The land lying out before her was rugged and brush-grown, sparsely inhabited and but little farmed. Here and there were stony rises and bluffs of torn stones, and while she looked up and down the expanse a grey tower appeared, rising out of the hills toward the east. The tower was of stone like the stone of the hills, an eight-sided tower with eight high indentures in its crown topped by eight stone crosses. The tower would be St Lucy, for ‘Beyond St Lucy’ had been the legend by which she had walked all day through the roads and lanes. She would live, she reflected, somewhere down within that rugged stretch of land. She would sink down into the land, turning through the hills as the road went; she would go into the place. She laid her hand again on the heifer’s side and together they walked down the sloping road. The near aspects of the land, hummocks and scrubby hills, stones and gullies, closed around them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The farm Henry had rented was called the Orkeys place, a mere patch of land, twenty-five acres, small indeed beside Wakefield’s two hundred or more, but here Henry was a renting tenant and full proprietor for the time. Many of the neighbouring farms were small and poor and stony, and of the larger tracts much lay uncultivated and was used as rough pasturage. Off to the north stood St Lucy, the abbey house and church, and the bell in the tower rang often during the day and the night. In still weather the notes came slowly and sweetly across the hills, beating on the stones and clods, each blow distinct, belonging to itself; but in high winds they came like a wailing horn, the beating falling into the midst of a continuous rising and sinking note. The house at the Orkeys place had once been a toll house. It stood at the roadside, a stoop reaching out onto the road for the convenience of the toll-taker. Now few travellers passed, for this was a partly abandoned road, and no tolls were gathered. Ellen’s room lay beside the family room, both extending along the road and both opening onto the stoop, and behind these two rooms lay the kitchen. The walls inside had been whitewashed the year before and the roof was tight so that there were no leaks. During the first rains of her stay there Ellen felt the snugness of the night, the dark outside, the falling wet, the dry security of the indoors, so that in her room, shut away from the elements, she felt the security to be within herself as if she were detached by the prison-like whiteness of the dry walls from her own memories, to begin her being anew; she had never before known this detachment from the immediacy of the weather. A small high shelf extended along one of her walls, and the print of a clock was shadowed above, a low rounded clock. She could even see the print of ghostly springs and a dial. This was the only mark which had meaning on the dull white walls.