by Annie Groves
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 excit
ement, 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 distan
ced 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.