since the truth of what a railway actually meant had burst upon them, had set up a great caterwauling, quite often shot-gun in hand, that the infernal machines would startle their horses, disrupt the seasonal habits of their grouse and pheasant, scare off the foxes and thus ruin the hunt. By local farmers who maintained, just as stubbornly, that engine sparks would set fire to their crops and sour the milk in their cattle, causing them to abort. By certain clergymen of a puritanical persuasion who being concerned above all things with the preservation of the Sabbath, had seen in the proposed use of trains for the quick delivery of mail, a most pernicious temptation to Sunday travel.
    By Lord Merton of Merton Abbey, the greatest land-owner in the area, whose estates included