Most of them, moved with hunched shoulders and tucked chins, shielding themselves from the icy rain. Two old men led the procession through the front door. Uncle Percival, even more enormously fat than she remembered, shambled slowly toward her. The other, ancient, tall, but so thin that he hardly cast a shadow, was a distant cousin whose name she'd forgotten. The two of them were the only male remnants of the once-numerous Hights, and both were childless. She and Alanna were the last of the line. A pitiful remnant indeed, of proud Saxon yeomen, loyal followers of Ethelred the Unready, whose descendants had held the land he'd rewarded them with for six hundred years. And most recently, a follower of Wellesley in Spain. Her brother had died at Roliça. In one fateful battle, the entire future of the Hights had vanished in a puff of canon smoke. Mr. Whitsomeworth, the solicitor, was a bent little man with peculiar tufts of grey hair sticking out to the sides of his head like a cow's ears.
