The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff

patiently for the child to leave the family. It might have taken ten years more, or twenty. But no matter. Her plan had not required haste.
    After an hour, Esther saw an older girl and three younger children leave the cottage in the quickening dark to fetch water from the well, and heard a snoring from within that sounded like the rattle in the chest of a man about to die.
    Somewhat later, having accomplished in Nomansland what she had set out to do, Esther returned to her children, setting off early the following morning with all due speed across Salisbury Plain. By nightfall, they had reached a large estate with a secluded orchard in which she and her family had often, in years past, spent the night in peace.
    From their camp among the apple trees, the children crept down across a series of rolling lawns to catch a glimpse of Lord Hayward’s grand stables, in which sixty horses were attended by an army of smartly attired grooms. Had they managed to gain entrance to the place and not been shooed away with loud threats and warnings, they might have come across a stocky white part-Arab, recently acquired—under somewhat unusual circumstances—for George Hayward’s daughter, Caroline.

Nineteen

    P ell felt a chill as they left the village, and hugged her shawl tightly round her shoulders, hurrying along a road thrown into shadow by a tall brick wall. At the first opportunity, she ducked through a doorway in its long blank length, hoping to find a place to sleep. Inside, the wall still held heat from the setting sun.
    With Dicken close at heel, she walked quickly, on constant watch for someone who might object to their presence. Far across the gardens and fields she could see a grandly proportioned old farmhouse, constructed in a strange mishmash of Gothic arches and peaked roofs. Even from far away, the place had an abandoned air; whatever staff remained to keep house for the absent owner was nowhere in evidence. Dismissed, she thought, or perhaps just gone to earn money elsewhere.
    She followed the wall until she came to the first of a series of garden rooms held in its curve. Ducking through a low arch, she skirted the unchecked growth of deep borders and flowers gone to seed, came to a second room, then a third, and a fourth, until finally she entered a kitchen garden that looked as if it had received somewhat more attention. The only light left now was in the sky, and Pell could just make out vast cabbages, beans twisted round long stakes as high as her forehead, the luxuriant feathery growth of fennel. Along the warm west wall, she saw the dark outline of espaliered fruit trees, heavy with apples and pears but unpruned, with branches reaching out into the garden as if overjoyed to be released from symmetry. She tugged at the top of a carrot and pulled out a gnarled giant nearly as long as her forearm, planted last year and left to grow unchecked for months. Jack would love this, she thought, forgetting.
    Still no shelter. But the kitchen garden felt unnaturally warm and, frowning, Pell pressed her hands against the high south wall. It was too hot merely to have absorbed the heat of the day, and as she followed it farther she came to a huge hearth built into the wall, smoldering with the remains of a great fire. She had seen such constructions before: hollow channels conducting heat through the walls to raise the temperature of the gardens. The wall would retain its warmth for several hours after the fire died, and as the cold seeped into her bones, Pell felt the old temptation to curl up against warm bricks for the night.
    There had to be a potting shed or other shelter nearby, she thought, a little panicky now with darkness upon her. No moon lit the sky, and she had to feel her way forward beside the wall, stepping over the tangle of plants at her feet. And then suddenly the wall gave way to another hearth, empty this time, and she crouched down inside it, peering along its dark hollow channels. The heat from the fire