Evening. Driving back to London

Evening. Driving back to London, I pass her old house. I must have done this once a month for fourteen years (whenever I return from seeing my parents) and I have scarcely given it a glance. Her family left it years ago, and in any case the yellow brick façade, with its Victorian windows , is like a theatre set. Its memories lie unseen behind: in he passages, the sitting room, the enclosed garden.
I stop and ring the doorbell. Whoever opens the door will seem an impostor, of course, a caretaker. I ring the bell again. It makes the same noise as fourteen years ago: a dry shrillness in the bowels of the house. I know now that nobody will come, and that seems right.
I walk round to try the garden gate. It opens. In the fragrant enclosure nothing has changed. Two flagstoned steps descend from French windows into a tangle of spring flowering shrubs. The neighbours’ wall at the end shows the same patina of grey blue lichen. The whole garden is barely thirty foot deep, and narrow. Behind my back the house windows hang dark. I close the garden door softly behind and stare down the shrub-avenue. For some reason I’m frightened. Close to where I entered, everything is all right. She is watering plants in a summer dress (it’s always summer), swinging the can back and forth in her long, impatient fingers. But a few paces beyond, just out of sight of the house windows, a grass clearing laps against the patinated wall. I remember it perfectely, although I can’t see it yet. I pause among the sheltering shrubs. I feel cold and slightly sick
From ‘ Nothing has changed’ By Colin Thrubron.

The town of Shiring had a carnival air

The town of Shiring had a carnival air during sessions of the country court. All the inns around the square were busy, their parlours crowed with men and women dressed in their best clothes, all shouting for drinks and food. The town naturally took the opportunity to hold a market, and the square itself was so closely packed with stalls that it took half an hour to move a couple of hundred yards. As well as the legitimate stallholders there were dozens of strolling entrepreneurs: bakers with trays of buns, a busking fiddle player, maimed and blind him beggars, prostitutes showing their breasts, a dancing bear, a preaching friar.
Earl Ralph was one of the few people who could cross the square quickly. He rode with three knights ahead of and a handful of servants behind, and his entourage went through the melee like a ploughshare, turning the crowd aside by the force of their momentum and their carelessness for the safety of people in their way.
They rode on up the hill to the sheriff’s castle. In the courtyard they wheeled with a flourish and dismounted. The servants immediately began shouting for ostlers and porters. Ralph liked people to know he ha arrived.
He handed his reins to a groom and looked around. The castle was not a military fortification. It was more like a tavern with a courtyard, though strongly built and well guarded. The sheriff of Shiring could live here safe from the vengeful relatives of the people he arrested. There were basement dungeons in which to keep prisoners, and guests apartments where visiting judges could stay unmolested.
Sheriff Bernard showed Ralph to his room. The sheriff was the king’s reprentative in the country, responsible for collecting taxes as well as administering justice. The post was lucrative, the salary usefully supplemented by gifts, bribes, and percentatges skimmed off the top of fines and forfeited bail money. The relationship between earl and sheriff could be fractious: the earl ranked higher, but the sheriff’s judicial power was independent. Bernard, a rich wool merchant of about Ralph’s age, treated Ralph with an uneasy mixture of camaraderie and deference.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

Wulfric at forty was still the handsomest man

Wulfric at forty was still the handsomest man Gwenda had ever seen. There were threads of silver now in his tawny hair, but they just made him look wise as well as strong. When he was young his broad shoulders had tapered dramatically to a narrow waist , whereas nowadays the taper was not so sharp nor the waist so slim – but he could still do the work of two men. And he would always be two years younger than she.
She thought she had changed less. She had the kind of dark hair that did not go grey until late in life. She was heavier than she had been twenty years ago, although since having the children her breasts and belly were not quite as taut as formerly.
I was only when she looked at her son Davey, at his smooth skin and the restless spring in his step, that she felt her years. Now twenty, he looked like a male version of herself at that age. She too, had had a face with no lines, and she walked with a jaunty stride. A lifetime of working in the fields in all weathers had wrinkled her hands, and given her cheeks a raw redness just beneath the skin, and taught her to walk slowly and conserve her strength.
Davey was small like her, and shrewd, and secretive: since he was little she had never been sure what he was thinking. Sam was the opposite: big and strong, not clever enough to be deceitful, but with a mean streak that Gwenda blamed on his real father, Ralph Fitzgerald.
For several years now the two boys had been working alongside Wulfric in the fields – until two weeks ago, when Sam had vanished.
They knew why he had gone. All winter long he had been talking about leaving Wigleigh and moving to a village where he could earn higher wages. He had disappeared the moment the spring ploughing began.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet