The Fugitive Queen by Fiona Buckley Page B

generosity, my ward had started the journey in a fit of sulks.
    Pen, of course, knew nothing of the ulterior motives behind the long ride north. As far as she was concerned, she was being dragged to Yorkshire because she was in disgrace. Until we left Sheffield, Pen spoke only when she was spoken to, and then replied in the fewest possible words. Meg chattered all the time,agog with excitement, but even Meg could make no headway against Pen’s obstinate silence.
    What finally broke through to her, unexpectedly, was the way the land around us had risen into high moors and steep hillsides, growing wilder and lonelier, it seemed, with every mile we traveled.
    â€œAre those mountains?” she asked suddenly, taking her left hand off her reins to point at a spectacular skyline. “And how can sheep graze on a slope like that? Do they have sticky pads on their feet?”
    Everyone laughed. “Not they,” said Dick Dodd. “Just sure-footed, they are. My dad kept sheep, so I know.”
    â€œBut don’t they stray and get lost? The shepherds can’t be up there with them all the time!”
    Harry Hobson was a quiet fellow, but he had a jolly laugh on occasion and we heard it now. Our guide chuckled, too. He was one of those very tough elderly men who look as though they have been pickled in brine and then hardened by time like the ships’ timbers so often used in house construction. His wiry pony looked similarly tough.
    â€œTrue enough, lass,” he said to her, “but t’sheep don’t need all that much shepherding. They know their own ranges and t’owd yowes teach their lambs. They won’t stray off t’land they know or get mixed up wi’ other flocks. Shepherds mostly knows where t’look when they want to find t’flock.”
    He had a strong northern accent but Pen, inclining her head and paying close attention, managed to follow him and said: “But how clever! I didn’t think sheep were as clever as that!”
    A moment later, when the guide had gone ahead to lead us through a place where several tracks met, Meg said to her: “I couldn’t understand him very well. What did he say, Pen?”
    Pen told her, and then repeated her question about whether the hills could be called mountains. “Almost,” I said. “But proper mountains are even higher. I’ve seen them in Wales.”
    After that, because having once emerged from her sulks, she couldn’t very well sink back into them, Pen was easier company, though still at times inclined to be prickly.
    â€œShe’ll get over it,” said Sybil to me when we had found an inn at Glossop and she and I chanced to be alone together in the parlor. “New things to see and do will probably work wonders. I hope that we do find a good man for her in the north. It’s what she needs.”
    â€œI hope she doesn’t go and fall in love with Harry Hobson or Tom Smith,” I said worriedly, but Sybil shook her head.
    â€œSo far it’s always been older men, the kind she can look up to. Hobson and Smith are far too boyish for her—and well beneath her socially as well. She does have a sense of her position, you know. She’s far from being a fool. She’s just young, and at the mercy of longings she doesn’t understand yet.”
    I looked at Sybil with affection. She was in her forties and by no means a beautiful woman, for the proportions of her face were wrong for that. They looked as though her features had been compressed between crown and chin. Her eyebrows swept out and upward too far beyond the corners of her eyes, and her nostrils were too splayed. Yet it was a face full of character, and the dark eyes under the remarkable eyebrows were always kind. “You understand young girls,” I said.
    â€œI have a grown-up daughter,” said Sybil simply. “You’ll be the same, when Meg is a little older.”
    The approaching voices of