Ellie Pride (30 page)

‘She really is dying, isn’t she?’ Gideon burst out harshly.

The doctor inclined his head in a brief nod of assent.

‘How much…how long…?’

‘It is hard to say. A week at most, I suspect.’

‘A week!’ Gideon went grey.

After the doctor had taken his formal leave of him, Gideon made his way upstairs. There was something he had to say to Mary, a decision he had made, which nothing and no one could change.

She was propped up against her pillows, a tiny shrunken figure whose flesh clung tight to the bones of her face. Only her eyes were still her, still Mary.

‘You’ve seen the doctor?’ she asked him.

Gideon nodded.

‘He says I shall have a week, maybe more, but he is over-optimistic,’ Mary told him, giving a small gasp as a rigor of pain shook her body, and she reached for a handkerchief, holding it pressed tight to her mouth as she tried not to cough.

‘You must not talk. You must save your strength,’ Gideon said, with the gentleness of a son. ‘I will stay with you now – until you don’t need me any more.’

‘Gideon.’

Even though it was almost two o’clock in the morning, Gideon was awake immediately, getting up from the chair where he had been sleeping, to go to Mary’s bedside.

Automatically he took the hand she lifted towards him and held it in his own, trying to warm its coldness.

‘It’s time now, Gideon,’ Mary told him softly. ‘I can feel it.’ Her voice was little more than a breathy whisper, each word a painful effort.

Over these few final shared days she had talked to him continuously, even when he had urged her to save her strength.

‘I want to do this, Gideon,’ she had told him softly. ‘I want to share with you my precious memories of your father and our love, the plans we made.’

Her voice paper thin, she told him now, ‘I have made you the main beneficiary of my estate, Gideon. No,’ she stopped him when he began to object. ‘You do not know how it grieves me even now not to be able to acknowledge you publicly as my son, but I have made a statement to my lawyer telling him of the true relationship between us and of your true parentage. When the time comes and you meet, as I hope you will, the woman you can love as I loved your father, I want you to tell her that I was your mother and that I loved you dearly – so dearly that, for your sake, I chose to give birth to you in secret and hardship instead of taking my own life and yours with it so that I could be with
your father. At last I can soon be with him, Gideon. I wonder if he will recognise me, grown old whilst he still has his young handsomeness – and he was so handsome, so gifted. You have his gifts. I have seen it in your drawings…

‘I pray that when you have a son, Gideon, he will inherit that gift and that you will cherish it in him for your own sake and for your father’s.’

She died ten minutes later, her hand clasped between Gideon’s, shocking him as she suddenly sat upright in her bed, her whole face transformed with joy, transfixed on something, someone beyond his sight. She trembled as though her whole body was reaching out to a waiting lover.

He saw her great joy as she said his father’s name, spending her last breath on it. But he could not see whoever it was she had looked past him to smile at with so much love.

Stiffly Gideon closed her eyes, and kissed her still-warm lips, his voice thick with tears as he whispered to her, ‘Goodbye, Mother.’

‘What a pity it is that Henry will not change his mind and allow you to go and stay with Cecily and my mother,’ Iris commented as Ellie kneeled at her feet, pinning the hem of her gown. Iris had brought it round to Ellie announcing that she had torn the hem whilst riding her bicycle.

‘I attended a lecture by Annie Kenney this week, Ellie. It made me realise how much has changed in the way we live our lives, even in the short time we have known one another,’ Iris commented, adding with candour, ‘and you have changed a great deal yourself! You have become a very independent and strong-minded woman, whom I am proud to call my friend, Ellie, and whose opinion in all things I value – especially,’ she added with a rueful smile, ‘in matters of dress!’

Ellie laughed. ‘Well, I am certainly not the same girl who left Preston,’ she acknowledged.

‘Preston! Oh, I knew there was something I
meant to tell you! How could I have overlooked it? Ellie, the saddest news. You remember Mary Isherwood? She has been one of the movement’s longest-standing supporters. I’ve heard that she has died. She was a neighbour of Cecily’s mother’s, I know, and Cecily said that according to her mother, the funeral was very quiet, at her own request, and it seems that she has left everything to that young man – what was his name?’

‘Gideon Walker,’ Ellie told her mechanically.

Her pale face and set expression caused Iris to look queryingly at her, but Ellie ignored the question in her eyes and said expressionlessly, ‘I have repinned the hem, Iris, and it shouldn’t take me long to repair the tear.’

Once Iris had gone, though, all the emotion Ellie had been forced to suppress surged up inside her. Gideon had, it seemed, been well rewarded for the role he had played in Mary Isherwood’s life. An acid feeling of helplessness swirled through Ellie. Gideon…Had he ever thought of her when he held Mary in his arms? Had he ever wondered, wanted…? An ache so fierce and sharp that it caught her breath arced through her, a tormenting, fierce thrust of hot female need, unfamiliar and shocking.

Where had that come from – and why? Panic brought tiny beads of perspiration up along her forehead and beneath her breasts.

Gideon stared blindly out of the window and into the garden beyond. It was over. Everything had been done as Mary had desired. Everything! Mary…In his thoughts even now she was still Mary, and not…

He swallowed and turned and walked up the stairs, pausing before turning the handle of the bedroom that had been hers.

Gideon’s hand lay on the bed, flat now without the thinness of Mary’s body beneath its covers.

Of course, there had been talk once the news of his inheritance had become public, but he had never once wavered in his determination to keep the truth of their relationship private.

Only he knew how rawly it had rubbed his emotions to open the albums she had left for him, albums that, he realised, she must have taxed herself to prepare during the last months of her illness – filled with her mementoes of his father, his letters to her declaring his love, the little sketches he had drawn for her and which she had treasured, a lock of his hair, as night-dark as his own. He had also discovered, with a surge of shock that had caught his emotions in dragons’ teeth of pain, the small baby gown she had given them to dress him in after his birth, a book of prayer in which she had written his name and a blessing for him, and, most painful of all, some rough work sketches he had done for her at various times, on which she had written, obviously for herself and not for him, alongside their date, ‘Our son has your gift, my darling one – I pray he may achieve his
ambitions, for his sake and for the sake of my own unbearable guilt.’

His ambitions! Well, he would never be an architect, but he was wealthy – extremely wealthy, in fact.

But his wealth was not a ripe juicy fruit whose flavour one wanted to linger on the tongue. Instead it held a tainting bitterness.

It was too soon yet for him to admit to himself how much he yearned for Mary, how much he yearned to be able to share with her the relationship they had both been denied, and so instead he directed his pain towards that segment of the town’s matrons, especially those with marriageable daughters, who had suddenly decided that he was now socially worthy of their recognition.

He would never find the love Mary had told him she wanted him to have; he would never find it because he did not believe it existed! One day, no doubt, he would marry – he was now a man of property and means, after all, and as such it behoved him to provide himself with a son or two to pass it on to – but his wife, when he came to choose one, would be picked as carefully and clinically as a shepherd choosing his breeding stock. Of course, there were those who deliberately shunned him, despite his newly acquired wealth, and one of them was Mary’s neighbour Dr Gibson’s wife, and Ellie Pride’s aunt.

Gideon wondered what it was that gave the Barclay sisters such an elevated idea of themselves.
In the town’s social pecking order, Mary had ranked a good couple of rungs higher up the ladder than Amelia Gibson. However, there was no disgrace greater than that of a young woman bearing an illegitimate child, and he, as that child, must carry the same stigma! In the eyes of the town’s matrons it was better that he should be thought of as Mary’s secret lover than her son, and he knew that if Amelia knew the truth she would consider that she had even more reason to shun and ostracise him!

‘Henry, please try to understand I have to go and see Connie,’ Ellie pleaded across the dining-room table. She had had to wait until Henry had returned from business to tell him of her shock at receiving a tear-stained letter from Connie, begging her sister to help her, and to send her some money, and going on to give her the even more shocking news that she had left their aunt and uncle’s home and was presently living in rented accommodation secured for her by ‘a friend’.

‘Connie would not have written to me if she was not in the direst of circumstances. I have let her down so badly in the past, Henry, I cannot do so again.’

‘Ellie, you must not go. You must not leave me here alone with my father. I cannot bear it if you do,’ he told her wildly.

‘Henry, it will not be for very long,’ Ellie soothed
him. ‘I shall get the train in the morning and I shall be back before dinner. You will be working, and I shall be home before you return. I must see Connie, Henry,’ Ellie told him desperately. ‘She needs my help.’

Henry was giving her a peevish look that made her heart sink.

‘Henry, I
must
go to Connie,’ Ellie persisted pleadingly. ‘I cannot let her down again.’

Henry was refusing to answer her, and had not asked her one single thing about Connie or what had happened.

Of course, the moment she had read Connie’s letter Ellie had telephoned her Aunt Simpkins, and received the angry disclosure that Connie’s ‘friend’ was probably the most unsuitable young man she had been seeing in direct disregard of her aunt and uncle’s wishes.

‘He is a young Irishman of the wildest kind of reputation, and a Catholic!’

Ellie’s heart had sunk. Whilst, in the main, Catholic and Protestant families in Preston lived amicably with one another, the two religions were strictly segregated and their respective clergy frowned upon them leaving their own faith to marry members of the other, and for Connie, from a strict High Church Protestant family, to have anything whatsoever to do with a young man who was a Catholic was extremely shocking. Protestant girls knew that the only thing Catholic boys wanted from them was the sex they would never be allowed
with good Catholic girls, and, because of that, good Protestant girls naturally refused to have anything to do with Catholic boys.

Unhappily Ellie studied her husband’s hunched back. She had to help Connie. And, if necessary, she would go to Preston to see her without Henry’s permission!

Ellie’s head was aching when she got off the train in Preston. Henry had refused to speak to her over breakfast, and had left for the office in a huff.

They were having the hottest August Ellie could remember, and she could feel the perspiration trickling between her breasts as she hurried through the dusty heat of Preston’s streets.

All the newspapers were carrying warnings that there were soon to be strikes, and she could see the sombre groups of men huddled together here and there, obviously deep in serious discussion. Ellie had every sympathy with the men, although she would never have dared say so in her father-in-law’s presence.

As she hurried through the streets, Ellie recognised that the town had a sullen, sulphurous atmosphere about it which, at any other time, would have alarmed her. This was not the Preston she knew and loved. Trickles of angry-eyed, grim-faced men and women had begun to percolate through the streets, and a crowd was gathering in the market area, but Ellie was too concerned about Connie to pay them
much attention. Ellie skirted past the market as she headed for the area close to the docks where Connie had written that she was now living.

As she drew closer to the docks area, Ellie wrinkled her nose fastidiously at the pungent smell wafting along the street, and then gathered her skirt close in to her body with a small gasp as she saw the grey shadow running along the gutter. A rat!

It couldn’t be much further now, surely. The streets had become narrow and more squalid-looking, and as she walked past a group of children squatting on the pavement, she heard the clatter of the handful of small stones one of them had thrown after her. Children’s foolishness, that was all, and yet suddenly she felt threatened and vulnerable. Deliberately she refused to quicken her pace or show any panic. Preston was her home. She had grown up, if not in these particular streets, then those of Friargate and Fishergate and the market area. She was a Prestonian through and through, just the same as those urchins glowering sullenly at her, and proud to be one!

Grimly, Gideon looked at the faces of the two young people standing in front of him. The last person he had expected to see when he had called at the property his mother had rented out, to find out why the rent had not been paid, was Ellie Pride’s sister Connie, and still less had he expected to see her with Bill Connolly’s nephew Kieron.

Connie’s face was streaked with tears, her expression one of fear and defiance, her hands wrapped possessively and determinedly around Kieron’s broad forearm as she stood close to him.

Kieron, on the other hand, a sturdy six-footer with a shock of overlong dull black hair, a stubborn jaw and a dangerous temper, looked uncomfortable and ill at ease.

‘Look, Mr Walker, don’t say anything to me uncle, will ye? I mean about us being here, like.’

‘It won’t need me to tell him, for him to find out that you’re shacked up here with a Protestant, will it, Kieron?’ Gideon pointed out bluntly. ‘And when he does find out…’

It was no secret that Bill Connolly ruled his children and those of his brothers with his belt, and that no child of his or theirs was too big or too old to feel it against their backsides if he felt that they deserved it.

Gideon had walked into the Connollys’ kitchen one night to talk business with Bill only to find his eldest daughter bent over a chair, her naked buttocks exposed and already livid with bruises and stained with blood, screaming her head off whilst Bill wiped his belt clean and cuffed her head, whilst telling her not unaffectionately, ‘Ah, stop yer noise now, our Maureen. Sure, and you know you had it coming to ye, and ye got off lightly ‘cos I’ve got a soft spot for ye, God help me. But when the priest comes round and tells me that he’s heard a rumour that a daughter of mine has been fornicating…’

‘I wasn’a, Da. I wasn’a,’ Maureen had sobbed. ‘He’s telling lies. He’s a dirty rotten liar, that Father O’ Malley. All the girls know what he’s like, always slipping his hand up their skirts, and –’

A sharp scream had splintered the air as Bill had brought his belt down across her buttocks again.

‘Go and wash your mouth out wi’ soap, girl,’ he had roared. ‘No way will a daughter of mine speak so disrespectfully of a man of the cloth!’

Oh yes, Bill Connolly had very strong views about how his family ought to conduct themselves, and no way would he allow one of its members to live over the broomstick with a Protestant girl.

But it was Connie’s behaviour that had really surprised Gideon. For a girl of her upbringing and family to do what she had done meant that their reputation was completely ruined.

How were Ellie and her hoity-toity family going to feel when they discovered that Connie had been thrown out into the gutter for not paying her rent, and by him?

However, he gave no hint of the cynical delight he was feeling, the pleasurable sense of anticipation, as he removed some papers from his pocket and said curtly, ‘Well, well, if it isn’t Miss Connie Pride. I take it it is still Miss Connie Pride and not –’ he began.

But Connie stopped him, her face on fire as she burst out angrily, ‘Kieron and I are to be wed just as soon as it can be arranged.’

‘Really?’ Gideon turned enquiringly towards Kieron. ‘Is this true, Kieron?’

‘Of course it’s true,’ Connie stormed, stamping her foot. ‘You don’t think for one minute that I would be living here if it wasn’t, do you?’

‘Well, as to that, your morals are not my concern, Miss Connie, but according to my records this house is let to a Miss Byerly, a respectable schoolteacher.’

Immediately, Connie’s chin tilted, her eyes darkening with defiance. Tossing her head she told him, ‘Miss Byerly was the name of a teacher at my school. I borrowed it when I rented this house.’

‘You borrowed it? Well, you might have been better employed “borrowing” enough money to pay your rent,’ Gideon told her pithily. ‘You do realise that it is three weeks behind, don’t you?’

‘Three weeks? I have only been here a week!’

‘The rent agreement calls for an advance payment of two weeks’ rent, which has not yet been paid according to my reckoning, and although I might not have had the advantages of your posh schooling, Miss Pride, I can still reckon up. It means that you owe me three weeks’ rent.’