‘Robert, we have all had a tiring day,’ she began firmly. ‘Ellie in particular. Perhaps it might be a good idea if you took Mr Walker into your office, if you wish to talk further with him.’
Ruefully, Gideon accepted her hint and got to his feet, calmly thanking her for her hospitality.
Ellie could feel herself flushing slightly when he shook her hand. She wanted him to keep on holding it, but at the same time she wanted to pull away. Without meaning to she looked at his mouth and then sucked in her breath as she suddenly felt hot and giddy. But that was nothing to how she felt when she realised that Gideon was looking at her mouth.
Gideon whistled happily as he made his way back to his lodgings. The crowd had dispersed and the late evening air was softly balmy.
Ellie Pride! One day soon, very soon, if he had his way, she was going to find out just what happened when a girl looked at a man’s mouth the way she had looked at his tonight!
Ellie Pride…Ellie Walker!
‘And Gideon said the next time he comes down with our uncle he will bring me a sheepdog puppy of my very own, and…’
Lydia frowned as she listened to John’s excited chatter. It was nearly five months since the Guild festivities, and in those months Gideon Walker had become a far more frequent visitor to Friargate than she liked.
Right now, though, she had other things to concern her in addition to her anxiety about the dangerous effect such a handsome and masculine young man was likely to have on her vulnerable sixteen-year-old daughter.
Automatically she put her hand on her stomach. The child she had conceived the night of Robert’s Guild parade was already swelling her body. Robert had been shocked and contrite when she told him. Looming over both of them was the warning she had been given after the stillbirth of her last child.
‘Are you sure you want to go to Aunt Gibson’s, Mother?’ Ellie asked anxiously.
Her mother had told her earlier in the week that she was to have another child, and this confidence had confirmed to Ellie her status in the household of a grown-up and adult daughter, and not a child. She had automatically begun to mother Lydia in much the same busy way she did her own younger siblings, and Lydia, exhausted by the sickness of her early months of pregnancy and her fear, had wearily allowed her to do so.
She still had her sisters to face. By now Amelia’s doctor husband was bound to have informed his wife of her condition. Which was, no doubt, why Amelia had summoned her to take tea with her this afternoon.
‘The walk will do me good,’ Lydia responded.
They were almost in February, and the cold air misted their breath as Ellie and her mother stepped out into the street.
‘Gideon is so good, offering to bring John a puppy,’ Ellie commented happily to her mother as they walked towards Winckley Square.
‘He is certainly a very handsome and determined young man,’ Lydia agreed coolly, ‘but as to him being “good”…’
Ellie gave her mother a surprised look. ‘I thought you liked him.’
‘I do,’ Lydia agreed. ‘But…’ She paused and shook her head.
‘But what, Mother?’
But Lydia refused to be drawn.
They had reached Winckley Square now, and stopped in surprise at the comings and goings at the large mansion on the opposite side of the square to the Gibsons.
‘It looks as though someone is moving into Mr Isherwood’s old house,’ Ellie commented.
It was over a month since the elderly widowed mill owner, who had lived in the house, had died, and despite the busyness of the removal men, the house still had an air of bleakness about it.
Ten minutes after they had been shown into Amelia Gibson’s parlour, Lydia asked her sister, ‘Has the Isherwood house been sold, only we saw someone moving in when we walked past?’
‘No,’ Amelia replied. ‘It seems that Mr Isherwood’s daughter has decided to return to Preston. She was his only heir and, despite the fact that they quarrelled so badly that she left home, he left everything to her, apparently. I shall call and leave a card, of course, but I must say I always thought her rather odd. I mean, going off to London like that to live virtually on her own…
‘You look very pale, Lydia,’ she announced, changing the subject. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I am well enough,’ Lydia replied.
As she stood protectively beside her mother, Ellie saw the sisters exchanging looks.
‘Ellie, why don’t you go upstairs and join your cousins?’ Amelia suggested firmly.
A little uncertainly, Ellie looked at her mother.
‘Yes, Ellie,’ Lydia agreed. ‘Do as your aunt says.’
Obediently, Ellie got up, but once she was outside the parlour door she hesitated. From inside the room she could hear her Aunt Gibson’s voice quite plainly.
‘So it is true, then?’
Ellie could discern the anger in her aunt’s voice, but before she could learn any more her cousin Cecily suddenly appeared on the stairs.
‘Ellie, come up quickly. I can’t wait to show you the trimmings I have got for my new hat. Mother and I saw them last week in Miller’s Arcade.’
Reluctantly, Ellie started to climb the stairs.
In the parlour Amelia Gibson shook her head as she looked at her youngest sister.
‘Lyddy, Mr Pride knew you were not to have another child. He was told that it would be too dangerous. Alfred is most concerned. He has sought the advice of an eminent specialist on your behalf but he confirms what has already been said.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Lydia replied wanly, before bursting out in a panic-stricken voice, ‘I am so afraid, Melia, and not just for myself. I have my girls to think about, especially Ellie. If anything were to happen I would want them –’
‘Lyddy, please, you must not distress yourself
like this,’ Amelia said firmly. ‘You may rest assured that we, your sisters, shall always do what is right and proper for your daughters. Even though you defied and hurt our mother when you went against her to marry Robert Pride, I know she would want and expect us to treat your daughters as our own.’
‘He has provided well for us,’ Lydia defended her husband quickly. ‘He has a good business and –’
‘He has got you with child again, Lydia,’ her sister interrupted, speaking with unusual bluntness. ‘And he was warned the last time. Had you married a man of our own class such a thing would not have happened. I’m afraid that men of Mr Pride’s class have…appetites that should never be inflicted on a lady!’ She added delicately, ‘Alfred made it quite plain to him that if he wished to indulge in…marital relations he must adopt certain…safeguards.’
Lydia bowed her head, unable to make any response. How could she possibly tell her sister that she had been the one to urge Robert on?
A dull smog from the factory chimneys was thickening the air when Ellie and her mother finally left Winckley Square.
Ellie had noticed a tremendous difference in her mother these last few months. She no longer smiled and sang about the house, but had become critical and cross. Ellie couldn’t remember the last time
she had seen her father come into the parlour and pick her mother up off her feet, as he had once frequently done, whirling her round in his arms and planting a kiss on her lips, whilst Lydia mock-scolded him for his boisterousness.
Yes, there was a very different atmosphere in the Pride household now, and although Ellie, growing quickly to womanhood herself, longed to know if in some way the baby her mother was carrying was responsible for the change in her, she knew better than to ask such an intimate question.
Ellie wasn’t ignorant of the way in which a child was conceived; their father’s family, for one thing, had a much more vigorous and salty approach to life than her mother’s, especially their Uncle William, the drover for whom Gideon sometimes worked.
William Pride was the black sheep of the family; a rebel in many ways, who had still managed to do very well by himself materially. And in doing so he also ensured that their father was supplied with the best-quality meat on offer, since it was William who went to the northern markets to buy fat lambs and beasts, as well as poultry in season, driving the animals back from the Lakes and Dales markets to sell to several butchers, including his brother.
Ellie knew that her mother did not approve of her husband’s brother, and she always tried to discourage her husband from spending any more time than necessary with him when he was in town.
As they hurried through the smog-soured streets,
keeping their scarves across their faces to protect themselves from its evil smell, out of the corner of her eye, Ellie saw a group of young millworkers huddled in a small entry that led into one of the town’s ‘yards’.
The houses, crammed into these places to accommodate the needs of the millworkers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before the mill owners themselves had put up new terraces of cottages to house their workers, had no proper sanitation and were deemed to be the worst of the town’s slums. Even through the thick choking smog, Ellie had to wrinkle her nose against their nauseating smell.
A man crossed the street in front of Ellie and her mother, causing them to step into the gutter to avoid him as he stood in front of the girls, leering at them. Drunk and unkempt, he made Ellie shudder in distaste. Her mother tugged sharply on her arm, drawing her firmly away. But Ellie already knew that the place they had just passed was one of the town’s most notorious whorehouses.
Grimly, Mary Isherwood studied the dark and dank hallway of her childhood home in Winckley Square. Despite his wealth her father had been a notoriously mean man. Fires were only to be lit when he himself was at home, and her mother, the poor thin-blooded woman he had married when he was in his fortieth year, had shivered
ceaselessly from November until April, her hands red and blue with cold.
Mercifully, Mary had inherited her father’s sturdier physique. It had been common knowledge that her father had only married her mother because of her connection with the landed gentry – and that having done so he had mercilessly bullied her and blamed her for the fact that she had not given him a son.
Mary had grown up hating her father even more than she had despised her mother. Naturally scholastic, she had infuriated her father with her ability to out-argue him, shrugging aside his taunts that she was too clever for her own good and that no man would ever want to marry her unless he himself paid him to do so.
She had never let him see how much that jibe had hurt her, but she had made sure that he paid for it. Only through her could he have grandsons, the male heirs he longed for, and she had decided that he would never have them. She would never marry; never put herself in a position where he could boast and torment her that he had bought her a husband. Mary was every bit as stubborn as her father had been, and she had stuck to her resolution.
It had shocked her to learn that he was dead, and it had shocked her even more to discover that she was his sole heir. She had expected that he would cut her out of his will – that he would rather leave his wealth to the foundling home, whose occupants he so brutally used and destroyed working in his
appalling factories, rather than allow her to see a penny of it.
The factories were sold now. Horrocks’s had made her father an offer he couldn’t refuse, and Mary was glad of it. They represented everything she most hated.
Perhaps her father would have redrafted his will if he had realised that he was facing death. Mary felt ironically amused to learn that he had died of a chill on the lungs. Her mother had suffered a long agonising decline and a painful death from tuberculosis, brought on, Mary was sure, by her husband’s refusal to allow her any home comforts. She had lived as poorly as any of the workers in her husband’s mill.
Yes, Mary reflected, her father had been a hard man and a cruel one, but now he was dead, and she had decided to move back to Preston. She knew people would question her decision, but she had her own reasons for being here.
Frowning, she studied the huge oil painting of her father that hung at the top of the stairs.
‘I want you to take that down,’ she instructed the removal men.
‘That’s fine, missus, but where will you be wanting us to put it?’ the foreman asked her.
‘Anywhere you like, just so long as it is gone from this house,’ Mary responded coolly.
She had ordered coal to be delivered ahead of her arrival, but it seemed that her late father’s housekeeper had not received her instructions to
light fires in every room. Ringing for her, Mary stood in the hallway and watched as the men struggled with the huge gilded frame.
She had been eighteen years old when the portrait had been commissioned and her father had been at the height of his power. He had paid the man who had painted it more than he had spent in feeding and clothing her mother and herself in a dozen years. Mary knew because she had seen the bill.
‘You rang for me, miss? Oh, the master’s portrait…’ The housekeeper, Mrs Jenkins, placed her hand to her throat in shock as she saw what the men were doing.
‘Yes I did,’ Mary confirmed. ‘It seems that a letter I sent you from London, requesting that you have fires lit in all the rooms, went astray. And –’
‘Oh no, I got the letter, miss,’ Mrs Jenkins confirmed, ‘but the master would never have allowed anything like that. Why, even in the week he died he refused to have a fire lit in his bedroom, despite the doctor saying that he should.’
Mary could tell from her accent that the housekeeper was a countrywoman, and she suspected that, like everyone else who had ever worked for her father, she had been in terror of him.
‘My father is dead now, Mrs Jenkins, and I am mistress here,’ Mary replied. ‘You will, I hope, find me a good and a fair mistress, just so long as you understand that it is I and not my father who now gives the orders. As soon as you have a
maid free you will instruct her to light all the fires, please.’
‘Very well, miss…but you cannot mean to remove your father’s portrait,’ the housekeeper blurted out. ‘He was that proud of it; used to stand and look at it every day, he did, before he got poorly.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Jenkins, I am aware of my father’s pride in himself.’ And of every other aspect of his unpleasant personality, Mary could have added.
She still bore the faint scars on her back where he had whipped her as a child. She was forty now, but sometimes at night, when she couldn’t sleep, they still ached.
‘But what is to go in its place?’ the housekeeper was fretting. ‘The wallpaper will have faded, and in such a large space –’
‘If it has then we shall have new wallpaper, Mrs Jenkins. In fact, I believe we shall have new wallpaper anyway. Something light and modern. Now just as soon as the men have finished, I want someone to take them down to the kitchen and give them a good hearty meal before they leave.’
The housekeeper was staring at her, and Mary guessed why. She doubted that anyone in the household knew what a good hearty meal was. Well, they were soon going to discover.
She might have particular plans for the huge inheritance she had received, but that did not mean
that she didn’t fully intend to enjoy some of its benefits immediately. Starting with doing something about the house.