Grimstone House, the Duchess’s ancestral home was five miles away, but it might to all intents and purposes have been in another world.
Here in Little Medlock life was slow and easy. The villagers came to Church because they wished to worship God and they brought their troubles and their joys to the Vicar because he belonged to them. What happened on other parts of the estate did not concern them.
“How can we tell Uncle Theophilus?” Aspasia asked her brother.
“It will not be easy,” Jerry said, “and you realise this means that I will not be able to go back to Oxford?”
Aspasia gave a little cry.
“Why not?”
Then even as she spoke she knew the answer.
If the little money they had, and it was indeed little enough, had to be spent in finding somewhere else to live, they both knew that it
