The Care and Management of Lies by Jacqueline Winspear Page B

he’d been drinking the local ale—and it would have been after wine in his City haunts. And he knew himself, that he had a good eye for the board, and if he wanted to hit a double top, he could.”
    “So what happened?”
    Thea drew back, laughing. “Oh, you are a silly—he won, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t have the farm! Hawkes had to keep to his word, because there were witnesses and the bet had been written up with both men’s signatures. It was over and done with quite quickly, the transfer.” She sighed. “I think the worry of it all took a toll on my great-grandfather though, but he worked hard to make the farm a good, solid going concern to leave to his son, my grandfather. And he renamed the farm and the fields—I think just before my father was born—to be a lesson. According to my father, his own grandfather was always saying that the way he won the farm for the family should be a lesson never to gamble on anything and never to be a debtor. He admired Dickens, and thought him some sort of morality messenger.” She shook her head. “If it had been up to me, it would be Brissenden Farm by now, and that would be it. But seeing as it’s no longer my home, well, it’s not up to me, is it?”
    “Oh, Dorr—” said Kezia.
    “See—that’s one reason why. I’m who I am here. There on the farm, to everyone in the village, I’m nothing but little Dorrit.”
    “Sorry, Thea. It was just a slip.”
     
    T hey slept as girlhood friends that night, in Thea’s bed. It was as if they were at Camden again, at a time when both felt homesick for a place that, in truth, they’d been happy to leave—for Thea it was the farm, and for Kezia, her role as daughter of the parsonage. It had been fear of the future that brought them together in sisterhood, a sense that neither quite belonged because they were scholarship girls. They’d had to prove themselves again and again to feel deserving of an education that came with strings attached. Now another kind of fear had taken root in their hearts, a fear that began to grow with talk of war, as if it were disease spreading through the body.
    “Who knows what tomorrow will bring, Dorry?” said Kezia, in the darkness of Thea’s room.
    Thea did not rush to correct Kezia this time, perhaps feeling comfort in a name she’d so easily discarded.
    “Can you hear that, Kezia? There’s still people on the streets. It sounds like they’re letting off firecrackers.”
    “I can hear them. I wish they’d all go home.”
    “I do too. I’ve to work tomorrow—we may have ended the term, but we have a number of children coming back during the summer for private lessons, mainly in French and English literature, and of course arithmetic. So many have trouble with their addition and subtraction.” Thea sighed and turned in the bed, pushing Kezia even farther towards the edge.
    They spoke no more, and eventually Thea’s breathing changed and Kezia knew she was asleep. The bed was uncomfortable enough for one; for two it was impossible. They were girls no longer, after all. Kezia lifted the covers and stretched out her legs. She crept over to the armchair, pulled a cardigan around her shoulders, and looked out of the window to the nothing of a dark night. She wondered if this was the difference between London and the country, that on the streets people kept each other up waiting for something to happen, whereas in the country it seemed that everyone went to bed knowing exactly what the next day would bring because the land dictated their work, and unless that work were done, the land would not reward them. Kezia would stay one more night with Thea. Tomorrow she would go to the shops, to the markets too, where she would buy spices and herbs she knew could not be found in the village store, or even in Tunbridge Wells. She’d buy some good coffee, the sort her father had introduced her to on her twelfth birthday. She’d winced at first as the strong black liquid touched her