There was scrub grass, a tree snarled and crooked, bare rocky ground, clouds that hung low and menacing. There was heather with no bloom on it, beaten a brickly brown. Certainly the surroundings were not inviting. What was the matter with him? He had become jittery, casting anxious looks about him, hurrying in a way that told me he was eager to be off. “If you’re sure you want to stay,” he said. “It is, Mistress.” He tied the strings on his hat more tightly and wrapped his greatcoat more closely around himself before he lifted out my two boxes and my trunk and set them beside me. He helped me to the ground, and I stared in dismay.

Could they see through the dark and wind? Were they exhausted? They needed to rest.īut now Robert was reining them in and the carriage was rumbling to a stop. Now and then, I heard the horses whinny, and I wondered about them. We were quiet then, rolling unevenly on a road that seemed to grow steadily more narrow. It was difficult to make myself heard as I tried to communicate with him. The wind had risen to a roar, shaking the sides of the carriage, flailing against the windows. I don’t come this way often.” He’d muttered something else, but I could not distinguish the words. I’d thought Robert was not going to speak but then he shouted, “I do not know the people here, Mistress. I was going to Brindle Point, a more distant part of the town. “The people do not seem friendly,” I shouted, holding on to my bonnet to keep it from being blown away. “This is Brindle?” I’d shouted up to him. Robert cracked his whip, and we were rattling away, the carriage swaying from side to side. One man wearing a stained hat shouted, “What’s your business here?” in a truculent voice.Ī woman yelled, “Go back where you’ve come from!” They had paused in their conversations and were staring at our carriage, staring at me, with such malevolence that my blood chilled. When he slowed to avoid a woman singing in the street, I’d gazed at the people around us. The carriage bounced and shook so that I feared a wheel might come loose. Robert, the carriage driver, rushed through it fast, the collar of his greatcoat half hiding his face, his gaze fixed on the road. It had seemed to me at first to be filled with gaiety. And then there’d been the strangeness of the last village we’d gone through, where all the shops and houses were brightly lit, people stood around the street, music played loudly through the open doors of one of the establishments. The journey had been tiring and difficult. We’d traveled through wind and rain that grew fiercer the closer we got to the coast. Though an orphan, I would have a family again. But I told myself to be brave and to consider myself fortunate to have an aunt and uncle to go to. It was sad and strange to think of myself as an orphan now that my parents had died. I’d taken two traps, a coach, and a carriage to get here from my old, beloved home in Edinburgh.

Forbidden by Eve Bunting