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Updated: May 25, 2025
She was firmly convinced that neither Nan nor Mene would do a stroke of work if she was not "at them"; the same opinion applied in a lesser degree to the men in the yard. So till Ansdore's early breakfast appeared amid much hustling and scolding, Joanna had no time to think about her lover, or continue the dreams so strangely and gloriously begun in the sunless dawn.
A strong rumour was blowing on the Marsh that shortly Great Ansdore would come into the market. Joanna's schemes at once were given their focus. She would buy Great Ansdore if she had the chance. She had always resented its presence, so inaptly named, on the fringe of Little Ansdore's greatness.
The main stream of her life had suddenly been turned underground it ran under Ansdore's wide innings on Monday it would come again to the surface, and take her away from Ansdore. The outward events of Monday were not exciting. Joanna drove into Rye with Peter Crouch behind her, and met Albert Hill with a decorous handshake on the platform.
There was a light mist over the watercourses, veiling the pollards and thorn trees and the reddening thickets of Ansdore's bush a flavour of salt was in it, for the tides were high in the channels, and the sunset breeze was blowing from Rye Bay.
As we begin we shall have to go on, and we can't go on settling and ordering our life according to Ansdore's requirements it's a wrong principle. Think, darling," and he drew her close against his heart, "we shall want to see our children and will you refuse, just because that would mean that you would have to lie up and keep quiet and not go about doing all your own business?" Joanna shivered.
It seemed to her now as if that precipitate taking of Arthur Alce had been at the bottom of all her troubles; she had been only a poor little schoolgirl, a raw contriver, hurling herself out of the frying-pan of Ansdore's tyranny into the fire of Donkey Street's dullness. She knew better now besides, the increased freedom and comfort of her conditions did not involve the same urgency of escape.
Dick Socknersh began to look wan and large-eyed under the strain he looked more haggard than the shepherd of Yokes Court or the shepherd of Birdskitchen, though they kept fast and vigil as long as he. His mistress, too, had a fagged, sorrowful air, and soon it became known all over the Three Marshes that Ansdore's lambing that year had been a gigantic failure.
In a couple of years Ansdore's credit once more stood high at Lewes Old Bank, and Ellen could be sent to a select school at Folkestone so select indeed that there had been some difficulty about getting her father's daughter into it.
Joanna was for the first time confronted by the need for economy, and she hated economy with all the lavish, colour-loving powers of her nature. Even now she would not bend herself to retrenchment not a man less in the yard, not a girl less in the kitchen, as her neighbours had expected. But the failure of the cross-bred lambs did not end the tale of Ansdore's misadventures.
It pleased Joanna to talk of Socknersh and herself as "we," though she would bitterly have resented any idea of joint responsibility in the days of Fuller. The rites of lambing and shearing had not dimmed her faith in the high priest she had chosen for Ansdore's most sacred mysteries. Socknersh was a man who was automatically "good with sheep."
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