‘I assure you, it’s true. Wealthy people would pay some poor old codger to live alone in a rundown cottage they had built for them.’
‘Why?’
‘They thought it romantic, or poetic or something.’
‘I doubt if it was romantic or poetic for the poor old man living here.’
‘Apparently, they were often unfortunate men who had returned from the Napoleonic Wars with their nerves shot to pieces and unable to return to their old lives.’
‘How awful.’
‘Yes, but my grandparents thought what they were doing was noble. They had weird notions about the dignity of living a simple life and being close to nature.’
‘As long as they weren’t the ones living the simple life or being this close to nature.’
‘Exactly. Do you want to see inside?’
‘Yes, I’d love to.’
He pushed back the weather-beaten wooden door. ‘Excuse my bad manners, but on this occasion I think I should enter first.’
Lowering his head in a manner he never had to do as a child, he walked through the small doorway. He’d expected the cottage to be in a state of advanced dilapidation, full of spider’s webs, with the floor covered in animal droppings, but it was just as he remembered from his childhood—rundown but livable. The rough limestone walls needed a coat or two of plaster, but it looked as if someone had been tending to the cottage in his absence. The flagstone floor had been swept. There was a copper kettle suspended from an iron hook above the hearth and piles of dry wood were stacked beside the fireplace.
Perhaps the gamekeeper or someone else employed on the estate had been using it as a place to shelter and make himself a cup of tea.
‘This isn’t so bad,’ she said, looking around. ‘Although I wouldn’t want to live here.’
‘When I was home for the school holidays I did virtually live here.’ He indicated the straw mattress on the small cot in the corner where he’d often slept at night when he did not want to return home to the cold, unwelcoming house and his cold, unwelcoming father.
She scanned the bookshelves, which still contained books from his childhood, including, rather embarrassingly, some by the romance poets, a leftover from his sentimental adolescence.
He hoped and prayed she did not open any of them as even more embarrassing would be the poems he had penned himself and placed inside the books, believing them fit for publication. From memory, they were all odes to girls he’d never met and contained some excruciating rhyming.
‘No, don’t!’ he cried out as she opened a book and pulled out a crinkled page, scanned it then looked up at him.
‘Oh, girl of mine, you are so fine.’
Jacob groaned and sank onto the cot, his head in his hands.
‘Am I to assume you composed this?’
‘I was fifteen,’ he pleaded. ‘I thought I was the next Lord Byron. I should have thrown those poems away long ago.’
She grinned at him above the paper and continued reading.
‘With hair of gold you make me bold, Like stars in the night, your eyes are bright, Big and round and such a delight.’
He groaned again, even louder. ‘Please, stop this torture.’
Her teasing expression suggested she would show him no mercy. ‘So, who was this fine girl with big, delightful eyes and golden hair?’
‘A figment of my adolescent dreams.’
‘Well, I’m sure any fifteen-year-old girl would be pleased to receive it.’
‘A fifteen-year-old girl with no taste in poetry.’
‘Are there any more poems?’ She flicked through the pages of the book.
