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Chapters (44)
  1. Lark Rise to Candleford
  2. Copyright
  3. LARK RISE
  4. 1
  5. 2
  6. 3
  7. 4
  8. 5
  9. 6
  10. 7
  11. 8
  12. 9
  13. 10
  14. 11
  15. 12
  16. 13
  17. 14
  18. 15
  19. OVER TO CANDLEFORD
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  21. 17
  22. 18
  23. 19
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  26. 22
  27. 23
  28. 24
  29. 25
  30. 26
  31. 27
  32. 28
  33. 29
  34. CANDLEFORD GREEN
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  36. 31
  37. 32
  38. 33
  39. 34
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  42. 37
  43. 38
  44. 39

Now it had had its operation and there it hung, cold and stiff and so very, very dead. Not funny at all any more, but in some queer way dignified. The butcher had draped a long, lacy piece of fat from its own interior over one of its forelegs, in the manner in which ladies of that day sometimes carried a white lacy shawl, and that last touch seemed to Laura utterly heartless. She stayed there a long time, patting its hard, cold side and wondering that a thing so recently full of life and noise could be so still. Then, hearing her mother call her, she ran out of the door farthest from where she was working lest she should be scolded for crying over a dead pig.

There was fried liver and fat for supper and when Laura said, “No, thank you,” her mother looked at her rather suspiciously, then said: “Well, perhaps better not, just going to bed and all; but here’s a nice bit of sweetbread. I was saving it for Daddy, but you have it. You’ll like that.” And Laura ate the sweetbread and dipped her bread in the thick, rich gravy and refused to think about the poor pig in the pantry, for, although only five years old, she was learning to live in this world of compromises.

18

“Once Upon a Time”

No one who saw Laura’s mother at that time would have wondered at the hasty, youthful marriage which turned her husband’s contemplated sojourn of a few months into a permanent abode. She was a slight, graceful girl with a wild-rose complexion and hair the colour of a new penny which she parted in the middle and drew down to a knot at the back of her head because a gentleman of the family, where she had been nurse to the children before her marriage, had told her she ought always to do it like that.

“A pocket Venus,” she said he had called her. “But quite nicely,” she hastened to assure her listener, “for he was a married gentleman with no nonsense about him.” Another thing she told her children about her nursing days was that when visitors were staying in the house it was the custom for some member of the family to bring them up to the nursery after dinner to listen to the bedtime stories she was telling the children. “A regular amusement,” she said it was with them, and her own children did not think that at all strange, for the bedtime stories were now being told to them and they knew how exciting they were.