Annie Groves - Ellie Pride

Ellie shivered as she stepped out into the cold dampness of the rain-sodden day. The cortege was waiting; her aunts already installed in their barouches with their families, white faces grimly unsmiling, garbed in deepest funereal black.

The horses, bearing their black feathers, their coats as wetly polished as the hired carriages and just as dark, stood sombrely beneath the stinging rain.

Ellie averted her eyes from the sight of her mother’s coffin. She was to travel in one of the last carriages with Connie and her cousins. John, though, was to ride in the principal coach with their father, whilst the new baby, who was to be named Joseph according to her mother’s wishes, remained behind in the care of her aunt’s nursemaid.

‘But, Father, why cannot we have the baby here at home with us?’ Ellie had protested, desperate to cling to this last human piece of her mother.

‘Because it was your mother’s wish that he should be brought up by her sister,’ Robert Pride had told her, his face becoming bitter as he’d muttered under his breath, ‘No doubt she felt she could not trust me to do so.’

Her father had changed so much in the short time since her mother’s death. Her mother’s body had not even been cold when he had left the house, only returning once all the funeral arrangements had been put in hand, obviously drunk and maudlin, weeping openly as he grieved for the woman whose death he had caused.

In the space of a few short days Ellie’s whole world had changed and she had lost everything that had been safe and familiar. The strong, good-humoured, gentle father she had known and loved had turned almost overnight into a weak, broken man, content to let his sisters-in-law have their way.

In her sleep she dreamed of him holding them all protectively close in his paternal arms, and her father’s arms weren’t the only ones in which she dreamed of being held fast. But it was wrong of her to think of Gideon.

She had declared passionately, when Connie had asked her why they had not seen Gideon, that she never ever wished to set eyes on him again. And she had meant it!

There was nothing left in her world to give her comfort or hope. Her aunts, she knew, were bitterly vehement in their condemnation of her father. She had heard what they had to say about him as they moved about her mother’s bedroom, performing the duties Lydia had requested of them. Deep down inside, Ellie had resented their presence and their assumption of a greater closeness to her mother than she herself was allowed. With them her mother had inhabited a world, known a life in which Ellie had never played any part. In their eyes she had seen grief and anger that excluded her as much as it bound the remaining four sisters together. In death it was as though her old life had reclaimed Lydia, so that the Prides were not only robbed of her physical presence but also of their memories of her. Ellie’s aunts had ordered every detail of the funeral – a funeral that would befit a Barclay! Lydia was not to be buried in the plot that Robert had hastily bought, but in the same grave as her parents. Initially Ellie had thought that her father had been going to protest and insist that Lydia be buried where he could eventually join her, and Ellie had held her breath, aware that, for her, more than just the last resting place of her mother was hanging in the balance. If her father should persist, if her Aunt Amelia should back down, then maybe…

Maybe what? She could break her word to her mother? Ellie was furious with herself for even permitting such a thought. She would never do that, never.

But then Aunt Amelia had announced that it had been her mother’s wish that she be buried with her parents, and Ellie had watched as her father had turned away in silence.

Inside, a vulnerable part of her had ached for him and for herself, and she had longed to run to him; to tell her aunt defiantly that their mother belonged to them and not to her sisters and her parents. Now it was too late.

Their neighbours had come out to stand in respectful silence as the cortège made its solemn, mournful way down the street. Tears pricked at Ellie’s eyes, blurring everything around her as they turned out of Friargate and headed for St John’s Parish Church.

Gideon’s head was aching and there was a sour taste in his mouth. Slowly, like a trickle of rancid milk, memories of the previous evening came back to him.

He had taken Nancy to the music hall, where they had both had too much to drink. They had then made their way back to his lodgings, but when they had got there, and Nancy had offered to come inside with him ‘to finish off the evening’, Gideon had suddenly sobered up and recognised that the last thing he wanted was to take her to bed.

He had tried to be tactful, but Nancy had a very straightforward attitude to life and she had immediately objected to being denied the end of the evening she had been anticipating. What had begun as a quiet conversation had quickly escalated into a very noisy argument, at least on Nancy’s part. Before too long she had been joined by some of the other mill girls, who had gleefully egged her on.

Gideon winced as he recalled their frank and bawdy comments about his refusal to ‘show her what he was made of’.

To make matters worse, some of the clients of the nearby whorehouse had objected to the noise and had come out into the street with their whores, whereupon a fight had begun between the two groups of women.

The mill girls, robust though they were in their attitude to sex, considered themselves very much a cut above the whores, who sold sex, and the opportunity to air long-standing offences and give vent to festering insults was not one either party had been readily prepared to relinquish. In the end it had taken the threat of sending for the police to break things up, and even then one of the whores had claimed triumphantly that they would have to get the local sergeant out of her bed first.

After everything had quietened down, Gideon had finally made it into his lodgings to be greeted by his stony-faced landlady, who had informed him grimly that she kept a clean and respectable house, thank you very much, and that if he did not mend his ways and his choice of company he would be looking for new accommodation…

Ellie’s mother was being buried today. Gideon blinked his gritty eyes at his clock. The service was to be at eleven o’clock. It was nearly nine thirty now.

Quickly he got out of bed, groaning as he felt the alcohol-induced pain thudding in his head. In the yard shared by all the houses, he sluiced himself down with cold water from the pump, gritting his teeth as its cold bite increased the fierce pounding of his hangover.

Upstairs in a neighbouring house, one of the mill girls stood and watched him admiringly. He was a fine-looking lad, that Gideon Walker. No wonder Nancy had warned the rest of them off him.

It was over. Her mother had gone to her rest. Ellie shook with the reaction she was still feeling to that moment of sickening dread when she had thrown her handful of earth down onto the shiny wood of the brass-bound coffin.

Now they were all to go back to Aunt Amelia’s where a funeral tea would be served, to fortify the mourners, and the will was to be read to those it concerned.

As they started to make their way back to the waiting carriages, Ellie was conscious of her Aunt Lavinia walking alongside her. Of all her mother’s sisters, Aunt Lavinia was the one Ellie knew the least – the one who had married the most successfully. Her husband was the senior partner in a firm of solicitors based in Liverpool, and they lived in a huge mansion in Hoylake.

Their house had its own separate coach house and stables, as well as a tennis court and a croquet lawn, and their neighbours were the wealthy shipowners who were clients of Josiah Parkes.