4 results for (book:sdpc AND heading:introduct AND stemmed:seventeen)
“There were windows in the front room, though, and benches and a stone floor. It was a stone house with a fireplace; September, damp and foggy in the afternoon, about four o’clock. Sarah Wellington was blond. She had stringy hair. She wasn’t very pretty, but bony. She was seventeen.
I paused again. Then I saw the whole thing very clearly, and I said, excited: “She died, at seventeen, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. The cobbler came out of the back room, and there she was, all in flames and screaming. He shoved her out into the street and rolled her over and over on the stones and in the dirt; but she died.
“The people didn’t go to London often. Some never went at all. The first Sarah, who died at seventeen, never went. Albert’s Sarah went. King Edward was in London then. Albert and Sarah did well and could afford to go. When Edward was crowned, they made the trip. They didn’t see the coronation. She was forty-one and he was forty-six at the time. They had two or three children. I don’t know what happened to them.
Then suddenly, I was back again, seeing the later time. “In London, I don’t know why, Albert’s wife liked to go to the bakery shops. They had fancier breads there than in the village. And Sarah … the first one … if she hadn’t burned to death, she would have died anyhow at seventeen, of tuberculosis. One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. The village wasn’t sunny, and they kept the windows closed. There weren’t many windows anyway. The land was so rocky … and they would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. … Sarah’s dress was dirty. It was woolen, a brown natural color because it wasn’t dyed. It wouldn’t have burned so, but it had grease on it, and the grease caught the flames. …”