H. Rider Haggard

The Lady of Blossholme


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       H. Rider Haggard

      The Lady of Blossholme

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664594600

       CHAPTER I

       SIR JOHN FOTERELL

       CHAPTER II

       THE MURDER BY THE MERE

       CHAPTER III

       A WEDDING

       CHAPTER IV

       THE ABBOT’S OATH

       CHAPTER V

       WHAT PASSED AT CRANWELL

       CHAPTER VI

       EMLYN’S CURSE

       CHAPTER VII

       THE ABBOT’S OFFER

       CHAPTER VIII

       EMLYN CALLS HER MAN

       CHAPTER IX

       THE BLOSSHOLME WITCHINGS

       CHAPTER X

       MOTHER MEGGES AND THE GHOST

       CHAPTER XI

       DOOMED

       CHAPTER XII

       THE STAKE

       CHAPTER XIII

       THE MESSENGER

       CHAPTER XIV

       JACOB AND THE JEWELS

       CHAPTER XV

       THE DEVIL AT COURT

       CHAPTER XVI

       THE VOICE IN THE FOREST

       CHAPTER XVII

       BETWEEN DOOM AND HONOUR

       CHAPTER XVIII

       OUT OF THE SHADOWS

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      Who that has ever seen them can forget the ruins of Blossholme Abbey, set upon their mount between the great waters of the tidal estuary to the north, the rich lands and grazing marshes that, backed with woods, border it east and south, and to the west by the rolling uplands, merging at last into purple moor, and, far away, the sombre eternal hills! Probably the scene has not changed very much since the days of Henry VIII, when those things happened of which we have to tell, for here no large town has arisen, nor have mines been dug or factories built to affront the earth and defile the air with their hideousness and smoke.

      The village of Blossholme we know has scarcely varied in its population, for the old records tell us this, and as there is no railway here its aspect must be much the same. Houses built of the local grey stone do not readily fall down. The folk of that generation walked in and out of the doorways of many of them, although the roofs for the most part are now covered with tiles or rough slates in place of reeds from the dike. The parish wells also, fitted with iron pumps that have superseded the old rollers and buckets, still serve the place with drinking-water as they have done since the days of the first Edward, and perhaps for centuries before.

      Although their use, if not their necessity, has passed away, not far from the Abbey gate the stocks and whipping-post, the latter arranged with three sets of iron loops fixed at different heights and of varying diameters to accommodate the wrists of man, woman, and child, may still be found in the middle of the Priests’ Green. These stand, it will be remembered, under a quaint old roof supported on rough, oaken pillars, and surmounted by a weathercock which the monkish fancy has fashioned to the shape of the archangel blowing the last trump. His clarion or coach-horn, or whatever instrument of music it was he blew, has vanished. The parish book records that in the time of George I a boy broke it off, melted it down, and was publicly flogged in consequence, the last time, apparently, that the whipping-post was used. But Gabriel still twists about as manfully as he did when old Peter, the famous smith, fashioned and set him up with his own hand in the last year of King Henry VIII, as it is said to commemorate the fact that on this spot stood the stakes to which Cicely Harflete, Lady of Blossholme, and her foster-mother, Emlyn, were chained to be burned as witches.

      So