We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address

Transcribed from the 1913 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

CATHARINE FURZE

CHAPTER I

It was a bright, hot, August Saturday in the market town of Eastthorpe,in the eastern Midlands, in the year 1840.  Eastthorpe lay aboutfive miles on the western side of the Fens, in a very level countryon the banks of a river, broad and deep, but with only just sufficientfall to enable its long-lingering waters to reach the sea.  Itwas an ancient market town, with a six-arched stone bridge, and witha High Street from which three or four smaller and narrower streetsconnected by courts and alleys diverged at right angles.  In themiddle of the town was the church, an immense building, big enough tohold half Eastthorpe, and celebrated for its beautiful spire and itspeal of eight bells.  Round the church lay the churchyard, fringedwith huge elms, and in the Abbey Close, as it was called, which wasthe outer girdle of the churchyard on three sides, the fourth side ofthe square being the High Street, there lived in 1840 the principaldoctor, the lawyer, the parson, and two aged gentlewomen with some property,who were daughters of one of the former partners in the bank, had beenborn in Eastthorpe, and had scarcely ever quitted it.  Here alsowere a young ladies’ seminary and an ancient grammar school forthe education of forty boys, sons of freemen of the town.  Thehouses in the Close were not of the same class as the rest; they weremostly old red brick, with white sashes, and they all had gardens, long,narrow, and shady, which, on the south side of the Close, ran down tothe river.  One of these houses was even older, black-timbered,gabled, plastered, the sole remains, saving the church, of Eastthorpeas it was in the reign of Henry the Eighth.

Just beyond the church, going from the bridge, the High Street wasso wide that the houses on either side were separated by a space ofover two hundred feet.  This elongated space was the market-place. In the centre was the Moot Hall, a quaint little building, supportedon oak pillars, and in the shelter underneath the farmers assembledon market day.  All round the Moot Hall, and extending far up anddown the street, were cattle-pens and sheep-pens, which were never removed. Most of the shops were still bow-windowed, with small panes of glass,but the first innovation, indicative of the new era at hand, had justbeen made.  The druggist, as a man of science and advanced ideas,had replaced his bow-window with plate-glass, had put a cornice overit, had stuccoed his bricks, and had erected a kind of balustrade ofstucco, so as to hide as much as possible the attic windows, which lookedover, meekly protesting.  Nearly opposite the Moot Hall was theBell Inn, the principal inn in the town.  There were other inns,respectable enough, such as the Bull, a little higher up, patronisedby the smaller commercial travellers and farmers, but the entrance passageto the Bull had sand on the floor, and carriers made it a house of call. To the Bell the two coaches came which went through Eastthorpe, andthere they changed horses.  Both the Bull and the Bell had marketdinners, but at the Bell the charge was three-and-sixpence; sherry wasoften drunk, and there the steward to the Honourable Mr. Eaton, theprincipal landowner, always met the tenants.  The Bell was Toryand the Bull was Whig, but no stranger of respectability, Whig or Tory,visiting Eastthorpe could possibly hesitate about going to the Bell,with its large gilded device projecting over the pathway, with its broadarchway at the side always freshly gravelled, and its handsome balconyon the first floor, from which the Tory county candidates, during electiontimes, addressed the free and independent electors and cattle.

Eastthorpe was a malting town, and down by the water were two orthree large malthouses.  The view from the bridge was not particularlypicturesque, but it was pleasant, especially in summer, when the windwas south-west.  The malthouses and their cowls, the wharves andthe gaily painted sailing barges alongside, the fringe of slanting willowsturning the silver-gray sides of their foliage towards the breeze, theisland in the middle of the river with bigger willows, the large expanseof sky, the soft clouds distinct in form almost to the far distant horizon,and, looking eastwards, the illimitable distance towards the fens andthe sea—all this made up a landscape, more suitable perhaps tosome persons than rock or waterfall, although no picture had ever beenpainted of it, and nobody had ever come to see it.

Such was Eastthorpe.  For hundreds of years had the shadow ofSt. Mary’s swept slowly over the roofs underneath it, and, ofall those years, scarcely a line of its history survived, save whatwas written in the churchyard or in the church registers.  Thetown had stood for the Parliament in the days of the Civil War, andthere had been a skirmish in the place; but who fought in it, who werekilled in it, and what the result was, nobody knew.  Half a dozenold skulls of much earlier date and of great size were once found ina gravel pit two miles away, and were the subject of much talk, sometaking them for Romans, some for Britons, some for Saxons, and somefor Danes.  As it was impossible to be sure if they were Christian,they could not be put in consecrated ground; they were therefore includedin an auction of dead and live stock, and were bought by the doctor. Surnames survived in Eastthorpe with singular pertinacity, for it wasremote from the world, but what was the relationship between the scoresof Thaxtons, for example, whose deaths were inscribed on the tombstones,some of them all awry and weather-worn, and the Thaxtons of 1840, noliving Thaxton could tell, every spiritual trace of them having disappearedmore utterly than their bones.  Their bones, indeed, did not disappear,and were a source of much trouble to the sexton, for in digging a newgrave they came up to the surface in quantities, and had to be shovelledin and covered up again, so that the bodily remains of successive generationswere jumbled together, and Puritan and Georgian Thaxtons were mixedpromiscuously with their descendants.  Nevertheless, Eastthorpehad really had a history.  It had known victory and defeat, love,