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So we did middling well, and Jan got one of the men that was a bit of a scollard to write to his mother, and got a hawker to take the letter along for the mending of his shoes. And in six months the hawker came back to say that mother was dead and that father had sold Loudacott and was gone to live in the town, where he was drinking and doing no good.
She couldn't never abide the name of me, Jan's mother couldn't; and father, he couldn't abide Jan. For his father hadn't been more than a servant with the old squire, nor his mother neither, and Jan, he'd a been bound 'prentice to a shoemaker, and wasn't long out of his time; while we was the Clatworthys to Loudacott.
"Years agone, long afore you ever come this way, my Lady, my father lived not above seven or eight mile herefrom, up to Loudacott; you must surely have heard the name of the place. Well, there he lived with his own bit of land, for he was a yeoman, he was, and the Clatworthys had lived up to Loudacott hundreds of years, as he used to tell me.
There was more came than you'd a think for, plenty enough to turn the head of a silly maid; and there was one that father favoured particular, for he had land close nigh by Loudacott, but I didn't like he never could. There wasn't but one that pleased me, and that was Jan Dart. You know his old mother that lives to Ashacombe, or used to live, for they tell me that she's a-dying.
It's a lonely place, is Loudacott, and it wasn't many folks that we saw there when I was a child; but when I growed up into a comely maid, and men seed me now and again to market or fairing time, they began to come a-courting; for 'twasn't me only that they would get, but forty acre of land with me, if father liked mun well.
There was Jan Dart that 'listed twenty year agone, and 'ticed away Lucy Clatworthy to follow mun, her that was only child of Jeremiah Clatworthy up to Loudacott; and the old Jeremiah got drinking and died after she left mun. And there's Jan's old mother, poor soul, that loved mun as the apple of her eye, waiting here alone, and I reckon her time's short. No!
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