White Cottage

In 1845, events in the British Isles included the invention of the rubber band, the manufacture of self-raising flour, and the infamous Jack the Ripper took his first victim. None of these made the slightest ripple in Holmeside, where day to day life did not change enough to be worth talking about, except for the passing of old faces and the birth of new ones. Otherwise, life went on as predictably as it had since the Luddite uprising, although there were few old enough to remember much about it. Mill workers in Holmeside died early, as did all factory workers. Sarah Gledhill was an exception. She outlived most of her contemporaries.

There was some change in that place, but it had happened at such a slow pace as to be imperceptible. Sarah’s home, White Cottage at the moor’s edge above the village, was no longer white. Like other buildings in that setting it was caked with soot from the forest of smoky chimneys, augmented by Outcote Mill’s giant smokestack. No amount of rainfall could wash the buildings clean. When Sarah was offered the tenancy of White Cottage it had stood its watch for more than three hundred years. Most of that time it had been a lodging for shepherds. When shepherding dwindled, White Cottage was just one more building owned by Outcote Mill and had all the inconveniences common to old places. Sarah Gledhill jumped at the chance to live there when she retired. She paid a peppercorn rent, a kindly gesture to an old woman that had been the mill’s servant for more than half a century and whose reputation for honesty, thrift, and hard work was widely known. She took the cottage because of the views from its windows, both of which were at the front of the house, one either side of the door. Looking to her left she co...

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...your punishments too harsh.

God bless you all. Sarah Ludd.”

Smiling, she put the letter back in its place and ate her supper with thanksgiving. Picking up the pencil, she broke its lead point off on the table vowing never to write with it again. “I shall write no more. I have nothing more to say, and I am so very tired.” She drew the curtain across the windows and went towards her bed in the corner. Before reaching it she turned back to the table and took the letter from the Bible. Then she went to her bed in the back corner of the living room clutching the letter against her heart. She blew out the candle and lay in the dark rustling the letter between her fingers, murmuring, “Seth. Oh, Seth, my Seth, I am, so tired.” She pulled the covers up under her chin to keep the cold away. She fell asleep. Sometime during that long and silent night, her soul took flight.