دانلود رمان انگلیسی “یک معامله زمستانی”

The wind on the Yorkshire ridge did not care that Eleanor Hartley was now the mistress of the estate. It whipped at the heavy black crepe of her mourning dress and pulled strands of hair from her pins with a rudeness that no person in the valley would dare replicate. Eleanor pressed her hand to the top of her bonnet to keep it from flying off toward the slate-grey river below. Below her boots the land stretched out in a patchwork of green and brown that she knew better than the lines on her own palm. This was Hartley land. It had been Hartley land when her father was alive and it had remained so under the stewardship of her aunt. Now the deed and the heavy iron key to the manor sat in her pocket but the weight of it felt like a heavy anchor dragging her down into the mud. She looked down at the cluster of cottages near the stream where smoke rose from stone chimneys in thin and wavering lines. The tenant families were there. The Millers. The Davises. The O’Malleys. They were working the soil or tending to the sheep or mending fences that the winter storms had battered. Every one of them looked to the big house on the hill for protection. They looked to her. A figure detached itself from the lower path and began the trudge up the incline toward her. Eleanor stiffened. She recognized the gait immediately. It was Thomas Miller. He walked with a limp he had earned fixing the barn roof three winters past. Eleanor waited. To turn away now would be an admission of weakness.