I wheeled it away, throwing my leg over the saddle as I began to progress down the driveway, hearing the pebbles crunch beneath me. To my surprise, considering I had only been at Gaudlin Hall for little more than twelve hours, I felt a curious sense of relief at putting distance between the house and myself.Eustace wasn’t wrong in his directions or timings. The journey towards the village was a pleasant one, my mood improving considerably as I made my way along twisting lanes, the recently harvested fields turning to green on either side of me, the fresh air blowing in my face and offering me a sense of well-being. Why would anyone live in London, I wondered, dirty, fog-fouled, smog-smothered London, with its murderers and its streetwalkers and its criminality on every corner? The stinking, twisting river polluting our bodies, the empty palace mourning its absentee Queen, the calamitous weather, the striking workers, the filth in the streets. Here, in Norfolk, I might have been in another world entirely.
