Steadfast Kenton is fourteen, slow of speech and trusted: his father, churchwarden of Elmwood near Bristol, and the vicar have shown him the cave in Hermit's Gully where they have hidden the parish chalice and paten from the Parliament men. Then the war comes up the lane. Royalist troopers foraging round besieged Bristol plunder the farm and cut John Kenton down, and elder brother Jephthah rides off to take vengeance in a Puritan troop, leaving Stead with his sisters Patience and Rusha, the baby, a few beasts and the secret of the cave. Charlotte Yonge wrote it for young readers, to show what the civil war meant to quiet folk in cottages and farmhouses, and she did not soften it. Fifty-three plates after painters including Turner and Constable trace the cottage, field and lane of Steadfast's England, so the quiet world he defends stands before the reader in the same volume.
