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.

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.

As the men brought the painting down the stairs, the artist’s name glittered under the light of the chandelier. Hesitantly, Mary reached out and touched it, running her fingertips over the slightly raised surface of the paint.

Richard Warrender.

Very briefly she closed her eyes. Some memories were too painful for her to recall, even now.

FOUR

‘A puppy for John, is it, or more like a sweetener to win the favour of young Ellie?’ William Pride laughed as he watched his young helper button the collie pup he had brought with him from the borders inside his jacket.

‘You’re wasting your time there, my lad,’ William told Gideon, shaking his head. ‘She’s a fine-looking girl, I’ll grant you that. Got her mother’s looks and her fancy airs and graces as well. Lyddy will never allow any daughter of hers to get sweet on a working lad like you. Thinks too much of herself for that, she does.’

‘Mr Pride has always made me very welcome in his home,’ Gideon said stiffly.

‘Oh aye, our Robert – Mr Pride – he will, but we’re talking about Mrs Pride now, lad, ’er as was “a Barclay” before she wed our Robert. I remember how it was when they first met. Let us know that she thought herself well above us, she did, allus talking about her father the solicitor in that posh voice of hers. Of course, our Robert was well fixated on her. Daft as a tuppence-halfpenny wristwatch he was – dafter! I could never see the sense in it m’sel’. Never catch me allowing any woman to rule my life. Good enough in their right place, women is, but only that place!’ He winked meaningfully at Gideon. ‘What tha’ wants, lad, is some willing wench – but make sure she’s clean, mind. I don’t mind telling you I had my problems in that way when I was a young green ’un. Don’t you make the mistake of settling for one before you’ve sampled a few like I did, either. Naught wrong with our Gertie, mind, but a bit of choice isn’t a bad thing, if you know what I mean.’ He grinned, tapping the side of his nose.

Grimly, Gideon forced himself not to object. He knew exactly what his employer meant, and he knew too that once they had parted company William would make his way first to the pub, where he would garner the current gossip, and then to the home of the woman who was his ‘wife’ whenever he was in the town, and by whom he had three tow-headed sons.

Gideon wasn’t finding it as easy to get work as he had hoped – but William Pride paid a fair wage to his men, even though the work itself wasn’t what Gideon really wanted to do.

Every time they visited Preston, as well as calling at Friargate, ostensibly to update John on the progress of his pup, Gideon combed the town’s streets, looking for somewhere to set up his business.

So far his search had been disappointing. Those townspeople rich enough to employ a cabinet-maker, instead of buying ready-manufactured furniture, automatically looked to tradesmen they knew and believed they could trust, many often going as far afield as Gideon’s own ex-master in Lancaster.

He had had one small but potentially lucrative job, which had set his hopes soaring – the restoration of a carved banister in a tumbling-down manor house in Lancashire, which had been bought by a newly rich railway shareholder, but the man had refused to pay Gideon the full amount they had agreed, and he had been lucky to cover his costs for the job, never mind make a profit.

He was not about to give up, though. The struggle he was having now would make his eventual success very sweet, and even sweeter if he were able to have Ellie to share it with him.

Ellie. How she teased and tantalised him, giving him bold, tormenting looks one minute, and the next blushing a softly delicious pink just because he had happened to comment on her mother’s pregnancy.

Gideon frowned as he thought about Lydia Pride. There was a very different atmosphere in the Pride household now, in April, than there had been when he had first been invited there in Guild Week.

Robert Pride himself had changed, Gideon believed. He no longer seemed to laugh as easily or as heartily, and there was a hangdog, sheepish look about him whenever he was around his wife.

Even Ellie seemed to be affected by the change in her parents’ relationship, and Gideon had seen how very protective she had become of her mother.

The pup inside his jacket struggled and yelped, reminding him of its presence and his plans. He had first to take his bag to his lodgings – a small but reasonably clean room tucked away at the back of a small courtyard – and then he would deliver the puppy – and set eyes again on Ellie.

‘Show me again, Gideon,’ John pleaded as the balls he had been trying to juggle refused to move as dextrously in his hands as they did in Gideon’s.

Laughing, Gideon did so. They were standing outside Robert’s shop in the sharp spring sunlight, waiting for the rest of the Pride family. Robert had invited Gideon to join them for the traditional Easter Monday egg rolling in Avenham Park, and Gideon had accepted gratefully, only too pleased to have a legitimate excuse to spend some time with Ellie.

‘If you don’t want to go to the park, Mother, would you like me to stay here with you?’ Ellie offered anxiously.

‘No, you must go, Ellie, if only to keep an eye on John and that wretched dog of his,’ Lydia sighed tiredly.

The combination of a boldly inquisitive and danger-prone ten-year-old and an equally adventurous collie pup was not one that was designed to soothe a mother’s natural fears.

John had become devoted to his pet. They went everywhere together, and virtually every day he insisted that they all watch whilst this wondrous creature performed some new trick he had taught it.

‘And look out for Connie too. You know what she’s like.’

The closer it got to her due date, the more haunted Lydia was becoming by the warnings she had been given. It was all very well for Robert to say that doctors always tended to look on the black side, and to remind her that she had already produced three healthy children with no risk to herself whatsoever. Sometimes in the night she dreamed that she was a girl again, her body slender and empty, and she would wake up full of relief until she realised the truth.

Her sisters, she knew, blamed Robert, and so increasingly did she.

As the youngest child of the family she had perhaps been indulged rather more than the others – she had certainly been far more rebellious. Also her marriage, Lydia knew, was different from those of her sisters, just as her nature was different. If her daughters had inherited that streak of sensuality from her they would need to learn to guard against it, otherwise…

‘Are you sure?’ she heard Ellie asking her.

‘Yes. You go, and, Ellie…’ But as Ellie turned back, Lydia shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

To warn her daughter at this stage against Gideon Walker might do more harm than good. Ellie was a young girl, after all, and Gideon was an extremely handsome young man. Lydia was not so old that she could not remember the way she had felt when Robert had first looked at her with his bold, laughing eyes and his warm smile…

Sunshine danced on the crystal bowl in the middle of the table, and suddenly Ellie was impatient to be outside. Giving her mother a swift kiss, she hurried to the door.

‘John, if you are not careful you will break all your eggs before we even reach the park,’ Ellie scolded, as John, growing bored with his family’s leisurely progression, began to swing his basket of eggs.

The town’s Easter Monday festivities at Avenham Park was a popular and well-attended event, especially the egg-rolling race.

But much as John wanted to hurry them towards what he considered to be the most important and exciting part of the day, his sisters obstinately refused to listen.

‘Oh, Ellie, do look. There is Sukey Jefferies from school. Just look at her dress.’ Connie was tugging on Ellie’s arm.

Judiciously Ellie studied the other girl, who, like them, was accompanied by her family. The Jefferies family were involved in the cotton trade, and considered to be well-to-do, even though they did not actually own any of the town’s mills.

‘The silk is far too rich for a daytime outing,’ she pronounced, ‘and as for all those lace frills and flounces…’

‘It looks very grand,’ Connie breathed enviously. ‘I wish that Mother would allow me to wear a proper grown-up dress, instead of making me wear these stupid pinafores, like a child. After all, Sukey is only a year older than me.’

‘She is two years older,’ Ellie corrected her, ‘and her dress is far too fussy.’

It wasn’t just their beauty that the Barclay sisters were renowned for, it was their taste and stylishness as well, and Ellie knew instinctively just what her mother would have thought of Sukey’s gown, with all its fanciful, overdone trimmings.

Her own dress, for all its simplicity, was, Ellie knew, far more stylish and elegant, but before she could say as much to her sister, John was rudely interrupting their conversation, demanding, ‘Oh, why must we waste time talking about such stuff? If we don’t hurry we won’t get a decent place.’

‘There is plenty of time, and I know the exact spot we need,’ Ellie reassured him, unaware that she was being observed keenly by Gideon, walking slightly behind them with her father, as she gave John an impishly droll look.

‘What, you mean you will show me the spot you’ve won the egg race from three years running?’ John exclaimed in excitement.

This awesome feat by his elder sister had become a part of their family history, and secretly it was John’s goal not just to match it but, with luck, to better it.

‘What’s this? I hadn’t realised that we had a champion egg roller in our midst!’ Gideon exclaimed, joining in the fun.

Flushing a little, Ellie nevertheless held his gaze.

‘I think we shall have to put your skills to the test,’ Gideon announced, ‘since I consider myself to have some sporting skill.’

‘Yes! Yes!’ John encouraged, dancing up and down.

‘What do you say, Miss Pride – will you allow me to challenge you?’ Gideon laughed.

A little uncertainly, Ellie looked at her father, half expecting and even half hoping that he might object and insist, as she suspected her mother would have done, that such behaviour on her part would be unseemly, but to her consternation he just laughed and said, ‘You will have to be very good, Gideon, if you are to best Ellie. Had she been a boy I dare say she would be captaining the Hutton cricket team by now.’

They had nearly reached the end of the elegant colonnaded walk that led into the park. Several family groups had paused to chat, and Ellie recognised her cousin Cecily in one of them, with her fiancé, but she didn’t draw her father’s attention to their presence, sensitively aware that Cecily might not want to acknowledge them if she was with her fiancé’s family.

Cecily’s father-in-law-to-be was, as Aunt Gibson had proudly informed her sister, a very senior Liverpool surgeon, Sir James Charteris, who, through his wife’s family, was connected with the nobility!

A group of girls of around her own age hurried past them, and Ellie guessed from their loud voices that they must work in one of the town’s mills. Everyone knew that the noise inside the weaving sheds turned people deaf and that the millworkers had devised their own sign language for communicating with one another.

One of the girls suddenly stopped. Taller than Ellie, with a wild mane of thick curly red hair and a pale complexion, she gave Ellie an astutely assessing female look before tossing her head dismissively and going boldly up to Gideon, throwing him a look that was openly flirtatious, as she exclaimed in the thickest of the town’s dialect, ‘Well, if it isn’t Mr Gideon Walker…’

‘Good afternoon, Miss Nancy,’ Gideon responded with an easy openness that shocked and dismayed Ellie. Immediately she drew herself up to her own full height and pursed her lips every bit as disapprovingly as her mother would have done.

‘Miss Nancy!’ the redhead emphasised, and laughed.

‘Come on, Nance.’ One of the other girls tugged on her skirt. ‘There’s free refreshments for them as gets there first, and I’m fair clemmed…’

Watching the girls hurry away, Ellie had to admit that the cheap dress worn by ‘Miss Nancy’ had far more style about it than those of her companions. Did Gideon find the redheaded mill girl attractive? Did he think her pretty…prettier than she? Did he want to kiss her? Had he perhaps already kissed her?

Ellie’s mother considered that red was not a suitable hair colour for a young lady, and Ellie had been brought up to be proud of her own soft golden curls, but now suddenly she was sharply aware that a woman did not necessarily have to have blonde curls and ladylike manners to attract a man.

‘Who was that?’ John demanded, too young to feel any need to conceal his curiosity.

‘Miss Nancy and some of her co-workers rent rooms in the house next to where I rent my own,’ Gideon explained easily. ‘She came to me for assistance some time ago, when…when one of the girls had…had fainted. I believe that underneath her brash manner she is a good sort, and –’

‘These mill girls have a very hard life,’ Robert Pride interrupted. ‘Every year so many are killed in accidents with the heavy looms. There is much talk of the need to reform the conditions under which the mills are run.’

‘There is always talk,’ Gideon replied sharply, ‘but very rarely any action, and even when there is, the mill owners seem to find a way to circumvent it. I was called into one of the mills the other day to repair a piece of machinery – I think I would go mad had I to work there permanently. The noise alone, never mind anything else.’

Ellie could feel the heaviness that had enveloped the two men as they talked. The looks on their faces reminded her of the man she had seen in the fish market the previous Friday when she had gone there with her mother.

He had gathered a small crowd around him, and Ellie had been forced to wait until a pathway had been cleared before she could follow her mother past him. Whilst she had done so, she had heard the man declare, ‘These mills are a running sore on the face of our town, and worse, the running sore we can see. But what of those other sores which are hidden shamefully from view, the plight of those who work in such abominations? The plight of our womenfolk, our sisters, our daughters, our mothers…’

Ellie’s mother had dragged her away before Ellie could hear any more.

Now suddenly she felt angry with ‘Miss Nancy’ for intruding on the happiness of her day.

‘Come on,’ John was urging them all. ‘Hurry up…’

‘Are you sure you haven’t changed your mind?’ Gideon demanded teasingly as he and Ellie stood side by side at the top of the hill.

All around them children were rolling their eggs, their cries of disappointment or triumph filling the air.

Since neither she nor Gideon had come equipped with eggs to roll, Gideon and her father had purchased some from one of the booths set up in the park. Surreptitiously Ellie checked them. In her experience the right consistency of hard-boiled egg was essential if they were to roll any distance – and not just the consistency of the inside of the egg. She had always painted hers with a special paint she had mixed herself, which had helped to bond the shell together. But these eggs…

‘Chicken?’ Gideon demanded, laughing.

‘Chicken…eggs,’ John laughed, hugely delighted with his wit.

‘I don’t know why you are laughing, John Pride,’ Connie taunted him. ‘All your eggs are broken – apart from those eaten by your dog!’

With the two of them squabbling amicably as a backdrop, Ellie picked up her first egg.

Childishly she held her breath a little as it rolled down the hill, only letting it out when she saw that the egg had gone a respectable distance and remained unbroken as it lay in the small dip in the group that had trapped it.

‘Ah-ha. That is good, but I believe I can do better,’ Gideon boasted.

He had seen the look of smouldering female resentment that Ellie had given Nancy, and it was that rather than any desire to win the egg-rolling race that was responsible for his high spirits. Ellie had been jealous!

Carefully, Gideon reached for his first egg.

‘No, you can’t do that,’ Ellie reproached him firmly, as he gently threw the egg several yards before it dropped to the ground and rolled with great speed down the hill.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s against the rules.’

‘What rules? I haven’t seen any rules,’ Gideon protested, mock innocently.

He loved the way Ellie’s eyes darkened with emotion, the way she threw herself so wholeheartedly into everything she did. Was she herself aware of the passionate intensity of her own nature or had her mother succeeded in hiding it from her beneath the smothering strait-jacket of ladylike behaviour she imposed on her?

‘Gideon’s egg has gone further than yours, Ellie,’ John sang out.

Ellie reached for her second egg, giving Gideon a challenging look of determination.

This time it was Connie who was dancing up and down in excitement as they watched Ellie’s second egg roll triumphantly past Gideon’s.

‘Right!’ To John’s delight Gideon immediately took up a very determined male stance, rubbing his hands together lightly before picking up his own second egg.

Once again Ellie discovered that she was holding her breath whilst willing Gideon’s egg not to match the distance achieved by her own.

Judiciously, Gideon mentally measured the distance from where he was standing to where Ellie’s egg lay.

‘Come on, Gideon,’ John shouted. ‘You can’t let her beat you. She’s a girl.’

She certainly was, Gideon acknowledged, trying not to let himself think about the way the bodice of Ellie’s dress moulded the soft curves of her breasts.

There was something distractingly enticing about the demure, daintily pleated neckline against her throat. And as for that enchantingly ridiculous nonsense of straw and ribbons she was pleased to call a hat – did she have any idea just what she was doing to him when she looked up at him from beneath its brim, or when he looked at her and could see only the straight sweetness of her nose, and the full promise of her mouth?

If he allowed her to win, John would never let him hear the end of it, but if he beat her…He too was holding his breath as he watched his egg roll down the grassy slope.

Just a few feet short of her own, Gideon’s egg came to a stop. Exhilarated colour warmed Ellie’s face. She started to turn towards Gideon and then stopped as out of the corner of her eye she saw Rex, John’s pup, suddenly rush past her in pursuit of the egg.

‘No…he mustn’t touch it!’ she cried out, but Gideon, guessing what the pup had been instructed to do, was already lunging down the hill. Angrily, Ellie followed him, whilst Robert Pride firmly held John back, demanding that he recall his errant accomplice.

The pup had already reached the egg, which he had picked up, but the moment he saw Nemesis in the shape of both Gideon and Ellie bearing down on him, he dropped it and headed back to his master.

The egg, given fresh impetus, rolled happily forward, quickly overtaking the others, before dropping out of sight into a small hidden grassy dip.

‘Oh no!’ Ellie cried out hotly, and then gasped, as she suddenly lost her footing and pitched forward.

Immediately, Gideon turned to try to help her, his arms wrapping protectively around her, and somehow ended up also slipping on the steep slope. Body to body they followed the path of the egg and, like it, came to rest in the secluded grassy dip.

‘Oh, that John,’ Ellie condemned her young brother, as she lay against the protective warmth of Gideon’s body, trying to get her breath.

‘He is a mischief,’ Gideon agreed in amusement, the expression in his eyes suddenly changing as he looked at Ellie. ‘But right now,’ he murmured, ‘it is his sister I am much more interested in. Has anyone ever told you, Ellie Pride, just how beautiful you are? How adorably sweet your nose is. How irresistibly kissable your lips are…?’

With every word he uttered Gideon’s voice became thicker and softer, and with every word Ellie’s sense of excitement and wonder grew. She could feel her heart beating so fast beneath the bodice of her dress that it was a wonder she could still breathe.

As he looked down at her, into her eyes and then at her mouth, before lifting his gaze to her eyes again, Gideon groaned softly.

‘Ellie,’ he whispered. His fingertips touched the side of her face, and he marvelled at the softness of her skin, its purity and perfection, whilst Ellie shuddered in pleasure that such a little touch should do so much!

She could feel the warmth of Gideon’s breath against her face, her lips. His eyes were no longer a cold silver grey, but a hot liquid gunmetal colour that made her insides feel as though they were melting.

His lips touched hers, brushing them gently. Ellie gave a small gasp and then a soft sigh.

Boldly, Gideon kissed her with more pressure. He could feel his longing for her, his love exploding inside him. Unable to stop himself he ran the tip of his tongue along the soft, closed virginal innocence of her mouth. Her lips felt so soft, so warm, so Ellie…Cupping her face in his hands, Gideon forced himself to remember where they were.

‘I know it may be too soon to say this to you, Ellie Pride, but let me tell you this,’ he began, his voice husky with emotion. ‘I love you and I will always love you. And just as soon as I am able to do so I intend to claim you for my own. For my wife,’ he emphasised, just in case Ellie might mistake the seriousness of his intentions.

Her eyes shining with emotion, Ellie gazed wonderingly back at him. Gideon loved her. And she knew that she loved him. Hadn’t she spent far too many nights lying in the bed she shared with Connie, secretly thinking about him and dreaming of a moment like this, even to think of doubting it?

‘Nothing can stop what’s happening between us,’ Gideon told her fiercely. ‘Nothing…and no one.’

‘If the ladies are ready, I suggest that we start to make our way back to Winckley Square.’

Courteously Stephen Simpson waited for the female members of his party to agree with him. It had been at his suggestion that they had gone to the park to watch the local children rolling their eggs. He had a house party this Easter, and his guests had clamoured to witness such an unusual custom.

As she joined the other ladies of the party, Mary Isherwood smiled at her host. The Simpson family had owned their gold thread works in Avenham Lane for several generations, and were a sociable family, who, Mary knew, had been very fond of her mother. It had been kind of them to invite her to join this party. The ladies of the family had been the first hostesses to leave a calling card on her return to Preston.

‘I understand that you are having a great deal of work done on your late father’s house.’

Mary turned towards the woman speaking to her. They had met for only the first time today, and it was tempting for Mary to reply that she must have come by her information from someone else, since Mary herself had made no mention of Isherwood House.

Almost as though she guessed what Mary was thinking, the other woman explained, ‘I live across the square from you. My husband is Dr Gibson.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Mary acknowledged, fibbing politely. ‘I believe I have seen you in the square with your family.’

‘My daughters,’ Amelia informed her proudly. ‘My eldest, Cecily, has recently become engaged to Mr Paul Charteris. His father is an eminent surgeon and Mr Charteris hopes to follow in his father’s footsteps.’

Mary was able to place the other woman now and to realise who she was. ‘Ah, yes. I see that your daughters have inherited the Barclay family looks. They are both very pretty girls.’

Amelia beamed and preened herself a little. ‘Well, yes, it is true that they have. That is…my sisters and I…and luckily all our daughters have…’ She trailed off as she saw the direction in which Mary was looking.

‘I see that you are admiring Mr William Ainsworth’s villa,’ she smiled.

‘Admiring it!’ Mary’s voice hardened. ‘I could never do that, knowing the nature of the man who built it. My father had the reputation of being a hard employer – he was certainly a very hard father – but his lack of regard for his workers was nothing to that of William Ainsworth. The cruelties and injustices he inflicted on those who worked for him!’ Mary’s mouth compressed. ‘It is an open secret that the fines he imposed upon his wretched workers for his own cleverly thought-up “offences” rendered them unable to live on what was left of their wages, to the extent that the female workers were forced to –’

‘My dear,’ Amelia intervened hastily, her face flushing, ‘I have no wish to offend you, but as an unmarried woman, I do not think –’

‘You do not think what?’ Mary challenged her sharply. ‘That I should have been indelicate enough to discuss the fact that members of our sex have to sell their bodies on the streets of our town simply to feed themselves? No, shameful indeed that I should dare to do so! But how much more shameful is it that such a situation should exist and that we as women should turn our backs on it?’

Without waiting for Amelia to respond, Mary turned away and went to take her leave of her host.

It was perhaps unfair of her to let rip at her neighbour in such a way, but it infuriated her that women of Amelia’s ilk should so easily and so damagingly turn their backs on the misery that lay so close to their homes. But then who could blame her for her attitude when the law of the land itself denied her any say in the way the country was run? It was inequitable that in a country like Great Britain, which considered itself to be the foremost and most advanced, politically democratic nation in the world, that its women should be denied the most basic and most important political right – that of being allowed to vote.

The sooner that situation was changed the better, so far as Mary was concerned, and she knew that she was not alone in her desire.

FIVE

‘And this year I am going to enter Rex in the agricultural show, and –’

‘Oh, do stop going on about your wretched dog,’ Connie commanded her brother impatiently. ‘Have you spoken to Mam yet about my new dress, Ellie? I’m old enough now to have a proper grown-up outfit. All the other girls in my class –’

‘Connie!’ Ellie stopped her sister angrily. ‘You know that Mother does not like us to speak like that. We are to call her Mama or Mother.’

‘That is because she is a snob. That’s what Jimmie Shackleton three doors down says his mam calls her. Oh, look, here is our aunt arriving.’

As Connie made to slide off the piano seat, Ellie informed her firmly, ‘I shall see to our aunt, Connie, whilst you continue with your piano practice.’

‘You cannot tell me what to do, Ellie,’ Connie declared sulkily. ‘Just because you are walking out with Gideon, that does not mean –’

‘I am not doing any such thing,’ Ellie protested, pink-faced.

‘Oh, yes you are,’ Connie insisted. ‘You are sweet on him, and don’t try to pretend that you are not. Your voice goes all gooey and funny whenever you speak about him.’

Ellie could feel her colour deepening.

Since Gideon had declared his feelings for her, they had spent as much time together as they could, but it had not been easy, as her mother was increasingly dependent on Ellie’s help, and increasingly insistent on keeping her close at hand.

Gideon had told Ellie that there was no way he could approach her father to ask for her hand until he had established his business and was able to provide her with a proper home.

‘I know that you can do it, Gideon,’ Ellie had whispered lovingly to him, her eyes warm with pride and dreams. ‘I can see it now. Everyone will want to commission you to make them furniture, including the Earl. All you need is the opportunity to prove to people how good you are.’

‘I hope that you are right,’ Gideon had responded.

By taking on extra work for William Pride he was managing to save some money, but the extra work he was doing meant that he had less free time to visit Preston and see Ellie, never mind look for premises for his business.

Ellie had urged him to seek help from her father. ‘Since he is in business himself he is bound to know if the right kind of shop premises become available,’ she had counselled Gideon practically.

But Gideon had told her stubbornly, ‘No, Ellie, I do not want to go cap in hand to your father for help. I want to show him that I can establish myself, that I am fit to be your husband. And besides, we have plenty of time. You are still only sixteen.’

‘Seventeen soon,’ Ellie had reminded him.

Putting down the nightgown she had been sewing for the expected baby, she checked Connie with a stern frown before going to greet her Aunt Gibson.

‘Ah, Ellie, I am come to see your mother.’

‘She is upstairs in her room,’ Ellie informed her aunt.

There was something about her mother’s eldest sister that Ellie had always found slightly daunting. And now, for no reason at all, she discovered that she was fidgeting slightly as Amelia subjected her to scrutiny.

‘I know the way, Ellie. You do not need to accompany me,’ she informed her niece firmly, as she swept towards the stairs, obliging Ellie to stand to one side.

Ellie waited until she had heard her mother’s bedroom door open and then close again before returning to the back parlour to oversee Connie’s piano practice.

‘Lyddy, my dear, I came as soon as I had your message. What has happened? Is it the baby?’ Amelia demanded anxiously as she hurried to embrace her sister.

Lydia shook her head. ‘No.’ Her pregnancy still had some three or so weeks to run, and the enforced rest Amelia’s husband had insisted she must take was making the time hang heavily. She would much rather have been active, the chatelaine of her home as she had always been, rather than being obliged to leave so many of her duties in the hands of her elder daughter.

Not that Ellie was not fully capable of running a home. No, Lydia had seen to it that both her daughters knew how to maintain and order a household.

‘Then what is amiss?’ Amelia asked her.

In contrast to the obvious swollenness of her belly, Lydia’s face looked alarmingly thin, her eyes sunken in its paleness, her flesh stretched almost painfully over her elegant bones, but it was the look of fear in her eyes that affected her sister the most.

Lydia was ten years Amelia’s junior, the baby of their family, the prettiest of all of them, the spoiled precious youngest child, who had been adored and fêted all her life until she had so foolishly and disastrously married Robert Pride. And now look at her!

‘It’s Ellie, Amelia,’ Lydia told her sister tiredly. ‘I am so concerned about her.’

‘Concerned? In what way?’

‘She has become involved with this Gideon Walker – I have told you about him. Oh, she says nothing to me, but I know what has happened. She thinks herself in love with him. I can see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice every time his name is mentioned. I have tried to talk to Robert about it, but he will not listen. He does not understand – how can he? Melia, Ellie must not do as I have done. She is worthy of so much more. But what is to be done? Robert is allowing Gideon the run of the house as though…as though he were already a member of our family. John worships him, and I am not well enough to keep a check on what is happening.’

‘Ellie must be sent away before any more harm can be done,’ Amelia announced grimly. ‘The best place for her to go would be to our sister in Hoylake. Lavinia and Mr Parkes live a very social life there. Mr Parkes has several wealthy shipowners as clients, and I dare say that after attending a few parties where she may meet some proper young gentlemen, Ellie will soon forget any foolishness over this…this Gideon.’

‘Oh, Amelia, do you think so?’ Lydia’s expression brightened. ‘But Hoylake! I don’t know…I need Ellie here and –’

‘You need do nothing for the present,’ Amelia assured her comfortingly. ‘I shall write to our sister, and just as soon as you have been confined and safely delivered, Ellie may be sent to stay with Lavinia in Hoylake until the danger of her fancying herself in love with Master Gideon is completely over.’

‘When?’ Lydia cried bitterly. ‘Oh, Amelia, I am so –’

Hastily Amelia interrupted her. ‘Alfred says that you may expect to be confined before the end of the month.’

‘Yes. He has said as much to me.’

Lydia’s lips trembled. She had not been able to bring herself to ask her brother-in-law if he still believed her life to be at risk. She had been too afraid of what he might say, and so instead she had allowed herself to believe Robert when he insisted optimistically that she had nothing to worry about. But sometimes in the dead of night, she woke sweating and trembling, her heart racing and her mouth dry, overwhelmed by fear.

Making plans for Ellie’s future, and the ways in which she could thwart Gideon Walker’s intentions of ruining her daughter’s life, gave her a means of escaping those fears.

‘Cecily is to put off her wedding until next year so that you will be able to attend. She is determined to be a June bride,’ Amelia informed her sister.

What she could not tell Lyddy was that she herself had had to suggest discreetly that her daughter plan her wedding more than twelve months hence, just in case they should be overtaken by events. She certainly had no wish to wear mourning at her own daughter’s wedding.

And neither had she any wish to lose her youngest sister, but Alfred had refused to offer her much hope.

‘The damage caused by the birth of her last child is such that I do not believe she can survive this birth. I pray that I may be wrong,’ he had said to his wife when she had questioned him.

‘You must not tax your strength, Lyddy,’ Amelia told her now. ‘Whatever happens, you can trust us, your sisters, to do whatever is necessary for your children. We have already discussed this.’

‘Yes, I know that, Melia, and I am grateful to you all…’ Tears welled in Lydia’s eyes.

Quickly Amelia bent and kissed her cheek. ‘I must go. But remember, Robert is to send for Alfred the moment you need him.’

Wanly, Lydia agreed.

The forthcoming birth of Lydia’s child was also the subject of discussion in Alfred’s handsome consulting room in the Winckley Square house.

‘But if the risk to Mrs Pride is so great,’ Paul Charteris was saying earnestly, ‘then surely there can be nothing to lose and everything to gain by adopting such a procedure.’

‘Have you discussed this with your father?’ Alfred challenged his son-in-law-to-be.

Paul sighed. ‘I have, but he believes there are too many risks involved.’

‘Exactly,’ Alfred pounced. ‘To perform a Caesarean operation to remove the child might seem to be a solution, but in my view it is one that carries far too much risk, not just to mother and child, but also to the reputation of the surgeon who carries it out, to make it a responsible or viable option.’

‘But if it is the only means of saving the mother and her child, surely it is better to take that risk than to stand by and –’

‘Paul, Paul, your ardour does you credit,’ Alfred told him sombrely, coming round his desk to place a consoling arm about the younger man’s shoulders, ‘but I fear you are permitting your emotions to overrule your judgement, and that is something no physician should allow to happen.’

Bewildered, Paul watched him. His own father had been as loath to acknowledge the potential benefit of performing a Caesarean delivery as his prospective father-in-law was.

Caesarean deliveries were performed, of course, when the mother’s life was agreed to be of less value than that of the child she was carrying, or where a choice had to be made between mother and child, but to perform one where both mother and child were expected to survive was a dangerous medical procedure. And yet the operation had been done – and successfully. It was Paul’s dream that one day such operations would be a matter of course, and that he would be performing them; that he would be at the forefront of his profession, not content, as his father was, to rest on his reputation and accept a knighthood, but to push back the medical barriers as far as they could possibly go; to conquer the perils of infection, surgical trauma and blood loss.

Reluctant to abandon his dream he burst out, ‘Perhaps if Mrs Pride were to be consulted…If she were told, offered the choice…’

Alfred looked outraged. ‘How can you suggest such a thing? No! Poor woman, she already has enough to bear. She should be left at peace now, to compose herself for what lies ahead. That is our most solemn duty and responsibility to her.’

‘But surely, sir, our first and foremost duty is to try to save her life and that of her child,’ Paul insisted doggedly.

‘Do you think that I am not aware of that? Lydia Pride is not just my patient, she is also my wife’s sister,’ Alfred reminded Paul sternly. ‘And, besides, I am not convinced that such an operation, even if it were successful in saving the child, could save her. She should never have conceived again. It was only by good fortune that she was spared last time.’

Paul took a deep breath before asking, ‘Then would it not perhaps have been better for the pregnancy to be terminated in its early stages?’

The words fell into a heavy silence that suddenly filled the room. Alfred’s face grew stern. ‘I shall pretend that you did not utter that remark, Paul.’ When Paul said nothing, Alfred burst out angrily, ‘You know as well as I do that such a course of action is against the law.’

‘Yes I do, which is why women, poor creatures, are forced to resort to the desperate measure of paying some filthy harridan to maim and murder them.’

‘I will not listen to this, Paul. You are not talking about our own womenfolk here but a class of women you should know better than to discuss. If a woman has a need to resort to…to the solution you have just allowed to soil your lips, then it is because she herself has sinned and is seeking to hide that sin from the world and escape her just punishment for it!’

Paul gritted his teeth. The older man was only echoing the view shared by his own father, he knew, but it was a view that Paul himself did not find either acceptable or honest, never mind worthy of his Hippocratic oath. It was on the tip of his tongue to remind Alfred that, far from sinning, Lydia Pride had been an admirably dutiful wife, but he could see from the florid, bellicose expression on Alfred’s face that such an argument was not likely to find favour.

‘I have done my best for Lydia. I –’ Alfred coughed and looked embarrassed, ‘– I have discussed with Robert the…benefits of, ahem, not completing the…the act…’

‘But there are far more modern and reliable ways of preventing conception than that,’ Paul burst out, unable to contain himself.

Once again his frankness earned him a disapproving look. ‘I have no wish to continue this discussion, Paul.’

Frustrated, Paul turned away to look out of the window.

‘There is a gentleman to see you, ma’am, a Mr Dawson.’

‘Thank you, Fielding. I am expecting him. Please show him into the library,’ Mary instructed.

She had been advised to hire a manservant by the friends who had been so kind to her when she had originally left home to seek employment – and freedom – in London. A woman in her position needed to have the protection of a male retainer, they had insisted.

‘I’m not so sure about giving me protection, but he certainly adds an aura of grandness to the place,’ she had laughed to one of her neighbours, Edith Rigby, when she had invited Mary to take tea with her.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Dawson,’ Mary greeted her visitor as she hurried into the library. ‘Will you take tea? You have had a long journey here, I suspect.’

‘Tea would be very welcome,’ her visitor confirmed, his accent betraying that, unlike Mary herself, he was neither a member of the upper middle class, nor a local. His accent had a distinctly cockney twang to it, which was explained by the fact that Mary had originally recruited him via her contacts in London.

‘So,’ she sat down behind the huge partners’ desk, which had originally been her father’s, indicating to the waiting man that he was to take a seat, ‘what news do you have for me?’

Her heart sank as she saw the expression on his face.

‘I very much regret to have to tell you, Miss Isherwood, that the woman you wanted me to trace – your nurse, I believe you said she was – passed away some time ago. She was predeceased by her husband, and, as you informed me, she was in the employ of Earl Peel of Lancaster.’

‘Yes…yes…I…I understand.’

‘I have brought you bad news, I can see, and I am sorry for it.’

Mary gave him a wan smile. ‘You must think me foolish, Mr Dawson, but Emma was very dear to me. She was my nurse, you see, and my closest companion after the death of my mother. She was less than a dozen years older than I, and had been hired originally as a nursery maid.’

Frank Dawson remained quiet. He had experienced many scenes likes this one in his work as a private investigator, but something about Mary Isherwood’s quiet dignity elicited his highest accolade – his rarely given respect.

‘Emma was everything to me,’ Mary told him simply. ‘But then she…she had to leave. My father decided that I was old enough not to need her services any longer, and so Emma took employment elsewhere, which was how she met her husband. We kept up a correspondence for a while, until…until I quarrelled with my father and…and left home to go and live with friends in London.’

‘I am sorry if my investigations have brought you unhappiness.’ Frank Dawson gave a small cough. ‘There is, of course, the matter of my fees, but –’

‘No, no…I shall pay you now,’ Mary insisted firmly. ‘Do you have your account?’

Relieved, Frank Dawson reached into his pocket for the invoice he had written before coming north. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Mary, it was just that he knew the way that rich folk could take their time about paying bills.

‘Oh…’ she began, and then checked. ‘I had heard that Emma had had a child, Mr Dawson, a son. I don’t know if…?’ Mary’s face had become slightly pink and she sounded a little nervous.

‘Oh, yes, I almost forgot,’ Frank Dawson responded. ‘I was that concerned about telling you that your nurse had passed away that I nearly overlooked the boy. It’s all here.’ He proudly removed a notebook from his pocket and tapped it with one thick forefinger. ‘A son born not a year after they had wed, he was.’

‘I see. And what do you know of this son, Mr Dawson, if anything?’

‘There is not much to know, ma’am, other than that he visits this town in his line of business. Well, not exactly his line of business, since he was apprenticed to a master cabinet-maker in Lancaster, but it seems that Master Wareing could not find work for the young man, having three sons of his own to take into the business, and so currently by all accounts Mr Gideon Walker is working for William Pride, a cattle drover, whilst he tries his luck at setting himself up in business as a cabinet-maker.’

‘A cabinet-maker…and he visits Preston regularly, you say? Goodness, you have been thorough and clever, Mr Dawson,’ Mary complimented him. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have an address where I might find him, would you? I may have come into my inheritance too late to do anything to reward Emma for her care of me, but perhaps I shall be able to benefit her son – for her sake and her kindness to me.’

‘Very worthy sentiments, if I may be so bold as to say, ma’am. As to the young man’s address, I shall do my best to discover it, ma’am, and once I have done so I shall send you a note of it,’ Dawson promised.

‘You are every bit as efficient as my friends promised, Mr Dawson,’ Mary smiled, discreetly adding an extra guinea to the money she was placing on the table in front of her. ‘And I am very grateful for what you have done.’

After Frank Dawson had gone, Mary frowned into the silence of the room.

There had been a time when Emma had been everything to her: mother, sister, friend, protector.

The genteel poverty in which Mary had lived during her father’s lifetime, scraping a living giving private French lessons, had made it impossible for her to do anything to repay Emma for her care of her as a child, but now things were different.

With so much renovation needing to be done on the house she could easily find work for a skilled cabinet-maker. And surely she owed it to Emma to do for her son what she could no longer do for Emma herself.

SIX

Newly returned from Lancaster, as always when he walked past the huge bulk of the Hawkins cotton mill on his way to his lodgings, Gideon was struck by its gauntness and the dark, sour shadow it threw across the narrow street. Not for anything would he want to work in such an environment, and he sincerely pitied those who must. As he turned off the main street and in through the ginnel that led to the yard that housed his lodgings, he saw Nancy walking towards him.

‘Still seeing that posh lady friend of yours, are you?’ she demanded, giving him a bold-eyed look. ‘’Cos if you ain’t…’

A meaningful smile accompanied her words, but as she deliberately reached out and touched his bare forearm with her work-roughened hands, Gideon had to stop himself from protesting. Her touch was nothing like Ellie’s and it was almost a profanity even to think about his beloved in close proximity to a woman like Nancy.

‘Just wanted to thank you, like, for helping us out wi’ poor Peggy. Snuffed it, she did, of course. Best thing for her really. She was too far gone to risk what she did. Fair butchered her, that old Jezebel who calls herself a wisewoman did. Better she had had the brat and then left it on the doorstep of the foundling home – or, better still, with its father.’ Her face twisted into an ugly bitterness. ‘Not that he’d care to acknowledge it, nor what he gets up to wi’ lasses who can’t afford to say no to him.’

Gideon didn’t know what to say. He had guessed what had happened to the girl. William Pride had spoken openly to him about the way some of the mill girls were forced to supplement their small incomes, and their resultant need of the illegal services of the town’s notorious ‘wisewoman’, who for a fee was willing to help terminate their unwanted pregnancies.

‘Poor little sods might just as well throw ’emselves int’ Ribble!’ he had told Gideon wryly. ‘At least that way ’ud be quicker and less painful.’

Gideon had kept his own counsel, although he had found what he had been told disturbing.

His landlady approached him as he walked into the house.

‘There’s a letter for you,’ she told him. ‘It came a couple of days back. Shall I fetch it?’

Nodding, Gideon tried to conceal his impatience as he waited for her to return. He had made enquiries about a couple of shop premises, and maybe the letter was about one of them.

When his landlady returned with a sealed envelope with his name written elegantly on it, Gideon resisted the temptation to tear it open straight away. She was watching him with open curiosity, but, sidestepping her, Gideon made for the stairs.

Once inside his own room he ripped open the envelope, frowning a little as he read its contents.

Disappointingly, it wasn’t about either of the shop premises he had visited. Instead, the letter declared that its writer was aware that he was a skilled cabinet-maker newly come to the town, and that she had some work she wished to discuss with him if he could make himself available at the address given on the letter when he was next in Preston.

Ruefully Gideon reread it. Well, at least he had a potential offer of work, even if he did not have any premises, but he was warily conscious of the work he had done that had still not been paid for. This time he would behave a good deal less naïvely and trustingly when he visited his would-be customer.

He studied the address. Winckley Square. Very posh. What exactly was it that Miss Mary Isherwood wanted him to make, he wondered.

At least he would have some good news to tell Ellie. Whistling cheerfully under his breath, Gideon washed quickly and then put on fresh clothes. The last time he had been in Preston he had promised that he would take Ellie boating on the river. The thought of being with her made his heart lift in anticipation.

‘Oh, my poor head. What on earth is that dreadful noise?’

Ellie sighed, trying not to betray either her impatience or her longing for Gideon’s promised arrival and her escape from the stuffy, claustrophobic atmosphere of her mother’s room and company.

‘It is the men who have come to install the new telephone,’ she replied as patiently as she could.

Fretfully Lydia Pride pressed her hands to her temples. ‘I cannot understand why your father should have been so unthinking as to have them come round now when he knows that I am suffering from a bad headache.’

Ellie said nothing. The truth was that her mother had been suffering from ‘a bad headache’ and an even worse temper on and off now for weeks, and Ellie couldn’t help fidgeting a little and glancing longingly towards the window through which the late spring sunshine was shining in intoxicating temptation.

‘You must go and tell them to stop, Ellie,’ Lydia announced. ‘I really cannot stand any more of this noise. And whilst you are downstairs, tell Cook to prepare me a tisane. It might soothe my poor aching head. No, you had better make it yourself, Ellie, I am sure that Cook did not use newly boiled water yesterday when she made me one. It had a distinctly sour taste, and she had used far too much ginger!’

The taste of her mother’s tisane could not be any sourer than the air in this room, Ellie decided rebelliously, and certainly nowhere near as sour as her mother’s mood. Ellie scarcely recognised her gentle, laughing mother in the cross shrew she had turned into these last few weeks.

‘The men are almost finished,’ she tried to placate her.

‘But why could they not wait a little?’

‘Mother, you were the one who insisted that Father had a telephone installed as soon as he could, remember?’ Ellie couldn’t prevent herself from challenging. ‘You said that if all your sisters had telephones then you must have one too. You said that Father would find that it increased his business,’ Ellie pressed on, ignoring the protective little voice inside herself that was urging her to remember that her mother was not well, and that the pregnancy must be making her feel uncomfortable. Ellie couldn’t wait for the next few weeks to be over. In fact, she decided crossly, she wished her mother would have the baby now and then perhaps the Pride household might get back to normal!

‘Ellie, I wish you would not speak to me in such a way,’ Lydia responded sharply. ‘Did you tell Jenny about the sheets, like I asked you to? They must be sent straight back to the laundry, and no bill paid until they are returned properly laundered – and whilst we are on the subject, you must take care to watch what Jenny is doing on washdays. She cannot be left alone in the wash house with the copper. If she is she will skimp on her duties!’

Ellie bit on her bottom lip. Gideon would be here soon. He had promised her that he would make all speed to come round to Friargate the moment he arrived in Preston, and her uncle had already been round to the shop to try to persuade her father to join him in one of his favourite drinking haunts.

Gideon! Ellie was longing to see him again. Would he kiss her as he had done before? A delicious sense of anticipation was filling her, increasing her impatience with her mother.

‘Ellie! Pay attention! You are not listening to me! Jenny –’

‘I’m sorry about the washing, Mother, but you said that the things for your lying-in had to be prepared, and because of the rain it took longer to get everything dried.’

‘You must not make excuses for her, Ellie. Like all domestics Jenny will try to take advantage, if you let her – Ellie, why do you keep looking towards the window?’

‘It is nothing, Mother, only that Gideon Walker has promised to take us all boating on the river. John is so excited, and –’

‘Gideon Walker?’ Lydia interrupted her sharply, struggling to control the surge of fear and hostility that drove the dull ache in her temples into a hammering crescendo of pain. Just recently she had begun to sense a change in Ellie, a new wilful stubbornness that reminded her all too painfully of the way she herself had been at the same age. ‘Ellie, I need you here with me. You know that I am not well.’

‘You said that you wanted to be left alone to sleep,’ Ellie reminded her mother, aching with impatience to be gone. ‘And besides, I have already promised John that we are to go on the river. Father said it would do us all good to get out in the fresh air,’ she could not restrain herself from adding.

‘Ellie, I do not want you to go. I want you to stay here with me,’ Lydia stopped her angrily as she turned to the door.

Ellie stared at her mother. ‘But…but why?’ she demanded. She could feel the whole of her stomach cramping in anger and disbelief. Hadn’t she done everything she could to make her mother comfortable, and to do as she was bidden these last difficult weeks? ‘You are just being mean because you are cross, and –’

‘Ellie, how dare you speak to me like that?’ Lydia demanded angrily. ‘And as for you going anywhere with Gideon Walker, I absolutely forbid you do so!’

Ellie could not believe that this was her gentle, loving mother speaking to her so.

‘No,’ she denied fiercely, ‘no, I won’t stay. I won’t!’ Tears of confusion filled her eyes as she heard the rebellion in her own voice, and her legs trembled a little at her defiance, but that didn’t stop her from hurrying towards the door and wrenching it open.

Lydia watched Ellie leave in shocked disbelief. Had she behaved in such a way as a girl her mother would have had her whipped! Of course, Lydia knew exactly who to blame for her daughter’s behaviour. Gideon Walker!

What had happened to the mother she loved, Ellie wondered angrily, distressed flags of red flying in her cheeks as she hurried downstairs. For weeks now Ellie had dutifully acted as a go-between for her mother, conveying her increasingly demanding instructions to Annie and Jenny, and doing all she could to appease both of them as well as her mother. If anyone should have a headache, she decided rebelliously, it should be her.

Not that she was the only one to suffer from her mother’s suddenly sharp tongue. Only the previous day, Lydia had shocked them all when, at supper time, she had been discussing Cecily’s wedding.

‘It will be a very grand affair,’ she had announced. ‘My sister says that Cecily’s fiancé’s family are very well connected, and can trace their ancestors back to the reign of our late queen’s grandfather!’

‘Well, that is nothing,’ John had boasted immediately. ‘There were Prides keeping a butcher’s shop in the Shambles for hundreds and hundreds of years, weren’t there, Dad, before they were knocked down to make way for the new Harris Museum?’

‘John, I wish you would not mention such a place as the Shambles!’ Lydia had complained sharply. ‘And as for boasting about your father’s family’s connection with it, I would have thought I had taught you better.’

There had been a small uncomfortable silence whilst the siblings had looked at one another, and then their father had said quietly, ‘I seem to remember, Lydia, that when we first met you liked to hear stories about the origins of my family and the business.’

When Ellie had glanced across the table at her father she had seen a look in his eyes, a sadness that had made her heart ache.

And then he had got up and had left the table without finishing his supper, and her mother had sent John to bed.

But now, as she hurried downstairs, Ellie could hear John calling out excitedly, ‘Gideon’s here!’

Her heart was beating so fast she felt giddy. And even in the darkness of the narrow passageway Ellie felt as though she could feel the warmth and brilliance of the sun.

‘What on earth is happening?’

Ellie felt her whole body quiver at the sound of Gideon’s voice from across the small room at the back of the shop, where he was standing, with John and Connie both trying to out-do one another to engage his attention. At the same time, the dog, Rex, was barking his head off, as eager for Gideon’s acknowledgement of his presence as the others.

Ellie’s shy gaze met Gideon’s much bolder one. For a few seconds her feelings were so intense that it was impossible for her to answer his question, and even more impossible for her to tear her gaze from his.

‘The noise?’ Gideon prompted her, and Ellie shook her head, laughing, as Gideon waved in the direction of the workmen.

‘They are installing one of the new telephones,’ she informed Gideon.

Immediately, John chimed in, ‘Yes, and we went to the telephone company’s offices and saw how they worked, and they told Ellie that she could have a job working in the telephone exchange any time she wished.’

‘Did they indeed!’ Gideon marvelled, but it was the look in his eyes as his gaze met Ellie’s over the head of her younger brother that made her colour up so prettily, her argument with her mother already almost forgotten. Almost, but not quite.

‘Gideon, if you don’t mind I should like to call at Miller’s Arcade on our way back later. I want to buy some sweets for my mother. And there is a shop there that sells her favourite ginger pieces dipped in chocolate.’

As Gideon inclined his head, Robert Pride gave his elder daughter a pleased look. He was aware of just how much responsibility had been placed on Ellie’s shoulders recently, and just how much more there would be if things went wrong with the coming child’s birth, as had been so gravely forecast.

Sombrely he waited until the chattering quartet had moved out into the street, before giving his assistant instructions to mind the shop and hurrying up into the house.

Lydia looked up expectantly as the bedroom door opened. Ellie had obviously realised how badly she had behaved and had come back to beg her forgiveness. Mentally Lydia rehearsed what she intended to say to her erring daughter, but to her irritation it was her husband who was coming into the room.

‘Where is Ellie?’ she demanded peremptorily as Robert closed the door behind him.

‘She has gone off to the river with Gideon and the children.’

‘And you permitted her to go?’ Lydia’s mouth thinned. ‘I wish you would not encourage that young man to believe himself welcome here, Robert.’

‘But he is welcome,’ Robert told her easily. ‘He is a hard-working lad, and –’

‘He has no prospects! No family! Can you imagine what my sisters will think if Ellie should be foolish enough to walk out publicly with him?’

‘Your sisters?’ Robert’s genial expression gave way to one of anger.

‘Robert, listen to me,’ Lydia stopped him. ‘If anything should…should happen to me, I want your promise that Ellie will not throw herself away over someone like Gideon Walker. She is worthy of so much better. Surely you can see that?’

‘Lyddy, nothing is going to happen to you,’ Robert tried to reassure her, going over to stand behind the chair on which she was seated, placing his hands tenderly on her tense shoulders. ‘Even that old woman your brother-in-law has admitted that he does not know…’

‘That he does not know what?’ Lydia demanded tearfully. ‘That I shall die in childbed? Why didn’t I listen to my own mother? Why didn’t I realise how much wiser she was than I, and that she was only speaking in my own best interests when she tried to dissuade me from marrying you? It is easy enough for you to speak, Robert! You should have taken more care,’ she told him bitterly.

Behind her Robert’s face went white. He already knew that Lydia blamed him totally for her pregnancy and he had been too concerned for her to want to remind her that she had been the one to urge him on.

He ached to hold her in his arms and tell her how much he loved her, how afraid he was for her, and for himself, but he knew already that she would reject him and pull away from him. From the moment she had known she was pregnant she had erected a barrier between them, turning for consolation and comfort more and more to her sisters, especially her eldest sister in Winckley Square, and increasingly excluding him from her life.

It hurt him unbearably to know not only that she blamed him for her plight but also that she felt so contemptuous towards him, so angrily resentful, that she now allowed the love she had originally felt for him to be deemed secondary to her mother’s wishes.

‘I cannot bear to think that Ellie might make the same mistake that I did, Robert. You must promise me that you will not allow her to do so! Promise me!’ Lydia insisted, her voice rising with emotion. ‘You owe it to me and to Ellie to do so!’

Robert hesitated. ‘Lydia,’ he began gently, ‘you are overwrought and upset –’

‘Why won’t you listen to me? I intend to forbid Ellie to ever see Gideon Walker again, and you must do the same, Robert. Promise me!’

‘Lyddy…’ Robert tried to soothe her.

‘Promise me!’

Shaking his head, unable either to calm her or accede to what she was demanding, Robert stepped back from the chair.

Immediately Lydia got up and turned to confront him. ‘I want your promise, Robert,’ she began, and then stopped, giving a sharp gasp and clutching her body.

‘Lydia, what is it?’ Robert demanded.

Lydia shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she denied stubbornly, but the sickly pallor of her face betrayed her.

The truth was that she had been having slow labour pains for several hours, but she had stubbornly refused to acknowledge them, suffering in an increasingly terrified silence as she fought against them and against what lay ahead.

‘The baby?’ Robert guessed immediately. ‘Lydia, come and lie down. Shall I send for the midwife?’

‘No, not yet,’ she gasped, as a fierce pang of pain gripped her. ‘Send to Winckley Square, though, Robert, for my sister…’

As the pains rose and fell, searing her, savaging her, she was dimly aware of Robert opening the door and calling for Jenny.

‘Sit here with your mistress, and don’t leave her,’ she heard him telling the maid tersely. ‘I am gone to Winckley Square for her sister.’

‘I don’t want today to ever end,’ Connie declared passionately, pouting as Gideon began to steer their hired boat back to Mr John Crook’s premises on Ribbleside.

‘Neither do I,’ Gideon murmured to Ellie, the soft warmth of his breath tickling her ear and sending a rush of sweet pleasure through her.

Whether by accident or design, Gideon had managed things so that both John and Connie were seated facing away from them in the boat, leaving Gideon free to indulge in all manner of lover’s secret looks and whispered words to Ellie without her younger siblings knowing.

Only Rex the dog had threatened to spoil things, by suddenly jumping into the river to swim after a duck, and then having to be hauled back in to the boat again, whereupon he had shaken himself, covering them all in Ribble water. But even that incident Gideon had managed to turn to his own advantage, solicitously offering Ellie his brand-new handkerchief to dry off her dampened gown and arms.

‘I shall keep this for ever,’ he had whispered passionately to her when she had handed it back to him, causing her eyes to sparkle with the feelings she couldn’t manage to hide.

‘We must not forget to call at Miller’s Arcade for Mother’s sweets,’ she reminded Gideon now as they reached the shore.

‘No indeed, and I must not forget that I have some special news to share with you,’ Gideon responded.

‘You have found a shop?’ Ellie demanded excitedly. ‘Oh, Gideon…’

‘No, not that, I’m afraid, although I hope that I soon shall do so, especially now that I may be about to receive a new commission.’

‘A commission?’

‘Yes. There was a note waiting for me at my lodgings from a Miss Isherwood of Winckley Square. She has requested me to call on her so that she may discuss her requirements regarding some work.’

‘Miss Isherwood?’ Ellie frowned. ‘Oh, but she –’

‘You know her?’ Gideon was frowning himself now as he saw the discomfort on Ellie’s face.

‘Well, I do not exactly know her, no, but I know of her. My mother and my aunt were talking about her some weeks ago. She has recently returned to the town to take up her inheritance.’

‘And that causes you to frown?’ Gideon teased her.

‘No, of course not! It is just that my aunt said that…that Miss Isherwood – well, it seems that she quarrelled with her late father and then left home to go and live in London. Very little is known about what she did when she lived there.’

‘A mystery! I shall have to do my best to unravel it for you,’ Gideon laughed.

‘I wonder how she comes to know of you?’ Ellie mused.

‘I don’t know. Her note simply asked me to call.’ Gideon shrugged. ‘I dare say I shall know more once I have spoken with her. Perhaps someone recommended me to her. If so, I hope it was not the railway magnate who cheated me out of my fee.’ He paused and looked at her before revealing diffidently, ‘Had it been possible I should have liked to have studied to become an architect.’

He waited tensely for Ellie’s reaction. If she were to laugh and deride him for being foolish enough to have cherished such an impossible ambition he knew it would damage for ever that secret vulnerable part of himself he had learned to hide away from others.

‘An architect!’ Ellie’s eyes rounded in awe. ‘Oh Gideon!’

‘It’s not possible, of course. But, oh, Ellie, if it had been I would have built such buildings, and the most wonderful of all of them would have been the house I would have built for you.’

The passion in his voice sent a quiver of fiercely protective emotion shivering through Ellie, the brilliance of her eyes and the tenderness of her expression revealing to him what she was feeling.

‘I am just a foolish man with even more foolish dreams,’ Gideon mocked himself.

‘No, you are anything but foolish,’ Ellie told him sturdily, ‘and as for your dreams –’

‘Ah, but I have another dream now,’ Gideon whispered softly to her, looking deep into her eyes. ‘You are my dream now, Ellie. You and the future I hope we shall share together.’

‘As you are mine,’ Ellie responded shyly.

‘I shall be a good husband to you, Ellie. I shall work hard for you. A cabinet-maker may not be as grand as an architect, but he can still make a good living for himself. There is wealth in Preston,’ he told her enthusiastically, ‘and I aim to make sure that my name gets known in all the right quarters, and that I am the first choice of those wealthy residents looking for the best craftsman. And I shall be the best, Ellie.’

Just listening to him made Ellie’s heart swell with love and excitement, and a sharp sweet longing for the future he was drawing for her.

They had reached land, and Gideon busied himself helping his charges out of the boat, deliberately making sure that he placed the two younger ones, and the wretched Rex, on dry land first.

‘No, Gideon!’ Ellie protested breathlessly when he finally turned to take hold of her carefully, swinging her into his arms. ‘I can manage. You do not need…’

‘Oh, but I do need. Have you any idea just how much I want to kiss you, Ellie Pride?’ he demanded huskily.

His lips were only inches from hers and Ellie couldn’t stop herself from looking betrayingly at his mouth, her own lips parting slightly, her pretty pink tongue unknowingly revealing her feelings as she touched it against them.

She heard Gideon make a strangled sound, and saw his eyes darken, his grip on her tightening as he lowered her slightly.

‘Ellie…Ellie…I want you so much!’

Ellie shuddered excitedly at the passionate words.

‘If only I had you to myself right now…’ Gideon continued.

Silently they looked at one another in mutual longing, their rapt concentration broken only when John, tired of waiting for them, called out to them to hurry up.

With Connie, John and Rex walking ahead of them, Gideon surreptitiously took Ellie’s hand in his own. Flush-cheeked, Ellie looked at him, but made no attempt to pull away.

‘John! Connie!’

Ellie jumped a little as Gideon called her brother and sister. As they turned round and came over, Gideon released Ellie’s hand.

‘Ellie is feeling rather tired, so if I give you a penny each, can you run to Miller’s Arcade and buy some chocolate-covered ginger for your mother, and, of course, a treat each for yourselves? We will meet you back at Friargate.’

‘Gideon, you should not have done that,’ Ellie reproached him, as John and Connie sped off, clutching their money.

‘Perhaps not,’ Gideon agreed, ‘but they will come to no harm, and it was the only way I could think of to get you to myself.’

Very gently he led her towards a secluded part of the shrubbery, and then took her into his arms.

Helplessly Ellie allowed him to do so, blindly raising her face to his, her eyes closing, her body quivering with excitement and longing.

‘Ellie, Ellie…you are the most beautiful girl in the world. I think I fell in love with you the moment I saw you.’

‘Fell in love with me?’ Ellie managed to challenge him breathlessly. ‘You certainly looked at me very boldly.’

‘Boldly?’ Gideon laughed. ‘Is that what you thought? No, I felt anything but bold when I looked up at your window and saw you standing there, Ellie.’

‘So what did you feel?’ Like any woman newly and deeply in love she wanted to possess herself of every single small detail of her lover’s reaction to her.

‘I felt…’ Gideon paused, looking away from her, his eyes narrowed against the sun, ‘I felt that I had met my fate. I looked at you, Ellie, and I knew that my life could never be the same again. That I could never be the same again. That that one single look had changed everything. I love you, Ellie.’

In between each passionate word Gideon paused to kiss her, each kiss taking them both a little further away from the calm waters of sedate courtship and into the much deeper and dangerous ones of intense desire.

Protected from prying eyes by the shrubbery, Ellie pressed ever closer to Gideon, shuddering fiercely when she felt the tentative touch of his hand on her breast. She could feel the heat of his hand right through the fine fabric of her summer dress.

‘Ellie…’

A thrill of female satisfaction shocked through her when she heard the taut male agony in Gideon’s voice. The kisses he pressed on the soft skin of her throat, and then along the neckline of her dress, set off a fierce ache deep down inside her body.

‘I want you, Ellie! I want you now!’ Gideon muttered as he started to push the neckline of her dress out of the way.

The feel of his hand against her almost bare breast made Ellie cry out in awed pleasure. But instead of encouraging him to press her to further intimacy, her helpless sound of arousal made Gideon tense and then gently put her away from him, reminding himself that it was his duty to protect and be responsible for them both, even though that meant denying himself. She was his love, his life, his Ellie. His!

‘Come on. It’s time I took you home,’ he told her huskily, ‘before I truly forget myself.’

SEVEN

The minute they turned into Friargate and Ellie saw her brother and sister standing huddled together outside the closed shop door, she knew that something was wrong. Anxiously she started to walk faster.

‘Ellie, you’ve been ages…’ Connie’s face started to crumple, and she suddenly looked much more like a young girl than the young woman she was always claiming herself to be.

‘What is it? What?’ Ellie began, and then stopped as the door opened and her aunt stood there eyeing her coldly.

‘So you have finally returned, have you, you wretched creature?’ Aunt Gibson hissed bitterly. ‘Do you know what your disobedience has done to your mother?’

Horrified, Ellie looked past her aunt towards her father.

‘That’s enough, Amelia,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s not fair to blame Ellie. She –’

‘Not fair?’ Amelia gave Ellie an angry look. ‘Is it fair, Robert Pride, that my poor sister should go into labour ahead of her time because her daughter defied her?’

‘No!’ Ellie protested. What her aunt was saying couldn’t be true. It mustn’t be. She started to tremble, cold now where just a few minutes earlier she had been sweetly warm with the intoxicating memory of the illicit pleasure she and Gideon had just shared, delighting in the precious secret world of their love.

‘Yes!’ Amelia insisted sharply. ‘You are a wicked, wicked girl, Ellie Pride, and if your poor mother and this baby die, then it will be on your conscience.’

‘Amelia, that’s enough,’ Ellie’s father said sternly. ‘I know how upset you are, but if anyone’s to blame for this…’

Her mother die? What on earth was her aunt saying? Frantically Ellie looked towards the stairs.

‘Ellie, no!’ Robert Pride blocked her path. Grasping her arms, he told her in a gentler voice, ‘No, you cannot go up there right now. The midwife is with your mother, and…and your Uncle Alfred.’

‘So it is true,’ Ellie whispered, her eyes huge with distress and despair. ‘The baby is coming.’

‘Yes.’

Glancing past her Robert could see through the still-open door that Gideon had quick-wittedly drawn the two younger children out of earshot and was entertaining them with one of his tricks.

Releasing Ellie, Robert strode out to them, closing the door behind him.

‘Gideon, lad, I wonder if you would be kind enough to take our Connie and John over to Winckley Square? They are to stay there until…for the time being.’

‘What? Why have we got to go there?’ John demanded indignantly.

‘Is Mother really having the baby?’ Connie asked excitedly.

‘Aye, lass, she is,’ Robert confirmed. ‘Now be good children and go with Gideon. Your aunt has sent instructions home that beds are to be prepared for you.’

‘Well, I hope Mother doesn’t take too long to have this baby,’ John grumbled. ‘I don’t like it at Winckley Square. You have to be quiet all the time and not touch things.’

Awkwardly Robert patted his shoulder, but his concentration wasn’t really on his two younger children.

As Gideon ushered them away, Robert glanced up at the closed bedroom window above, his face tight with anxiety and despair.

In the hallway, Ellie was pleading tearfully with her aunt to be allowed to see her mother.

‘Certainly not, miss. It would not be at all proper, and besides –’

Amelia broke off as they both heard the long tortured cry of primeval pain that came from the room above them. Then Ellie pulled free of her aunt and raced up the stairs, pushing open her parents’ bedroom door.

A strong smell of carbolic filled her nostrils, making her catch her breath. The room was hot and lacking in fresh air.

Her mother was lying in bed, her hands gripping the bars of the brass bedstead, her teeth clenched over the twisted piece of cloth in her mouth, her head twisting from side to side as she tried to escape the pain tearing at her.

Ellie froze in shock. Surely this was not her fastidious, elegant mother, this woman who bared her teeth in a feral grimace before uttering a low panting animal grunt of mingled pain and endeavour?

Sweat caked her mother’s hair, which clung stickily to her face. As another wave of pain struck, she began to pant, her fingers gripping the arm of the midwife.

Was this what giving birth was? This primitive agony that filled the air with sights, sounds, scents from which Ellie recoiled, shocked by their visceral rawness.

But beneath her shock there was still her love for her mother; and her guilt. She was responsible for this, for her mother’s agonisingly hard labour; that was what her aunt had told her. She, by arguing and quarrelling with her mother and going against her wishes, had somehow brought on the arrival of the baby before its due date.

Unable to think logically, Ellie was filled with fear and remorse. She took a step towards the bed, barely aware of her aunt grabbing her arm to pull her back as her mother went rigid, beads of sweat glistening waxenly on her forehead as she began to moan.

‘Get that girl out of here. She has no business being here,’ Uncle Gibson demanded curtly, no longer the familiar, slightly pedantic figure Ellie knew, but a grim-faced stranger, whose presence cast a dark shadow over the bed.

As her aunt pushed her towards the door, Ellie suddenly tensed and turned round to look imploringly towards her mother, mentally begging her for forgiveness.

‘I’m so sorry, Mama,’ she whispered, adopting the baby form of address she had long ago grown out of. ‘I promise I will never ever disobey you again…never.’

As Ellie looked at her it seemed to her that her mother had changed; that her skin had somehow gone grey, her eyes become sunken. Instinctively Ellie wanted to go to her, but then suddenly Lydia’s whole body convulsed and she started to scream.

Ellie only realised that she was screaming as well when her aunt slapped her face briskly the moment she had her outside the bedroom door.

‘It is your mother who is in travail, you stupid girl,’ she told Ellie bitingly, ‘not you.’

Ellie couldn’t make any response. She was shivering, her teeth chattering. She desperately wanted to beg her aunt to reassure her that having a child was not always like this – that her mother’s agonising pain would never be her own. How could her aunt not be as shocked and appalled as she was herself? How could her uncle not do something to alleviate her mother’s agony? How could her father have allowed this to happen?

How could she have so cruelly and heedlessly disobeyed her mother?

All through the warm May evening it went on, until Ellie did not know which was the worst to bear – her mother’s screams or the oppressive silences between them when she kept her own body as still as she could in the emptiness of the parlour, listening, waiting…doing her self-imposed penance for her sin of disobeying her mother.

Her father had gone out, unable to endure the sound of his wife’s agonising distress; her aunt was still upstairs, assisting her husband and the midwife.

Ellie tensed as suddenly a thin, high scream split the thick silence, followed by the sharp mewling cry of a newborn child.

Picking up her skirts, she ran up the stairs, but before she could enter the room her aunt came out, firmly closing the door behind her and barring Ellie’s way as she gripped hold of her.

‘I want to see my mother,’ Ellie begged frantically.

Refusing to let go of her, her aunt dug her fingers painfully into Ellie’s arm.

‘No. You cannot. Your mother has given birth to a son. You have a new brother,’ her aunt told her tonelessly. ‘She is resting now and must not be disturbed.’

‘Resting!’ Ellie sagged against the banister in relief, closing her eyes as hot tears of release burned onto her skin, too innocent to recognise just what the grim, flat defeatedness in her aunt’s voice really meant. Her mother was alive!

Below, the front door opened and her father came hurrying up the stairs, bringing with him the smell of strong ale.

Amelia recoiled in distaste and shot him a bitterly contemptuous look.

‘Lyddy?’ he demanded thickly.

‘You have another son,’ Amelia told him curtly.

‘Mam is resting, Father,’ Ellie told him softly. ‘They are both all right.’

As she brushed away her tears, Ellie missed the looks her father and her aunt exchanged, her father’s questioning and anxious, her aunt’s grim and negative. When she looked up Ellie saw the dark tinge of colour burning her father’s face as he turned away from her aunt, and puzzled over it. Surely now that her mother had been safely delivered and both she and the new baby were alive, there was no need for her aunt to continue to be so angry.

Ellie ached to ask if she might see her mother but her uncle and the midwife were still in the bedroom with her, and Ellie gave the closed door a helpless stare before accompanying her aunt downstairs.

‘It will be better if Connie and John stay at Winckley Square until…for now,’ Ellie’s aunt said as she paused in front of the hall mirror to pin on her hat.

Aunt Amelia looked as though she had been crying, Ellie suddenly recognised, as she inclined her cheek for Ellie to kiss before opening the front door.

It was a soft late spring night, with the sky full of stars. A lovers’ night. Shame and guilt filled Ellie. She longed to be able to see her mother and to beg her forgiveness; to promise her once more that she would never disobey her again! She felt sick and shaky, overwhelmed with love for her mother, and overwhelmed too by her own intense remorse. Her guilt would be branded into her for ever, Ellie told herself.

Robert Pride looked down into the sunken face of his wife. Tears filled his eyes and his shoulders began to shake. Carefully he reached for her hand, hardly daring to touch it. She looked so fragile. So frail!

‘Robert?’

He tensed at the thin, whispery sound of her voice. She had opened her eyes, and even they looked different somehow: opaque, almost devoid of their normal rich colour.

‘Lyddy, don’t try to talk. You have to rest.’ His voice broke as he tried to control his emotion. Curling her cold hand into his own he lifted it to his lips, kissing her icy fingers, as though he was trying to breathe warmth – and life – into them.

‘She cannot survive, Robert,’ Alfred had told him after the midwife had finished her business and left them on their own.

‘But she is alive,’ Robert had protested, ‘and the birth is over.’

‘The child has been born, but Lydia is…’ Alfred had coughed, plainly uncomfortable discussing something so intimate. ‘But there was…she…she is bleeding badly, Robert, and we cannot stem it. I had feared that this would be the outcome of her pregnancy.’

‘Bleeding? But surely you can do something to stop it.’ It was inconceivable to Robert that, having survived the appalling agony of the birth of their child, Lydia should not be safe.

‘We have done all that we can,’ Alfred had told him heavily. ‘The midwife and I have raised the foot of the bed and done everything we can do to stanch the flow, but I’m afraid…’

As he spoke, Robert’s stomach had lurched. He had been vaguely aware of the midwife removing a pile of soiled bed linen, but he had not understood just what it meant.

‘I did warn you that this could happen,’ Alfred had reminded him sternly. ‘There was a similar problem with her previous birth, but then the child was not full term, and small. I must go now. There is nothing more I can do here. You must keep her quiet and still. The less she moves…’ He had shaken his head. ‘I’m afraid that it is only a matter of time, Robert. I shall return in the morning, but if…if you need me in the meantime…’ Awkwardly, he had patted Robert’s shoulder, sighing as he added, ‘I am afraid that Amelia is taking this very badly. Lyddy was…is her favourite sister and she feels…’

Numbly, Robert had let him go.

‘Robert, I want to see Ellie. Where is she?’ As she spoke Lydia was struggling to sit up.

Panic-stricken, Robert urged her to lie down. Beneath the covers she was swaddled in old sheets, wrapped around her to soak up the life draining from her.

‘Ellie…’ Lydia demanded weakly.

‘I shall bring her to you,’ Robert promised her. ‘Only lie still, my beloved. Please.’

‘Mother wants to see me?’

It hurt Robert unbearably to see the relief and happiness brightening Ellie’s pale face.

‘Oh, then she is getting better!’ Eagerly she followed him upstairs, pushing open the bedroom door and hurrying to her mother’s side.

The strong smell of carbolic still hung on the air but now it was overwhelmed by another smell, one that Robert recognised, but that he prayed both his wife and his daughter could not. How many times in the slaughterhouse had he breathed in that scent of hot blood? His throat closed and surreptitiously he wiped his hand over his eyes.

Briefly, Ellie glanced at the baby as she sat down beside her mother.

Robert followed the direction of her glance. The child at least was healthy in spite of its early arrival – a six-pound boy with a strong pair of lungs.

As he looked towards Lydia, Robert thought he could already detect signs of death in her still features. Ellie, though, thank goodness, was oblivious to her mother’s real condition as she bent her head to kiss her tenderly.

‘Oh, Mama, Mama, I am so sorry that I made you angry,’ she whispered. ‘Please, please, say that you forgive me!’

Quietly, Robert left the bedroom.

‘Ellie…please listen to me…’

Tiredly, Lydia closed her eyes and fought to summon what was left of her strength. There was none of the familiar ache she had experienced after her previous live births, none of the deep but satisfying exhaustion that told of hard labour well done; none of the cleansing sense of freedom and euphoria; of maternal joy, only a deep numbing coldness that seemed to seep up her body in a slow tide that could not be escaped. She didn’t need to see the tears of her husband, or the anguish of her sister, to know what was happening to her. She had known it from the moment she had felt that dreadful tearing pain, which had seemed to wrench not only the child from her, but her very womb as well. Time was running out for her, and she doubted that she would see another dawn, which made it all the more imperative that she spoke with Ellie.

‘I am listening, Mama,’ Ellie told her emotionally.

‘Ellie, I want you to promise me never to see Gideon Walker again. I ask you for this promise not because I want you to suffer but because I want to protect you. My mother pleaded with me not to marry your father, but I would not listen. I believed that I knew better than she, and now look what has become of me. Your father is a good man and I would not have anyone say any other, but…but none of your aunts, my sisters, would ever find themselves in the situation that I am in. Men like your father and Gideon Walker, they…’ Weakly, she closed her eyes. How could she explain to Ellie the terrible price that women had to pay to appease the hungry sexuality of such men?

‘Your aunts, my sisters, know my wishes, Ellie…and my hopes for you and your sister. I want you to promise me that you will obey them in all things, and that you will remember that they are carrying out my wishes. I cannot bear to think that you may meet a fate like mine, Ellie…Promise me, Ellie…’

Ellie started to cry, too overwrought to question logically what was happening, knowing only that right now her love for her mother took priority over everything and everyone else in her life.

‘Mama, please,’ she choked. ‘I will promise you whatever you want, if only you will forgive me…’

‘You will put Gideon Walker completely out of your life and your thoughts, and you will be guided by your aunts in all things, do you promise?’

‘I promise, Mama,’ Ellie sobbed.

‘Good. I want you to remember always that you have made me this promise, Ellie. To remember it and to honour it, because…’

Her mother’s voice had become so faint that Ellie could barely hear it, and then suddenly she stopped speaking, her head falling to one side on the pillow.

As she clung to her mother’s icy cold hand, Ellie could hear her breath rattling in her throat.

‘Oh, Mam, Mam, please, please get well,’ she begged heartbrokenly, reverting to the comforting softness of the town’s dialect as she clung to her hand.

Lydia’s eyes were closing. ‘Always remember and honour your promise to me, Ellie.’

The words were so low, little more than a sigh, that Ellie had to bend her head closer to her to hear them.

She saw her mother’s chest expand once as she breathed in – sharply – and then went still, her eyes suddenly opening, focusing not on Ellie but into the distance.

Panic suddenly filled Ellie. Releasing her mother’s hand she ran to the door and opened it, calling frantically for her father, as Lydia’s final breath bubbled in her throat.

EIGHT

Gideon paused as he turned into Friargate. Theoretically he was on his way to see Mary Isherwood, having telephoned to make an appointment, but naturally he wanted to call in at the Prides’ house to see how things were. And, of course, to see Ellie!

For once there was no busyness outside the shop, no carefully protected display of choice hams and salted beefs. The door was firmly closed, and there was no sign of either life or light inside, and then as Gideon glanced along the street he saw the sombre black ribbon attached to the front door knocker – a sign that the family was in mourning.

Had the child not survived? Reluctant to intrude, Gideon started to turn away, but as he did so the door suddenly opened and a buxom woman dressed in black emerged, accompanied by a white-faced Ellie, her hair escaping from its pins to curl softly round a face so riven with grief that Gideon caught his breath in anguish for her. The bleakness of Ellie’s expression didn’t belong to the girl he had held and kissed only the previous day.

‘Thank you, Mrs Jakes,’ Gideon heard her saying. ‘I’m sorry that my father isn’t here, but –’

‘Aye, that’s menfolk for you. First thing they do is turn to drink when they’re in grief. Never met one of them yet who could stomach a laying-out. ‘T’ain’t natural for ’em, you see. Tell your aunt that I’ve done the best I can. Allus close to your mother, she was. She’ll be sadly missed, will your ma, especially with a new baby to be cared for.’

‘My Aunt Jepson is to take care of the baby,’ Ellie said in a low, unsteady voice. ‘My mother left instructions for…for everything. She was afraid that –’

Unable to bear seeing her in so much distress, Gideon stepped forward, causing the departing midwife, who had come to lay out Lydia’s body, to give him a speculative look. Gossip was as much her stock in trade as births and deaths, and it seemed that the Pride household had very generously supplied her with all three. Whoever the young man was in such a rush to get to Ellie Pride, he was certainly a good-looking ‘un, that was for sure.

‘Ellie! What –’

‘Gideon!’ Ellie stepped back from him immediately, holding up her hands in a gesture of denial, but Gideon had already followed her into the hallway and was closing the door behind him.

‘I saw the black ribbon,’ he told her, ‘but I thought it must be the child. I had no idea…My poor little love. Believe me, I do know how you must be feeling. When I lost my own mother…But it will get better, Ellie, I promise you, and you have me and…’

Ellie froze. How could Gideon claim to know what she was feeling? How could he say that he understood? No one understood! No one knew what misery and guilt she felt, what pain!

As he saw the emotions chasing one another across her face, Gideon’s smile changed to a concerned frown. Swiftly he crossed the distance separating them, taking hold gently of her upper arms.

‘Ellie, Ellie, my love, please do not look so,’ he begged her, unable to keep his feelings out of either his voice or his eyes. ‘What is it?’ he demanded when he felt her stiffening against his hold.

‘Let go of me, Gideon,’ Ellie demanded sharply. The icy tone of her voice was her mother’s and as she heard her own words and recognised it, Ellie drew strength from what she felt must be her dead mother’s support and approval. Haughtily she drew herself up tall and looked into Gideon’s eyes.

‘Ellie, sweetheart, don’t look like that,’ he protested. Had she wept he would have known immediately what to do, but this icy stiffness bewildered him. ‘Come here,’ he commanded gently. ‘Let me hold you and –’

‘No!’

The fury in Ellie’s eyes as she pulled away from him shocked Gideon into silence.

‘Don’t touch me!’ Ellie told him. ‘Don’t come anywhere near me! I don’t want to see you ever again, Gideon. Ever!’

White-faced, she looked dispassionately at him. Why was he still standing there? Hadn’t she told him to go? The icy coldness surrounding her had somehow become a form of welcome protection, and she withdrew herself even deeper into its glacial grip. Here, within it, away from anyone else, she could truly make reparation to her mother for her guilt.

‘I promised my mother that I will never see you again, Gideon. And I intend to keep that promise!’ she announced.

Gideon stared at her, unable to take in what she was saying. Disbelief, anger, and then pain – oh, such a pain – held him silent! When at last he was able to speak, his voice was raw with emotion.

‘No! You cannot mean that! What are you saying? I understand how shocked and upset you must be, but your mother had no right –’ he began unwisely, carried away by his feelings of outrage.

Ellie stopped him. ‘I will not stand here and let you abuse my mother. My Aunt Gibson is right! If my mother had not stepped out of her class to marry my father she would still be alive now.’

As he listened to her increasingly hysterical outpouring, Gideon’s compassion and concern started to change to resentment and anger – not against Ellie, but against her mother.

‘You have no way of knowing that,’ he told Ellie brusquely, adding curtly, ‘And as for the rest – I knew that your mother was a snob, Ellie, and that she was encouraged by her sisters to believe she should not have married your father – your Uncle William has told me as much – but I never thought that you would be foolish enough to allow yourself to become tainted by the same brush.’

‘How dare you say that?’ Ellie rounded on him furiously. ‘How dare you even so much as speak of my mother?’

An ugly silence fell between them.

Ellie’s outburst had touched a raw spot on Gideon’s pride. Did she seriously believe that he wasn’t good enough for her? Had she believed that all along?

Gideon couldn’t bring himself to speak. If he did not go soon he would be late for his appointment with Mary Isherwood.

‘Ellie…’ he pleaded eventually, lowering his pride for the sake of their love, but immediately Ellie stepped away from him.

‘I promised my mother,’ she reminded him stiffly.

‘Ellie, Ellie, I understand that right now you are overwrought and upset, but I can’t believe you mean this. A deathbed promise! You can’t mean to destroy our love, our lives, the dreams we have begun to share, because of that. Your mother had no right!’ he exploded again, when he saw the stubborn look on her face.

‘I gave her my word,’ Ellie told him woodenly.

‘Yesterday you gave me your love!’ Gideon reminded her bitterly.

Ellie looked away from him. ‘My promise to my mother comes before anything and everything else, Gideon. I was…unwise…foolish…unknowing. My mother is…was right and –’

‘And I’m not good enough for you? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Gideon challenged her bitterly.

‘Please leave, Gideon,’ Ellie demanded, her voice thickening in her throat. ‘My aunts will be here soon to…to…see my mother. I should not even be here with you whilst she is alone. You see, even now you are coming between us. Oh! You don’t know how much I wish I had never met you!’

Fighting to master his emotions, Gideon looked at her. She had become someone he didn’t recognise, a very different Ellie from the one he had fallen in love with. She had become, he recognised bitterly, her mother’s daughter. His Ellie would come back, though, he was sure of it. He was not going to give her up so easily!

‘Very well then. If that is what you want,’ he told her quietly, ‘I shall go.’

After she had shut the door behind Gideon, Ellie leaned against it and closed her eyes.

‘I have done what I promised, Mama,’ she whispered as the tears blistered from her closed eyes and burned an acid trail down her face.

‘Edith, I’m afraid that I must go. I am expecting a young man to call round and see me – a Mr Gideon Walker. He is newly come to the town and wishes to set himself up as a cabinet-maker. I am determined to put my own stamp on the library, and I also want to commission some new cupboards for the drawing room.’

Edith Rigby’s eyebrows rose. ‘I am surprised that you would consider entrusting such a large commission to an unknown tradesman, Mary, especially when Gillows of Lancaster have such a good reputation.’

‘Gillows can afford to pick and choose their clientele and take their time about completing their commissions. It seems to me that if this young man has anything about him he will be so grateful to me for giving him a commission that he will put his whole heart and soul into his work, as well as complete it on time.’

As both ladies stood up, Edith Rigby hesitated a little, picking her words carefully. ‘It seems from what I have learned about you from certain friends of mine in London that we have a common interest. I do not wish to say too much at this stage, Mary, but if you are interested, I entertain a few…like-minded friends once a month. We are rather a serious crowd, I’m afraid, for we discuss in the main not fashion or the goings-on of the King and his friends, but rather more political issues. If you think you would be interested in joining us…?’ She looked searchingly at Mary.

Levelly, Mary returned her look. ‘I too had heard from my friends that you shared our beliefs and goals.’

Edith sighed. ‘A goal which even between ourselves neither of us quite dares to put into words for fear of ridicule and rejection. It is my passionate belief that our sex has been wrongfully and deliberately denied the right that every adult man may take for granted and that it is high time that we were accorded it in full, and given the vote. There, I have said it, and if I have offended you or mistaken the situation –’

Mary shook her head. ‘No, and you are right, Edith. I too am passionately committed to that goal. We owe it to our sex to do everything within our power to right what must be one of the most shameful wrongs ever done! For a country that abhors and has abolished slavery, to permit its women to be so disenfranchised is surely a sin against our sex.’

Having given her a fierce hug, Edith released her to say, ‘At the moment we are merely straws in the wind, Mary, an ununified smattering of like-minded people, but one day those straws will bind together and when they do we will be a force to be reckoned with. But there, I am lecturing to the converted, and you will be late for your cabinet-maker. If he is as good as you hope, you may instruct him to present himself here. I too have work I should like to have done. Who knows,’ she teased, ‘between us we may be able to convert him to our cause, and if he has a wife, a mother, a sweetheart or a sister, they will one day, I hope, have good reason to be grateful to us for doing so.’

As Gideon walked through Winckley Square, he was still trying to come to terms with what had happened. That Ellie, his lovely, gentle Ellie, could have spoken to him in such a way had hurt him very badly. Naturally, she was very upset about her mother’s death – he could understand that and, of course, forgive her her cruelty to him – but what he could not forgive was the way in which Lydia Pride had played upon her daughter’s feelings and tried to turn Ellie against him.

He loved Ellie and she loved him too. He was sure of it. Somehow he would find a way to make her see sense. But perhaps it would be best if he waited until the funeral was over before seeking her out again.

Of course, with her mother’s death she would have new responsibilities and would, no doubt, have to take charge of her father’s household. Gideon’s eyes warmed with a lover’s pride as he mentally envisaged his Ellie bustling about her new household duties – duties that might well mean that their married life would have to begin beneath her father’s roof, he acknowledged, because he certainly could not see Ellie abandoning her siblings. He would have preferred to have her all to himself, but Gideon was sensitive enough to recognise that Ellie would be needed at home. His spirits lifted by his imaginings, Gideon managed to shrug off his angry despair. All courting couples quarrelled from time to time, he reasoned, and it was far more pleasurable to think about the rosy future he was visualising for Ellie and himself than to dwell on the hurtfulness of her icy words.

He may not have particularly liked Lydia, but, of course, Ellie had loved her mother. Even he had been shocked by the news of her death, so how must his beloved Ellie have felt?

‘Well, Mr Walker, you certainly seem to have an excellent grasp of what I’m looking for.’

Surreptitiously, Mary studied him. He was both what she had expected and yet not. The years of his apprenticeship had given him an impressive breadth of shoulder to add to the height he must have inherited from his father – along with that cool and rather disconcertingly direct grey-eyed gaze. The shock of thick dark curly hair she supposed she should have expected, along with the slightly olive cast to his skin. His voice had a soft country burr, and there was a calm sureness about him that also spoke of his being a countryman. But that cool objective ability to assimilate what she required, and the instinctive skill to translate it into quick, economically elegant sketches that showed her just how her room would look as they came to life beneath his hands – that had caught her off guard. And that air of control and authority – where had he got that from? Herding William Pride’s livestock? Mary doubted that.

Determined not to let Mary see how anxious he was about her reaction to his drawings, Gideon sought to assume a nonchalant confidence he was actually far from feeling. He ached, like every young man in love, to prove to his beloved that he was worthy of her. He could feel the anxious tension gripping his gut whilst he watched Mary Isherwood studying the sketches he had made following her description of what she wanted. If she commissioned him to make her cabinets then a whole new future could open up for him: a future in which he could afford to provide for Ellie as his wife! And once they were married he would see to it that he made her so happy that she soon forgot about the snobbish aspirations of her mother!

‘Mr Walker, I believe we shall be able to do business together.’ Mary smiled as she handed back his rough sketches.

Gideon felt his pent-up nervous breath leak jerkily from his lungs. Mary had been studying the drawings for so long that he had begun to fear that they did not suit her. Just wait until he told Ellie! Gideon frowned. Of course, with Ellie in mourning for her mother he could not rush round to Friargate as he longed to do and share his excitement with her. No, he would just have to be patient…leave her to grieve for her mother for now, and then see her after the funeral.

‘I shall require you to supply me with detailed drawings, of course, and costings, and if I should find that you have attempted to cheat me by substituting inferior wood, or indeed in any other way, I promise you I shall make you sorry for it. I may only be a woman, Mr Walker, but I am not a woman to be underestimated.’

Controlling his excitement, Gideon forced himself to concentrate on what Mary was saying to him, and then frowned as the meaning of her words sank in.

‘It is not my habit to cheat, Miss Isherwood,’ he told her angrily.

‘No, I am sure it is not,’ Mary agreed calmly. ‘But you are a young man about to set up in business on your own account and there will be those who will seek to cheat you, I’m afraid. So you will do well to be on your guard. Now, how soon can you let me have the detailed drawings and your costings?’

Gideon thought quickly. ‘By the end of the week?’

‘And the work? When will you be able to begin that?’

Gideon tensed. This was the question he had been dreading.

‘I…there is a slight problem, Miss Isherwood,’ he admitted uncomfortably.

‘You have other commissions to complete?’

‘No…’ Gideon told her reluctantly. ‘The truth is,’ he blurted out, ‘as yet I do not have any premises to work from. I have two in mind, but I am waiting for the landlords to come back to me.’

‘I see.’ Mary looked searchingly at him. ‘And where exactly are these premises?’

Hesitantly, Gideon gave her the addresses.

‘Well, Mr Walker,’ Mary said crisply, ‘we must just hope that one of your prospective landlords comes back to you very soon, otherwise I fear we are both going to be disappointed. Mollie will show you out.’ She rang the bell for the housemaid who had originally shown him into the room.

‘Oh, Mr Walker…?’

Halfway towards the door, Gideon stopped.

‘You have a very fine eye for detail,’ Mary told him. ‘I wonder if when you have finished with them you would allow me to have the sketches you have just done?’

When Gideon stared at her in surprise she gave a small shrug and explained carelessly, ‘I am keeping a record of all the work this house has undergone, and I would like to put them in it.’

‘Of course you may have them,’ Gideon replied.

One foot on the stairs, Mary Isherwood paused to glance at the wall where her father’s portrait had hung.

How furious he would have been had he known what she was planning. It had been her mother’s relatives, the second cousins who had taken Mary in after she had fled from her father following their bitter quarrel, who had been responsible for her original involvement in the women’s movement.

Irene and Amy Darlington, the two spinster sisters, who had been derided by her father for being ‘unmarried bluestockings’, shared a passionate belief in the cause of women’s suffrage and their right to be treated as men’s equals.

Now in their eighties, they were still as fiercely dedicated to that cause as they had been as young women, and Mary shared their dedication.

She had heard about Edith Rigby’s involvement on the grapevine that linked the small groups of women’s rights activists together. The time was coming when those groups were going to have to be melded together, to work together, and Mary already knew that she would be called upon to play her part in this process. That, after all, was one of the reasons she had come back.

One of the reasons. She looked at the blank wall again. Perhaps she would commission Gideon Walker to carve some suitable piece to hang in the portrait’s place.

She had already dispatched a note to one of the potential landlords Gideon had mentioned to her, having immediately recognised that he was simply an agent and that the true owner of the business property was herself. Her father had built up a strong portfolio of properties in the town, which were let out, and she could see no good reason why Gideon Walker, and therefore she herself, should not benefit from this.

NINE

Ellie shivered as she stepped out into the cold dampness of the rain-sodden day. The cortege was waiting; her aunts already installed in their barouches with their families, white faces grimly unsmiling, garbed in deepest funereal black.

The horses, bearing their black feathers, their coats as wetly polished as the hired carriages and just as dark, stood sombrely beneath the stinging rain.

Ellie averted her eyes from the sight of her mother’s coffin. She was to travel in one of the last carriages with Connie and her cousins. John, though, was to ride in the principal coach with their father, whilst the new baby, who was to be named Joseph according to her mother’s wishes, remained behind in the care of her aunt’s nursemaid.

‘But, Father, why cannot we have the baby here at home with us?’ Ellie had protested, desperate to cling to this last human piece of her mother.

‘Because it was your mother’s wish that he should be brought up by her sister,’ Robert Pride had told her, his face becoming bitter as he’d muttered under his breath, ‘No doubt she felt she could not trust me to do so.’

Her father had changed so much in the short time since her mother’s death. Her mother’s body had not even been cold when he had left the house, only returning once all the funeral arrangements had been put in hand, obviously drunk and maudlin, weeping openly as he grieved for the woman whose death he had caused.

In the space of a few short days Ellie’s whole world had changed and she had lost everything that had been safe and familiar. The strong, good-humoured, gentle father she had known and loved had turned almost overnight into a weak, broken man, content to let his sisters-in-law have their way.

In her sleep she dreamed of him holding them all protectively close in his paternal arms, and her father’s arms weren’t the only ones in which she dreamed of being held fast. But it was wrong of her to think of Gideon.

She had declared passionately, when Connie had asked her why they had not seen Gideon, that she never ever wished to set eyes on him again. And she had meant it!

There was nothing left in her world to give her comfort or hope. Her aunts, she knew, were bitterly vehement in their condemnation of her father. She had heard what they had to say about him as they moved about her mother’s bedroom, performing the duties Lydia had requested of them. Deep down inside, Ellie had resented their presence and their assumption of a greater closeness to her mother than she herself was allowed. With them her mother had inhabited a world, known a life in which Ellie had never played any part. In their eyes she had seen grief and anger that excluded her as much as it bound the remaining four sisters together. In death it was as though her old life had reclaimed Lydia, so that the Prides were not only robbed of her physical presence but also of their memories of her. Ellie’s aunts had ordered every detail of the funeral – a funeral that would befit a Barclay! Lydia was not to be buried in the plot that Robert had hastily bought, but in the same grave as her parents. Initially Ellie had thought that her father had been going to protest and insist that Lydia be buried where he could eventually join her, and Ellie had held her breath, aware that, for her, more than just the last resting place of her mother was hanging in the balance. If her father should persist, if her Aunt Amelia should back down, then maybe…

Maybe what? She could break her word to her mother? Ellie was furious with herself for even permitting such a thought. She would never do that, never.

But then Aunt Amelia had announced that it had been her mother’s wish that she be buried with her parents, and Ellie had watched as her father had turned away in silence.

Inside, a vulnerable part of her had ached for him and for herself, and she had longed to run to him; to tell her aunt defiantly that their mother belonged to them and not to her sisters and her parents. Now it was too late.

Their neighbours had come out to stand in respectful silence as the cortège made its solemn, mournful way down the street. Tears pricked at Ellie’s eyes, blurring everything around her as they turned out of Friargate and headed for St John’s Parish Church.

Gideon’s head was aching and there was a sour taste in his mouth. Slowly, like a trickle of rancid milk, memories of the previous evening came back to him.

He had taken Nancy to the music hall, where they had both had too much to drink. They had then made their way back to his lodgings, but when they had got there, and Nancy had offered to come inside with him ‘to finish off the evening’, Gideon had suddenly sobered up and recognised that the last thing he wanted was to take her to bed.

He had tried to be tactful, but Nancy had a very straightforward attitude to life and she had immediately objected to being denied the end of the evening she had been anticipating. What had begun as a quiet conversation had quickly escalated into a very noisy argument, at least on Nancy’s part. Before too long she had been joined by some of the other mill girls, who had gleefully egged her on.

Gideon winced as he recalled their frank and bawdy comments about his refusal to ‘show her what he was made of’.

To make matters worse, some of the clients of the nearby whorehouse had objected to the noise and had come out into the street with their whores, whereupon a fight had begun between the two groups of women.

The mill girls, robust though they were in their attitude to sex, considered themselves very much a cut above the whores, who sold sex, and the opportunity to air long-standing offences and give vent to festering insults was not one either party had been readily prepared to relinquish. In the end it had taken the threat of sending for the police to break things up, and even then one of the whores had claimed triumphantly that they would have to get the local sergeant out of her bed first.

After everything had quietened down, Gideon had finally made it into his lodgings to be greeted by his stony-faced landlady, who had informed him grimly that she kept a clean and respectable house, thank you very much, and that if he did not mend his ways and his choice of company he would be looking for new accommodation…

Ellie’s mother was being buried today. Gideon blinked his gritty eyes at his clock. The service was to be at eleven o’clock. It was nearly nine thirty now.

Quickly he got out of bed, groaning as he felt the alcohol-induced pain thudding in his head. In the yard shared by all the houses, he sluiced himself down with cold water from the pump, gritting his teeth as its cold bite increased the fierce pounding of his hangover.

Upstairs in a neighbouring house, one of the mill girls stood and watched him admiringly. He was a fine-looking lad, that Gideon Walker. No wonder Nancy had warned the rest of them off him.

It was over. Her mother had gone to her rest. Ellie shook with the reaction she was still feeling to that moment of sickening dread when she had thrown her handful of earth down onto the shiny wood of the brass-bound coffin.

Now they were all to go back to Aunt Amelia’s where a funeral tea would be served, to fortify the mourners, and the will was to be read to those it concerned.

As they started to make their way back to the waiting carriages, Ellie was conscious of her Aunt Lavinia walking alongside her. Of all her mother’s sisters, Aunt Lavinia was the one Ellie knew the least – the one who had married the most successfully. Her husband was the senior partner in a firm of solicitors based in Liverpool, and they lived in a huge mansion in Hoylake.

Their house had its own separate coach house and stables, as well as a tennis court and a croquet lawn, and their neighbours were the wealthy shipowners who were clients of Josiah Parkes.

They had no children, a fact that Ellie had heard being spoken about in hushed tones by her mother and Aunt Gibson.

‘Ellie, you will ride back with your Aunt Lavinia,’ Amelia announced firmly, putting a restraining hand on Ellie’s arm as Ellie started to make to join her cousins.

Blank-eyed, Ellie did so. Her Aunt Lavinia had a soft plumpness that the other Barclay sisters lacked, and when she walked she seemed to gasp for breath slightly. She smelled of lavender water, just as Lydia had done. Ellie felt her eyes fill with hot tears.

Numbly Ellie headed for the carriage, and then froze. She had no idea just what had made her stop and turn round to look behind her, to where a group of non-family mourners were keeping a respectful distance as they said their final farewells. There at the back of the small group stood Gideon, his uncovered head bowed as he stood in silence, the wind ruffling his thick rain-slicked hair, the mourning clothes, which Ellie guessed he must have hired for the occasion, suspiciously tight across his chest.

Gideon! Ellie felt her heart leap inside her chest, her emotions churning in wild confusion. What was Gideon doing here after what she had said?

Ellie! Gideon felt his heart soar and then crash as his eyes recognised the truth his heart did not want to accept.

Across the rain-sodden space they looked at one another. Ellie’s face was set, her eyes cold as she focused on him and then dismissed him with a single blank look.

For one wild moment Gideon was tempted to cross the distance separating them, to take hold of her and shake the coldness from her, to demand that she return to being his warm, laughing, gentle Ellie and not this cold, haughty girl-woman who was looking through him as though he were too far below her for her to acknowledge him.

‘No!’ He wasn’t even aware that he had shouted his furious denial out loud until Robert Pride touched him on the shoulder.

Robert had aged dramatically since his wife’s death. Gone was the proud jauntiness of his step, his shoulders were stooped and his expression more apologetic than proud.

‘Gideon, lad!’ he exclaimed warmly. ‘’Tis good to see you here –’

‘I wanted to see Ellie,’ Gideon cut him short, his own emotions too sore to allow him the luxury of good manners. ‘I need to speak to her.’

The look of pity in Robert Pride’s eyes made Gideon’s stomach roll in despair.

‘Leave her be, lad,’ Robert told him wearily. ‘It’s for the best. I know that you and Ellie…’ He paused. ‘Things are different now, Gideon. You’re best forgetting about her.’

‘Forget about her? How the hell can I do that?’ Gideon exploded, but Robert was already walking away from him to talk with other mourners.

Desperately, Gideon looked past him to where Ellie had been, but she had gone.

He had come to the church in part to pay his respects to Lydia – no matter what she had thought of him or he of her, his parents and especially his mother had given him a lovingly strict upbringing – but, of course, he was here mainly so that he could see Ellie.

Well, he had seen her and she had seen him, even if she had refused to acknowledge his presence.

He knew that she had a stubborn strength about her and he admired her for it, but then he had not realised that that strength and that stubbornness were going to be turned against him, and against their love!

Lydia’s will was brief and straightforward.

To her sisters she left those mementoes she had brought into her marriage from the home she had shared with them: the silver dressing-table set she had been given by her grandmother; the pretty golden necklace that had been a confirmation present from her godmother; her personal books and small pieces of jewellery – apart from the rings Robert had given her.

Those, her engagement, wedding and eternity rings, were to be given to her daughters, her will stated – her wedding and eternity rings to Ellie, and her engagement ring to Connie.

Holding them in her cold, closed hand, Ellie fought fiercely to stem the jealousy she felt at knowing her mother had left the things that were most precious to her not to Connie and herself but to her sisters. The silver dressing-table set in particular had been a favourite of her mother’s, and Ellie could picture her now, using it, smoothing the heavy polished metal, for Lydia had allowed no one other than herself to clean it. It had been a family heirloom, given originally to her grandmother by her mother, and Ellie ached to be able to pick it up and touch it; to lift it to her face and breathe in any last traces of her mother’s scent that might lie hidden in it.

There were, however, letters for Ellie, Connie, John and for the new baby as well.

In Ellie’s, her mother told her how much she loved her and how much she hated having to leave her before she was fully grown up.

I have spoken already to my dearest sisters about my fears for you and for Connie, Ellie, and I have spoken to them too of my hopes and desires for you. They have assured me that they will do everything within their power to help you to achieve my hopes for you. You MUST be guided by them in all things, as you would be if they were me. Their words to you will be my words; their experience will guide you as mine would have done. You are to be obedient to them at all times, and in every way, and to remember that they are protecting your Barclay heritage.

When I disobeyed my mother to marry your father I believed I knew my own mind. I have loved your father, Ellie, and I honour him as a good man, but there have been many, many times when I have regretted my wilfulness, and envied my sisters – and never more than where you and your sister are concerned.

Your future now lies with your aunts, and I beg you, for my sake, to be guided always by them.

The plans and arrangements they will make for you have already been discussed with me, and if my worst fears come to be, and I do not survive the birth of my child, then you will read this letter in the knowledge that everything your aunts do for you is with my knowledge and approval. Always remember that I love you and that what I have done I have done in your best interests and out of my love for you.

May God bless you, my darling daughter, and may I rest in peace knowing that you will be dutiful and obedient to your aunts, my sisters.

I am your loving mother,

Lydia Barclay Pride

However her mother may have signed herself, the letter had been written as Lydia Barclay and not Lydia Pride, Ellie recognised bleakly.

People were starting to leave. Dutifully, Ellie went to say her goodbyes to them, gently guiding Connie with her.

Connie’s normally expressive face was blank, her clothes for once uncreased and unmarked, her agile body stiff and unyielding.

‘Ellie, what is to happen to us?’ she burst out in a frantic whisper. ‘In her letter to me, Mam says that I am to obey my aunt and be a good daughter to her, but I am not her daughter, am I? I am Father’s daughter.’

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