years after their defeat.
He would work for this small agency against overwhelming evil.
This would be his gift to Emma.
The Green Bay Tree
While doing research for my novel Ill Met By Moonlight, I came across everything that was happening around the time this story is set. The biographer was sympathetic to Judith and her strange marriage, but I started wondering how all of it made her straight-laced sister Susannah feel. In fact, how would Susannah, married to the very religious Doctor Hall feel about her eccentric family life?
Susannah Hall stood in her spacious, oak lined front hall, and looked through the little, thick glass squares amid the lead panes.
Her husband, Dr. John Hall, was late from his round of visiting his patients around Stratford. Susannah had given 保険見直し dinner to their daughter, five year old Elizabeth, and sent her to bed, and she'd set the mutton joint in the kitchen, close enough to the fire to keep it warm. Jane, the kitchen wench, had gone to bed, also.
Blurred through the window, Susannah saw the square building of the Guild Chapel, stark and dark-looking, under the grey sky of late March. Just out of sight, out of the corner of her eye, to the left, she saw a glimmer of light, no doubt from the many tapers lighting up the hall of New Place and shining through the big windows onto the street.
When Susannah had been a child, she and her brother and sister had lived, with their mother, in a much more modest house, in Henley street, and made their own tapers of mutton grease. Her father had lived in London, and who knew how or in what conditions. The only joy the little house had known came with her father's sporadic visits, his stories of London, of the theater.
Now, Hall Croft, where Doctor Hall had brought Susannah when he married her was yet a different type of house—large and spacious, but sparely ornamented. No painted cloths on the walls, such as had graced her parents' home. No colorful cushions. Only, everything cleaned and polished and right, beauty coming from a preservation of order and Spartan organization, rather than from that excess her father's house now displayed.
Susannah looked at the light, and thought why it must be so, that her father would only come back to Stratford when it was too late, when she'd already grown up fatherless. Now, he'd come and be the gentleman of New Place, and draw everyone's eyes in Stratford to his magnificence.
But Susannah remembered a childhood of much-mended skirts, of bare feet in cold weather, of scant food, of darkened rooms and, always, always, of longing for her father's visits, for his presence.
She took her hand to her hair, the hair so much like her father's had been—those thick, dark curls—only hers confined in a bun and worn beneath a proper bonnet, as befit a doctor's wife.
Her attire was also what a doctor's wife should wear—thick, clean, dark bodice and skirt over a high necked, long-sleeved shirt—and it molded her still-slender, spare figure gracefully enough, but modestly, bespeaking at once both her station in life and her husband's strong puritan beliefs.
Coming from a house where religion
He would work for this small agency against overwhelming evil.
This would be his gift to Emma.
The Green Bay Tree
While doing research for my novel Ill Met By Moonlight, I came across everything that was happening around the time this story is set. The biographer was sympathetic to Judith and her strange marriage, but I started wondering how all of it made her straight-laced sister Susannah feel. In fact, how would Susannah, married to the very religious Doctor Hall feel about her eccentric family life?
Susannah Hall stood in her spacious, oak lined front hall, and looked through the little, thick glass squares amid the lead panes.
Her husband, Dr. John Hall, was late from his round of visiting his patients around Stratford. Susannah had given 保険見直し dinner to their daughter, five year old Elizabeth, and sent her to bed, and she'd set the mutton joint in the kitchen, close enough to the fire to keep it warm. Jane, the kitchen wench, had gone to bed, also.
Blurred through the window, Susannah saw the square building of the Guild Chapel, stark and dark-looking, under the grey sky of late March. Just out of sight, out of the corner of her eye, to the left, she saw a glimmer of light, no doubt from the many tapers lighting up the hall of New Place and shining through the big windows onto the street.
When Susannah had been a child, she and her brother and sister had lived, with their mother, in a much more modest house, in Henley street, and made their own tapers of mutton grease. Her father had lived in London, and who knew how or in what conditions. The only joy the little house had known came with her father's sporadic visits, his stories of London, of the theater.
Now, Hall Croft, where Doctor Hall had brought Susannah when he married her was yet a different type of house—large and spacious, but sparely ornamented. No painted cloths on the walls, such as had graced her parents' home. No colorful cushions. Only, everything cleaned and polished and right, beauty coming from a preservation of order and Spartan organization, rather than from that excess her father's house now displayed.
Susannah looked at the light, and thought why it must be so, that her father would only come back to Stratford when it was too late, when she'd already grown up fatherless. Now, he'd come and be the gentleman of New Place, and draw everyone's eyes in Stratford to his magnificence.
But Susannah remembered a childhood of much-mended skirts, of bare feet in cold weather, of scant food, of darkened rooms and, always, always, of longing for her father's visits, for his presence.
She took her hand to her hair, the hair so much like her father's had been—those thick, dark curls—only hers confined in a bun and worn beneath a proper bonnet, as befit a doctor's wife.
Her attire was also what a doctor's wife should wear—thick, clean, dark bodice and skirt over a high necked, long-sleeved shirt—and it molded her still-slender, spare figure gracefully enough, but modestly, bespeaking at once both her station in life and her husband's strong puritan beliefs.
Coming from a house where religion