The Tale of Hill Top Farm Read online

  “Don’t be silly, Hannah,” Grace said sharply. Hannah was impressionable and inclined to gossipy exaggerations. If she wasn’t stopped, it would be all over Sawrey that Miss Potter was a witch, and she and Old Dolly would be spoken of in the same anxious breath.

  “Why was she lookin’ out toadstools, you ask?” Mathilda repeated Hannah’s question. “She said she was drawin’ pictures, but I never seen a toadstool in her stories. Leastwise, not in Peter Rabbit,” she added. “That was t’ book I read.”

  “Miss Potter likes to study fungi,” Grace said sternly. “When I met her several years ago, she expressed a great interest in them, and in fossils, too. She’s a naturalist, as well as an author.”

  “A naturalist, eh?” Mathilda snorted disdainfully. “If tha ask me, that Peter Rabbit of hers ain’t any too natural, with that little blue coat and them slippers. Nivver saw a rabbit wearin’ a coat and slippers, and that’s a fair fact.”

  Hannah shook her head, still not quite comprehending. “But fancy a lady buying a farm. ’Tis a girt puzzler.”

  “Fancy indeed,” harrumphed Mathilda. “Becky Jennings, poor thing, is worrit right out of her mind, frettin’ where they’ll find another place when they’re turned out, and her with a babe on t’ way.”

  “I’m sure Miss Potter won’t turn the Jennings out,” said Grace, not liking the direction the conversation was taking.

  Hannah, open-mouthed, added, “O’ course she woan’t. She can’t possibly mean to farm t’ place herself.”

  “I should hope not,” said Mathilda emphatically. “Ladies got no business with farms, Crook sez, and I agree.”

  “My feeling, too,” Rascal remarked, with a sly, side-long glance at Crumpet. “Women-folk belong in the kitchen, where the good Lord put them.”

  “That’s as much as you know, you daft ha’p’orth,” Crumpet replied loftily. She licked her paw. “There’s no reason on earth why a woman can’t manage a farm just as well as a man.”

  “I’m afraid that the question is more pressing in the short term,” Grace went on quickly, to forestall any more discussion of Miss Potter’s intentions. “With Miss Tolliver gone, Miss Potter obviously can’t stop at Anvil Cottage. She can’t put up at the Tower Bank Arms, either, since both of the Barrow children have chicken pox. Do you suppose you could take her at Belle Green, Mathilda? I understand that Ben Drysdale has moved to Ambleside, so his room must be empty.”

  “I suppose I could take her,” Mathilda said with a great show of reluctance, “although Crook woan’t like it. He’s that put out at her for snatchin’ Hill Top away from a serious farmer who would’ve made something of t’ place.”

  “Perhaps you can speak to George,” said Grace soothingly, who had known the Crooks for many years and had long ago come to terms with George’s tempers. “I’m sure he can manage to be civil for a fortnight.”

  “But if Miss Potter doan’t mean to farm,” Hannah wondered once again “what’s she want with a place like Hill Top? Seems reet daft to me.”

  Grace avoided the question with a little smile, but Mathilda seized on it. “I’ve not a glimmer what t’ lady wants, Hannah.” Her eyes narrowed. “But I nivver could abide a mystery, so I mean to find out.”

  “Well, good,” Hannah said, with satisfaction. “Soon’s ye find out, you can tell me.”

  And when that happened, Grace thought, resigned, everyone else in the village would know, as well.

  2

  Miss Potter Arrives

  Miss Tolliver’s funeral—celebrated in Lakeland fashion, with the traditional arval bread, cheese, and ale given to each of the mourners—took place on Friday. On the following Monday, Dimity Woodcock rode the ferry across the lake to Windermere to spend the day with her old nurse, who had retired to a little cottage there. On the return trip, late in the afternoon, her charabanc arrived at the Bowness ferry landing just behind the coach from the railway station. Since the ferry was over on the Sawrey side, there would be a wait. Dimity climbed out of the coach and walked to the shore.

  It was a clear, cloudless afternoon, and Lake Windermere, England’s largest lake, was a beautiful sight, its blue waters ruffled by a fresh southern breeze, the trees on the western side of the lake dressed in splendid autumn reds and yellows. Dimity was enjoying the bright sun, the cries of the gulls, and the tug of the brisk breeze in her hair when her felt hat suddenly went sailing.

  “Oh, blast!” she exclaimed, grasping futilely for the treacherous thing.

  “I have it!” a woman called triumphantly, from a little way up the shore. She held up the hat. “A lucky catch.”

  “Thank you,” Dimity said gratefully, going to get it. “I should have tied it on, I’m afraid.” She took the hat and smashed it firmly on her head. Then, as she got a proper look at its rescuer, she recognized her. “Why, Miss Potter!” she exclaimed, and held out her hand. “How very nice to see you again!”

  With a shy smile, the other woman hesitantly took Dimity’s hand and then let it go. In her late thirties, she was of medium height, dressed with an unfashionable plainness in a gray serge skirt, black jacket, and black gloves, with a narrow-brimmed gray hat decorated only by a plain black ribbon and a small posy of black ribbon flowers. She had a certain youthful prettiness, but her brown hair was pulled back artlessly from her round, rosy-cheeked face, giving her the look of a woman who was indifferent to her appearance. Her nose was prominent, her chin and eyebrows firm, and her bright blue eyes sharp, betraying a penetrating intelligence. At the moment, though, her expression seemed weary and her eyes shadowed with sadness, as though something unspeakably dear to her had been lost.

  “I understood that you were to arrive today,” Dimity said. She hesitated. “I didn’t expect to see you, but now that I have, perhaps I had better ask whether you’ve heard our sad news.”

  “Sad news?” Miss Potter asked, startled. Her voice was sweet, and rather high-pitched.

  “Yes. I’m very sorry to tell you that Miss Tolliver has died.”

  “Died!” Miss Potter exclaimed, greatly dismayed. “It must have been terribly sudden. I received a letter from her not a fortnight ago, confirming my visit. There was no mention of an illness.”

  Dimity shook her head. “There was no illness. Doctor Butters says that her heart simply stopped. She was buried on Friday, at St. Peter’s, poor thing.”

  Miss Potter’s eyes filled with tears and she turned away, biting her lip. “Oh, dear,” she said, very low.

  “Oh, Miss Potter!” Dimity said, instinctively putting out her hand. “Please don’t take it so hard. It was a mercifully quick end, Dr. Butters said. She did not linger in pain.”

  “That’s some comfort.” Miss Potter took a deep breath and with an effort, straightened her shoulders. “We must be grateful when the end comes swiftly. Thank you for telling me, Miss Woodcock. It seems, though, that I must find another place to board for my visit to Sawrey—a fortnight, I was hoping, perhaps a few days longer. I’m sure Anvil Cottage will not be available.”

  “I’m afraid that’s true,” Dimity agreed, adding quickly, “but the Crooks have a room to let at Belle Green. It’s very pleasant, overlooking the garden, and spacious and quite private. They are anxious for your coming.” That might not be entirely true, Dimity thought ruefully, thinking of the way George Crook was going on about Miss Potter’s purchase of Hill Top Farm. But George and Miss Potter would see each other only at meals, and Grace Lythecoe had assured Dimity that George would hold his tongue. They ought to get along well enough—for a fortnight, at any rate.

  “Well,” Miss Potter said, managing a smile, “it’s all taken care of, then. I’m grateful to whoever made the arrangement.”

  “That would be Grace Lythecoe,” Dimity said. “She suggested—” Her sentence was interrupted by the piercing shriek of a steam whistle, as the ferryboat, an open wooden-hulled scow loaded with horses, a carriage, and a half-dozen passengers, approached the landing, belching black coal smoke.

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nbsp; “I’ll see you in Sawrey,” she mouthed over the noise, and went back to the charabanc.

  Miss Potter also went back to her coach, where Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s wicker hamper, Josey’s and Mopsy’s box, and Tom Thumb’s traveling cage were all safely stowed on the back, along with her trunk and portmanteau and a large box of drawing supplies.

  “I don’t fancy ocean passages,” squeaked Tom Thumb, a small gray mouse. He was a recent widower (his wife, Hunca Munca, had fallen off a chandelier the previous July), and inclined to be a twittery traveler. “I wish we’d stayed in London.”

  “It isn’t an ocean,” Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle replied haughtily. “It’s only a lake, and a narrow one, at that.” Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Miss Potter’s hedgehog, was a seasoned traveler and inclined to look down on those who had not had her experiences. “Traveling is educational,” she was often heard to say. “I am glad I don’t live in a muddy bank, with no one for company but a few ignorant moles and a stupid rat. What kind of pleasure is there in that?”

  “I certainly hope there’s a garden where we’re going,” Josey Rabbit put in, twitching her nose. “I am thoroughly sick of leftover salad with oil-and-vinegar dressing on it. Fresh greens—that’s what I need. A bit of parsley, a few carrots, some fresh cabbage.” Josey’s life had begun in the wild and had nearly ended in a gardener’s trap, where she had been rescued by Miss Potter. She still hankered after the old days, when she was free to go anywhere she liked, although she had to admit that it was rather nice to be indoors during the winter—so long, of course, as she had fresh greens.

  “Don’t talk about food, please,” Mopsy Rabbit moaned. She settled back in a corner of the cage she shared with Josey and closed her eyes. Mopsy, who had a flighty disposition and a nervous stomach, found travel unsettling. If she could choose, she’d never leave Number Two Bolton Gardens in South Kensington, where she lived with Miss Potter.

  It may seem strange that a grown woman would travel with a collection of animals, especially since there wasn’t a cat or dog—the usual choices in animal companions—among them. But animals had always been an important part of Beatrix Potter’s rather lonely life. Left to inattentive nannies and nursery maids in the large London mansion where they were born, Beatrix and her brother Bertram, five years younger, consoled themselves by bringing an immense number of mice, rabbits, bats, snakes, frogs, birds, and insects into the nursery on the top floor of the house, where their parents seldom ventured, not even for tea. Both of the children were keen naturalists, and their animals were not only pleasant companions of hearth and heart, but a scientific challenge, as well. They had been known to boil the flesh from the bones of certain dead specimens they had collected, so they could study the skeletons.

  Bertram gave up most of his pets when he went away to school. But for Beatrix, who stayed behind with a series of governesses in the third-floor schoolroom, animal companions—furred, feathered, scaled, and gilled—took the place of her brother and the friends and schoolmates she would never have. She drew them, of course—and when her parents remarked nervously about the latest acquisition, it was easy to say that she needed this or that animal model for her sketches. But the truth was that she loved them. She loved even the unlovely and unlikely ones, like Judy (a lizard) and Punch (a green frog), and loved them deeply, in the way that a desperately lonely person loves a little creature who seems to return that love without condition. Like many other solitary people, Beatrix often felt that the only real love in her life came from her animal friends—a sad truth that had become even sadder and more true in the past few months.

  Back inside the coach, Beatrix was glad that the only other passenger—a bald, portly gentleman in a flowered waistcoat—was sound asleep. She gazed with unseeing eyes out of the window as the coach was pulled onto the ferry and the horses unhitched for the short trip across the narrow lake. The bald gentleman stirred and snorted but did not waken.

  The steam ferry was a flimsy affair and Beatrix always felt nervous as a passenger, especially when the wind blew from the south and the waves broke over the ferry’s low prow. But this time, she didn’t notice the choppy water or the gathering twilight. She had not meant to let Miss Woodcock see how sharply she had felt the unexpected news of Miss Tolliver’s death—although it was not Miss Tolliver for whom she mourned. Beatrix had been pleased by the generous offer of bed and board during her visits to the village, but she had scarcely known the lady who offered it.

  No, it was Norman Warne she mourned. Norman, the news of whose death had reached her by telegram whilst she was visiting her uncle in Wales scarcely two months before. Gentle Norman, whom she had loved with all the fierce, pent-up passion of a heart that had long ago despaired of loving or being loved. Kind, compassionate Norman, who had known her as she was and had loved her in spite of all her defects and shortcomings. They had been engaged for only a month when (to her parents’ great distress) he died, suddenly and unexpectedly. Now, all Beatrix’s plans and hopes for a bright future lay buried in Highgate Cemetery, in a new grave still covered by raw earth, as raw as her heart.

  The steam whistle shrieked again, and Beatrix resolutely closed her mind to thoughts of Norman and all that might have been of their life together. She had not come here to mourn, but to get on with the daily business of living, as he would have wanted and as her own nature—usually optimistic and hopeful—urged. She took out a handkerchief, wiped her eyes, and was blowing her nose when the gentleman opposite awoke with a hiccup and shook himself.

  “Whazzit?” he asked. “Whuzzum?”

  “The landing,” Beatrix said distinctly. “We’ve arrived on the Sawrey side.”

  In a moment, the horses were hitched again and the coach bumped off the ferry. Beatrix felt her heart quicken, realizing that she was so near her destination, so near to the place where she hoped to begin a new life—if not now, then someday.

  The village of Far Sawrey was just at the top of Ferry Hill, and less than half a mile beyond was Hill Top Farm and the hamlet of Near Sawrey. The names of the twin villages, which seemed so perversely backward, always confused visitors who came across Lake Windermere. Why was one village called Far Sawrey, when it was a half-mile nearer the lake, the ferry, and the railway? And why was the other village called Near Sawrey, when it was farther away and altogether less important?

  All became clear, however, when the visitor realized that “near” and “far” were measured not from the lake but from the ancient market town of Hawkshead, three miles to the west, for centuries the most important settlement in the area. The village of Near Sawrey (sawrey was an Anglo-Saxon word for the rushes that grew along the shore of Esthwaite Water) was nearer to Hawkshead by about a half-mile.

  To the tune of the coachman’s shout, the snapping whip, and the creaking harness, the four horses pulled the lumbering coach up the climbing, twisting road to the top of Ferry Hill and through Far Sawrey. Off to the left, on a green hill some distance away, Beatrix could see St. Peter’s and the churchyard where Miss Tolliver lay buried. She did not allow her glance to linger, but she could not quite suppress the sadness that welled up inside her. Norman lay in a fresh grave in Highgate Cemetery, in the shadow of a large fir. She had not been able to talk of her grief to anyone other than Norman’s sister Millie, for her parents had been deeply opposed to the match, and no one other than their immediate families knew that they had exchanged rings.

  It had all happened so suddenly, too suddenly to comprehend. So much unspeakable joy, so much unbearable pain, all of it sharply compressed into so few days, too few days: Norman’s proposal of marriage on the twenty-fifth of July, his death on the twenty-fifth of August. And the news from Hill Top Farm only added to these difficulties, for soon after Norman had proposed to her, Beatrix had discovered that the farm (which had been purchased by a Hawkshead timber merchant earlier in the year) was once again for sale. The price, although still unreasonably high, was now within her reach, for the acreage had been reduced from 151 acres to th
irty-four, and she had telegraphed her intention to purchase it.

  Her parents, of course, had been initially opposed to her purchase. There was nothing novel in their opposition, for any suggestion that their daughter might want to lead an independent life was met with displeased frowns and gloomy sulks, and often outright antagonism. But Beatrix was glad, now, that she had persisted. Hill Top Farm would give her a place to escape from the buried dreams of might-have-been, from her father’s deplorable tempers and her mother’s exacting demands.

  The driver shouted and the coach jerked to a stop in front of the Tower Bank Arms, Near Sawrey’s only pub. Beatrix got out, retrieved Mrs. Tiggy and the others, and saw to it that their boxes and cages were safely stowed on the wooden cart that Spuggy Pritchard had pulled around the corner.

  “These go up to Belle Green,” she said when Spuggy had added her trunk and bag, and gave the old man sixpence. “Please tell Mrs. Crook that I’ll be right along.”

  “Mind, now!” Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle cried imperiously. “Don’t jostle my basket! And keep that dog away from me!” A small fawn-colored Jack Russell terrier was dancing around the cart, barking gaily at the strange animals.

  “Dog?” Mopsy moaned. “Did someone say ‘dog’?”

  “Dog? Dog? Oh, woe!” twittered Tom Thumb, who had come all the way across the lake with his head buried under a heap of wood shavings in his traveling cage. “Where in the world have we got to? The ends of the earth? Oh, rural life will never do, never do at all, at all! I’m a town mouse! A town mouse, I tell you!”

  “We’ve reached Sawrey village, Tom,” Josey said briskly. “And don’t fret about the dog. He’s just being friendly.”