Follow your HEART
THE STORY SO FAR: Between jobs as a domestic servant in Manchester, Sarah Morton has come back to her parents’ hill farm for a few days. It’s almost lambing time, and when her father’s weak chest leaves him bedbound, Sarah takes on the job of checking the ewes. Her first love turns up – a farmer called Davey. He helps her with a ewe that’s in trouble, and indicates he regrets leaving Sarah for another girl. Sarah is momentarily wistful, but says they can’t turn back the clock. As they part, a horse rider gallops past, a dog at his heels, and splashes them with mud from a puddle. Davey tells her it was Guy, the newly arrived nephew of local, childless widow, Mrs Bradshaw. He sneers that Guy wants to worm his way into the Bradshaw fortune, but Sarah can’t help being intrigued.
Dad? What are you doing up?’
Sarah turned from the range where she’d just set a pan of bacon to fry. Her mother Martha was out collecting the eggs, and Sarah had planned to take her father breakfast in bed.
Jed Morton made his way carefully to a chair and sat.
‘I’m fine,’ he wheezed. ‘Better up and about. You die in bed, as my old mam used to say.’
Sarah refrained from pointing out that you could drop dead anywhere, any time, from doing too much when you weren’t up to it. But she
