The Poor Clare

THE POOR CLARE
by Elizabeth Gaskell
CHAPTER I.

December 12th, 1747.--My life has been strangely bound up with
extraordinary incidents, some of which occurred before I had any
connection with the principal actors in them, or indeed, before I even
knew of their existence. I suppose, most old men are, like me, more
given to looking back upon their own career with a kind of fond
interest and affectionate remembrance, than to watching the events--
though these may have far more interest for the multitude--
immediately passing before their eyes. If this should be the case with
the generality of old people, how much more so with me! . . . If I am to
enter upon that strange story connected with poor Lucy, I must begin a
long way back. I myself only came to the knowledge of her family
history after I knew her; but, to make the tale clear to any one else, I
must arrange events in the order in which they occurred--not that in
which I became acquainted with them.
There is a great old hall in the north-east of Lancashire, in a part they
called the Trough of Bolland, adjoining that other district named
Craven. Starkey Manor-house is rather like a number of rooms
clustered round a gray, massive, old keep than a regularly-built hall.
Indeed, I suppose that the house only consisted of a great tower in the
centre, in the days when the Scots made their raids terrible as far south
as this; and that after the Stuarts came in, and there was a little more
security of property in those parts, the Starkeys of that time added the
lower building, which runs, two stories high, all round the base of the
keep. There has been a grand garden laid out in my days, on the
southern slope near the house; but when I first knew the place, the
kitchen-garden at the farm was the only piece of cultivated ground

belonging to it. The deer used to come within sight of the
drawing-room windows, and might have browsed quite close up to the
house if they had not been too wild and shy. Starkey Manor-house
itself stood on a projection or peninsula of high land, jutting out from
the abrupt hills that form the sides of the Trough of Bolland. These hills
were rocky and bleak enough towards their summit; lower down they
were clothed with tangled copsewood and green depths of fern, out of
which a gray giant of an ancient forest- tree would tower here and there,
throwing up its ghastly white branches, as if in imprecation, to the sky.
These trees, they told me, were the remnants of that forest which
existed in the days of the Heptarchy, and were even then noted as
landmarks. No wonder that their upper and more exposed branches
were leafless, and that the dead bark had peeled away, from sapless old
age.
Not far from the house there were a few cottages, apparently, of the
same date as the keep; probably built for some retainers of the family,
who sought shelter--they and their families and their small flocks and
herds--at the hands of their feudal lord. Some of them had pretty much
fallen to decay. They were built in a strange fashion. Strong beams had
been sunk firm in the ground at the requisite distance, and their other
ends had been fastened together, two and two, so as to form the shape
of one of those rounded waggon- headed gipsy-tents, only very much
larger. The spaces between were filled with mud, stones, osiers, rubbish,
mortar--anything to keep out the weather. The fires were made in the
centre of these rude dwellings, a hole in the roof forming the only
chimney. No Highland hut or Irish cabin could be of rougher
construction.
The owner of this property, at the beginning of the present century, was
a Mr. Patrick Byrne Starkey. His family had kept to the old faith, and
were stanch Roman Catholics, esteeming it even a sin to marry any one
of Protestant descent, however willing he or she might have been to
embrace the Romish religion. Mr. Patrick Starkey's father had been a
follower of James the Second; and, during the disastrous Irish
campaign of that monarch he had fallen in love with an Irish beauty, a
Miss Byrne, as zealous for her religion and for the Stuarts as himself.

He had returned to Ireland after his escape to France, and married her,
bearing her back to the court at St. Germains. But some licence on the
part of the disorderly gentlemen who surrounded King James in his
exile, had insulted his beautiful wife, and disgusted him; so he removed
from St. Germains to Antwerp, whence, in a few years' time, he quietly