A Time Like No Other (35 page)

‘Perhaps the lady you are to marry and her wealthy father will not be too pleased to hear that you seduced your best friend’s widow only months after his death, or perhaps you would prefer to hear from my lawyer on the matter of slander. Harry and I, even if we were forced to go to court and have our names whispered all over Yorkshire, would swear that we were having an affair months before we were married. Perhaps even before the death of my first husband. We might be pilloried but I don’t imagine it would be for long. Harry is a person of enormous influence, well respected and with more wealth than any man in these parts. There are very few who would care to be in his bad books. We would both fight
dirty
to save our marriage, Roly, our life together, our children, one of whom happens to be called Caterina Sinclair.’

‘I’ve had enough of this garbage,’ Roly said savagely, reaching for his caped overcoat and hat which hung on the stand by the office door. ‘I shall ride over and see Harry and if my visit harms his health, which seems very delicate at the moment, then that will be laid at your door. If you cannot keep out of my way and remain where gentlewomen are supposed to be, which is in their own homes, then anything that results from your unwomanliness is your own affair.’

Lally stood up and so did Biddy and Susan and it seemed to him, though he knew he was being foolish, that they posed some sort of threat to him. The other two were tall, standing protectively on either side of Lally who was not. Their faces were impassive and though he hadn’t the slightest idea what they could do, if anything, to stand in his way, he found himself taking a step back.

‘I mean everything I say, Roly. I will not let you take what Harry has built up over all these years. I know you have had a hand in building it so surely you could be satisfied with the excellent lifestyle you enjoy. He will not sell any part of it to you, nor will he agree to splitting it. He has told me so’ – which was, of course, a lie – ‘and I am only repeating what he said.’

‘Why isn’t he here then, fighting as a man should for what is his?’

‘He cannot sit a horse.’

‘Rubbish.’ Roly began to pull on his overcoat. ‘I shall ride over this minute . . .’

‘If you come within a foot of the entrance gates to the Priory I shall send Carly for the constables and have you arrested. Now, get on with running the Sinclair mills, Roly, if you can, and I promise that as soon as Harry is well enough he will be up here to discuss your grievances. Oh, and give my very best wishes to your fiance’e. I wish you both happy!’

22

‘What will you do now, my clever lass?’ Biddy was the first to speak as they sat in the carriage on their way back to the Priory. She had had nothing to say while the three of them were at High Clough and it was not because she was overawed by Roly Sinclair, nor that she felt out of place, but that she was a strong woman who had learned the hard way how to stand up to anything life could throw at her and Roly Sinclair, in her opinion, was nowt a pound. Biddy Stevens, from a working-class background, came from Halifax and was twelve when her mother died and her father began to pester her, and she had left home for a life in some sort of decent work, perhaps as a domestic, a scullery maid, she didn’t care as long as it was decent. Unfortunately she had discovered that even the most lowly housewife would not take on a girl who knocked at her back door without references asking for work. She did a stint in a mill that manufactured ‘shoddy’, working on a machine with revolving teeth called a ‘devil’ which tore the rags already sorted to pieces. She had to wear a bandage to prevent the inhalation of the foul dust from infecting her lungs, which was bad enough, but when she was raped by the overlooker and she made a fuss, an unnecessary fuss in his opinion, for it was a regular occurrence among the girls at their machines, she was put off. She took to the streets. If she was going to be abused, she decided, by any man who fancied it, she might as well get paid for it! She became friends with an ageing prostitute who took her under her wing, showing her how to protect herself, not only against aggressive men, but against becoming pregnant.

But the day when the old prostitute’s training let her down and the man she had thought looked agreeable proved to be just the opposite was when her life had changed dramatically. The man, silent and menacing, would have raped her had not Delphine Atkins’s carriage passed by. Delphine’s coachman was an ex-prize-fighter and with a shriek from his mistress to stop the carriage, he had soon seen off the pervert and Biddy was bundled into the carriage with nothing more than a black eye and the marks of the man’s hands about her throat.

She had served Delphine devotedly until she died. She had brought up Lally, who had been no more than a scrap of white lace, a short cap of dark curls and eyes the colour of aquamarine when Biddy first saw her. She was as pretty as a picture and Biddy had loved her from the start which was just as well, for Delphine, well meaning but not maternally inclined, lived a strange life among what were known in Halifax as ‘arty types’! They met in Delphine’s drawing room where they quoted Balzac to one another and read out loud passages from Dostoyevsky. They discussed the merits of one painter against another while Biddy and the child sat comfortably in the warm kitchen and went through their letters from a child’s reader. For several years after Delphine sadly passed away she and Lally lived with Aunt Jane, a distant relative who took them in until Miss Lally became Mrs Christopher Fraser of the Priory.

When Miss Lally had married Mr Chris, Biddy was ready to go down on her knees and thank the Being in whom she had never believed, for even then she had had her doubts about the other one, the dashing, charming, handsome sprig of a youth with whom her lamb and Mr Chris had shared their wild ways. Roly Sinclair, son of a rich mill-owner, spoiled rotten in Biddy’s opinion, but likeable all the same.

But he had showed his true colours today and Biddy needed time to marshall her thoughts before she conferred with Miss Lally on what Miss Lally’s next step was to be.

‘I don’t know, Biddy, but you can be certain Roly Sinclair is not going to get his hands on Harry’s mills. He is a partner and I suppose he will have to remain so but I know Harry wouldn’t sell out to him nor would he split the business to give Roly half. When we get home you and I and Susan will discuss what we think our next step should be.’

But when they got home the house was in uproar and for a dreadful moment Lally’s heart leaped painfully in her chest, for she thought it was something to do with Harry but it turned out that Pinky had been mislaid and her daughter was refusing to be comforted. At eight months old Cat was a lovely child with her mother’s colouring, her dark hair in fat, shining curls about her head, her eyes a brilliant blue-green, her cheeks round and soft with a tint of peach in them. She had her parents’ strong will and at six months had been crawling, following the patient dogs and hauling herself across their smoothly brushed black and white backs. Even now, as she shrieked her displeasure at the non-appearance of her beloved Pinky she was doing her best to stand, pulling herself up against Dora’s neat skirt. Dora was pathetically pleased to see them, declaring that even the master was at this moment searching his own room for the missing toy. For ten minutes Biddy, Lally and Susan joined the search until Pinky was found, of all places under the curled-up kitten in the kitchen who had taken a liking to its softness. The kitten, now five months old, was the only one left of the three from Folly Farm. The other two had been taken discreetly to live in the stable since they were both male and as Fluffy was female Susan said firmly she wanted no addition to the nursery which was already overflowing with animals.

Cat was overjoyed, hugging the threadbare toy to her chest, kissing it passionately and though Biddy, who was not a particular lover of animals, decreed that the toy should be washed before the child should be allowed it, none was prepared to separate baby and toy.

Harry was still out of bed when Lally entered the bedroom, in fact he was half under it looking for Pinky, his expression anxious and Lally was made to realise how much Cat meant to her husband even though she was not naturally his. He often sat with her on his knee in the chair by his bed, the pair of them half asleep, his face peaceful and loving, for the first recognisable word she had spoken had been ‘Papa’!

He grinned now and shrugged when Lally told him the toy was found, standing up and holding out his arms to her and in their new closeness she moved into them, a closeness that seemed to have grown stealthily but naturally and she had not been displeased. He lifted her chin and gently placed a kiss on her lips.

‘And where have you been while this drama was taking place? I was just about to call for Piper and ride into Moorend to see if any suitable replacement for Pinky might be had.’

It was the perfect opportunity to tell Harry what was happening at his mills. He had already been told that Roly was out to make trouble, since she had spoken to him about it before the incident with the Weavers but at that time they had no idea what it was Roly was after. The beating Harry had taken from the Weaver brothers had knocked all remembrance of it from his mind.

‘Harry.’ She took his hand and led him to the sofa which was placed to one side of the fire so that in the evenings they might sit side by side. ‘I think it is time we talked about . . . about what happened before the . . . before you were attacked. It is a month now and you are so much better. You are getting about the house and Carly tells me you have even ventured into the yard. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you on Piper’s back before long and so perhaps it is time to talk of the future.’

In the back of Lally’s mind there was a slight but growing suspicion that Harry’s subconscious spirit was doing its best to hide from something it did not care to remember. Nothing to do with the mills or his life as a businessman but
her
and the child who was not his but whom he had grown to love as though she were. He was beginning to move about the world of the household, stronger and seemingly
physically
recovered from his attack but something held him back from total recall. Should she chance sending him spiralling away beyond her reach? John advised waiting, saying let him come back to himself when his mind was ready for it, but quite honestly she did not know what to do about Roly’s threat. Oh, she was prepared to suffer the scandal that would ripple through the community should Roly tell the world that Cat was his, for she could bluff it out, but could Harry? In his right mind, the strong and tenacious mind he had possessed before the Weavers attacked him, he would fight beside her to protect the children and their rightful inheritance and not only that but their place in their own society. But he was
not
in his right mind and might not the truth damage him even further? She knew if she was honest with herself, that if Roly refused to run the business, let it come to a standstill, walked away from it and started up on his own with Anne Bracken’s wealth behind him, there was no way on God’s earth that she could step into Harry’s shoes. She knew nothing about the worsted trade, not only the actual manufacture of the miles of worsted yarn the mills turned out each year but the financial side, the accounting, the buying of fleeces, the selling of the finished goods. Susan knew the inside of a weaving shed, for she had worked in the loom gate, ‘minding’ more than one machine at a time. She had known how to describe the piece Roly had been studying when they entered his office; ‘boardy’ she had called it, which had impressed Roly, but there was more to it than that. Biddy was staunch in her loyalty and resolution to help in any way she could, even to standing at a power loom herself since she knew the inside of a mill, Lally had no doubt, but without the knowledge that was in Harry’s head and his years of experience, where were they to start?

‘The future?’ Harry echoed, drawing away from her as though already his mind was searching for a hiding place. Lally heard the sound of Jenny and Tansy laughing as they ran down the back stairs to the kitchen passage. They had come from one of the guest bedrooms changing the bed linen, for though recently they had not had guests to stay Mrs Stevens was a stickler for the correct way in which a house such as the Priory should be run, insisting the bedrooms were ‘done out’ and the beds changed every week. Daft, they called it, but since neither of them had the laundering to do, what was it to them?

Lally looked up into Harry’s troubled face. The cast had been removed from his nose and the bruises put there by the Weaver boy’s kicks had faded. He looked his old self except for the hesitant expression on his face. What was it that had altered his mind so that the most important part of his life had become hidden from him? He was an intelligent man, sharp, experienced in the ways of business, a man who from entering the mills as a youth and working next to his own father had learned the trade, absorbed every aspect of it so that it was a part of him and yet, though he was physically improving, he seemed to shy away from anything that was not involved in his life with her and the children, the house, even the gardens which he asked about. Doctor John told her to let him recover at his own pace, that the memory of his commercial life would return gradually as he recovered from the blow to his head but that had been weeks ago and still he clung to what she was beginning to believe was the place where he had chosen to hide.

She could not press him, she just couldn’t. She must somehow manage to carry on without him, how she did not know, but the danger of forcing him to remember what his life’s purpose was, running the mills, was something she couldn’t chance.

‘The . . . the future?’ he repeated vaguely. ‘I’m not sure . . .’

She smiled up at him and without thinking, put her arms about him and held him close to her. She marvelled at how dear this man was becoming to her. Once she had looked to him for protection, for security from the threat of scandal and he had not failed her. Now he needed her to safeguard his interests, to keep his mills running, his concerns forging ahead and she didn’t know where to start. Roly would fight her every step of the way to get what he wanted and she must gather her frail, female strength to stop him. But not only had she to do this tremendous deed, she must keep her household running, her children cocooned in the childhood safety they deserved and she must bear the child that she knew was growing inside her. Harry’s child!