“What you children call the ‘Burnt Farm’ is really the ruins of a manor house; the squire lived there, Captain Purdue, and since the burning there has been no squire at Dry Coulter. I can remember him very well: a tall man who had been a captain in the navy, and he certainly thought a great deal about appearances. One could tell that just by looking at him; what one could not have told was that he cared a great deal about money too.”
“You have forgotten to say that he had been dismissed the service,” Richard reminded his mother.
“Well, his ship was wrecked, you know, and he left the navy after that; I have heard that he was turned out because of it, but I do not really know,” said Mrs. Sotheby. “Certainly he was a very unlucky man, but at first all went well; he had a fine house, built in the time of King Charles II (Oliver’s men had burnt the old house down in the civil wars), and a wonderful garden (he had a whole greenhouse full of arum lilies in the winter), his horses were famous, and his dairy cows won prizes. At that time there was not a gentleman’s place for miles round that was kept up better. But I should have said that Captain Purdue was married, to a very good-looking lady indeed. She was a good deal younger than he was, and I think she came from the Channel Islands. But they had no children.”
There was the jangle of the shop bell. Mrs. Sotheby broke off her sentence and started to her feet, but Rachel had slipped out into the shop before her, and they could hear a woman saying that she had just run across for a bar of soap, and then, when she had made her purchase, ask: “It is your birthday, isn’t it, Rachel? Many happy returns! How does it feel to be grown up?” and the little girl answer: “Very pleasant indeed, thank you very much, Mrs. Papworth.”
“The first of the Captain’s misfortunes,” continued Mrs. Sotheby, “was that his wife ran away from him, and it was not long after that before he was killed in an accident. He was having his barn altered; it was an old building, nearly as old as the house, and he wanted to make it a couple of feet higher and was having the roof raised on jacks. They got one side of it up some inches, and then the foreman sent for him to tell him that it couldn’t be done. The Captain went to see for himself but he would not listen to anything the men said, but gave the word to go on with the work, and they had not given the screws on the other side half a dozen turns before the main beam broke in two and the whole roof fell in on them. Captain Purdue was standing just underneath, and was killed, and three of the men were badly injured. You see it was no one’s fault but his own, and indeed it was very lucky that others were not killed beside himself.”
“But how did the house get burnt, and what had the ploughmen to do with it?” asked Anne.
“Nothing at all,” answered Mrs. Sotheby with a laugh. “But some of the most ignorant of the men said that his bad luck was because they had ploughed the doorstep up. That’s why it was so wrong of them to behave like that to your father if they really believe what they say. But I don’t think they do believe such things nowadays: everyone laughs at them, but I think people will do anything if it is the custom.”
“So they are expecting us to have bad luck?” asked Anne with her face suddenly serious.
Richard looked at her rather maliciously and laughed.
“Yes, we all expect you to run away from home and your father to fall out of a tree and break his neck while he is putting a young bird back into its nest.”