Read Online The Tale of Castle Cottage by Susan Wittig Albert - Free Book Online

now, grown up and with their own youngsters in tow, have come to visit the place where she lived.
    But I’m about to tell you something that most people don’t know, for Miss Potter’s real home in Sawrey was not Hill Top Farm; it was Castle Cottage. Hill Top was very dear to her heart, it is true. She could retreat there from London and her parents, and she wrote and drew many of her little books there. But the house itself was rather like a holiday cottage, and she was rarely able to spend more than a fortnight there at any given time.
    In actuality, Beatrix Potter’s real home was Castle Cottage, where she spent the last thirty years of her life. After you’ve toured the house at Hill Top and you’re walking back in the direction of the car park, glance up the hill to the north (to your right), past the other houses in the village. The large white house at the top of the hill—slate roof, whitepainted chimneys with red top hats, red-trimmed windows, and a porch with a skylight—is Castle Cottage. To get there, you will walk up the lane, past the row of cottages that used to include Ginger and Pickles’ village shop and Rose Cottage and the joiner’s workshop and the blacksmith’s forge and Croft End Cottage. At the corner, turn to the right, then turn left when you reach Post Office Meadow, and walk up the hill to Castle Cottage. Neither the house nor the grounds are open to the public. But as you stand at the gate and peek into the garden, perhaps you can imagine Miss Potter, dressed in her gray Herdwick tweeds and her old black felt hat, a woven basket over her arm and clippers in hand, coming out of the door and stepping into the green and neatly kept garden, with blooming flowers and trimmed hedges behind a stone fence.
    So. That is Castle Cottage as it is now.
    It did not look that way on this particular July afternoon in 1913, however. Beatrix, dressed in those same tweeds and black felt hat, is taking the same route to Castle Cottage that I have just described. But the village is not yet a tourist destination—if it were, I daresay that Miss Potter would have found another place to live straightaway!—and as she comes down the steep walk from Hill Top (the path is behind the Tower Bank Arms), there are only a few people about. Harry Turnell, the brewer’s drayman, in his leather apron, shirt sleeves rolled past the elbows, is delivering kegs of beer and ale to the Tower Bank Arms. Robert Franklin, wearing his handwoven rush farmer’s hat, trundles a wooden wheelbarrow loaded with two red hens and a rooster in a wooden cage. And a pair of fell-walkers in short pants and knee stockings, kitted out with knapsacks and walking sticks and pert green felt hats, are striding along as boldly as if they are setting out to climb the Matterhorn instead of merely hiking up Coniston Old Man, on the other side of Esthwaite Water.
    Miss Potter barely noticed, however. She was in an exceedingly perplexed frame of mind, for what Sarah Barwick had told her as they finished lunch now lay like an ominous shadow across her thoughts. The theft of a pair of door handles seemed almost trivial enough to overlook, although she thought she really ought to do something about it.
    But what? Whatever she did was bound to cause some sort of trouble—and if she did nothing, that could cause trouble, too, in the end. And not trivial trouble, either. What if she weren’t the only victim? What if other of Mr. Biddle’s clients were being robbed, too? Or perhaps there was no truth to the story at all. She was perfectly aware of the various ways the truth could be stretched out of shape, once it got into the village gossip mill.
    She was still mulling over this problem when, in front of the village shop, she met Mrs. Regina Rosier, an acquaintance from nearby Hawkshead. Mrs. Rosier was recently retired from teaching in the grammar school there (the same school where the poet William Wordsworth, as a boy, had carved his name into the top