Book One Charlotte Redhead Chapter 5

Feeding time and milking time were done; in his jutting room over the door-place John was washing and dressing for Sunday evening. He called out to her through his window, "Go up to our seat and wait for me there."

He had come back again, suddenly, that morning, a day before they had expected him.

Charlotte came out of the hot field into the cool room of the beech ring. She sniffed up the clean, sharp smell of sap from the rough seat that she and John had put up there, sawing and hacking and hammering all Sunday afternoon. Every evening when the farm work was done they would sit there together, inside the round screen of the beeches.

The farm people wouldn't disturb them; not even Mr. Burton, now, looking in, smiling the fat, benevolent smile that blessed them, and going away; the very calves were so well used to them that they had left off pushing their noses through the tree trunks and staring.

John's window faced her where she sat; she could see his head passing and passing across the black window space. To her sharp, waiting soul Barrow Farm took on a sudden poignant and foreign beauty. The house was yellow where the rain had soaked it, gold yellow like a sun-struck southern house, under the black plume of the firs, a yellow that made the sky's blue solid and thick. The grass, bright green after the rain, stretched with the tight smoothness of velvet over the slopes and ridges of the field. A stripe of darker green, where their feet had trodden down the blades, led straight as a sheep's track from the garden gate to the opening of the ring.