Tales of Rye Town - Tapa blanda

Reseña del editor

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905. Excerpt: ... VI My Lady Clemency Welcomes a Guest Chapter I THE sudden state which it pleased my Lady Clemency Honeyfoot, of Pages Court, in Sussex, to assume after three years of deepest mourning for her brother, the young Earl of Oxney, was the source of much gossip in the neighbourhood of the Five Ports and the two "ancient towns " of Rye and Winchelsea. Her silver plate, it was said, had been lately fetched from Rye Bank, where it had reposed ever since the tragedy, and she had even engaged extra servants in order to do justice to her position as lady of Pages. Every one was sure that she must be going to entertain at least some rich lover from a foreign country, and that she desired to make upon him a good impression, because, having refused every gentleman between Hastings and Dover, she thought it high time, seeing she must at least be thirty-two, to secure some kind of a husband. Further, her housekeeper whispered that a specially fine dinner was to be prepared for New Year, with all the old dignity which had marked the festival in the days of the well-loved young Earl, whose cruel and mysterious death had given the Romney Marshes something to puzzle over ever since. It was fully three years since the tragedy. People had told the story again and again in the neighbourhood to strangers whose attention had been fettered by the sight of the young and beautiful figure of a lady closely veiled as she drove about the Kentish and Sussex lanes, between Tenterden and Rye. The general version was that upon one storm-sodden night of February and, strangely enough, on the same fateful date (the 15th) as that on which Sir George Barclay and his comrades in evil had plotted to attempt the life of King William III. as he went a-hunting from Turnham Green to Richmond Forest--...