Shining Threads
| Shining Threads | |
| Audrey Howard | |
| Hodder Stoughton (2012) | |
| Rating: | ***** |
| Tags: | Lancashire Saga |
Synopsis
When beautiful Tessa Harrison and her twin cousins take over their parents' Lancashire cotton mill, their luxurious upbringing has left them unprepared for their new responsibilities. For Tessa, there is an added but forbidden attraction at the mill. Foreman Will Broadbent, with his genuine understanding of the business and its workers, could not be more different from the dashing cousins. Yet, like the twins, he is hopelessly in love with this untameable girl. Their love for Tessa will lead one to death, one to the arms of another woman, a thrid too faint-hearted to take up his inheritance. And Tessa, the girl who could choose any man she wanted, is forced to shoulder more burdens than she could have imagined before she can be united with the one man she truly needs.
Also by Audrey Howard
The Skylark’s Song
The Morning Tide
Ambitions
The Juniper Bush
Between Friends
The Mallow Years
A Day Will Come
All the Dear Faces
There is No Parting
The Woman From Browhead
Echo of Another Time
The Silence of Strangers
A World of Difference
Promises Lost
The Shadowed Hills
Strand of Dreams
Tomorrow’s Memories
Not a Bird Will Sing
When Morning Comes
Beyond the Shining Water
Angel Meadow
Rivers of the Heart
The Seasons Will Pass
A Place Called Hope
Annie’s Girl
Whispers on the Water
A Flower in Season
Painted Highway
Reflections from the Past
Distant Images
As the Night Ends
Rose Alley
A Time Like No Other
The Long Way Home
The Flight of Swallows
About the author
Audrey Howard was born in Liverpool in 1929. Before she began to write she had a variety of jobs, among them hairdresser, model, shop assistant, cleaner and civil servant. In
1981, while living in Australia, she wrote the first of her bestselling novels. She lives in St Anne’s on Sea, her childhood home.
Shining Threads
Audrey Howard
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Audrey Howard 1991
The right of Audrey Howard to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 74509 2
Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 56236 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Again,
for Howard and Janet,
with my love
Contents
1
She was like a young queen in her hauteur. The warm honey of her skin, the pale, cat-like grey of her eyes, the sweeping burnished darkness of her hair which flowed unconfined
down the length of her straight back promised a stunning beauty to come. She had on a white cambric shirt, frilled down its front, with full sleeves which were caught in a narrow band at the wrist,
and, amazingly, pale buff riding breeches of the finest doeskin. Her knee-high boots were brown and of the very best leather, polished until they gleamed, and she wore brown kid gloves and carried
a riding crop.
Had it not been for her hair and the knot of scarlet ribbon with which it was carelessly tied back she might have been taken for a boy. She sat astride her small chestnut mare with the regal
grace which spoke of generations of majesty, of the divine right to rule stretching back into eternity, and yet her grandfather had been no more than a humble handloom weaver.
Her two companions were as attractive as she, with the same magnificent seat in the saddle. Dark as gypsies with eyes as blue as a cornflower with a touch of violet in them, they possessed the
wide, laughing mouth which was so eternally female in her, but which in them was firmed into masculine arrogance. Their hair was thick and curling, tumbling in boyish disorder above fiercely
swooping black brows. They were dressed just as she was but where her breeches were buff theirs were dove grey, clinging to their strong young thighs and buttocks.
It was a bright and pretty day. The sky was a high, placid blue and the sun fell in a brimming haze on the three young riders. They were laughing. Their heads were thrown back, their brown
throats arched and smooth and the noise they made disturbed a scatter of magpies. The birds scuttled about a stretch of tussocky grass for a moment before lifting above the bracken and into the
air, drifting away on almost motionless wings.
The slight breeze was warm and soaked in the fragrance of heather and gorse. It moved the shadows cast along the track by the shoulder-high bracken and rippled through the hair of the riders. A
curlew took flight in alarm, its liquid, bubbling song rising into the clear air, and the high-stepping, mettlesome mounts rolled their eyes and tossed their fine heads. Around their feet
quarrelled a pack of dogs, tall and black with brown markings and no tail to speak of, glossy and well muscled and as healthy and vigorous as the youngsters and the horses they rode.
‘Do you think my mother believed you?’ the girl said. Her voice still quivered with laughter as she spoke. She lifted her gloved hand to push back the heavy weight of hair from her
forehead, an impatient gesture implying she would dearly love to be free of it, as she was free at this precise moment of every other female constraint which hampered girls of her age and obvious
station in life.
‘Lord, I don’t know, but what could she do about it? It’s not the first time we’ve made that excuse to Aunt Jenny but short of sending a message to old Wilding to check
that he had actually summoned us to the schoolroom she was forced to accept our story. Anyway, what does it matter? We’re out now and it will be worth the flogging we’re bound to get
from Charlie when they discover where we’ve been. And we did ride into the schoolyard and out again so we’re not lying when we say we’ve been there, are we?’ The boy who
spoke grinned impishly. ‘And, by God, I would submit to half a dozen beatings to get away from that damned mill for an hour. We’ll be there soon enough one day, I suppose, when we have
done with lessons. But now we are on holiday and I fail to see why we should be forced into the weaving shed, don’t you agree, brother?’
He turned to laugh in the direction of the second boy and he might have been looking at his own reflection in a mirror: the same arrow-straight back and broadening young shoulders, the same eyes
and smiling mouth, firm white teeth and tenacious jaw, the same look of sleek and graceful high spirits, and it was plain there was no more than a minute or two between them in age.
‘But what did she say?’ the girl demanded to know.
‘Oh, the usual stuff. She could quite believe our schoolmaster was not satisfied with our performance as scholars and that we needed to do extra schoolwork to help keep up with the rest
but that in her opinion we were wasting our time and his.’
Drew Greenwood grinned broadly and his boyish face glowed. ‘Aunt Jenny’s not taken in by us, you know. She realises that if we can manage it we’ll not go into the mill with her
and Charlie. She understands too, whereas our mother doesn’t. Mother believes that anyone with the blood of Chapmans and Greenwoods in their veins could not fail to be intoxicated with the
idea of being a millmaster, as she was, but Aunt Jenny’s a good sort and she’ll not press us yet.’
The girl sighed. ‘I wish she was the same with me. I had to slip out of the side door while Laurel’s back was turned. Then Walter refused to saddle my mare saying he’d been
given orders not to and that if I showed my face in the stables he was to send for Miss Copeland at once.’
Tessa Harrison’s face was indignant. Her clear skin flamed to poppy at her cheekbones, the reminder of the stable boy’s outrageous behaviour so incensing her she moved her mare to a
faster gait as though to escape it.
‘What did you do?’
‘I had to saddle her myself.’
‘Did Walter try to stop you?’
She turned to grin lazily, lifting an amused eyebrow.
‘Oh, come now, Drew Greenwood, would he dare lay a hand on
me
?’
‘No, I don’t suppose he would. Silly question, really.’
The three young riders had reached the summit of Badger’s Edge where, it was said, a ‘badger’ or travelling salesman had fallen to his death in a snowstorm many years ago. With
fluid grace both boys sprang from their saddles and with a word to their horses, two tall bays with impeccable bloodlines, to stand, they sauntered across the uneven spiky grass to stare, shoulder
to shoulder, over the sprawling town which lay far below in the valley. The girl dismounted more slowly, speaking softly to her mare, rubbing its nose affectionately with a strong, slender hand
before moving to join the others.
All three were tall. The girl was a bare six inches shorter than her companions who were exactly the same in height and size and colouring and so compellingly identical it was impossible to tell
them apart. Pearce and Drew Greenwood then, twin sons of Joss and Katherine Greenwood, and beside them their cousin, Tessa Harrison, only daughter of Jenny Harrison, their father’s sister,
and all three of them would inherit a share in the fortune, the great estate, the mills, the railway stock and every other asset which made up the wealth of one of the most influential and affluent
families in south Lancashire. Endowed from birth with not only the shining good looks of the superior beings they so obviously thought themselves to be, they possessed too the glorious belief that
they were unique in their world, and in every other come to that, and had the financial provision which made other, lesser mortals reluctant to disagree.
‘They should have let us go away to public school at Arnmoor with Nicky Longworth and Johnny Taylor instead of to that damned grammar school in Crossfold.’ Pearce said moodily,
flicking his riding crop against his leg. ‘We might have been taught something other than two and two makes four and how much profit a successful manufacturer may realise before breakfast,
which, as far as I can make out, must be at least double what
other
manufacturers are capable of. Mother can’t see it, of course, nor Father, as we are to spend our lives in the mills,
they say. What use would the education the
Squire
’
s
son receives be to us, she asks, for we are to be industrialists and not landed gentry as Nick is. Our grandfather and
his
father before him did not slave to make money merely for Drew and I to spend. I nearly said “why not?” I’ll tell you this, if we
are
to be cotton manufacturers
as she says, I’ll not do it without a fight.’
Pearce Greenwood shaded his eyes from the sun, looking towards the west and the thick pall of smoke which lay like a sour blanket over the town below. A great sweep of wildly rolling moorland
stretched between, rough and uneven, patched with wide folds of growing bracken, gorse and heather which, in a few weeks’ time, would be thick and verdant with colour, yellow, green and
purple, as summer reached towards its peak.
Tessa stood between the two boys, all three with their backs against a grey-veined rock. A skylark sang high above them and they turned to stare upwards into the great vault of the blue sky
until their sharp eyes detected the black speck which was the bird. She sighed gustily then lowered her gaze to scan the familiar landscape which lay at her feet and stretched as far as the eye
could see on either side of her and high at her back where the south Pennine heights rose up and away towards Yorkshire. She had roamed these hills with her cousins ever since she had been able to
sit a horse, trailing far behind them at first since she was younger and had not the strength nor expertise to keep up. But it had not taken her long to be as swift and as skilful as they in
guiding her mount across streams with dangerously unstable wooden footbridges, following narrow lanes winding in long curves up steep slopes and on into the misty distances of the packhorse routes
which had once carried goods to outlying hamlets and isolated farmhouses. She learned to go over stony paths which led nowhere but to huge outcroppings of rock, stretches of moorland which were
steep and identical to a dozen others and in which a man could lose himself for days, or forever! It was damp for the most part, with grey-topped hills reaching into the clouds, peopled by none but
the starving, itinerant families who moved from town to town looking for work, or mischief, and often not caring which they found, ruffians some of them who would knock a man senseless on the
chance of a farthing.
