Annie Groves - Ellie Pride

‘Ellie, Ellie, my love, please do not look so,’ he begged her, unable to keep his feelings out of either his voice or his eyes. ‘What is it?’ he demanded when he felt her stiffening against his hold.

‘Let go of me, Gideon,’ Ellie demanded sharply. The icy tone of her voice was her mother’s and as she heard her own words and recognised it, Ellie drew strength from what she felt must be her dead mother’s support and approval. Haughtily she drew herself up tall and looked into Gideon’s eyes.

‘Ellie, sweetheart, don’t look like that,’ he protested. Had she wept he would have known immediately what to do, but this icy stiffness bewildered him. ‘Come here,’ he commanded gently. ‘Let me hold you and –’

‘No!’

The fury in Ellie’s eyes as she pulled away from him shocked Gideon into silence.

‘Don’t touch me!’ Ellie told him. ‘Don’t come anywhere near me! I don’t want to see you ever again, Gideon. Ever!’

White-faced, she looked dispassionately at him. Why was he still standing there? Hadn’t she told him to go? The icy coldness surrounding her had somehow become a form of welcome protection, and she withdrew herself even deeper into its glacial grip. Here, within it, away from anyone else, she could truly make reparation to her mother for her guilt.

‘I promised my mother that I will never see you again, Gideon. And I intend to keep that promise!’ she announced.

Gideon stared at her, unable to take in what she was saying. Disbelief, anger, and then pain – oh, such a pain – held him silent! When at last he was able to speak, his voice was raw with emotion.

‘No! You cannot mean that! What are you saying? I understand how shocked and upset you must be, but your mother had no right –’ he began unwisely, carried away by his feelings of outrage.

Ellie stopped him. ‘I will not stand here and let you abuse my mother. My Aunt Gibson is right! If my mother had not stepped out of her class to marry my father she would still be alive now.’

As he listened to her increasingly hysterical outpouring, Gideon’s compassion and concern started to change to resentment and anger – not against Ellie, but against her mother.

‘You have no way of knowing that,’ he told Ellie brusquely, adding curtly, ‘And as for the rest – I knew that your mother was a snob, Ellie, and that she was encouraged by her sisters to believe she should not have married your father – your Uncle William has told me as much – but I never thought that you would be foolish enough to allow yourself to become tainted by the same brush.’

‘How dare you say that?’ Ellie rounded on him furiously. ‘How dare you even so much as speak of my mother?’

An ugly silence fell between them.

Ellie’s outburst had touched a raw spot on Gideon’s pride. Did she seriously believe that he wasn’t good enough for her? Had she believed that all along?

Gideon couldn’t bring himself to speak. If he did not go soon he would be late for his appointment with Mary Isherwood.

‘Ellie…’ he pleaded eventually, lowering his pride for the sake of their love, but immediately Ellie stepped away from him.

‘I promised my mother,’ she reminded him stiffly.

‘Ellie, Ellie, I understand that right now you are overwrought and upset, but I can’t believe you mean this. A deathbed promise! You can’t mean to destroy our love, our lives, the dreams we have begun to share, because of that. Your mother had no right!’ he exploded again, when he saw the stubborn look on her face.

‘I gave her my word,’ Ellie told him woodenly.

‘Yesterday you gave me your love!’ Gideon reminded her bitterly.

Ellie looked away from him. ‘My promise to my mother comes before anything and everything else, Gideon. I was…unwise…foolish…unknowing. My mother is…was right and –’

‘And I’m not good enough for you? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Gideon challenged her bitterly.

‘Please leave, Gideon,’ Ellie demanded, her voice thickening in her throat. ‘My aunts will be here soon to…to…see my mother. I should not even be here with you whilst she is alone. You see, even now you are coming between us. Oh! You don’t know how much I wish I had never met you!’

Fighting to master his emotions, Gideon looked at her. She had become someone he didn’t recognise, a very different Ellie from the one he had fallen in love with. She had become, he recognised bitterly, her mother’s daughter. His Ellie would come back, though, he was sure of it. He was not going to give her up so easily!

‘Very well then. If that is what you want,’ he told her quietly, ‘I shall go.’

After she had shut the door behind Gideon, Ellie leaned against it and closed her eyes.

‘I have done what I promised, Mama,’ she whispered as the tears blistered from her closed eyes and burned an acid trail down her face.

‘Edith, I’m afraid that I must go. I am expecting a young man to call round and see me – a Mr Gideon Walker. He is newly come to the town and wishes to set himself up as a cabinet-maker. I am determined to put my own stamp on the library, and I also want to commission some new cupboards for the drawing room.’

Edith Rigby’s eyebrows rose. ‘I am surprised that you would consider entrusting such a large commission to an unknown tradesman, Mary, especially when Gillows of Lancaster have such a good reputation.’

‘Gillows can afford to pick and choose their clientele and take their time about completing their commissions. It seems to me that if this young man has anything about him he will be so grateful to me for giving him a commission that he will put his whole heart and soul into his work, as well as complete it on time.’

As both ladies stood up, Edith Rigby hesitated a little, picking her words carefully. ‘It seems from what I have learned about you from certain friends of mine in London that we have a common interest. I do not wish to say too much at this stage, Mary, but if you are interested, I entertain a few…like-minded friends once a month. We are rather a serious crowd, I’m afraid, for we discuss in the main not fashion or the goings-on of the King and his friends, but rather more political issues. If you think you would be interested in joining us…?’ She looked searchingly at Mary.

Levelly, Mary returned her look. ‘I too had heard from my friends that you shared our beliefs and goals.’

Edith sighed. ‘A goal which even between ourselves neither of us quite dares to put into words for fear of ridicule and rejection. It is my passionate belief that our sex has been wrongfully and deliberately denied the right that every adult man may take for granted and that it is high time that we were accorded it in full, and given the vote. There, I have said it, and if I have offended you or mistaken the situation –’

Mary shook her head. ‘No, and you are right, Edith. I too am passionately committed to that goal. We owe it to our sex to do everything within our power to right what must be one of the most shameful wrongs ever done! For a country that abhors and has abolished slavery, to permit its women to be so disenfranchised is surely a sin against our sex.’

Having given her a fierce hug, Edith released her to say, ‘At the moment we are merely straws in the wind, Mary, an ununified smattering of like-minded people, but one day those straws will bind together and when they do we will be a force to be reckoned with. But there, I am lecturing to the converted, and you will be late for your cabinet-maker. If he is as good as you hope, you may instruct him to present himself here. I too have work I should like to have done. Who knows,’ she teased, ‘between us we may be able to convert him to our cause, and if he has a wife, a mother, a sweetheart or a sister, they will one day, I hope, have good reason to be grateful to us for doing so.’