CATHARINE FURZE


CHAPTER I


It was a bright, hot, August Saturday in the market town of Eastthorpe,
in the eastern Midlands, in the year 1840. Eastthorpe lay about five
miles on the western side of the Fens, in a very level country on the
banks of a river, broad and deep, but with only just sufficient fall to
enable its long-lingering waters to reach the sea. It was an ancient
market town, with a six-arched stone bridge, and with a High Street from
which three or four smaller and narrower streets connected by courts and
alleys diverged at right angles. In the middle of the town was the
church, an immense building, big enough to hold half Eastthorpe, and
celebrated for its beautiful spire and its peal of eight bells. Round
the church lay the churchyard, fringed with huge elms, and in the Abbey
Close, as it was called, which was the outer girdle of the churchyard on
three sides, the fourth side of the square being the High Street, there
lived in 1840 the principal doctor, the lawyer, the parson, and two aged
gentlewomen with some property, who were daughters of one of the former
partners in the bank, had been born in Eastthorpe, and had scarcely ever
quitted it. Here also were a young ladies' seminary and an ancient
grammar school for the education of forty boys, sons of freemen of the
town. The houses in the Close were not of the same class as the rest;
they were mostly old red brick, with white sashes, and they all had
gardens, long, narrow, and shady, which, on the south side of the Close,
ran down to the river. One of these houses was even older,
black-timbered, gabled, plastered, the sole remains, saving the church,
of Eastthorpe as it was in the reign of Henry the Eighth.