Golden Summer (Kate Greenway)

A young woman waiting in a garden by the gate. Photographic print after Kate Greenaway. See page for author, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I thought the picture above of a young woman in a garden would go well with the excerpt of Elizabeth in a garden below from The Tenant’s Guest.

Elizabeth stood just beyond a low border, watching Cecily play with her children in the garden. The ball rolled toward the large tree that shadowed the far corner, and Lucas Abbot, the elder brother at nearly four years of age, ran after it while Aiden Abbott, the younger brother and just three months past his first birthday, swayed slightly and then took one wobbly step followed by another equally unstable step before falling with a plop to the ground. The action of dropping so ungracefully to the ground did not please the young child. His scowl before he took to crawling after his brother made Elizabeth smile. He was a determined young man. A little fall was not going to stop him from pursuing his goal, which at this moment was the ball with which his brother was taunting him.

Cecily waved to Elizabeth. “Come, join us.”

Elizabeth, having just returned from what had proven to be a rather disturbing call at the parsonage and wishing for some time to think about all Lucy had shared with her, would have made her excuses and gone into the house. However, the motion of his mother had turned Aiden toward Elizabeth, and the ball was seemingly forgotten in favour of the new arrival.

“Izabef!” Lucas, ball in hand, reached her before his brother could. “Will you play ball with me, Izabef?”

Elizabeth tousled the boy’s hair. “Of course. Do you wish to run before I throw it?”

The young man’s head shook furiously from side to side. “I want to race it.”

“Very well.” Elizabeth took the ball from his hands and squatted down. “Ready,” she warned. “Go.”

The ball rolled along the grass, passing just beside Aiden, who stopped and sat, looking first at Elizabeth and then the ball — clearly unsure which should get his attention.


The Tenant’s Guest is on sale until the end of this month, and And Then Love, the book before this book is free until the end of next month. If you don’t have these two books, now’s the time to get them.

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Leenie Brown

Leenie Brown fell in love with Jane Austen's works when she first read Sense and Sensibility followed immediately by Pride and Prejudice in her early teens. As the second of five daughters and an avid reader, she has always loved to see where her imagination takes her and to play with and write about the characters she meets along the way. In 2013, these two loves collided when she stumbled upon the world of Jane Austen Fan Fiction. A year later, in 2014, she began writing her own Austen-inspired stories and began publishing them in 2015. Leenie lives in Nova Scotia, Canada with her two teenage boys and her very own Mr. Brown (a wonderful mix of all the best of Darcy, Bingley and Edmund with healthy dose of the teasing Mr. Tillney and just a dash of the scolding Mr. Knightley).

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