“Aye, and remember: boil plenty of it in t’water, strain it off and give her the infusion. “You said I’m to continue giving Mother the horehound…”
“I’m sorry, Aethelgyth,” she apologised, using the old woman’s full name to atone for her transgression. “Judith? You’re wandering,” Aethel chided gently, her rheumy eyes full of sympathy. Two slender window slits scowled back at her from the top of the tower, like hostile eyes, she thought. Her blue eyes narrowed and fixed on the grey stone walls in much the same way as a puzzled scribe would stare at a parchment written in a language he could not understand. She could not tear her gaze from the blank cliff-like walls of the keep that loomed over the villagers’ simple wooden houses. She should have been giving her full attention to the advice the old woman was offering, but whenever she came to the village it was the same.
Judith stood in the doorway of the herbalist’s hovel, staring up at the castle. When not taking refuge from the modern world by reading historical novels or writing her own, she loves to escape to the deep countryside.Ĭarol Townend lives with her copywriter husband and young daughter near Kew Gardens. Widely traveled, Carol Townend has explored places as diverse as North America and Sri Lanka, Mexico and the Mediterranean. Perhaps this fact had something to do with the passion for the past that led her to a history degree at London University, and on, eventually, to writing historical novels.
Is a Yorkshire woman whose nineteenth-century fore-bears were friendly with the Brontë sisters.