All the dear faces by Audrey Howard

set across the front of the kitchen and in between was the door to what Lizzie had hopefully called the garden .
    Annie stood on the bottom step of the staircase and gazed about her. Opposite the fire-window at right angles to the inglenook was a stone partition called the 'heck' and this shielded the inglenook and anyone sitting in it from the draughts which can come, and usually did, through the door which led out into the yard at the side of the farmhouse. Along the heck side of the fireplace was the `sconce', a fixed wooden bench under which the kindling for the morning's fire was stored and on the opposite side of the fire was a long, elaborately carved settle. To the side of the fire at eye level and set in the wall so that the warmth of the fire kept it dry was a cupboard in which spices and salt were stored. The door of this cupboard was carved with the initials of some long-dead Abbott. FA, it said and was dated 1701 .
    Nothing had changed. Nothing .
    The floor of the kitchen was flagged with slate slabs. Opposite the hearth was placed Lizzie's oak bread cupboard where she had stored the Haver bread she baked. It was carved with the initials of Lizzie's grandmother who had bequeathed it to her, AB for Annabelle Bowman and the date, 1736. There were two carved oak chairs, similarly decorated and an oak table so big it had obviously been built within the house .
    On the hearth was a poker, a copper kettle, a box smoothing iron and iron fire dogs to prevent the fire from falling out and to support the poker and tongs. There was a cooking spit and a dripping pan, toast dogs on an iron tripod with spikes to hold the bread which was to be toasted, an iron frying-pan, a cast-iron kail pot with a lid for boiling meat and all looking exactly as though Lizzie Abbott had put them there before she went to bed in readiness for the next day's work .
    Which she probably had, her daughter thought as she stepped slowly down from the stair into the kitchen. She had gone to her bed, probably coughing and feverish with the inflammation of the chest which was, though she had not known it, to kill her. Had anyone nursed her? Or her father? Who had died first? Questions which would be answered soon when she could get out to Upfell, the Mounsey farm, but first she must make the place warm, get some food from somewhere to put inside herself and her child. The room was filthy and draped about it, from the heavy beams, from chair to table, from hearth to heck, were cobwebs, for it was over a year since the farm had been occupied. Every object, every surface, the floor, the table, the low window-sills were thick with dust and the valley's 'bottom wind' had blown a drift of soot down the chimney which had settled wherever the draught, always present, had placed it. It was barely light though her country senses told her that it must be almost midday and when she moved to the window to peer through the veil of dirt which curtained it, a mantle of fine rain moved across her vision screening the fields and even the lake which lay in the front of the farmhouse. She could see nothing beyond the blurred outline of the gigantic hawthorn tree which stood at the right-hand corner of the farmhouse .
    She remained at the window for a while and the presence of her mother crept about her again, touching her with that almost shy affection which was all she had ever shown her daughter. Defensive somehow, as though she had expected a rebuff or perhaps her husband's irritation which could not do with any show of what he would have thought of as weakness. What a sad, drab life she had led, her daughter reflected, doing her husband's bidding, working every hour of daylight and then beyond into the dark night with no thought of her own needs, or even if she had the right to any, or her own satisfaction. With no hope of reward, not even that of affection nor gratitude from the man she had married. Her home had been her life. Keeping it neat and clean and the best she