This article was originally published in the April 2003 edition of Soul Search, the journal of The Sole Society

‘Bertram,’ said Crawford, some time afterwards, taking the opportunity of a little langour in the game, ‘I have never told you what happened to me yesterday in my ride home.’ They had been hunting together, and were in the midst of a good run, and at some distance from Mansfield, when his horse being found to have flung a shoe, Henry Crawford had been obliged to give up, and make the best of his way back.

‘I told you I lost my way after passing that old farmhouse, with the yew-trees, because I can never bear to ask; but I have not told you that, with my usual luck - for I never do wrong without gaining by it - I found myself in due time in the very place which I had a curiosity to see. I was suddenly, upon turning the corner of a steepish downy field, in the midst of a retired little village between gently rising hills; a small stream before me to be forded, a church standing on a sort of knoll to my right - which church was strikingly large and handsome for the place, and not a gentleman or half a gentleman’s house to be seen excepting one - to be presumed the Parsonage - within a stone’s throw of the said knoll and church. I found myself, in short, in Thornton Lacey.’

‘It sounds like it,’ said Edmund; ‘but which way did you turn after passing Sewell’s farm?’