She left her great-aunt’s Stone House on the edge of the New Forest at ten o’clock on that beautiful Spring morning at the end of April with the firm intention of breaking her journey only in order to have lunch at Cridley. It was about the halfway stage between Wandles Parva, where she had been spending a short holiday, and Douston, where in a week’s time she was to be married from the house of some cousins. She expected to arrive at her destination in time for tea or, in any case, in plenty of time to dress for dinner. Her parents were dead, and her pied-à-terre was a London flat which she shared with three other young women, so this accounted for the fact that she could not be married from her own home.
She had never made the journey from the New Forest to Douston Hall by car, and she was looking forward to it. The route she had chosen took her first to Cadnam and from there to Romsey. Here she parked the car and went to look at the abbey. She had always loved its austere beauty and she spent more time in renewing her memories of its transitional Norman architecture, its carved stone crucifixes in the south choir aisle and outside the abbess’s door, its beautiful window-mouldings and the remains of the Saxon church below the present flooring, than she had allowed for. In consequence, she was three-quarters of an hour behind schedule when at last she turned out of Romsey and made for the market town of Waymark.
After Waymark she had to swing eastwards to take a secondary road across what the map had indicated was open country. It was not the most direct way to Cridley, which she still hoped to reach in time for lunch, but it enabled her to avoid a couple of towns which had been developed as overspill areas not far from some new factories near a motorway.
Twelve miles out of Waymark, however, she was held up in an infuriating traffic jam in the narrow main street of Evebury, where it happened to be market day and where, to complicate matters still further, a procession of workmen, anticipating May-Day, were holding a protest rally with much shouting of slogans and display of crudely-lettered banners.
It was after she had managed to get clear of Evebury and was still thirty miles from Cridley and the lunch she had planned to have at the Crown hotel there, that what she afterwards diagnosed as a fit of madness overtook her. The road she was on seemed to stretch into infinity and there was not even a farm in sight. The time was half-past one and she was desperately hungry. Then she saw a signpost. It had only a single arm. This pointed to the left and read: Seven Wells 7. Fenella thought of a village pub and a ploughman’s lunch at the bar. The turning she took was narrow and winding, and the miles seemed long ones. The undulating pastureland was occasionally broken by belts of dark trees on the low-crowned hills, and once she passed a manor house whose drive ran almost parallel with the road until it suddenly veered off at right-angles and was lost in woods, although there was a glimpse of the house beyond them.
The road which Fenella was following mounted and dipped more steeply until, at the top of a ridge, it skirted a beech-wood and then, at an unfenced stretch of the hilly chalk, it turned for the last time and wound steeply downwards to a village.
It was a fairly considerable place, but was so quiet that, instead of being a Wednesday, it might have been a Sunday afternoon at the hour of siesta. The whole of the main street showed no sign of life or activity except for a stray cat which ran across in front of the car and a curtain which one of the cottagers drew aside and hastily closed again.
The main street was a long one, and the houses and cottages seemed to have been built at various periods from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century. There were no new bungalows or raw, brash, new houses, and the setting of the village was pleasant enough, although the general impression was that of a place which had ceased to exist in the Diamond Jubilee year of Queen Victoria. Some of the cottages were thatched, others tiled, and Fenella, driving slowly on the look-out for the village inn, also noticed a row of plain, neat, Georgian dwellings, each with its fanlight over the door and its long, rectangular windows from whose frames the paint was peeling. These houses were indistinguishable from one another except for their curtains. The front doors, with their characteristic Georgian panels, were not even numbered, and the blank façade had something uncanny about it, as though the occupants had gone to sleep before the turn of the century and nothing had caused them to wake up again.
To her great relief, almost at the end of the village street Fenella came upon the inn. Before she reached it she could see, half-hidden behind some cottages, a fourteenth century church. The inn was near it, but was on the opposite side of the street, about two hundred yards further on. With its overhanging storeys and diamond-paned windows, the inn appeared to date from the early sixteenth century. It was half-timbered and picturesque and its sign-board bore the unusual name MORE TO COME.
‘How much or how many more, I wonder?’ thought Fenella. ‘It sounds quite promising,
