‘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.
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.