The Weeping Ash by Joan Aiken

huddling the shawl tightly around her slender arms and shoulders.
    The door gave onto a flagged path which skirted the house. The first thing that met Fanny’s eye, as she stepped out, was the tree that had so excited Thomas’s wrath on the previous night.
    It was a graceful young ash, perhaps thirty years old, tall, well shaped, its topmost boughs reaching already as high as the roof of the house. The smooth silver-gray trunk was still no thicker man a ship’s mast, but the upper branches were already beginning to spread wide. The fingerlike, pinnate leaves, which in the windy night had swung and signed and shaken so wildly, now hung calm in the morning light, their color, already nipped by the first frosts, a delicate, radiant pale gold; the branches that had groaned and wailed like the strings of some giant’s harp now held their elegant position unmoving against the cool sky. Yggdrasil , thought Fanny—for among the Rev. Mr. Herriard’s theological library there had also been many books on mythology and Fanny had read them all—Yggdrasil, Odin’s ash tree, the sacred stem, the axis that holds earth and sky together; and her heart lifted, in acknowledgment of the tree’s peaceful gold-and-silver beauty.
    Beyond it lay a drift of mist, beyond that a hillside shouldered up on the far side of a small, deep valley. No houses were to be seen.
    Fanny carefully tiptoed the length of the house on the flagged path, then took a diagonal across a dewy lawn to reach the edge of the garden, which, she now saw, occupied an extensive, wedge-shaped terrace of land. Beyond the boundary wall the ground appeared to drop away steeply.
    Descending a short, shallow flight of steps, Fanny found herself on a lower level, a long, grassy walk which ran the entire length of the garden on its valley side. The walk was screened from the house by a yew hedge; on its far side a low wall gave onto the valley; beyond this wall the drop was quite steep—from ten to twelve feet—so that the garden seemed bounded by a rampart.
    Fanny caught her breath at the beauty of the prospect over the wall: in the bottom of the valley, visible here and there between drifts of mist, a clear brook meandered, its course marked out, from curve to curve, by an occasional oak or clump of osiers; beyond the brook meadows ran up steeply to the top of a small hill crowned with a spinney; and beyond this hill a higher, darker mass of woodland stretched away into the distance. To the north of the ridge the country flattened out into a blue expanse of weald—plowland, pasture, and small patches of copse extending far away to a distant line of blue hills on the horizon, possibly thirty or forty miles off. Perhaps London lies there, thought Fanny, whose notion of distance was very inexact; and she strained her eyes, searching for smoke or the hint of a city on the misty plain. Barnaby had gone to London to be with his regiment until it sailed for India; perhaps he was there still…
    Fanny did not know how long she stood absorbed, the morning sun warm on her cheek, drinking in the beauty of this landscape. As long as I can come here, she told herself; as long as I can see this—even if only once a day—I shall be able to bear anything .
    Having formed even this small plan comforted Fanny a little; she felt as if she had been able to make some effort to regulate her new life. Then, recalling to mind that the breakfast hour must be fast approaching, she turned to ascend the steps and retrace her way to the house.
    She had, overnight, wholly abandoned any notion that she might ever find it possible to love Thomas Paget. Try as she would, she could discover in him no quality that she could admire, or even like; he might conduct himself with rectitude in his professional sphere, no doubt he did, but at home he was churlish, parsimonious, unloving to his daughters, and apparently so completely lacking in delicacy or sensitivity that