Kitabı oxu: «Ellie Pride»
Ellie Pride
Annie Groves
To my grandmother who was the inspiration for this book,
and to my lovely husband who was there at its beginning but did not live long enough to see its end.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
PART TWO
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
PART THREE
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
PART FOUR
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
ONE
Wednesday, 3 September 1902
‘Ellie, why can’t we go without them? If we don’t get to Fishergate soon, there won’t be any places left!’
‘John Pride, we can see everything in the procession just as well here at home on Friargate as we can from Fishergate,’ Ellie reminded her younger brother with neighbourhood loyalty. And it was true. As Ellie looked out of the parlour window of their home above their father’s butcher’s shop, she could see down into the street decorated with hundreds of yards of bunting to celebrate this, the first Preston Guild of the new century – and the first in the reign of the new King.
‘But the procession will be here soon and I’ll never see everything on the Textile Trades’ drays from inside! And everyone wants to see them,’ John protested, his lower lip protruding mutinously as he glowered at Ellie. ‘They’re going to have real working machines, and they’re going to be the best displays in the whole parade –’
‘John Pride, how can you say that?’ Connie, the middle one of the three Pride children, cut him off challengingly. ‘Our dad’s lot, the Master Butchers, is going to be the best. They are going to have two bullocks, sheep, shepherd boys leading collie dogs, journeymen in butchers’ attire, and boys on horses,’ she announced triumphantly, ticking off the list on her fingers.
‘Oh, I know all about that,’ John fought back scornfully, ‘and I knew about it before you did, because our dad told me first and not you…and –’
‘No he did not,’ Connie denied hotly.
‘Yes he did.’
‘Will you two stop it?’ Ellie Pride demanded, a quick elder-sister frown creasing the smoothness of her pretty face. ‘Now, John, is that a dirty mark on your collar already? And just look at your new suit! You know what Mother said…’ As she tutted and fussed, secretly, and despite her newly grown-up sixteen-year-old status, a part of her positively itched to be out on the street with the rest of the excited crowd. But, of course, she wasn’t going to admit as much to her younger sister and brother. Their mother had left Ellie in charge.
A little self-consciously she touched the pins holding up her hair. She had been practising putting it up for weeks now, but this was the first time she had been allowed to appear in public with it worn in such an adult way.
Her new dress was also more grown-up than that of one fourteen-year-old Connie, who was still wearing a girl’s starched white pinafore over hers, her long hair curling loosely down her back as she kicked impatiently at the strut of the wooden chair on which she was sitting.
Stifling her own longing to be outside joining in the fun, Ellie reproved John. ‘You know that we are to stay here in the house until our Aunt and Uncle Gibson and our cousins come round from Winckley Square, and then we are all to watch Father leading the Master Butchers in the Guild parade. Once they have gone by we’ll go to Moor Park to see the Earl of Derby open the agricultural show.’
‘Well, I agree with John. I don’t want to wait for our Aunt and Uncle Gibson either,’ Connie announced rebelliously. She considered herself far too grown-up to be told what to do by a mere sister.
John pulled a mutinous face at Ellie. ‘Why do we have to go to the showground with Aunt and Uncle Gibson, anyway? I don’t like them. Just because they live in Winckley Square and Uncle Gibson is a doctor, they think they’re better than us. Father doesn’t think so. He says it takes more skill to butcher a beast properly than it does to –’
‘John Pride!’ Ellie stopped him warningly.
John looked warily at her. He knew that there was nothing his sisters hated more than him talking about the more gory aspects of their father’s trade, though it regularly proved to be an excellent way of reinforcing his male superiority over them. Even if he was just ten, and the youngest of the family, he was still the only son, the one who would in time inherit the family business.
Ellie, however, despite her own delicate and feminine appearance, was not someone to be recklessly baited or disobeyed. She might be all dressed up in a new frock made for the occasion by their mother’s dressmaker, and be wearing her hair up in a way that made her look disconcertingly grown up, but, as John had good cause to know, she could still outrun him and deliver a smart buffet that would leave his ears stinging.
‘Anyway,’ John added, ‘they haven’t got so much to be high and mighty about now, not with our dad being President of the Master Butchers this year, and being on the Guild Committee.’
Preston’s famous Guild celebrations went back to the time when the town had been granted its Guild Merchant charter. As the Guild ceremonies were only re-enacted and celebrated once every twenty years their occurrence naturally generated intense excitement in the town.
‘You know that Mother wouldn’t like it if she could hear what you are saying,’ Ellie reproved her brother. ‘Aunt Gibson is her sister, and you know that Mother was –’
‘One of the beautiful Barclay sisters,’ Ellie’s siblings chanted in unison.
‘Quickly, Connie, Ellie. Come and look,’ John demanded, scrambling from the chair he’d pulled up to the window to stand on the windowsill itself and crane his neck so that he could look down the street. ‘There’s a photographer waiting. I bet the procession won’t be long now.’
‘John Pride, come down from that window right now,’ Ellie began, but John wasn’t listening to her.
‘When I grow up I’m going to be a photographer,’ he continued importantly.
‘You can’t be,’ Connie objected. ‘You’ll have to be a butcher like Dad. All the Prides have been butchers.’
‘Not all of them,’ John argued. ‘Uncle William isn’t.’
‘No, well, that’s because he was the younger brother and, anyway, he’s a drover and not a photographer and you can’t be either –’
‘Yes I can!’
‘No you can’t.’
‘Can, can, can…’
As John jumped down from the window and reached out to tug on Connie’s hair she let out a shriek and tried to box his ears.
‘Stop it, both of you,’ Ellie commanded. ‘Otherwise I shall send you to your rooms and you will miss the parade completely.’
‘You can’t do that; you aren’t our mother,’ Connie objected fiercely. ‘Anyway, I don’t think it’s fair that we aren’t allowed to go to any of the balls,’ she announced, strategically changing the subject, but not before she had aimed a quick triumphant hidden kick at John’s shin. ‘Two of the girls from school were both going to private dances.’
‘Private dances are different from public balls,’ Ellie reminded her sister wearily.
Connie was like quicksilver, her moods and reactions changing so abruptly that it could be exhausting just trying to keep pace with her.
‘You know that Mother and Father can’t have a party of their own because they will have to attend the official ball, with Father being President of the Master Butchers this year, and on the Guild Committee. And because of that he will be too busy to take us to any of the subscription balls,’ Ellie explained patiently, though she was aware that Connie knew this as well as she did.
‘Aunt and Uncle Gibson are having a private party, though. I heard cousin Edward talking about it after church last week. Why can’t we –’
‘Quick, quick. The floats are coming!’ John’s excited cry brought his sisters hurrying to press their noses up against the glass.
A roar of excitement from the crowds massed on the pavements below greeted the arrival of the procession. Ellie was every bit as excited as her younger brother and sister, even though she tried not to show it. After all, this was her first Guild celebration too.
For the first time in the Guild’s history, because of the huge number of displays, the procession had been split into two parts: the Textile procession and the Trades procession. The Textile procession was the first to parade down Friargate.
The Prides had been butchers in Preston for close on four hundred years, and Robert Pride was every bit as proud of his family tradition as his wife Lydia’s family were of their more ‘gentrified’ professional status.
‘Just look at that,’ John cried out as a huge horse-drawn dray lumbered past, filled with pretty female millworkers in immaculate outfits weaving at their loom.
A little hesitantly Ellie peered over her brother’s shoulder.
The cotton millworkers were considered to be lowest in the town’s workers’ pecking order, and Lydia Pride had never allowed her own children to mix with them. Some of the millworkers had been foundlings, and the threat of being condemned to the workhouse was never far away from the poorer paid.
Ellie had been warned by her mother that she must behave in a grown-up and ladylike way; that she must always remember that she would be judged by her behaviour as well as by her position in the town’s society. She must never forget, Lydia Pride had told her daughter, that although her father was a tradesman, she, her mother, came from the town’s professional class.
Ellie’s grandfather had been a solicitor, and his elder brother had been a judge. Lydia’s sisters had all married within their own class, and Lydia was determined that her two daughters would be brought up as ‘young ladies’, as she had been.
Beneath the window, Friargate was thronged with people: those standing watching the procession and those following it, the latter being a boisterous crowd of apprentices and schoolboys, in the main, out for the kind of mischief her younger brother was quite obviously itching to take part in, Ellie recognised.
Their maid, Jenny, was standing outside on the pavement with several other girls. Lydia Pride had taken Annie, her cook, with her when she had left to go to Moor Park, where she and the other wives were in charge of organising one of the refreshment pavilions, in this, the hottest Guild Week in living memory.
Ellie had noticed the thin curl of her Aunt Gibson’s lip when her mother had mentioned her refreshment pavilion duties.
‘My dear Lydia,’ she had exclaimed fastidiously, ‘surely it would have been better to have brought in caterers! Alfred insisted that I have our small party catered.’
‘Robert wanted to make sure that the meats that were served were of the highest quality,’ Ellie’s mother had responded in her gentle, well-modulated voice, ‘and he says that the only way to do that is to oversee the ordering and cooking ourselves. It seems that some of the more unscrupulous caterers provide very inferior food. And, after all, in view of Robert’s trade…’
‘Ah, yes…trade,’ Ellie’s aunt had sighed disdainfully. ‘It is such a pity, my dear –’ she had continued, stopping when she realised that Ellie was listening. But Ellie knew what she had been about to say. It was no secret to the Pride children that their mother’s sisters felt she had married beneath her.
Absently Ellie glanced at the float passing beneath the window. The young workers on it might be immaculately dressed today in their pinafores and caps, but everyone knew about the unpleasant, often dangerous, working conditions and low pay that these women had to endure, whilst those who owned the mills lived in the town’s biggest and finest houses.
A group of rough-looking young men were running alongside the float and, without meaning to, Ellie discovered that she was staring at one of them. The sun was shining down on the thick dark curls of his capless head. She could see the sinewy strength of his muscular arms through the soft cotton of the shirt he was wearing – open at the neck, she noticed, before her face coloured in self-consciousness. There was something about him that made her feel odd…excited, nervous, tingling with the sudden rush of unfamiliar sensation invading her body. That feeling made her angry with herself and even more angry with him for being the cause of it. His skin was warmly tanned, as though he worked outside. Was he perhaps one of the railway workers who had been responsible for adding the extra platforms to the station to cope with the influx of visitors come to enjoy the Guild Week celebrations?
Preston’s Guild Week was famous throughout the country – and even further. It had been in the papers that visitors were expected from as far afield as Canada, Australia, and even New Zealand.
It had taken the committee organising the celebrations nearly two years to plan everything. Ellie could well remember her father returning from his meetings in either a state of high exultation and triumph, or deep despondency, and one of the committee’s most spectacular achievements had been to obtain the offer by the new electric company of free electric lighting for the event. People would come from counties away just to see that, Robert Pride had forecast excitedly.
Leaning a little closer to the window, Ellie gazed at the young man below her, her dark blue eyes becoming darker, and her soft skin a little pinker, her lips parting as she breathed faster, caught up in a sensation she herself did not understand.
As though somehow he had sensed her curiosity he suddenly stood still in the street and looked up at the window.
His eyes were a curiously light silver grey, and there was something about him…Ellie gave a tiny little shudder before snatching her gaze away from his. He had no right to look at her in that…that openly bold and…and dangerous way. No right at all.
‘Ellie, why is that man staring up at us?’ John demanded.
‘Silly, it’s because we’re girls,’ Connie answered him, preening as she tugged on her ringleted curls and coquetted openly, giggling when the stranger suddenly swept her a deep bow, and then reached into his pocket to remove three coloured balls, which he proceeded to juggle expertly.
‘Oh, look at him, isn’t he clever? Ellie, I want to go down and give him a penny.’
‘No, you mustn’t!’ Ellie protested, horrified.
‘Mother would want me to. You know she’s always saying that we should be charitable,’ Connie insisted smugly. ‘Come on, John.’
‘What? Waste a penny on him? No fear,’ John refused sturdily. ‘I want to buy myself a toffee apple at the park.’
The procession was moving on, and the ‘juggler’ was being urged to join it by his companions. Connie laughed and clapped her hands together as he returned the juggling balls to his pocket and swept the Prides another bow.
Someone was knocking on the back door to the house, and Ellie could hear Jenny, who had obviously returned to her duties, going to answer it. She knew that the arrivals would be their aunt and uncle, who would have taken a short cut through Back Lane to reach them. Her brother and sister, obviously sharing her thoughts, both ran towards the door, anxious to join in the celebrations.
As Ellie lingered, the young man stood watching her. Just before she turned away he suddenly gave her a look so undisguisedly bold that it shocked her, his gaze lingering on the bosom of her gown before he deliberately blew her a cheeky kiss.
Scarlet-cheeked, Ellie hurried away.
Tiredly, Lydia Pride started to remove the feathers from her headdress. In the mirror she could see her husband, Robert, walking up behind her. Bending down, he brushed his lips against the bare skin of her shoulder.
‘You looked beautiful tonight,’ he told her approvingly. ‘I did very well for myself the day I married you, Lydia.’
Silently Lydia watched him. He had been outstandingly handsome as a young man and very confident. He was still handsome now, at close to forty, and, if anything, even more confident. He had told her the first time they met that he intended to marry her. She had laughed at him then. Her father was a solicitor, and her parents had a large house in Winckley Square. Robert lived over his butcher’s shop in Friargate, with his widowed mother, his younger brother and his two sisters, and there was no way Lydia could ever see herself marrying someone like him.
‘Did you see the Earl talking with me, Lydia?’ Robert demanded. ‘He spent longer with me than with anyone else,’ he boasted. ‘He said that beef you served him was the finest he had ever tasted. See if I don’t get a good deal of extra business from this. We could even open a second shop. My, but that sour-faced brother-in-law of yours looked put out when he saw how much more interested in what I had to say the Earl was than in him. I can never understand what your sister saw in him. He’s about as much use as a pocket in a shirt.’
‘He’s a doctor, Robert,’ Lydia replied a little tartly. Self-confidence was all very well, but there was such a thing as reality! And in the eyes of the world at large, there was no way a butcher could be considered on an equal social footing to a doctor. Or a butcher’s wife and family’s status equivalent to that of a doctor’s – a fact that was beginning to prey with increasing frequency on Lydia’s private thoughts. ‘They live in a fine house in Winckley Square.’
Frowning, Robert looked at her. ‘What’s to do, lass?’
As always at times of emotion, the strong Preston burr of his accent intensified. Lydia made a mental note to ensure that John would be sent to Hutton Grammar School once he was old enough. There he would be mixing with boys of the same social standing as her sisters’ sons and would lose that accent.
‘Nothing. Nothing is wrong,’ she denied, answering Robert defensively. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, it’s just that lately you seem to be forever comparing our life to that of your sisters – and finding ours wanting. Do you find it wanting, Lyddy?’ The simple directness was so much a part of his character and his strength.
Lydia felt a touch of shame and remorse. ‘Oh, Robert, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…it’s just that with the girls growing up, especially Ellie…Robert,’ she swung round eagerly to face him, ‘she is so very pretty. Prettier than any of her cousins – prettier, I think, than I was myself, and she could have so much. I don’t want her to…’
‘To what? To marry beneath her, like you did?’
Lydia bit her lip.
‘Lyddy, I don’t know what’s happened to you just lately. I thought I’d made you happy; seen to it that you wanted for naught. Why, I’ve built the business up to four times what it was, and you wait and see, we shall see it increase even more after today.’
‘Oh, Robert,’ Lydia protested guiltily, ‘it isn’t for myself that I…worry. It’s for the girls. I want them to be –’
‘Young ladies! Yes, I know. But they are a butcher’s daughters – my daughters – and that should be good enough for anyone. And all these airs and graces you’ve insisted on giving them! Piano lessons; dancing lessons…’ He shook his head.
‘It’s no more than my sisters’ daughters have. No more than I had myself!’ Lydia pointed out passionately. ‘I don’t want to see either Ellie or Connie wasting herself on some…some going-nowhere apprentice, Robert. I wouldn’t be doing my duty to them as their mother if I allowed that to happen.’
‘Has it occurred to you that who or where they marry will be out of our hands? Love’s like that, Lyddy, as you and I have good cause to know.’
‘Love…’ Lydia moved restlessly in her chair. Yes, she had loved Robert. Passionately, violently, wildly. But the experience of those emotions, of being held in thrall to them and being overwhelmed by them, was not something she wanted for her daughters. No, for them she wanted what she herself had disdained – especially for Ellie, whose beauty, even if Ellie herself was unaware of it as yet, was truly out of the ordinary.
‘Yes, love,’ Robert repeated, his voice thickening. ‘Our kind of love, Lyddy, and I’ll bet that that is something that those posh sisters of yours won’t ever have had!’
Lydia stiffened a little as he slowly edged her low-necked, lace-trimmed ball gown even lower down her arms to expose the soft flesh of her breasts.
‘Robert!’ she protested. ‘You know what we were told, what Alfred said the specialist said. That I should not have another child.’
She had lost a child at birth eight months after Robert had first learned he was to be on the Guild Committee, and they had been told then that it would not be safe for her to conceive again. The lost baby, a boy child, had damaged her inside. Since then Robert had been acutely careful but Lydia still worried.
‘There won’t be a child,’ Robert assured her thickly. ‘I shall see to that. God, but I want you, Lyddy…’
He had always been a vigorously sexual man, which was part of what had attracted Lydia to him in the first place, even if she had been too naïve then to recognise her feelings for what they were. He had been very different from the other young men she had known: the sons of her parents’ friends, destined to enter either the legal or medical professions, like their fathers and their grandfathers. Robert had been a breath of dangerously exciting fresh air, blowing through her sheltered world and catching her up in it.
‘Marry Robert Pride! My dear, no, you can’t mean it!’ her mother had protested, shocked.
But Lydia had meant it. She had been of age, and she had had her little bit of money left to her by her grandmother and, more important so far as she had been concerned, she had had love and Robert.
And, of course, she still loved him, but now she had her daughters’ futures to think of, and now, ironically, she understood just how her own mother must have felt because there was no way she wanted her daughters to follow her example. No! What she wanted for them was what she herself had so recklessly disdained: the house in Winckley Square like her elder sister, Amelia; or the elegant vicarage like Jane, her second; or the handsome mansion in Hoylake on the Wirral, like the elder of her twin sisters, Lavinia, who had married a solicitor. Her twin Emily’s husband was the headmaster of Hutton grammar school twenty miles away.
The futures of their sons and daughters, unlike her own, were assured. Their sons, unlike her John, would automatically go to Hutton, as her father had done; her daughters, like theirs, might have been educated at Preston’s Park School, but, once adult, the world of their cousins would be closed to Ellie and Connie, unless they married into it.
Robert’s hungry, demanding kisses distracted her. It was a hot night; the sounds of the revelry outside echoing into their bedroom.
‘Robert, please be careful,’ she pleaded with him as he slipped her dress off her shoulders and started to unlace her.
She always worried when, as now, he was in one of his ebullient, boisterous moods, filled with energy and excitement, just in case he should forget himself and the precautions they were obliged to take. She gave a small moan as she felt him touching her, her body tensing and then quivering as the aching sensation of wanting him began its familiar dance with her fear. Outside, the raucous laughter of some late revellers masked the small groan of pleasure she gave as her own need overwhelmed her fear. It had always been like this between them for her; her own secret cause of joy and shame. She had no idea where it had come from, this deep, dangerous chord of sensuality, so strong that it could override everything else.
Calling out to Robert, she dug her nails into the strong muscles of his arms, lifting her body against his, driven by her own hunger. Wrapping herself around him, she drew him down against her and into her body, glorying in the hot, strong feel of him inside her.
No, her sisters would never have known anything like this. Even now, Robert still had the power to make her want him with a ferocity that shocked her in the cold light of day as much as it thrilled her in the sweaty, secret, dark heat of night.
And it had been so long. Weeks…Passionately she bit at his mouth, and felt him shudder as she urged him to thrust deeper.
‘Lyddy…’ Robert tried to protest, but he ached so much for her – as much now, after nearly twenty years of marriage, as he had done when they had first met. But they had to be careful. There must be no child…he must not…
Gritting his teeth, Robert made to withdraw from her, but Lyddy refused to let him, moaning in protest, clinging to him, locking her muscles and writhing frantically against him.
‘No. Lyddy…we must not…’ Robert repeated, but the words were lost, torn from him by Lydia’s passionate kiss.
It had always been like this between them, and Lydia desperately hoped that she might not have passed on to her daughters this wanton strain in her nature of which she was so ashamed.
As the sensation inside her swelled and grew, it became impossible for her to think any longer – only to feel, to ache, to want…
She was almost there. Almost…
‘Robert!’ As she cried his name and clung to him she felt him groan and jerk back from her.
The spill of his completion fell hot and sticky against her thigh.
Shuddering, and gripped only by her own sense of aching frustration, Lydia reached out to guide his hand to her body so that he might complete what he had started.
TWO
‘Now remember, we are all to stay together,’ Robert warned his family as they stepped out into the street to join the crowds already there, intent on watching the final torch-lit procession of the Guild celebrations as it made its way through the streets to the barracks.
It had been a long day. After attending a subscription lunch they had seen the matinée performance of The Yeomen of the Guard at the Theatre Royal in Fishergate. From there Robert had taken John to watch the traditional football match played by the Guild against Woolwich Arsenal. And now they were joining the crowds pouring through the streets to watch and follow the procession.
Just the noise from the revellers was enough to make Ellie want to cover her ears.
‘I don’t think there’s any point in trying to get to Fishergate,’ her father was saying. ‘There’s even more people here than I expected. They’re saying that the shopkeepers in Fishergate have made hundreds of guineas letting out viewing space from their windows.’
‘Well, we have had just as good a view from our own home,’ Lydia told him, ‘and it hasn’t cost us a single penny!’
She gave a small gasp and clung tightly to her husband’s arm as the crowd swirled round them. ‘Stay close together, children,’ she urged them anxiously. ‘Connie, you hold on to me and, Ellie, you take charge of John and keep close to us. Robert, are you sure it’s safe to be out?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘The street is packed so close with people that in the heat I feel I can hardly breathe.’
‘They are saying that it is the best-attended Guild on record,’ Robert confirmed happily. ‘And we shall be perfectly all right just so long as we stay together.’
‘Dad, just look at that,’ John called out excitedly, as a group of ghostly looking grotesques walked past, their torches held aloft to illuminate their eerie masks and costumes.
Ellie shuddered, as repelled by their appearance as her younger brother was admiring.
The noise from the revellers watching and the participants in the procession was ear-shatteringly strident: young children blew shrill toy trumpets, girls screamed, and each group participating in the parade seemed to have its own musical accompaniment. A group of boisterous young men, shouldering their way through the crowds, were singing bawdy music-hall songs, whilst another group sang a rousing military anthem.
All around the Prides the warm night air was punctuated by the sounds of people’s enthusiastic excitement, and as for the smells…! Ellie wrinkled her nose as one of the Southport shrimpers walked past in her distinctive local dress, carrying a tray of her wares. The wings of her white hat were so wide that Ellie marvelled they weren’t crushed by the crowd, but then everyone knew that the shrimpers were a formidable band of women and took care not to jostle them.
John started to beg for some, but Lydia shook her head. It had been a hot day, and heaven alone knew just how long the shrimps had been on those trays. A scuffle broke out amongst the crowd and Robert started to move his family out of the way.
‘Ellie, let go of me,’ John demanded. He had seen a school friend a few yards away and was determined to boast to him about how close he had been able to get to the balloon in Avenham Park before it had begun its ascent.
‘John!’ Ellie protested, as he finally broke her hold and darted into the crowd. ‘Come back here.’
She went after him, calling crossly to him as she did so, but he refused to pay any attention to her.
Having gained his freedom, John quickly abandoned his original goal of reaching his friend and instead started to make for the front of the street, intent on getting a better view of the procession. He thought it a poor thing that his father had refused to allow him out on his own or, at the very least, agreed that they could walk alongside the procession.
For an agile ten-year-old, wriggling through the tight-packed mass of people was relatively easy; for Ellie, following furiously in his wake, it was very much more difficult.
With her hair up and her new dress on she was not a young girl any more but a young woman. Disapproving matrons and high-spirited young men both commented on her progress through their midst in terms that brought a hot sting of colour to her face, although for very different reasons.
When one young gallant actually dared to refuse to let her pass until she had allowed him a kiss, she gave him such a look of fulminating fury and disdain that he immediately stepped back. Where on earth was John? Despairingly Ellie searched the crowd. She had come only a few yards down Friargate, but the press of people was such that she felt almost as though she was in an alien land. All around her she could hear the hum of unfamiliar accents mingling with those of the townsfolk.
‘John!’ she called out, relief filling her as she suddenly saw his familiar tow-coloured head only feet away from her.
The procession was almost out of Friargate now and, as Ellie plunged into the crowd to grab hold of John, it suddenly became a dangerous maelstrom of humanity as it poured into the space left by the procession and surged down the street behind it. To Ellie’s shock she suddenly found herself being lifted off her feet by the sheer force of the tightly packed bodies and carried forward, totally helpless. She started to panic, frantically trying to turn round and make her way back to where she had last seen John, but the press of the crowd made it impossible for her to do so. It was the most frightening sensation she had ever experienced.
She gave a small cry of pain as her new straw hat was tugged off, causing its pins to pull on her hair. She could hardly breathe, let alone move. She could hear other women screaming and men calling out but somehow she felt oddly distanced from the sounds. Her chest felt so tight, she could feel her own heart pounding, and her head too. Someone’s elbow jarred accidentally into her body but she barely felt the blow. She wanted her father! Her mother! She tried to call for them but could only make a tiny pitiful mew of sound, it was becoming so hard for her to breathe. There was a dreadful pain inside her chest, as though it was being crushed…
Gideon Walker had seen Ellie as he made his way through the crowd and had immediately recognised her as the pretty blonde girl he had seen standing in the upper window embrasure of Robert Pride’s Friargate butcher’s shop. His eyes had been drawn to her. She was very pretty, and he had spent more time than he wanted to admit thinking about her since then.
He had seen what was happening to her, but by the time Gideon, who had been less than ten feet away from her, finally managed to push through the crowd to reach her, she was in very grave danger of being trampled by the crowd as it surged after the procession.
Terrified and scarcely able to breathe, Ellie was at first too relieved to be aware of just who her rescuer was when a pair of strong male hands grabbed hold of her and dragged her upright, but by the time Gideon had guided her free of the crowd she was acutely conscious not just of the fact that he had probably saved her life but also of his identity. Now that she was standing so close to him she could see just how tall and broad-shouldered he was, and how mesmerising those silver-grey eyes of his actually were.
‘You shouldn’t be out alone. It isn’t safe,’ Gideon told her, his voice gruff with the mixed emotions of protectiveness and desire that she was arousing in him.
‘I was trying to find my brother,’ Ellie defended herself. Her head ached, and her hands were shaking as she reached up to try to straighten her hair. She knew how dishevelled and untidy she must look. There was a tear in the flounce of her new dress and several grubby stains marked its original pristine freshness.
‘Ellie! There you are! Thank goodness!’ Robert Pride was frowning at Gideon as he studied him.
‘Father, this young man has just been kind enough to help me,’ Ellie explained, guessing what her father was thinking. ‘John ran off and I was trying to find him and…and the crowd…’
As her emotions overcame her, Gideon stepped forward. ‘I saw Miss Pride. And fortunately I was close enough to be able to go to her assistance.’
Robert’s frown deepened. ‘You know my daughter?’ he demanded suspiciously.
‘I know your brother, William Pride, the drover. I have been working for him. He pointed out your shop to me and Miss Pride happened to…to be there,’ Gideon responded equably.
‘I see.’ Robert’s frown relaxed. ‘Well, we are indeed indebted to you, Mr…?’
‘Walker. Gideon Walker.’
‘And you say you work for my brother?’
‘Only on a temporary basis. I was apprenticed to a master cabinet-maker in Lancaster.’ Gideon gave a small shrug. ‘He has three sons of his own to follow him into the business. Now that I am out of my apprenticeship, and have done my time as a journeyman, it is my intention to set up in business on my own.’
‘So you come from Lancaster. Do you have family there?’
‘Robert, I want to get Ellie inside,’ Lydia interrupted her husband. ‘She is very much shocked.’
‘Of course,’ Robert agreed.
‘Oh, it is too bad,’ John was complaining. ‘I wanted to go all the way to the barracks with the parade and buy myself some souvenirs.’
‘I’m sorry, son, but with this crowd it would be far too dangerous.’
Sensing that John was about to argue, and aware of Ellie’s need to get inside, Gideon shook his own head. ‘I must say, I would not want to do anything so foolhardy. I dare say there must be a hundred pickpockets in that crowd and –’
‘Pickpockets?’
Over his son’s head Robert gave Gideon a grateful look. John cared far more for his pocket than his person and Gideon had hit on exactly the right means of dampening his eagerness to follow the parade.
‘I don’t know what your plans are for the rest of the evening,’ Robert smiled at Gideon, ‘but you would be more than welcome to join us for supper.’
‘That would be very kind,’ Gideon responded, ‘but I wouldn’t want to impose.’
‘There would be no imposition,’ Robert assured him, ‘and, besides, you will be able to furnish me with the latest news of my brother.’
The two men exchanged a complicit look and Gideon recognised that it was no secret to Ellie’s father that his brother had a woman in the town whom he visited whenever he was there, as well as a wife in Lancaster.
‘So, Gideon, tell me a little bit more about yourself,’ Robert insisted, as they all took their places around the supper table.
‘There is very little to tell.’
Ellie had disappeared upstairs with her mother once they had returned to the house, but Gideon was pleased to see that she was feeling well enough to sit down to supper, even if she was still looking very pale.
‘My father was one of Earl Peel’s gamekeepers until his death some years ago. He had met my mother originally when she was a personal maid to the Countess of Derby. Later she worked here in Preston, I believe, but moved back to the country when she married. My mother only survived my father by a few months and I was very fortunate in that the Earl paid for my indenture for me.’
‘So both your parents were in service then, Mr Walker?’ Lydia stated coolly.
Calmly Gideon inclined his head in assent.
It was already plain to him that Lydia considered herself to be something above the common run. The china from which they were eating was of high quality, the tablecloth elegantly embroidered Irish linen – Gideon knew that because he had been taught to recognise and appreciate such things by his mother. There was no snobbery as sharp and keen as that of the nobility’s household servants.
‘Well, Preston is a thriving town,’ Robert assured him, apparently oblivious to his wife’s coolness towards their guest.
‘But it won’t be easy for you, Mr Walker, to establish yourself in such a business without any financial or family support,’ Lydia was quick to point out.
She was already aware of the discreet interest Gideon was showing in Ellie, and she was determined to make it plain to Gideon that Ellie was beyond his reach. When she had married out of her own class, at least Robert had had a thriving business, and she her own inheritance. Gideon, it was obvious, had nothing. She might have ignored the warnings of her own mother, but she did not want either of her daughters to copy her mistakes. Love was all very well, and she did love Robert, but she also felt many sharp pangs of envy and regret whenever she visited her sisters and compared their lives to her own.
‘It won’t be easy, no,’ Gideon responded, ‘but certainly it is not impossible either.’
There was no way he was going to reveal his childhood dreams to Lydia. He could still remember how his mother had reacted when she had found him meticulously drawing a plan of Earl Peel’s house.
‘Gideon, what are you doing?’ she had asked him in an angry scolding voice. ‘You are supposed to be practising your handwriting, not wasting time drawing.’
‘But, Mam, just look at this. See how this part of the house comes out here – well, if it were to be brought out further and –’
‘Give that to me!’ his mother had demanded, tearing in pieces the sheet he had been drawing on, her mouth compressing and her face very red. ‘Don’t let me catch you wasting time on such silliness again, otherwise your father will be taking his belt to you.’
Gideon had loved his mother and he knew that she had loved him, but he had often felt that she did not understand him, and as a child that had both confused and hurt him at times. To him, the drawing that she considered to be a waste of time was as instinctive and necessary as breathing, but he had quickly learned that it was a pleasure it was best to keep hidden.
He had been twelve when he had realised that he wanted to be an architect – having read about the profession in one of the Earl’s discarded newspapers – and not very much older when he had recognised that for someone like him, this was an impossible dream. At least as a cabinet-maker he was able to satisfy in some small measure his hunger to create and build.
Was Gideon Walker challenging her, Lydia wondered, as she absorbed both his answer and the thoughtful look he had given her. If so…
A quick glance at her daughter’s still-pale face assured her that Ellie was in far too distressed a state to be aware of the young man’s interest in her, never mind return it.
‘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!
THREE
‘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.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
