Following the death of her beloved Aunt Belle, Lorna Kent abandons her life in the city to move to a small country town. Once an ancient valley settlement, Canterlow's surrounding countryside remains, even in 1919, virtually untouched by the passage of time. Immediately welcomed by her new community, Lorna soon finds herself helping at the local school and befriending its well-respected headmaster, Adam Ushart.
Enchanted by its beauty, and enraptured by her first experience of love, Lorna is unprepared for the dark undercurrent of violence and betrayal lying beneath the smooth surface of life in Canterlow. When the mysterious death of a beautiful young girl named Alice captures her imagination, Lorna soon finds herself entangled in a web of dangerous secrets. Alice had also been in love, and by discovering the identity of the young girl's seducer, Lorna finds herself involved in the lives of more than one person with something to hide, in Anna Gilbert's A Morning in Eden.
Following the death of her beloved Aunt Belle, Lorna Kent abandons her life in the city to move to a small country town. Once an ancient valley settlement, Canterlow's surrounding countryside remains, even in 1919, virtually untouched by the passage of time. Immediately welcomed by her new community, Lorna soon finds herself helping at the local school and befriending its well-respected headmaster, Adam Ushart.
Enchanted by its beauty, and enraptured by her first experience of love, Lorna is unprepared for the dark undercurrent of violence and betrayal lying beneath the smooth surface of life in Canterlow. When the mysterious death of a beautiful young girl named Alice captures her imagination, Lorna soon finds herself entangled in a web of dangerous secrets. Alice had also been in love, and by discovering the identity of the young girl's seducer, Lorna finds herself involved in the lives of more than one person with something to hide, in Anna Gilbert's A Morning in Eden.
eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Following the death of her beloved Aunt Belle, Lorna Kent abandons her life in the city to move to a small country town. Once an ancient valley settlement, Canterlow's surrounding countryside remains, even in 1919, virtually untouched by the passage of time. Immediately welcomed by her new community, Lorna soon finds herself helping at the local school and befriending its well-respected headmaster, Adam Ushart.
Enchanted by its beauty, and enraptured by her first experience of love, Lorna is unprepared for the dark undercurrent of violence and betrayal lying beneath the smooth surface of life in Canterlow. When the mysterious death of a beautiful young girl named Alice captures her imagination, Lorna soon finds herself entangled in a web of dangerous secrets. Alice had also been in love, and by discovering the identity of the young girl's seducer, Lorna finds herself involved in the lives of more than one person with something to hide, in Anna Gilbert's A Morning in Eden.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466873568 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 284 KB |
About the Author
Anna Gilbert was born and raised in the north of England where she still lives. Her previous books include The Look of Innocence, winner of the Romantic Novelists' Award, The Treachery of Time, which won the 1994 Catherine Cookson Award, and A Hint of Witchcraft.
Anna Gilbert was born the second child of a schoolmaster in a village of England's North Country. A teacher of literature for many years, she is the author of several novels, including The Treachery of Time, which won Britain's prestigious Catherine Cookson Award for fiction; The Look of Innocence, winner of the Romantic Novelists' Award; A Morning in Eden; and A Hint of Witchcraft.
Read an Excerpt
A Morning in Eden
By Anna Gilbert
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Anna GilbertAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7356-8
CHAPTER 1
They had come too far. For the older ladies, especially for Aunt Belle, this particular Sunday evening walk had been a mistake. Aunt Mabel of course refused to give in: the expedition had been her idea, and her determination alone had got them as far as this, almost to the end of Fold Lane.
Lorna, walking ahead, had already reached the turning where an overgrown track on their left led to their destination, the old Hammond house. Pausing to cast a backward glance and a word of encouragement, she saw Aunt Belle's fair face flushed to purple and ran back, groping in her pocket for the smelling salts.
'You're sadly out of shape for walking.' Mabel watched as her sister took a second grateful sniff. 'You'd better sit on the wall here for a minute and then we'll turn back.'
'I'm sorry, dear. You're disappointed.'
'That's neither here nor there. All I wanted was to see if there'll be a good crop on that apple tree. There isn't a tree in Canterlow that bears as well as that one of the Hammonds – and nobody there to benefit. It does seem a shame.'
'A terrible shame,' Belle echoed, thinking of the three Hammond boys, all killed in the war.
'It's such a good early apple, the Grenadier.'
'But not as tasty as your own Bramley.' Lorna knelt to push Belle's hat back and gently wipe her forehead with a handkerchief.
'But they're for storing. The Grenadiers are ripe no later than the first week in September as a rule. Never mind. Another day perhaps. Only' – it occurred to her that tomorrow she would be on her own again – 'there's nothing to stop you from going on to the Hammonds' place. It wouldn't take long, you go at such a pace.'
'I'd like to.' Lorna sprang to her feet with the alacrity of a prisoner unexpectedly released.
'You needn't come back this way. You can take one of the field paths and cut across the churchyard – as if you'd gone to look at your Uncle Arthur's grave. You could even be home ahead of us and see that Gladys has the table set and the kettle on the boil.'
But Lorna walked slowly, savouring the bliss of solitude. The annual holiday at Canterlow was almost over. Never once until now had she been free to do as she liked. There were so many other things to be done when staying at The Birches. Ungrudgingly she would so have described the experience of being constantly at Aunt Mabel's beck and call, and was rewarded for her forbearance by the speed with which she forgot her: forgot everything but the stillness of summer trees, the patterns of light and shade on the turf, the scent of wayside flowers. In the absence of other people the natural scene asserted its living presence and transformed her, she felt, into the person she was meant to be.
The green lane became a woodland path and presently the grey walls and stone roof-tiles of the Hammond house appeared between branches. She had been there before but not for a long time; yet there were fewer changes than might have been expected in a house left unoccupied for years and in the middle of a wood, so that instinctively she glanced at the windows as if someone might see her as she picked her way through the overgrown garden, disturbing butterflies, her skirt brushed by rampant valerian, her feet occasionally caught in long stems of periwinkle.
There was no mistaking the tree. Against the warm south-facing wall it promised a crop of Grenadiers to satisfy Aunt Mabel's most extravagant expectations. She plucked one from a low bough. It resisted her twist, a sign of unripeness confirmed when she set her teeth in it and winced.
'Let us hope,' she thought, with what she felt to be sardonic wit, 'that Eve was luckier.' Not that she deserved to be. Never having known temptation – or serpents either for that matter – Lorna had little sympathy for our First Parent, the Mother of us all, whose fatal weakness had caused so much trouble.
But now she was tempted. Having come all this way it seemed a shame not to take a peek inside. The windows had fortified themselves over the years with tangled vines and nettles. Impossible to get near them. In any case the small leaded panes were practically opaque with dirt: it must be almost dark inside. She was a little taken aback to find the front door of heavy oak unlocked. It yielded to a firm push, letting a shaft of light into the dimness of the stone-flagged hall.
'Is there anybody there?'
Only her absolute certainty that there was not gave her courage to call out like that. Had there been a reply she would have taken to her heels or simply died of fright. Even so, she left the door open behind her in preparation for instant flight and stood well away from the walls, with a wary eye on the staircase.
A fireplace occupied most of one wall, its hearth black and empty under a heavy stone mantelpiece. There was no furniture, only a high stool by the window and at the bottom of the stairs a broken Windsor chair; and over all a quietness deep enough to chill the blood of a person standing there alone.
In other circumstances she might have lingered, picturing the place as it ought to be; furnishing the empty hall to her own taste, as if, having lived all her life in someone else's house, she had at last found one of her own. But now there stole upon her a sense of solitude quite different from that of the green lane and its sheltering trees: an awareness of the immense burden of human suffering: of a family bereft of its three sons in the space of two years: of the pitiless waste of life.
Such thoughts left her with no impulse to explore the other rooms as she had half looked forward to doing. The door dragged on the stone flags as she pulled it to, taking a last look round before closing it. In the narrowing shaft of light she caught sight of something on the floor under the window: a small brightness; a man's cuff-link; a square stone of dark red rimmed with gold. She picked it up and put it carefully, as if it mattered, on the window ledge. Because there was nothing else of interest, nothing on which to fix the mind, it became significant like a message. Whereas a moment before she had felt only the void left by the three young men who had gone, leaving no visible trace, here was tangible evidence of a masculine presence. A relic? Or perhaps it had been dropped by an intruder. Whoever was responsible for the house should keep it locked.
Her way home, as she stood with her back to the house, was to the left. Ahead, framed by trees and wonderfully bright after the gloom indoors, an aerial pool of light filled the sky. A few steps forward and she looked down steeply sloping fields to the gleaming water of a dam, now golden as the sky above. On its farther side woodland rose as steeply, its heavy foliage dark against the radiance of sunlight.
It was then that she saw them, halfway down the slope. They stood on one of the paths that intersected the hillside: a girl and a man close together, facing each other. From above she could not see the man clearly – an outspread bough from the ragged hedge of hawthorns partly screened his figure in its Sunday black – nor could she see his face under the brim of a black hat.
It was the girl that she saw and remembered: a girl in a white dress, and rather younger than herself, judging by long hair falling free almost to her waist. Whether actually fair or light brown, the long beams of the westering sun turned it to gold. In white and gold, suffused with light, she looked from this distance – how could one describe her? – ethereal.
They were lovers: there was no doubt of it. Even though they simply stood there – Lorna had seen no embrace – in their closeness and in the girl's attitude of total commitment to her companion without reservation, she sensed an intimacy that set her own heart beating faster. To her, as yet, love was an idea, an ideal; a marvel: a mystery: endlessly fascinating; to be looked forward to, hoped for, discovered some day in a miraculous fulfilment of destiny. She was witnessing the thing itself and ought not to watch.
Then to her dismay – it was distressing to see – the girl raised her arms to her lover's shoulders as if to embrace him. He drew back. She did not let him go but leaned against him as if for the support he seemed to be denying her. Her arms, white and clinging, slid down his rigid black form as the girl herself sank down until she crouched at his feet, head bowed. He stooped. Lorna saw only an arm, a hand, the crown of his black hat as he wrenched apart the hands that fettered him. A moment later he was gone, a moving darkness between green hawthorns.
Alone, on her knees, the girl watched him go. There drifted through the air a thin cry of distress as she sank face-down on the grass, weeping no doubt. But there was no sound of weeping as she got slowly to her feet, no sound at all – no movement except the moving away of a cloud, to leave an extra dazzling brightness on the water. Had the girl seen it as she wiped away tears with the back of her hand? She was looking down at the dam.
It was startling to see her come suddenly and violently to life – to see her running headlong downhill with a reckless disregard of the risk of falling. Lorna was to remember that in spite of her unhappiness she ran with the fluid unconscious ease of youth as if to escape for ever from the scene of her rejection. A low wall marked the end of the pasture. She went over it with scarcely a pause and into the meadow where grass was greening again after the early hay harvest.
From the trees on the opposite hillside came the raucous cry of a jay. A heron rose from the dam and flapped slowly away. It might have been a dream. In dreams one feels more intensely than in waking hours and for a few minutes pity for the girl had been as vivid as the heightened sensation from which one wakes with relief. Now in its frame of arching branches, the picture of golden sky, green earth and bright water was as it had been: undisturbed, unchanged, except for a faintly discernible circle of white on the grass. The girl's hat.
The incident had been no dream. What could be more real than the discovery that love is inseparable from pain? If it's like that, Lorna thought. ... Is it always like that? Must it be like that?
CHAPTER 2Lorna and her Aunt Belle left for Donnerton early the next morning. 'It's been very nice.' Belle settled snugly in her seat as the train steamed out. 'But a fortnight is long enough.'
'You say that every year. I wonder if Aunt Mabel feels the same about her fortnight with us at Christmas.'
'Perhaps. There's no place like home. Oh, I know that's a hackneyed thing to say but it's true.'
No. 3 Princes Crescent was certainly her home: she had been born there; and she would have been hurt by any suggestion that it was not also the home of her niece, who had been with her from infancy. Lorna's mother had died in childbirth. The aunts had rallied to the crisis with such dutiful willingness that by the time she was five, her father had felt free to escape to West Virginia and a share in a small coal mine. Lorna was to remain with her aunts until she was old enough to keep house for him. But before she had attained that useful age he had married again and gave no sign of returning, though the £50 he allowed annually for her maintenance was paid into the bank at Donnerton with unfailing regularity.
Lorna had never known Aunt Mabel's husband who died when she was two, but she was forever grateful to him for having lived long enough to prevent Aunt Mabel from taking her in. Or on? Arthur could scarcely be expected, his wife argued reasonably, to shoulder the burden of a newborn child not his own, when Belle, still a spinster, had the old family house in Donnerton with eight rooms all to herself and would be all the better for her niece's company in the years to come.
And so she was. Belle had been blessed with a serenity of temperament and lightness of heart denied to her sister Mabel, who was inclined to disapprove of her manner as being too girlish for a middle-aged woman. Perhaps only Lorna knew that the apparent lightness was counterbalanced by more serious moods though even she never penetrated their depths.
Aunt and niece were happy together, their relationship a rare blend of motherly care, daughterly trust and sisterly comradeship, and they were able to feel sorry for Mabel, widowed in her early thirties and childless – or to put it more precisely – to feel that Mabel had not been improved by the misfortune of having to live alone.
Nevertheless, though No. 3 Princes Crescent had all the advantages of a home and was so indistinguishable from a real one that Lorna never consciously thought about it, there lurked at the back of her mind an awareness that the security it offered was conditional: she was there because of Aunt Belle's goodness of heart which she must in some way acknowledge. How? By being useful? The charmless word was often on Aunt Mabel's lips and Lorna, who thought of herself as being unremarkable in every way, cheerfully accepted it as a way of describing herself. It was no trouble to be useful. For the time being there was nothing else she passionately wanted to be.
'There's more in life than being useful,' Aunt Belle decreed when the topic was once broached. 'We must each live in accordance with our own nature.'
Such remarks, inspired by novels borrowed from Heath's Lending Library, occasionally enriched their conversation. 'Little did we think' or 'Alas, it was not to be' applied to a disappointment over a picnic or a failed omelette gave a kind of bogus stateliness to a humdrum situation. Aunt Belle was probably the only person in Donnerton who used the words 'Alas', 'deemed' and 'nonetheless'.
'There are times,' she told Lorna 'when one must rise a little above the merely commonplace,' and she would gaze for a moment or two into the middle distance as if recalling a way of life not to be found in Donnerton, though she had in fact never lived anywhere else and had never strayed much farther than Canterlow. Lorna paid heed (as Belle would have put it) and sympathized but was not deceived, recognizing such a mood as the flutter of wings of a caged bird. From Aunt Belle she learned that one can live on more than one level.
Lorna was interested in other people, less disposed to talk about herself. But in her quiet attentiveness there was an awareness that, as Aunt Belle declared, 'Things are not always what they seem to be – or people'. It was a question of using one's common sense, Lorna supposed, being as yet ignorant of its extreme limitations in dealing with human problems.
Her sense of indebtedness was perhaps more deeply ingrained because, as she came to realize, her very life had been granted at the expense of her mother's. It was chastening to think that if she had not existed, her mother would have continued to do so. An actor whose appearance on the stage coincides with the exit of a more important player need not expect to be greeted with a round of applause and may not necessarily be taken to the hearts of the audience. Moreover her grasp of the plot and meaning of the drama may be less confident than that of players who have managed things less awkwardly.
At the very beginning she had undoubtedly suffered a loss. The first natural bond had been broken. To emerge from the womb not into the maternal arms but into the arms of an aunt – indeed the arms of two aunts – may induce an unconscious hesitation. Though, on the other hand it is said that what you never have you never miss, the proposition is hard to prove. Mercifully, in Lorna's early years the floodtide of psychology had not yet engulfed the general public. There were still enlightened people who had never heard of Freud or of inhibitions or neuroses; nor was it in Lorna's nature to brood over so distant an event as her birth.
'Be thankful you're alive,' Aunt Belle said, Lorna's reference to it having sounded faintly apologetic. 'You might have gone too and what would I have done all alone without you?' It was spoken from the heart and not in the manner of Miss Braddon or Marie Corelli.
To have saved Aunt Belle from a life of solitude had entailed no sacrifice. It was Aunt Mabel who, dipping into the future, hinted at problems as yet unforeseen.
'She may marry, I suppose, though she doesn't seem given that way, and then you'll know what it's like to be on your own,' she told her sister more than once. 'But there'll always be a home for you at The Birches when she does, and most of your furniture can be fitted in somehow except great-grandmother Featherstone's long-case clock. It's far too tall for my ceilings. But those balls could be taken off the top, I dare say, and it should be kept in the family.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Morning in Eden by Anna Gilbert. Copyright © 2001 Anna Gilbert. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.