The Tale of Holly How by Susan Wittig Albert

out at night to dance on the green turf. Now, she loved to walk up Stony Lane to sketch at Moss Eccles Tarn, the small lake behind Oatmeal Crag. And she enjoyed riding through the countryside with Mr. Jennings, for he had farmed in this area for quite some time and was usually willing to share what he knew about the land and the people. When she first met the farmer, he seemed taciturn and withdrawn, but now that they were better acquainted, he was proving a regular gossip, and much friendlier than his wife.
    Just now, he pointed with his pony whip at a tall, frowning house that stood well off to their right, on the other side of Wilfin Beck. It was built of gray stone, with a gray slate roof and narrow windows that gleamed like steel in the afternoon light. A fortress, grim and uncompromising, it was half-screened by gloomy fir trees, and behind it rose the dark wildness of Cuckoo Brow Wood.
    “Tidmarsh Manor,” Mr. Jennings remarked. “Sad place, that.”
    “Sad?” Rascal asked. He shivered and moved closer to Miss Potter on the seat. “I call it sinister.”
    “Why so?” Beatrix inquired encouragingly.
    “Why sinister? Because Dudley—Lady Longford’s spaniel—says there’s trouble brewing.” Rascal looked up at Miss Potter, whose pink cheeks were even pinker with the heat. “Dudley is fat and rude and nobody much likes him. But he knows what’s going on at the Manor.”
    “If tha doan’t hush thi noise, Rascal,” Mr. Jennings said sternly, “tha can’st get down and walk.” To Beatrix he replied, “ ’Tis sad because Lady Longford’s husband died, and her son—t’ young Lord Longford—went off to New Zealand and bought a sheep station.”
    “Really,” Beatrix remarked with interest, remembering that Dimity Woodcock had named Lady Longford as the person who had nominated a candidate for the school.
    “Oh, aye. Great pity, ’twas.” Mr. Jennings pulled his brows together and pursed his lips. “Lady Longford had it in mind that t’ lad would marry t’ Kittredge daughter and take over t’ estate, which by rights he should’ve done, o’course.” He flicked a fly off Winston’s shoulder with a light touch of the whip. “But he didn’t like t’ girl, ’spite of t’ fact that t’ lands join, and raised a great protest against t’ marriage. His mother told him to go away and ne’er come back. So he ran off to New Zealand and married a sheep farmer’s daughter, and then got killed in a t’rrible train crash, and now there’s no one to keep t’ fam’ly line goin’ or manage t’ Tidmarsh estate.” Mr. Jennings concluded his speech with the satisfied air of a man who has managed to pack a great many complicated details into one brief narrative.
    Beatrix flinched as if she had been touched by Mr. Jennings’s whip, for the story was rather too near her own. “Oh, dear,” she murmured, thinking that parents could be extraordinarily cruel when it came to managing their children’s lives. It did no good and caused nothing but pain, all round.
    “There’s the granddaughter,” Rascal pointed out. “Of course, she’s half a New Zealander, Dudley says, which is the reason the old lady turns up her nose.”
    “There would be somebody to inherit,” Mr. Jennings went on, “if Lady Longford would have her, but she won’t. T’ son had a daughter, y’ see. Now t’ girl’s father is dead and her mother, too. She’s stayin’ at t’ Manor, sin’ she has nowheres else to go. Caroline, she’s called.”
    Caroline. It was the name of Beatrix’s favorite cousin, Caroline Hutton. She cast a glance back over her shoulder at the house, which stood gaunt and forbidding behind the firs, with an air of desolate isolation.
    “It looks a lonely place for a child,” she remarked, feeling an immediate sympathy for the girl who was exiled there.
    Perhaps because she herself had not had playmates in the usual way, Beatrix was not very comfortable with the village youngsters who tormented