Angel Meadow (34 page)

Nancy evidently had the same thought, for she drew herself up even further, presenting him with a full view of her disfigured face, her frosted eyes telling him that what had happened to her was none of his concern. But Josh Hayes was no longer the engaging, carelessly good-natured, happy-go-lucky young man who had swept Evie Edward off her feet. He had matured, shouldered responsibilities not only as a father but as a man of business with a standing in the community. This young woman was not his responsibility but could he ignore what had been done to her, the deed seemingly gone unpunished, and still call himself a gentleman? He could not.

“Miss Brody, I cannot rest . . . I beg your pardon, but I cannot rest easy in my mind knowing that a madman is still on the loose. You say he has not been—”

“He ran away, Mr Hayes, so there is really nothing to be done about it.” Nancy’s emotions were racing from her head to her chest and even down to her knees which, though she was sitting down, felt curiously weak, no doubt due to her fall, she told herself firmly without believing it. Some contrary female part of her, even while she was arguing with him, was noticing the firm but pleasing shape of his mouth, the clefts at either side of it and, whenever he stopped to glare at her, the black lines that striped his silver grey eyes from the pupil to the outer circle. But this wouldn’t do. She had no time to play games with this fine gentleman who seemed determined to do battle on her part, which she supposed was what gentlemen of his class did for ladies. But she was no lady and though she would dearly like to see Mick O’Rourke brought to justice he – and Rosie – had been gone for the best part of a year.

Firmly she told him so, though she did not mention Rosie.

“Nevertheless I would like his name, Miss Brody. My family has some influence in Lancashire, contacts in all the cotton towns. If he is working hereabouts he would easily be found.”

She sighed, for there was nothing she would like more than to have news of Rosie, and where Mick was there surely would be her sister.

“Very well. His name is Mick O’Rourke.”

“Aah . . . Irish!”

“As I am, Mr Hayes. Or of Irish descent.”

“I apologise, Miss Brody. I meant no slur to you. Now then, I think we had better get you home. You might have concussion, or worse.” He was firm, sure in his male arrogance that, as a woman, she was incapable of getting herself anywhere without a male arm to support her, particularly now she was injured, not at all concerned about his mare which, apparently, was blocking the pavement to the annoyance of a constable. “I shall call a cab. Mrs Underwood, I presume you are Mrs Underwood?” And when Hetty Underwood, who had outfaced many a gentleman in her time, meekly said she was, he sent her scurrying into Market Street to hail a hansom cab.

“Really, Mr Hayes, this is ridiculous.”

“Why is it ridiculous, Miss Brody? Accidents happen.” His eyes were an incredible soft velvet grey and he was smiling as he knelt before her.

“You weren’t looking where you were going.”

“And neither were you.”

“Oh, damnation.”

“What is it now?”

“I don’t know. I just feel so . . . so annoyed.”

“With me?”

“I suppose so, and with myself.”

“Don’t be.”

“I can’t help it. I’m not usually such a fool.”

For a brief second she drifted against him, her head drooping to his shoulder. His arms rose and his hands gently gripped her forearms and when she lifted her head their eyes met and acknowledged something that was there between them. He thought he might have kissed her and so did she but there was a bustle at the door as Mrs Underwood and her assistant came to help her to the waiting cab. He picked her up and cradled her to his chest, neither of them aware of anyone but each other.

“Your horse, Mr Hayes?” Mrs Underwood said faintly and was not surprised when he did not seem to hear her.

19

She knew something unthinkable had happened. She had felt it, she supposed, years ago, when they had exchanged angry words in the mill yard. She had felt it in the ruins of the castle where she had gone, in her devastation, after Mick O’Rourke had raped her, making her pregnant, and Josh Hayes had thrown his good warm cape about her shoulders. There had been some essence of him in the cape which had enfolded her, entered into the place that had been so sorely hurt: her heart, was that it, or the flesh and bones of her which had ached with weariness, and she had felt comforted by it, soothed; and something else that she had not been prepared to recognise. Deep down, unacknowledged, she had felt it again at his warehouse in Moseley Street when he had given her, for a reason she had told herself was merely kindness, though of course it wasn’t, the key that had opened the door to her new venture with his willingness to sell her his cotton. Every time they had met something had flowed between them. Something she, at least, did not want and, she believed, neither did he if the coolness of his manner was anything to go by. And that afternoon when she and Mary and Jennet had taken Kitty for a picnic and he had come upon them, accompanied by his little son. What a bloody fool she had made of herself then. She could have bitten out her own tongue when she heard herself ask him about his wife, a question that had come from somewhere inside her that she had not even known existed. And with what incredible gladness she had received his answer. He had no wife, he had told her, looking at her as if to ask what the devil it was to do with her, which was as it should be, for what
had
it to do with Nancy Brody?

But he had put his hands on her outside Mrs Underwood’s shop, allowed her to feel the warmth and masculine vigour of him and from that moment she had accepted it, gloried in it, despaired over it and known it was too late. He had lifted her against his chest, lean and yet strong, held her close to him as he carried her into the shop, bent his head to her so that she had felt the warmth of his breath on her cheek and smelled the fragrance of expensive cigars mixed with his own particular male odour which seemed to be a combination of cologne and fine cloth. He had been alarmed and had wanted to curse her but his eyes had given him away, for they had been a soft, smoky grey, narrowed with his male impulse to hold her more closely than was necessary. His lean, dark face with its oddly slanting smile bewitched her and she felt her flesh warm with what could only be called desire as her hands felt the ripple of his muscles beneath the impeccable cut of his jacket as he lifted her effortlessly from the pavement. She had wanted the moment to go on for ever, for she had experienced a strange languor, warm and sweet and deep, cradling her in a most unusual need to be carried wherever he fancied taking her.

In the hansom cab he had arranged her to his own satisfaction against the faded, rather worn upholstery, keeping his arm about her shoulders as though to steady her and she had not objected. Telling the cab driver to go carefully, which was something of an impossibility in the midday traffic, he had directed him to take them to Grove Place, making no secret of the fact that he was well acquainted with her address. She had not explored the reason why, since she felt herself to be drifting in a hushed world of enchantment which lulled her into a state she had never before known. It filled her entire being, and his too, she knew that, erasing their busy, complicated lives with the one all-absorbing pleasure of looking at one another, of taking in odours, of hair and skin, the feeling of closeness, of female softness and male toughness so that the jolting ride from Market Street, along Victoria Terrace past the Collegiate Church and Victoria Station on to Bury New Road passed by them unnoticed.

The cab stopped at the front gate of her home and they dragged their eyes away from one another to stare foolishly about them.

“Oh, are we there?” she asked with slow dragging reluctance, for how could she bear the moment to be over.

“I’m afraid so,” he answered without thinking, both of them knowing exactly what he meant. It was not the time for speaking, for promises or declarations, but when his hard hand touched hers it burned her with a strange fire and she wanted him to go on touching her for ever. She felt drugged with happiness, a rare feeling; indeed she could not remember ever knowing it before. And in the midst of it all she found herself noticing what she had not seen before: the sweetness and humour in his firm lips, the quiet amusement behind his alert gaze. He was, quite simply, a beautiful man.

“I’ll carry you in,” he had told her and her heart had leaped, for his hands were a caress about her, going through her flesh to the bone, the length of his lean body an inch from hers, his slanting, enquiring smile like the sun warming her skin. His face was close to hers as he lifted her from the cab and, so separated had they become from the world in which they lived, again he might have kissed her, despite the fascinated stare of the cab driver, had not Annie, Jennet and Mary come hurrying down the steps and along the path. Kitty and the barking dog tumbled at their heels so that pandemonium reigned for several minutes. They surrounded her with cries of “what’s to do now?” and “what next?” patting her, begging to be told what had happened, eyeing Josh Hayes with some trepidation as though whatever it was must be his fault.

It brought them both back from that dangerous bewitchment with a rapidity that made her gasp and she could see the confusion in Josh as he carried her up the steps and into the kitchen where, turning for directions to Annie, he placed her gently in the chair indicated. The dog at once jumped up and put her paws on her knee and Josh frowned.

“Miss Brody suffered an accident to her ankle,” he told the twittering group of women, his voice suddenly distant. “Mrs Underwood kindly bandaged it but I . . . well, you might want to call in a doctor. Must that animal leap about at Miss Brody’s knee like that?” They were astonished by his irritation, wondering what had caused it, though Nancy knew, naturally. “No,” he continued, “please, it was no trouble. I must get back, my mare is still . . .” and he had gone.

She had not seen him since and the anguish was ferocious. She was in love. She who had resolved never, ever to get involved with a man after what Mick O’Rourke had done to her, who had sworn that she hated men, that she would concentrate her whole life on the task of making herself and her family respectable, wealthy, people of consequence with which an attachment of any sort to a member of the opposite sex would interfere, had fallen in love. She had fallen in love with Josh Hayes and she was savage in her anger, an anger directed not just at herself for allowing it to happen but at him who had encouraged it, or so it seemed to her. She was in a precarious position in her life, for Josh Hayes was not the only one to recognise what the civil war in America might do to the cotton trade. She and Jennet were laboriously building up a small but successful business, a growing business, for they sold their manufactured goods, not only on the market stall which Nancy insisted on keeping up, as a kind of insurance, but in a growing number of shops along Deansgate, King Street, Corporation Street and Piccadilly. Not of the class of Kendal Milne and Faulkner, of course, but respectable dress shops and drapers. But cotton was the sum and substance of their livelihood, their bread and butter, and if their supply dried up, as it looked increasingly likely it might, what was to become of their business? They were teetering on the edge of a precipice, so how could she add to the possible disaster by allowing herself to fall in love? She could not. Not now. Later, perhaps, when the cotton crisis was over and she would have time to think about it; but in the meanwhile she found herself torn most distressfully by a raging conflict of emotions. She suffered bursts of sheer joy at the thought of him, at the image of his lean, handsome face as it smiled quizzically into hers; then, abruptly, she would be caught up in an angry and urgent need to wish him as far away from her as possible where she hoped savagely he would stay. She didn’t want this, did she? And her heart told her most definitely that she did and her head argued against it until it ached. There would be nothing more wonderful than the passion and folly – and love, did he feel it too? – that had vibrated from his body to hers and yet nothing more disastrous!

It was two months before she saw him again. A warm and sparkling Sunday in August with nothing above the roofs of the houses but a span of azure blue. The sunlight turned the plain red brick of the houses in Grove Place to a rich and blushing burgundy and struck diamond reflections from the well-polished windows, and even the donkey-stoned steps seemed all the whiter. The housewives of Grove Place, Annie among them, though she was not, strictly speaking, a housewife, were as proud as punch of their smart little homes and spent many hours on their knees scouring and deep scrubbing every surface, inside and out.

Couples were strolling arm-in-arm beneath the shade of the massive sweet chestnut trees that lined Bury New Road, planted years ago when the busy thoroughfare was barely more than a lane. Children in their Sunday best rolled hoops, skipping ahead of their parents, and a slow procession of omnibuses, taking town dwellers out to Castle Hills and Sedgeley Park for the afternoon, passed their door in stately splendour.

She and Jennet had taken Kitty and Scrap for a leisurely stroll down Broughton Lane where the hedgerows were thick with hawthorn, the dry ditches beneath them submerged by a rising tide of wild flowers. Sweet cecily, fragrant with the scent of aniseed, standing waist high, its full green foliage and luxuriant white blossom crowded side by side with hedge parsley, dock and nettle which would be followed, as autumn mellowed, by meadow cranesbill, ragwort, foxglove and willowherb. The fields beyond were just as rampant, a spreading carpet of blue and pink and yellow and white where periwinkle, buttercup, clover and meadowsweet grew riotously side by side.

Putting Scrap on her leash they turned into the long, wide pathway that led to Lodge’s Nursery Gardens, and which was bordered by a small, running brook. They wandered along the paths between the extensive orchards of pear, apple and plum trees, all beginning to fruit, the colours quite glorious: apples of yellow and light red, the palest green, russet, orange and deep crimson; pears of the lightest green to the darkest; and the rich purple red of plums. Beds of antirrhinum bordered the paths, an explosion of colour from the palest lemon to the deepest red, delicate pinks and carnations, begonias and petunias in a patchwork quilt of colours. Roses of every sort, cabbage roses, pink and showy, the rich crimson of the red rose of Lancaster and many others, all neatly ticketed so that the novice gardener might have all the information needed to make his garden as glorious as the ones on show. There was a bed of buddleia bushes, known, the sign said, as a butterfly bush, the blossom varying in colour from white, violet-blue, pink to reddish purple and about them, as the name implied, was a cloud of dancing, skimming butterflies.