About ten miles north-east of Eastthorpe lies the town of Fenmarket,
very like Eastthorpe generally; and as we are already familiar with
Eastthorpe, a particular description of Fenmarket is unnecessary.
There is, however, one marked difference between them. Eastthorpe,
it will be remembered, is on the border between the low uplands and
the Fens, and has one side open to soft, swelling hills.
Fenmarket is entirely in the Fens, and all the roads that lead out of it are
alike level, monotonous, straight, and flanked by deep and stagnant
ditches. The river, also, here is broader and slower; more reluctant
than it is even at Eastthorpe to hasten its journey to the inevitable
sea. During the greater part of the year the visitor to Fenmarket
would perhaps find it dull and depressing, and at times, under a
grey, wintry sky, almost unendurable; but nevertheless, for days and
weeks it has a charm possessed by few other landscapes in England,
provided only that behind the eye which looks there is something to
which a landscape of that peculiar character answers. There is, for
example, the wide, dome-like expanse of the sky, there is the
distance, there is the freedom and there are the stars on a clear
night. The orderly, geometrical march of the constellations from the
extreme eastern horizon across the meridian and down to the west has
a solemn majesty, which is only partially discernible when their
course is interrupted by broken country.
On a dark afternoon in November 1844, two young women, Clara and
Madge Hopgood, were playing chess in the back parlour of their
mother's house at Fenmarket, just before tea. Clara, the elder, was
about five-and-twenty, fair, with rather light hair worn flat at the
side of her face, after the fashion of that time. Her features were
tolerably regular. It is true they were somewhat marred by an uneven
nasal outline, but this was redeemed by the curved lips of a mouth
which was small and rather compressed, and by a definite, symmetrical
and graceful figure. Her eyes were grey, with a curious peculiarity
in them. Ordinarily they were steady, strong eyes, excellent and
renowned optical instruments. Over and over again she had detected,
along the stretch of the Eastthorpe road, approaching visitors, and
had named them when her companions could see nothing but specks.
Occasionally, however, these steady, strong, grey eyes utterly
changed. They were the same eyes, the same colour, but they ceased
to be mere optical instruments and became instruments of expression,
transmissive of radiance to such a degree that the light which was
reflected from them seemed insufficient to account for it. It was
also curious that this change, though it must have been accompanied
by some emotion, was just as often not attended by any other sign of
it. Clara was, in fact, little given to any display of feeling.