Annie Groves - Ellie Pride

As Gideon walked through Winckley Square, he was still trying to come to terms with what had happened. That Ellie, his lovely, gentle Ellie, could have spoken to him in such a way had hurt him very badly. Naturally, she was very upset about her mother’s death – he could understand that and, of course, forgive her her cruelty to him – but what he could not forgive was the way in which Lydia Pride had played upon her daughter’s feelings and tried to turn Ellie against him.

He loved Ellie and she loved him too. He was sure of it. Somehow he would find a way to make her see sense. But perhaps it would be best if he waited until the funeral was over before seeking her out again.

Of course, with her mother’s death she would have new responsibilities and would, no doubt, have to take charge of her father’s household. Gideon’s eyes warmed with a lover’s pride as he mentally envisaged his Ellie bustling about her new household duties – duties that might well mean that their married life would have to begin beneath her father’s roof, he acknowledged, because he certainly could not see Ellie abandoning her siblings. He would have preferred to have her all to himself, but Gideon was sensitive enough to recognise that Ellie would be needed at home. His spirits lifted by his imaginings, Gideon managed to shrug off his angry despair. All courting couples quarrelled from time to time, he reasoned, and it was far more pleasurable to think about the rosy future he was visualising for Ellie and himself than to dwell on the hurtfulness of her icy words.

He may not have particularly liked Lydia, but, of course, Ellie had loved her mother. Even he had been shocked by the news of her death, so how must his beloved Ellie have felt?

‘Well, Mr Walker, you certainly seem to have an excellent grasp of what I’m looking for.’

Surreptitiously, Mary studied him. He was both what she had expected and yet not. The years of his apprenticeship had given him an impressive breadth of shoulder to add to the height he must have inherited from his father – along with that cool and rather disconcertingly direct grey-eyed gaze. The shock of thick dark curly hair she supposed she should have expected, along with the slightly olive cast to his skin. His voice had a soft country burr, and there was a calm sureness about him that also spoke of his being a countryman. But that cool objective ability to assimilate what she required, and the instinctive skill to translate it into quick, economically elegant sketches that showed her just how her room would look as they came to life beneath his hands – that had caught her off guard. And that air of control and authority – where had he got that from? Herding William Pride’s livestock? Mary doubted that.

Determined not to let Mary see how anxious he was about her reaction to his drawings, Gideon sought to assume a nonchalant confidence he was actually far from feeling. He ached, like every young man in love, to prove to his beloved that he was worthy of her. He could feel the anxious tension gripping his gut whilst he watched Mary Isherwood studying the sketches he had made following her description of what she wanted. If she commissioned him to make her cabinets then a whole new future could open up for him: a future in which he could afford to provide for Ellie as his wife! And once they were married he would see to it that he made her so happy that she soon forgot about the snobbish aspirations of her mother!

‘Mr Walker, I believe we shall be able to do business together.’ Mary smiled as she handed back his rough sketches.

Gideon felt his pent-up nervous breath leak jerkily from his lungs. Mary had been studying the drawings for so long that he had begun to fear that they did not suit her. Just wait until he told Ellie! Gideon frowned. Of course, with Ellie in mourning for her mother he could not rush round to Friargate as he longed to do and share his excitement with her. No, he would just have to be patient…leave her to grieve for her mother for now, and then see her after the funeral.

‘I shall require you to supply me with detailed drawings, of course, and costings, and if I should find that you have attempted to cheat me by substituting inferior wood, or indeed in any other way, I promise you I shall make you sorry for it. I may only be a woman, Mr Walker, but I am not a woman to be underestimated.’

Controlling his excitement, Gideon forced himself to concentrate on what Mary was saying to him, and then frowned as the meaning of her words sank in.

‘It is not my habit to cheat, Miss Isherwood,’ he told her angrily.

‘No, I am sure it is not,’ Mary agreed calmly. ‘But you are a young man about to set up in business on your own account and there will be those who will seek to cheat you, I’m afraid. So you will do well to be on your guard. Now, how soon can you let me have the detailed drawings and your costings?’

Gideon thought quickly. ‘By the end of the week?’

‘And the work? When will you be able to begin that?’

Gideon tensed. This was the question he had been dreading.

‘I…there is a slight problem, Miss Isherwood,’ he admitted uncomfortably.

‘You have other commissions to complete?’

‘No…’ Gideon told her reluctantly. ‘The truth is,’ he blurted out, ‘as yet I do not have any premises to work from. I have two in mind, but I am waiting for the landlords to come back to me.’

‘I see.’ Mary looked searchingly at him. ‘And where exactly are these premises?’

Hesitantly, Gideon gave her the addresses.

‘Well, Mr Walker,’ Mary said crisply, ‘we must just hope that one of your prospective landlords comes back to you very soon, otherwise I fear we are both going to be disappointed. Mollie will show you out.’ She rang the bell for the housemaid who had originally shown him into the room.

‘Oh, Mr Walker…?’

Halfway towards the door, Gideon stopped.

‘You have a very fine eye for detail,’ Mary told him. ‘I wonder if when you have finished with them you would allow me to have the sketches you have just done?’

When Gideon stared at her in surprise she gave a small shrug and explained carelessly, ‘I am keeping a record of all the work this house has undergone, and I would like to put them in it.’

‘Of course you may have them,’ Gideon replied.

One foot on the stairs, Mary Isherwood paused to glance at the wall where her father’s portrait had hung.

How furious he would have been had he known what she was planning. It had been her mother’s relatives, the second cousins who had taken Mary in after she had fled from her father following their bitter quarrel, who had been responsible for her original involvement in the women’s movement.

Irene and Amy Darlington, the two spinster sisters, who had been derided by her father for being ‘unmarried bluestockings’, shared a passionate belief in the cause of women’s suffrage and their right to be treated as men’s equals.

Now in their eighties, they were still as fiercely dedicated to that cause as they had been as young women, and Mary shared their dedication.

She had heard about Edith Rigby’s involvement on the grapevine that linked the small groups of women’s rights activists together. The time was coming when those groups were going to have to be melded together, to work together, and Mary already knew that she would be called upon to play her part in this process. That, after all, was one of the reasons she had come back.

One of the reasons. She looked at the blank wall again. Perhaps she would commission Gideon Walker to carve some suitable piece to hang in the portrait’s place.

She had already dispatched a note to one of the potential landlords Gideon had mentioned to her, having immediately recognised that he was simply an agent and that the true owner of the business property was herself. Her father had built up a strong portfolio of properties in the town, which were let out, and she could see no good reason why Gideon Walker, and therefore she herself, should not benefit from this.