A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant

Author:Cecilia Grant [Grant, Cecilia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-53252-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

A SECOND DAY of threshing only solidified his opinions. How was he to properly enjoy a slice of toast again, knowing the terrible drudgery that lay behind it? And what primordial coxcomb had first grown discontented with the earth’s bounty of fruit and game, and cast a calculating eye on stalks of grain? He should like to meet that man, and fetch him a sound knock to his shaggy head. If he hadn’t lost all his quickness, that was. Nearly four weeks without a bout at the parlor might have done irreparable harm. Each in turn he took his hands from the traces to flex out the fingers and clench them in fists.

“Should you like me to take the reins, sir?” Mr. Quigley, a slight whippet of a man, had clearly been nonplussed by the master’s inclination to drive the wagon instead of riding alongside on a horse, as Granville had the decency to do, and was every minute watching for signs that he might be required to take over.

“Not at all. You did your part with the threshing this past week. You’re to sit back now, and enjoy what scenery we encounter on the way to this mill.”

Quigley set his wide-splayed fingertips on his knees, and frowned at the road before him. Something in the attitude brought Mrs. Russell to mind. Not much for the incidental pleasures, these denizens of Sussex.

But the scenery rolled past, for those capable of enjoying it, until finally a town loomed into view, and at its near end, a smallish river with a gray-brick mill on its bank. A fall in the river sent water over the top of the wheel, driving it round and round with presumably enough energy to turn a grindstone. Gears came into it somehow, or so Granville had said. Large gears and small gears interacting in some mysterious way to make the stone turn faster than the wheel itself. Sideways as well. The waterwheel sat upright while the grindstones, both the fixed one and the one that moved, lay horizontal. Granville had sketched a diagram and Theo had nodded sagely at it while daydreaming of the widow’s bed.

At the mill they unloaded their sacks of grain—let Quigley eye him as dubiously as he would; he could match muscles with any laborer—and watched a wheel-driven chain hoist them one by one to the sack floor, where some mill fellow stood ready to pour the grain down a chute to the grindstones. There would be nothing to do now but wait for the wheat to come back as sacks of flour.

He looked about him, reaching for the hat he’d put off while unloading the wagon. “I might go take a walk through that town, if you can spare me,” he said to the agent. “I’ve been used to going for long rambles this time of day, but never yet to any of the neighboring towns.” A superfluous lie, perhaps. For all he knew, Granville hadn’t even noticed his pattern of absences in the afternoons.

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