This Rough Ocean by Ann Swinfen

Author:Ann Swinfen [Swinfen, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Shakenoak Press
Published: 2015-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

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It was snowing again the next morning, but not heavily, so Anne decided she would continue with her plan of riding to Weeford, although she was aching and tender from the previous day’s ride. She would not let herself give in to weakness and stay beside the fire which Peter had lit in the small parlour, though she was sorely tempted. Late the previous afternoon she had told Josiah to shift all the rotting hay on to the midden, and to wash down that part of the barn where it had been stored, lest the rot spread to the new hay.

‘I don’t understand why you kept it,’ she said. ‘It’s not fit for any beast to eat.’

‘It were not as rotted as this at the first. I thought us might have need of ’un,’ he said defensively.

Anne shook her head. Little as she knew about farming, she knew no animal could have eaten that blackening mess.

She waited at Swinfen long enough to see the first of the haywains from the bishop’s estate drive in, and fingered the hay anxiously.

‘Is it good enough?’ she asked Josiah.

‘Aye. As good as any this year. Those meadows belonging to the bishop are on good soil, and slope away to the south. They would’ve made hay there early, so maybe they ’scaped the rain that caught most of us.’

Mounted again on the mare Brandy, Anne rode south to the crossroads. There the Swinfen road met Roman Watling Street, which led away west to Wales and east towards Tamworth, and beyond that to Sutton Cheney, where John’s cousins lived. She nodded to a carter with a load of logs as he turned off Watling Street and headed for Lichfield, then she rode over the crossroads and south the short distance to Weeford. On the right hand lay the manor of Thickbroome where they had lived for twelve years, before John was elected to Parliament. They had leased the estate to the Sylvesters when they moved to London, but Anne looked eagerly at the familiar woods bordering the road before she turned left into the narrow lane leading down into Weeford.

This was her childhood home, for she had grown up at Weeford Hall in a large family, of whom six sisters and three brothers had survived infancy. They were married now and moved away, and when her parents had gone down into Kent, Mary and her husband had leased Weeford Hall and its manor from them. Mary Swynfen was just a year younger than her brother John, and the Swynfens and Brandreths had tumbled about like one family when they were children. The two girls had been friends since they could barely walk. Anne had been surprised and a little dismayed when Mary Swynfen married Thomas Pott nearly twenty years ago. Mary was just fifteen years old then, while Thomas was only a few months younger than her father, an old man of thirty-two. Thirty-two did not seem such a great age to Anne now, and the marriage had proved a happy one.

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