by Annie Groves
‘Well, wi’out anyone to run this house for you I don’t see as how you could have done anything else,’ Will had confirmed robustly.
It wasn’t his place after all to add to Robert’s misery by telling him what he thought of young Ellie for behaving in the way she had. Dropping Gideon who just wasn’t the same lad any more – aye, and acting like Preston wasn’t good enough for her now! Anyroad, Will knew his brother well enough to know that he would fly to his daughter’s defence, just as he had always done to his wife’s.
Now, though, Will’s forehead crinkled in genuine concern as he looked around the unkempt room. He had been hearing tales about his brother that made him feel it was time he stepped in and did what he could to help.
‘Se’thee, our Rob,’ he began breezily. ‘Why don’t you and me go into town and to a music hall this evening? That ’ud cheer you up. Bit of a comedian, and all them pretty lasses?’ he encouraged him enthusiastically.
Robert expelled a sigh. He didn’t really care what he did but he knew his brother well enough to know that he would not give up until he got his way.
‘Aw, come on, Robert. It’s too late to change your mind now! And besides, what harm will it do? It’s time you went out and had a bit o’ fun. You’ve mourned your Lyddy for a full twelve-month, as is right and proper, like, and now it’s time to get on with living. An evening at the music hall and a bit o’ supper. Where’s the harm in that?’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Robert agreed. He noticed that Will was wearing a new suit in honour of the occasion and looked very dapper indeed. There was an eager glint in his eyes that Robert knew of old but it was too late for him to have second thoughts now. Will was already urging him to hurry.
It had been a warm day and the town was busy, the millworkers making the most of their Saturday afternoon off. It brought a wry smile to Robert’s lips to notice that on no less than three separate occasions different women made bold attempts to catch the eye of his brother.
‘A friend of yours, Will?’ Robert teased him, mock innocently, when the third woman had taken umbrage at Will’s attempts to pretend not to know her. Lyddy would certainly not have approved of such an enterprise as a music-hall trip, especially in the company of Will.
The market square was still busy with shoppers and the brothers skirted round them.
‘Seen anything of young Gideon Walker lately?’ Will asked Robert conversationally as they reached the theatre, where a queue had already formed for the next performance.
‘He called by the other week,’ Robert answered. ‘You know he offered to take John’s dog when he went off to school and he wanted John’s address so that he could let him know how the dog was going on.’ Robert’s mouth compressed with remembered pain. He hadn’t been able to admit to Gideon that he couldn’t give him any news of John as he had none.
‘Well, seems like he’s doing pretty well for himself,’ Will commented, pausing to wink at one of the pair of girls standing in the queue in front of them as she turned round.
She responded with a saucy smile, nudging her friend, who also turned round. Tall, with a mop of red curls, she looked past Will to Robert, her eyes widening in recognition as she did so.
‘It’s Robert Pride, isn’t it?’ she asked.
Assuming that the young woman must be an occasional customer he could not remember, Robert allowed himself to be drawn into the conversation, which Will had already eagerly instigated with the two girls.
Although, as a married man, he had never indulged in the open flirtatiousness that Will always adopted towards members of the opposite sex, Robert was by no means immune to the charms of a pretty face, especially when its owner was only too happy to make it plain that she was enjoying his company, and, somehow or other, by the time they actually got into the music hall, it had been arranged that the four of them would sit together.
‘Perhaps we could even go out and have a bit o’ supper together after the show, eh, girls?’ Will suggested nonchalantly, throwing Robert a grin as he did so.
Robert could feel the claims of his dead wife tugging at his conscience, but the doors had opened and the crowd swirled forward, catching the redheaded girl off guard and almost unbalancing her. Automatically Robert reached out a protective hand to steady her.
‘My, what a gentleman you are, Robert Pride,’ she teased him, batting her eyelashes at him and smiling provocatively. They had reached the door now and she grinned up at him. ‘Not going to offer me your arm, then?’
Obediently Robert did so.
‘That’s more like it, our Rob,’ Will murmured approvingly behind him, before demanding, ‘So what are your names, then, girls?’
‘Mine’s Maggie,’ the redhead responded boldly, whilst the young woman on Will’s arm giggled and told him, ‘And I’m Daisy.’
Gideon tensed and stopped walking, causing the person behind him in the busy street to curse as he almost bumped into him. His mind had been too busy mentally reckoning up how he was going to pay his suppliers’ bills whilst he waited for the money that was owing to him to warn him that he was about to turn into Friargate.
He avoided the street like the plague, although why he should bother to avoid it when Ellie wasn’t there any more was unclear.
Ellie. Gideon scowled, angry with himself for even remembering her name, never mind allowing her into his thoughts.
The sun had been dipping, dying into the horizon on a crimson sea, when he had emerged from his workroom to breath the sawdust out of his lungs and some fresh air into them. He had been working night and day for the last three weeks, desperate to finish a contract, which it now looked as though he wasn’t going to be paid for in full. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the more senior of the two jobbing carpenters he had taken on had drunk too much one Saturday night a fortnight ago, started a fight and ended up with a broken wrist. Unable to replace him at short notice, Gideon had been forced to do his work as well as his own.
The men who worked for him complained that Gideon drove them too hard, but it was no harder than he drove himself. All they had to worry about was their pay at the end of the week; he had to worry about a hell of a lot more. All the time he was driven by the fear that he could lose everything he was working so hard for. He was earning enough to pay his rent – just – and the men – most of the time – but he had had to cut his prices to the bone to get in as many orders as he could manage to establish himself, but also to make ends meet.
One of the first jobbing carpenters he had hired had lost his job with him because he had questioned Gideon’s pricing, shaking his head as he told him that he was cutting things too close.
‘I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself,’ Gideon had told him angrily. ‘I know what I’m doing. That’s why I’m the one doing the hiring and you’re the one working for me.’
He had to make money; he had to get himself established; he had to prove…Gideon froze. He had nothing to prove. Nothing. Especially not to Ellie Pride, damn her. A girl who had deserted her family when they needed her most.
Gideon had one ambition, one goal, and that was to become rich. So rich that when Ellie Pride heard how rich he was she would regret to her dying day that she had rejected him.
The pain inside him was like the dying sun, now painting the river with crimson streaks of light – hot, burning…
Gideon’s fingers itched for charcoal so that he could capture the scene in front of him. On the rare occasions when he wasn’t working, he walked the town, pausing to sketch buildings that caught his eye. Gideon was fascinated by buildings of every kind. Only the previous month, when he had gone to Winckley Square to finish a job for Miss Isherwood, he had watched from a distance as the young architect she had hired to design a conservatory for her had shown her his drawings.
Later that evening Gideon had got out his own sketchbook and started drafting some ideas of his own, before throwing the pad aside in a gesture of bitter frustration. He was a cabinet-maker and he h
ad better remember it instead of wasting his time on fools’ dreams.
The year had driven the last of the youthful softness from his face, carving harsh lines of bitterness from his nose to his mouth. The tender young lover who had walked with Ellie in the spring green of Avenham Park a year ago no longer existed. The man who had taken his place had stamped the tenderness out of his soul and replaced it with pitiless iron bitterness.
He was a man driven in equal measure by pride and pain. A man who had refused to give that broken-wristed workman a halfpenny more than he owed him, and a man who had still been fool enough to hand the carpenter’s wife a full guinea when she had come crying at his door, two snotty-nosed brats at her heels.
He looked down at the dog at his feet – John Pride’s dog, in reality, and the reason he was out here now, heading for a walk along the river instead of working on his accounts.
A woman with two brats and no money to put food in their mouths, a young boy with a dog he loved to desperation and could not keep – maybe he was soft enough to find compassion in his heart for them, but there would never be any there for Ellie Pride.
TWELVE
It was the week of Cecily’s wedding and of Ellie’s longed-for opportunity to see her family. Now that she was finally back home in Preston, Ellie could hardly breathe for excitement and anticipation.
‘Oh, thank goodness we are arrived. I am exhausted,’ Aunt Lavinia announced as she sank down into a chair.
Mr Parkes had hired several rooms at the Bull and Royal Hotel in Preston, where the wedding breakfast was to be held, with dancing in one of its ballrooms afterwards, and they had travelled by train from Liverpool earlier in the day.
Their visit was to last for several days to accommodate not just the wedding celebrations, but also to allow the four remaining Barclay sisters to spend time with one another.
Mr Parkes had not travelled to Preston on the train with them, having announced that he was far too busy to take so much time away from his practice, and would instead motor over to Preston and then return to Hoylake the day after the wedding.
At Aunt Lavinia’s insistence, both Wrotham and Lizzie had accompanied them, and Lizzie was now busy unpacking and pressing their gowns whilst Wrotham looked on watchfully. Aunt Lavinia’s eau-de-Nil silk gown, which Ellie had painstakingly altered, shimmered as Lizzie carefully removed it from the trunk.
‘Wrotham, you have packed my tonic, haven’t you?’ Lavinia demanded anxiously. ‘Perhaps I should have some now just as a precaution…Yes, I think I will!’
Surreptitiously Ellie glanced at her watch. All the bridesmaids, of which she and Connie were two, were to change into their dresses at the Gibsons’, and she did not want to be late arriving there. Connie and her Aunt and Uncle Simpkins were not staying at the Bull, having made arrangements to stay with another clergyman, whose parish lay within the town.
‘Well, of course, my sister’s husband does not possess the same financial advantages as Mr Parkes,’ had been Lavinia’s comment when she had discussed the arrangements for the wedding with Ellie, ‘and it will doubtless cost them nothing to stay with a fellow vicar.’
One of the things Ellie had learned during the months she had lived with her Aunt Lavinia was the sometimes amusing rivalry that seemed to exist between the sisters, often manifesting itself in petty jealousies more suited to the schoolroom than the drawing rooms of mature ladies. Although her own mother had refused ever to breathe a word of criticism against any member of her family, no matter how much Ellie and her siblings had sometimes done so in private.
So Ellie now knew that Amelia, the eldest of the sisters, was sometimes considered ‘bossy’ by the others, and that Jane, who was married to the Reverend Mr Simpkins, was, in Lavinia’s opinion, too fond of standing in moral judgement on Lavinia’s extravagances, whilst Emily, who was married to the headmaster of John’s school, must surely find it dreary having forever to listen to a man who spoke more often in Latin than he did in English.
However, nowhere was the rivalry between the sisters more keenly felt and shown than in social situations – hence Aunt Lavinia’s anxiety over her outfit for the wedding. Normally Ellie would have been endlessly entertained and amused by her aunt, but today she was too eager to see Connie to want to listen.
‘Ellie! Oh, I have missed you so much.’ Connie’s eyes filled with tears the minute she saw her elder sister, her determination to ignore her as a punishment for the way she had not written to her forgotten as she rushed towards Ellie.
Despite knowing their Aunt Amelia’s disapproving eye was on them, Ellie returned Connie’s hug with fierce intensity.
‘Ellie, I’ve got to talk to you,’ Connie burst out ‘Quick, let’s go somewhere that we can talk on our own.’
Ellie shook her head warningly. This was the Connie she remembered, and very definitely not the Connie of those stilted uninformative letters.
‘Connie, we can’t, not now! Not until after the wedding!’
‘Oh, that’s typical of you,’ Connie protested sulkily. ‘Ellie, you have no idea how miserable I have been.’ Connie couldn’t contain her feelings any longer. ‘You are so lucky to be living with our Aunt and Uncle Parkes. Just look at your gown – silk and in the latest style,’ she declared enviously. ‘Our Aunt Jane considers that it is wickedly sinful to waste money on expensive clothes instead of giving it to the poor! All she and our Uncle Simpkins can think of is religion and good works.’ Connie made a face as she glanced over her shoulder in the direction of their aunts.
Worriedly, Ellie studied her sister. She was used, of course, to Connie’s theatrical exaggeration, but she could see that her sister was thinner, and there was a look of desperation in her eyes that made Ellie’s heart clench in sisterly anxiety. She could well understand that her vain, giddy little sister would not take kindly to being dressed in a gown so plain that it was almost puritan, without so much as a flounce or tuck of lace to break up its severity.
‘I hate this dress! It’s just horrid,’ Connie complained, looking enviously again at Ellie’s.
‘The colour suits you,’ Ellie told her placatingly, ‘and if there is time whilst we are here I could trim it a little for you.’
‘Oh, Ellie, would you? When? On Monday? We could go to Miller’s Arcade and get the trimming. Mama’s sewing machine will still be at home. We can go there and…’ Suddenly her face crumpled. ‘Oh, Ellie, I miss home so much. You have no idea how unhappy I have been.’
Her distress caused Ellie’s own eyes to prickle a little with threatening tears. In an attempt to comfort her, Ellie whispered quickly to her, ‘Oh, Connie, so do I!’
‘Why can’t we go home, Ellie? I would have written to Father asking him to let us, but it was hard enough sending my letter to you. I was so afraid that the postboy wouldn’t take it, and it cost me a whole penny.’ She pulled a face. ‘I hate those stupid letters they make me write to you. Ellie, they are so unkind to me…’ Connie whispered, her bottom lip trembling and her eyes dark.
Ellie listened with growing dismay, not least because she had most definitely not received an uncensored letter from Connie. Her heart beat unpleasantly fast, and she felt frightened and distressed. It was a shock to learn how unhappy Connie was, and Ellie was already conscious of the narrow-eyed look their Aunt Jane was giving them. Connie was wilful and headstrong, Ellie knew, but she could see that her sister was genuinely upset.
Connie was her younger sister and it was her duty and her responsibility to take care of her!
‘Father has never written to me once, nor come to see me.’ Connie was practically wailing. ‘If he had done so I would have begged him to take me away. Ellie, you have no idea how unhappy I have been. And cold. I am always cold and hungry…’
Now Ellie really was shocked. ‘Connie, you are exaggerating,’ she began and then stopped as Connie gave her a bleak look.
‘No I am not,’ Connie replied passionately. ‘If you knew half of what I have had to put up with
– reading dreary books and being made to sew for the poor…and…and just not being at home with everyone, with Father and John and you…Oh, Ellie!’
Ellie couldn’t say anything. The truth was that she longed to return to their old home and their old life just as much as Connie. And now, added to that need, there was also her elder-sister desire to protect her younger siblings. Ellie felt conscience-stricken to discover that Connie was so unhappy, but what could she do about it?
‘Ellie, whilst we’re here couldn’t you go and see Father, and persuade him to let us come home? You could look after us all, and I know he would listen to you because you are the eldest.’
Ellie opened her mouth to tell Connie that they would never be allowed to do any such thing, and then closed it again. Her heart was racing with nervous excitement. It was a bold plan but maybe she could persuade their father. As her heart leaped again, Ellie realised just how much she longed to return home.
She took a deep breath. ‘Very well, Connie, I…I will speak to Father at the dance this evening. You are right, I’m sure, that I could manage to run the household at Friargate. Our Aunt Parkes suffers with her nerves, and often deputises me to give the servants their instructions, and besides, Mother taught us both how things should be done. I am older now and I do not believe that Mother would want us all to be separated from one another in the way that we are, especially the poor little baby. He will grow up without knowing us at all. I wrote to Aunt Jepson asking her to send me a photograph of him, but she has not replied.’ The subject of their baby brother had been causing Ellie increasing anxiety and guilt. ‘I am going to ask our father to change his mind and allow us all to come home, but you are not to say anything until I have spoken with him,’ she cautioned her sister.
‘But Father will not be at the dance,’ Connie told her sharply. ‘Did you not know? He has not been invited.’