Read Online The Tale of Hill Top Farm by Susan Wittig Albert - Free Book Online Page B

even more wonderful than the money or what she could do with it was what it represented: “It is pleasant to feel I could earn my own living,” she had written to Norman, in a triumph of conscious understatement. In fact, she rejoiced at the idea that her writing might allow her to lead an independent life, hugging the glorious thought to herself with a kind of incredulous jubilance several times a day, like a young woman with a letter in her pocket from a secret lover. Her books not only gave her many pleasant tasks with which to fill the empty hours; they were her ticket to independence, to a life of her own, away from Bolton Gardens.
    Beatrix always felt very much at loose ends when she had finished a project. She felt this now, perhaps because Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was the last book she would do with Norman. She would have to find a new way of working, and she had come to Sawrey, in part, to sketch. Before Norman died, they had discussed the possibility of a book that would feature a frog named Jeremy Fisher. She already had some drawings, mostly modeled from her pet frog Punch, who had died some years before. But if she could find another frog to draw, particularly a large, self-satisfied green frog, that would be a help.
    Having stowed Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle in her basket upstairs, Beatrix went down to the dining room. Mr. Crook and his helper had already gone to the smithy, and Beatrix sat down to a bowl of steaming oat porridge and a boiled egg. Edward Horsley was there, finishing his meal. He smiled at her and offered to build a small hutch for her animals in the back garden.
    “I’m sure they’d like that very much,” Beatrix said, surprised by his kindness. “It will be a nice change for them. They do so like to be outdoors in fine weather.”
    Mrs. Crook frowned. “Put it in the corner by the hedge out of the way,” she said shortly. “I don’t want to be fallin’ over it. And mind you make the door fast, Edward. If they get out, they’re bound to be lost.” She gave Beatrix a dark glance that said, plain as day, that she wouldn’t have been so quick to rent her the room if she’d known about the animals.
    But Edward only grinned and winked at Beatrix. “Oh, aye,” he said easily. “I’ll make it so they woan’t ’scape.” He took his hat and went off to work with a cheerful whistle.
    At seven-thirty, Beatrix put on her tweed jacket and wide-brimmed felt hat. With the Crooks’ dog Rascal tagging along behind, she walked down Market Street, then through the wicket gate beside the Tower Bank Arms and up the path to Hill Top Farm. She paused as the house came into view, savoring the moment and thinking how absolutely amazing it was that Hill Top was actually hers —or would be, when the papers were signed the next month.
    It was hard for Beatrix to explain to herself, much less to anyone else, how much she wanted her very own house. She had always loved houses—oh, not grand mansions, like her cousins’ Melford Hall in Suffolk; or gloomy, respectable houses like her parents’ three-story brick house in South Kensington. What Beatrix loved more than anything else were tiny cottages with crooked roofs, their stone-flagged floors brightened by rag rugs, the ceilings hung with braids of onions and fragrant herbs, the rooms furnished with old-fashioned oak sideboards and grandfather clocks and chairs with woven rush seats. Farm houses with no pretensions to grandeur, with mullioned windows and thick walls and narrow passages turning and twisting every which way. Houses that reminded her of the rooms and hallways in her uncle’s house at Gwaynynog in Wales, or the room she slept in at Camfield Place, her grandmother’s yellow-brick house. Houses that made her want to reach for her pencil and draw.
    Yes, perhaps it was her artist’s heart that coveted the warm glow of firelight reflected from copper-bottomed pans, or her artist’s soul that longed for shafts of dusty sunlight falling through windows