A Country Marriage by Sandra Jane Goddard Page B

be a good time to share some of her concerns.
    ‘Ellen, when you first met Will, did you… you know, did you fall in love with him straight away?’
    ‘Oh, most definitely I did, yes.’ There it was: that liveliness back in her eyes again, that sparkle. ‘It’s summat I shan’t ever forget. You see, me an’ Annie slipped out of home one night to go to Wembridge Fair. Needless to say, it was her idea, not mine. Anyway, that’s where we met them; the three lads, that is. Course, as you might well imagine, it was Annie who spotted them first and wanted to get a closer look. Me, I was mortified. I didn’t want anything to do with that sort of thing.’ She watched Ellen pull the blanket up to her chin, seemingly in a bid to quell laughter, her subsequent glance to the front of the cart suggesting that she didn’t want to be drawn into explaining what it was they were talking about. ‘Then Tom caught us looking at them and before we knew it, they were coming over to talk to us. And as soon as I saw Will proper, well, all I felt was giddiness and the sense that I’d forgotten how to breathe; such a powerful feeling that I’ll never forget it as long as I live! But I was so naïve that I didn’t know it for what it was. I thought I’d taken ill! All I could do was blush and stare at my feet, so it never occurred to me, even for one minute that Will would be interested in courting me.’
    ‘But he obviously was.’
    ‘He was, yes! And next thing we knew, him and Tom started walking all the way over to Wych Green just to see us. And when they walked over on the last Sunday of Advent, we all went up the church and I remember how me and Will sat in the porch talking and watching a washy sort of a sunset. And that’s when, out of the blue, he asked me to marry him. And even though I scarce knew him, I said yes, right away.’
    ‘But weren’t you ever… you know, nervous?’
    ‘Nervous? No, I don’t remember bein’ nervous. I just remember being excited and impatient to be wed and well, completely in love, I suppose.’
    Looking away from Ellen’s smile, she directed her eyes out beyond the dark hedgerows and into the fields, still characterless in the flat, early light.
    ‘And once you were wed, was it, you know, everything you thought it’d be?’ In truth it was a half-baked question to start with. Worse still was the fact that Ellen’s answer was never really in any doubt.
    ‘More even, if that don’t sound daft because I’d never before imagined the pleasure to be had from tending to a good man. See, to my thinking, Mary, love between a man and a woman is God’s greatest creation and all I can say is that it made a better person of me.’
    It was hard, she thought when Ellen stopped talking, to imagine this woman as anything other than a good person anyway, married or no.
    ‘So…’ But her thoughts about her own situation were far less straightforward. ‘You never had any… doubts?’
    Feeling Ellen’s hand on her arm, she glanced up to see what looked like understanding on her face.
    ‘George is a good man, Mary; a decent man. You’ve no need to fear him. And I’m sure that if you do as he asks and give yourself freely, then your union will be truly blessed.’
    She cast her eyes down to the blanket covering their laps. It would be no use talking to Ellen, then, about all of the other things bothering her because clearly she had never experienced such anxieties. Perhaps, though, the basis of her advice about doing as George asked was sensible enough.
    With the cart continuing its swaying progress over the deeply rutted track, she pulled the blanket back up to her chin and let out a long and shivery sigh. Above them, the heavens were a cloudless indigo, and looking across, she could just pick out the morning star clinging low to the easterly horizon. But by the time they reached the outskirts of the town, its twinkling had been consumed by the daylight and when, shortly afterwards, they