The House at Sunset (The Suffolk Trilogy Book 3) - Norah Lofts - [N27]seeders: 4
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The House at Sunset (The Suffolk Trilogy Book 3) - Norah Lofts - [N27] (Size: 474.6 KB)
DescriptionHouse at Sunset by Norah Lofts English | EPUB | 464 Pages | ISBN-10: 0753191725 | ISBN-13: 978-0753191729  1 June 2013 | Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Historical, Historical Fiction CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS PART ONE FELICITY HATTON’S TALE (CIRCA 1740) I II III INTERLUDE PART TWO HATTON FOLLETT’S TALE (CIRCA 1781) I II III INTERLUDE PART THREE LYDIA WALKER’S TALE (CIRCA 1850 ) I II INTERLUDE PART FOUR DAVID ARMSTRONG’S TALE (CIRCA 1887) I II III IV V INTERLUDE PART FIVE MARY CRISP’S TALE (CIRCA 1914) I II III IV INTERLUDE PART SIX JONATHAN ROPER’S TALE (CIRCA 1955) I II III IV INTERLUDE PART SEVEN FRANCES BENYON’S TALE (CIRCA 1956) I Excerpt: At the age of seven I was a skilful pickpocket. I could also sew neatly, write a tolerable hand, make a curtsey and a correct introduction, dance a little and play simple tunes on the harpsichord. I saw nothing incongruous in being equally at ease in the reeking streets about Aldermanbury Postern and in a drawing-room in St. Albans Street, nothing strange in one day running barefoot and the next mincing along in silk hose and satin slippers. All the seven crowded years of my life had been spent in violent oscillation between one extreme of fortune and the other, each change governed by Father’s luck at the card-table. When I was seven, Father was thirty-eight and had been playing cards for twenty-one years ever since, as a boy of seventeen, he had been sent up from the country to collect payment from a Smithfield butcher for some bullocks destined for the Christmas market. He’d got into a card game at a tavern and lost all the money, slept out that night in an alley, got up in the morning and sold his topcoat, hat, waistcoat and shirt and, with the proceeds in his hand, rushed back to join the game. It took him, he’d say, laughing, three days to get back the sum of money he had been sent to collect and when he had it he sent it to his father with a message to say that he had found his vocation and would not be returning to Suffolk. ‘Not that they’d have missed me; I was one of eight,’ he said. He was a man of imperturbably good humour, for all that he had the reddish hair which is supposed to denote hasty temper; I can truly say that I never saw him put out. He’d come home and say to Mother, ‘Annabel, we’re ruined,’ or ‘Annabel, we’re rich,’ and a deaf person in the room would never have known whether he was announcing good news or disaster. He had two advantages over Mother and me; when our fortunes were at low ebb and we lived in squalor he could always get away to Whaddon’s, where he played most often, or to Mariana’s in Soho Square or to one of the private houses he frequented; and his good clothes were never sold or pawned; they and his gold watch and his silver-knobbed cane were part of his stock-in-trade without which he would not have been welcome at any of his haunts. His clothes and his unassailable jauntiness enabled him to remain detached from his background when it was bad. He could emerge from our one wretched room in a filthy, mouldering rookery of a house as neat and clean and self-possessed as a tomcat. And he could pass along streets and through alleys where any other man thus attired would have been jeered at and spattered with filth; everyone seemed to know him by the name of “Gentleman Johnny”—his name in fact was Christopher—and his word about the merits of a racehorse or a prize-fighter was eagerly sought and much valued. Sharing Widget |