“That’s Hallow Hill land, miss,” he had said to Kate. “The tall rocks there, that’s the Hill itself. But it’ll take you all morning to get around the lake and the forest. No roads go through the woods by the Hill. They’d not dare to put a road there.” My land, thought Kate in surprise. She hadn’t expected it to be so wild.
“And what a beauty you are, my dear,” Aunt Celia said to Kate. “You favor your mother, doesn’t she, Prim? She was slender and small boned, too, such a graceful woman. She had the pick of the men in her day.”
Kate tried to smile at these kind remarks, but she found them rather embarrassing. She didn’t think of herself as a beauty, although she knew her mother had been one. In fact, Kate was uncommonly pretty. Her long blond hair formed small curls around her face, and she had a dignity and poise unusual for her age. Perhaps this was because she had spent so much time with her father. That lonely gentleman had lavished hours each day on her education. He saw a strength in her gentle nature that he openly admired, and this strength had carried the quiet Kate bravely through the last two months without him.
Rawboned and large handed, Primrose Roberts didn’t smile as often as her sister Celia, but this didn’t mean she was ill-tempered. She studied the blushing Kate, noting her fair skin and large, dark blue eyes.
“Now, you know Kate’s mother was dark, Celia, with that black hair. I think you’re like your mother in your build, though; such a little thing she was.” Kate sighed. She hated being so short. No one but her father seemed to take her seriously.
“I think you must favor your father, dear.” Aunt Celia had turned to Emily. The younger sister frowned by way of answer. Thin and dark, Emily certainly possessed her sister’s strength of will, but she didn’t always use it quite as sensibly. Her narrow face was very expressive, and her conduct often unexpected. Lively, intelligent, and quite immature, she usually burst out with exactly the comment that summed up the situation beautifully and therefore could never in politeness be said. It is true that she had her father’s plain brown hair and brown eyes. It is also true that it is annoying to live with a real beauty if you yourself are not one. Emily thought that she would have loved being a beauty and breaking men’s hearts. Kate just didn’t appreciate what she had.
“Hallow means ‘holy,’ doesn’t it?” asked Emily. “Why is this place called Hallow Hill? Is there a church nearby?”
“Oh, Hugh can tell you about that,” Aunt Celia said. “Hugh’s quite a scholar, you know. He’s writing a book of family history, all about Hallow Hill.”
Their legal guardian was a large, corpulent bachelor with a round face and ink stains on his hands. Emily kept staring at him because he wore a curled white wig. No one but lawyers and grandfathers wore wigs anymore. Except for the barest pleasantries, he had been silent since their arrival. He had brought a book to the table and was reading it as he ate, his spectacles resting low on his nose. Now he raised his pale eyes from the pages and glanced dismissively at Emily.
“I don’t suppose someone of your age and gender is going to sit through a linguistic analysis,” he remarked. Kate saw her little sister’s face darken and spoke quickly to prevent a catastrophe.
“We’d love to hear about Hallow Hill’s name,” she protested with a bright smile. “Place-name etymology is so fascinating. The words come out of Old English, don’t they, so the name can’t date back to the Roman times, but it could certainly predate the Norman Conquest.”
Hugh Roberts fixed Kate with a critical stare. She noticed an ink stain on his nose and hoped her sister wouldn’t mention it.
“So we’ve read a book or two,” he commented dryly. “Yes, the word hallow is Old English, but we don’t know that hallow, or holy, is what was intended at all. Perhaps hollow is what was meant. Some early documents call the bald peak behind this house Hollow Hill, and there certainly are caves throughout the area. And ‘Hollow Lake’ may just be a short way of saying the ‘lake by Hollow Hill.’
“However, we aren’t even positive that is the original Hallow Hill. Near the Lodge house is a smaller hill with a flat, circular crown, and around this crown is a double circle of ancient oak trees. The site was obviously an important druidic center. There are those who say that is the real Hallow Hill, but probably to the early inhabitants this whole region was sacred. It has never been mined, the forests haven’t been logged, and the locals retain to this day a tremendous superstitious lore about the area. Calling something hallow for hundreds of years has a way of making people treat it as holy whether it really is or not.” He picked up his book again. “It’s a fascinating human phenomenon, the tenacious preservation of ignorance,” he remarked caustically and ignored the conversation around him for the remainder of the meal.
In another half hour, Emily and Kate found themselves back out in the sunshine, facing another carriage ride. Their guardian lived in this large estate house, the Hall, but the girls were not to live here with him. They were to go on to the smaller house, the Lodge, where their great-aunts lived.
The Hall faced a large, open green that was not in the least interesting. It contained rigidly geometric pebbled walks, square garden beds, and bench seats set primly by the straight, tree-lined borders. But the ground to the sides and back of the house began rising at once into small, tumbled hills, and through the windows of the dining room the girls had seen tantalizing views of a shady terrace, moss-covered rock walls, and paths disappearing into the dim forest that reached down and enclosed the Hall on three sides. Kate and Emily were wild with delight at the thought of those secret paths winding through primeval woodland. They could hardly bear to climb into the carriage for the sedate jog over to the Lodge.
The ride proved more satisfying than they had expected. The gravel track passed the front of the Hall and rapidly left the depressing tidiness of the green behind. It skirted the very edge of the forest and rose and fell with the unevenness of the landscape, providing a view on the one side of windblown meadows full of wildflowers and on the other of those gloomy, green-dappled forest depths that they already longed to explore. The track passed through a grassy orchard as it climbed a steady slope, and the Lodge house stood before them, shaded by large, well-trimmed trees.
Kate and Emily stared up at the big white house. Emily was surprised by its size; hearing that she was to live in the “small Lodge house,” she had expected to see a two-room hut. The Lodge had three stories, the top one peeking out through small dormer windows tucked under a steep gray roof. The front door was exactly in the middle, and all the tall windows up and down were perfectly matched and symmetrical. Over their heads and over the house swung the thick boughs of the great shade trees, casting an ever-changing net of shadow and sun on the ground below. Kate listened to the gentle rush of the wind whispering through leaves and branches. She felt it settle into her soul and fill some lonely place there.
The Lodge was a very ordinary square house designed to provide four spacious rooms on each floor with a hallway down the middle. The front door faced the straight hall and staircase, which began about ten feet inside it. Kate, standing on the rug, could see right through to the back door, which stood open to let in the breeze. On her left was a parlor, on her right, a dining room, open to each other by the full width of the entry. Their walls began only at the staircase.