





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 about five
miles on the western side of the Fens, in a very level country on the
banks of a river, broad and deep, but with only just sufficient fall to
enable its long-lingering waters to reach the sea.  It was an ancient
market town, with a six-arched stone bridge, and with a High Street from
which three or four smaller and narrower streets connected by courts and
alleys diverged at right angles.  In the middle of the town was the
church, an immense building, big enough to hold half Eastthorpe, and
celebrated for its beautiful spire and its peal of eight bells.  Round
the church lay the churchyard, fringed with huge elms, and in the Abbey
Close, as it was called, which was the outer girdle of the churchyard on
three sides, the fourth side of the square being the High Street, there
lived in 1840 the principal doctor, the lawyer, the parson, and two aged
gentlewomen with some property, who were daughters of one of the former
partners in the bank, had been born in Eastthorpe, and had scarcely ever
quitted it.  Here also were a young ladies' seminary and an ancient
grammar school for the education of forty boys, sons of freemen of the
town.  The houses in the Close were not of the same class as the rest;
they were mostly 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 to the river.  One of these houses was even older,
black-timbered, gabled, plastered, the sole remains, saving the church,
of Eastthorpe as it was in the reign of Henry the Eighth.

Just beyond the church, going from the bridge, the High Street was so
wide that the houses on either side were separated by a space of over two
hundred feet.  This elongated space was the market-place.  In the centre
was the Moot Hall, a quaint little building, supported on oak pillars,
and in the shelter underneath the farmers assembled on market day.  All
round the Moot Hall, and extending far up and down 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 just been made.  The
druggist, as a man of science and advanced ideas, had replaced his bow-
window with plate-glass, had put a cornice over it, had stuccoed his
bricks, and had erected a kind of balustrade of stucco, so as to hide as
much as possible the attic windows, which looked over, meekly protesting.
Nearly opposite the Moot Hall was the Bell Inn, the principal inn in the
town.  There were other inns, respectable enough, such as the Bull, a
little higher up, patronised by the smaller commercial travellers and
farmers, but the entrance passage to 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, and there they changed horses.  Both the Bull
and the Bell had market dinners, but at the Bell the charge was three-and-
sixpence; sherry was often drunk, and there the steward to the Honourable
Mr. Eaton, the principal landowner, always met the tenants.  The Bell was
Tory and 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
broad archway at the side always freshly gravelled, and its handsome
balcony on the first floor, from which the Tory county candidates, during
election times, addressed the free and independent electors and cattle.

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

Such was Eastthorpe.  For hundreds of years had the shadow of St. Mary's
swept slowly over the roofs underneath it, and, of all those years,
scarcely a line of its