‘Ellie, I know that things don’t look good, but try not to give up hope. I mean…’
Ellie stared blankly at her brother as his voice faded away uncomfortably. He had arrived less than an hour after Gideon’s departure, to tell her that as yet there had been no news about Minaco. As she listened to him Ellie realised guiltily that for the past hour she had barely given the Japanese girl a thought.
That was the effect Gideon had on her. He made her selfish. Her mother had always said so.
‘Look, why don’t you go upstairs and try to get some rest?’ John suggested. ‘Mr Kershaw has given me permission to stay with you. He knows how anxious you are about Minaco.’
Silently Ellie headed for the stairs. The child in her womb had been moving vigorously all day as though…As though what? As though it sensed the presence of its father? Inwardly deriding herself, Ellie climbed the stairs, and entered the small cold bedroom.
Down by the docks the men surveyed the small pathetic bundle of flesh and bones, frozen stiff in death, the icy fingers clutching the photograph of the man she had loved.
Gideon stared around the elegant silence of the Winckley Square drawing room. Ellie Pride was carrying his child!
He could have other children, he reminded himself angrily. Other children with a wife far more suited to that position than the likes of Ellie Pride! He was a wealthy man now and she was a widow and a social outcast, who didn’t have the sense not to burden herself with even more responsibilities than she already had – that exotic-looking child, that girl who quite plainly was not in full possession of her wits.
His child! Gideon thought of his own childhood and of Mary.
A discreet tap on the door caused him to swing round.
‘Will you be requiring luncheon today, sir, only Cook…’
‘No, thank you, Fielding. But…No, it’s all right,’ he told the bemused servant. ‘I have to go out and I do not know how long I shall be.’
‘Gideon!’
John Pride looked surprised as he opened the
door to him, and Gideon grimaced to himself as he stepped past Ellie’s brother. His presence was a complication he had neither expected nor wanted. Now that he had made up his mind he was in a fever of impatience to have the matter settled just as soon as it could be.
He could not, would not, turn his back on his own flesh and blood. His own child! He would talk to Ellie, persuade her to hand the child over to him. He would bring it up himself. He would settle a sum of money on Ellie and she could do what she chose. He could hire servants to take care of his baby – a nursemaid…a governess…
There was no sign of Ellie in the cold parlour John showed him into, and Gideon was just about to ask for her when there was a loud banging on the front door. Excusing himself, John hurried to answer it, leaving the parlour door open as he did so.
‘Sergeant Johnson!’ Gideon heard him exclaiming, his voice faltering as he asked, ‘Have you found her?’
Found her? Gideon’s whole body tensed as he felt the ominous silence.
‘It’s not…not bad news, is it?’ he heard John’s voice falter whilst his own insides felt as though they were being squeezed in a vice. Something had happened to Ellie!
‘I’m afraid it is, John,’ the other man confirmed gravely. ‘A young woman’s body has been found –’
Gideon was through the door before he could stop himself, his face ashen. Ellie dead, and it was his fault! He was to blame. He had driven her, the mother of his child, the love of his life to – The love of his life? In a flash of awareness Gideon recognised that his fear, his despair, his gut-wrenching sense of loss and anguish were not for the child he had come here to take from Ellie into his own protection but for Ellie herself…his Ellie.
‘John, I heard someone at the door. What has happened? Has Minaco been found?’
As Gideon heard Ellie’s voice from the top of the stairs, the blood flowed hotly back into his numbed body as relief flooded over him. It was not Ellie who was dead. It was the poor Japanese girl who had been Henry’s mistress. He should have realised that for himself, Gideon acknowledged.
The police sergeant was looking uncomfortable. ‘Someone will have to come and identify the…ahem…the person,’ he began apologetically.
‘I will do it,’ John announced.
‘No, John!’ Ellie said immediately. ‘That wouldn’t be right.’ She avoided telling him he was far too young to have to undergo such an ordeal if anyone else could do it. Nor could she face going herself – and who would look after Maisie and Henrietta?
John turned to Gideon and requested almost formally, ‘Gideon, could I ask you, please, to remain here with my sister until I return? I do
not think she should be here on her own at a time like this.’
‘John, I do not need Gideon to stay with me,’ Ellie began to protest, and then stopped as she saw how strained her brother was looking. He had been such a support to her these last months, and sometimes she forgot how very young he still was. She would not reject his kindness, and when she agreed he left to go to Mr Kershaw with Sergeant Johnson.
Somehow she had known already that Minaco was dead. The Japanese girl could never have survived a night outside in such low temperatures and, more than that, Ellie knew intuitively that Minaco had stopped wanting to live.
A heavy shudder ran through her. She was now the only person who stood between Henrietta and the appalling fate of ending up in the workhouse orphanage. But she herself might easily die in childbed, as her own mother had done. Ellie had never felt more vulnerable or afraid – not for herself but for those who depended on her: Henrietta, Maisie, and even this new baby she had carried so unwillingly.
‘Ellie, I am sorry to hear about…about the child’s mother, but you and I have urgent matters of our own we need to discuss.’
Blankly Ellie focused on Gideon.
‘You are carrying my child,’ Gideon told her.
Ellie opened her mouth to deny his assertion and then discovered that she could not.
‘We must be married, and as soon as possible!’
Gideon frowned as he heard his own stern declaration. That was not what he had come here to say at all, but now the words had been said, and he discovered he had no intention of calling them back. In fact, bemusingly, he discovered that he was extremely glad that he had said them! A cavalier attitude of reckless determination filled him, a sense of excitement and hope, almost, of his life suddenly taking an unexpectedly enticing and longed-for turn.
‘We have no alternative. We must marry for the sake of our child,’ he told Ellie firmly – privately thinking: for the sake of their child and for the sake of his love for her as well – but these were words he could not say to her.
Ellie’s eyes were dull and empty. Had she heard what he had said? Had she registered his words, Gideon wondered.
‘I mean what I am saying, Ellie,’ he warned her. ‘I understand now what it is not to know my parents, and I would not have my child suffer from that under any circumstances.’
Now she was focusing on him! ‘What do you mean?’
Gideon took a deep breath. ‘Mary was my mother,’ he told her simply, so simply that Ellie knew immediately that he was speaking the truth. ‘She only told me herself when she was dying, and she begged me not to reveal it to anyone…other than the woman I…I married.’
Ellie stared at him. The knowledge that Mary had
not been his mistress but his mother was causing her to feel an emotion she was afraid to acknowledge. To prevent herself from having to, she reminded him flatly, ‘You hate and despise me.’
Gideon turned his head, unable to meet her eyes. ‘I shall hate myself even more if I do not do the right thing by my child,’ he told her curtly.
Ellie’s pride screamed at her to tell him that she would never marry him, never humiliate herself by joining her life to that of a man who had treated her as he had, who thought about her as he did, but a hardiness had developed in her these last months, a toughness that had no time for the luxury of an emotion such as pride. Every day that brought her closer to the birth of this child she carried brought her closer to her own fear.
‘Very well,’ she told him quietly, ‘but there is a condition I must make.’
Gideon waited, his heart twisting in bitterness, already anticipating what was to come. She would want money, payment for his child and for herself. She would want…
‘I will only marry you if you will legally adopt Henrietta and swear to me on the Bible that no matter what happens – no matter what – that you will care for her, and for this child,’ she added, touching her belly, ‘yourself! That you will not send them away from you to be reared by others. Also, I want you to swear that there will always be a place beneath your roof for Maisie.’
He was silent for so long that Ellie thought he
was going to refuse, unaware of the confusion and raw emotion making it impossible for him to say so much as a word.
Her ‘condition’ was so very different from what he had expected, so revealing of a side of her that he had previously refused to allow himself to see.
‘She is nothing to you!’ he told Ellie sharply, nodding in Henrietta’s direction.
‘On the contrary, she is everything to me,’ Ellie corrected him fiercely. ‘She is everything I should have done for my own brothers and sister and did not. I will not be responsible for another child suffering as they have done, Gideon. Either you give me your promise or I will not marry you.’
Gideon knew that she meant it.
‘Very well then,’ he agreed tersely.
They were married quietly six weeks later. Ellie had told no one in her family of her plans apart from her brother John, knowing how they were likely to react, and not just to the fact that she was marrying Gideon. She was, after all, officially still in mourning for Henry, but with her baby due in April Gideon had been insistent that there was no time to waste.
As they made their vows, Ellie was conscious of the way Gideon avoided looking at her. This was the second time she had been married, she reflected dully. The first time she had married a man she did not love, and now she was marrying a man who did
not love her! Despairing tears pricked her eyes. Why was she so upset? She did not love Gideon, after all! Not any more, even though today, marrying him, was making her remember all those joyous, tender, idealistic, youthful hopes she had once had. All the shining, adoring love she had once had…
The fierce kick of her child thankfully distracted her.
The staff of her new home had lined up to welcome Ellie as their mistress. For a moment she had hesitated a little apprehensively on the threshold.
‘Ellie, please allow me to present Mrs Harris, our housekeeper, to you.’
Ellie only had a moment to register the warm pressure of Gideon’s hand on her arm, as the housekeeper bobbed her a respectful curtsy and announced formally, ‘Welcome to your new home, ma’am.’
Her new home. She was now the mistress of this elegant, gracious house, Ellie had to remind herself as she was introduced to the other servants.
Gideon, observing her manner towards them, watched as relief and respect replaced the initial wariness in the servants’ eyes. By the time she had finished being introduced to them, and had acquainted herself with a brief history of each and every one of them via her gentle questions, Gideon could see that she was going to have them eating out of her hand, an opinion that was confirmed when
his starchy and sometimes formidable housekeeper unbent enough to declare, ‘I hope I know my place, Mrs Walker, but may I suggest that you take tea before I show you over the house?’ Tactfully the housekeeper made no reference to Ellie’s advanced state of pregnancy.
Smiling gratefully, Ellie agreed, and slowly followed Mrs Harris towards the small sitting room overlooking the large garden to the rear of the house.
Ruefully Ellie allowed herself to be seated in a comfortable chair and fussed over by Mrs Harris, thankful that her private worries that the servants might not take to her – or, even worse, might look down on her – had come to nothing.
As soon as Mrs Harris had left, John, who had been holding Henrietta, put her down and the little girl ran immediately to Ellie.
Bending down to lift her onto her lap, Ellie felt her eyes starting to fill with tears. Against her will she found herself thinking of the past, and of things she knew it would be better for her to forget. It was nearly four years since she had first seen Gideon and the woman she was now was a very different person from the girl she had been then, but a part of her couldn’t help thinking how different things might have been had she been allowed to follow her own heart.
A heart that Gideon had surely broken with his cruelty to her, Ellie reminded herself, as she hugged Henrietta close.
‘Let me take Henrietta, Ellie,’ John suggested, after the maid had brought in the tea trolley. ‘Then you can pour the tea.’
‘I’ll take her, John,’ Gideon intervened, mindful of the new role he was going to have to play in Henrietta’s life, but as soon as he approached Ellie, the little girl buried herself as tightly as she could against Ellie, hiding her face from him in a gesture of denial.
‘You’ll have to give her time, Gideon,’ Ellie said calmly, as John stepped in and took the little girl.
Gideon’s mouth compressed. These last six weeks had shown him an Ellie who had constantly surprised him with her strength and her maturity. The declaration she made to him regarding the future of those she felt responsible for in the event of her death had shocked him in its bleakness. Now, with his own experience of losing Mary, for the first time he was beginning to question within himself what it must have meant to her to lose her own mother in the way that she had.
‘Oh!’ Ellie exclaimed as she looked at the tea trolley, which was laden not only with several plates full of deliciously dainty and tempting sandwiches, but also a cake. Not just any cake, she recognised as her face began to glow self-consciously, but a wedding cake!
Following the direction of her gaze, Gideon told her brusquely, ‘I asked Mrs Harris to do it. I know you said you didn’t want any fuss, but I thought a wedding cake…’