Annie Groves - Ellie Pride

‘He has provided well for us,’ Lydia defended her husband quickly. ‘He has a good business and –’

‘He has got you with child again, Lydia,’ her sister interrupted, speaking with unusual bluntness. ‘And he was warned the last time. Had you married a man of our own class such a thing would not have happened. I’m afraid that men of Mr Pride’s class have…appetites that should never be inflicted on a lady!’ She added delicately, ‘Alfred made it quite plain to him that if he wished to indulge in…marital relations he must adopt certain…safeguards.’

Lydia bowed her head, unable to make any response. How could she possibly tell her sister that she had been the one to urge Robert on?

A dull smog from the factory chimneys was thickening the air when Ellie and her mother finally left Winckley Square.

Ellie had noticed a tremendous difference in her mother these last few months. She no longer smiled and sang about the house, but had become critical and cross. Ellie couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her father come into the parlour and pick her mother up off her feet, as he had once frequently done, whirling her round in his arms and planting a kiss on her lips, whilst Lydia mock-scolded him for his boisterousness.

Yes, there was a very different atmosphere in the Pride household now, and although Ellie, growing quickly to womanhood herself, longed to know if in some way the baby her mother was carrying was responsible for the change in her, she knew better than to ask such an intimate question.

Ellie wasn’t ignorant of the way in which a child was conceived; their father’s family, for one thing, had a much more vigorous and salty approach to life than her mother’s, especially their Uncle William, the drover for whom Gideon sometimes worked.

William Pride was the black sheep of the family; a rebel in many ways, who had still managed to do very well by himself materially. And in doing so he also ensured that their father was supplied with the best-quality meat on offer, since it was William who went to the northern markets to buy fat lambs and beasts, as well as poultry in season, driving the animals back from the Lakes and Dales markets to sell to several butchers, including his brother.

Ellie knew that her mother did not approve of her husband’s brother, and she always tried to discourage her husband from spending any more time than necessary with him when he was in town.

As they hurried through the smog-soured streets, keeping their scarves across their faces to protect themselves from its evil smell, out of the corner of her eye, Ellie saw a group of young millworkers huddled in a small entry that led into one of the town’s ‘yards’.

The houses, crammed into these places to accommodate the needs of the millworkers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before the mill owners themselves had put up new terraces of cottages to house their workers, had no proper sanitation and were deemed to be the worst of the town’s slums. Even through the thick choking smog, Ellie had to wrinkle her nose against their nauseating smell.

A man crossed the street in front of Ellie and her mother, causing them to step into the gutter to avoid him as he stood in front of the girls, leering at them. Drunk and unkempt, he made Ellie shudder in distaste. Her mother tugged sharply on her arm, drawing her firmly away. But Ellie already knew that the place they had just passed was one of the town’s most notorious whorehouses.

Grimly, Mary Isherwood studied the dark and dank hallway of her childhood home in Winckley Square. Despite his wealth her father had been a notoriously mean man. Fires were only to be lit when he himself was at home, and her mother, the poor thin-blooded woman he had married when he was in his fortieth year, had shivered ceaselessly from November until April, her hands red and blue with cold.

Mercifully, Mary had inherited her father’s sturdier physique. It had been common knowledge that her father had only married her mother because of her connection with the landed gentry – and that having done so he had mercilessly bullied her and blamed her for the fact that she had not given him a son.

Mary had grown up hating her father even more than she had despised her mother. Naturally scholastic, she had infuriated her father with her ability to out-argue him, shrugging aside his taunts that she was too clever for her own good and that no man would ever want to marry her unless he himself paid him to do so.

She had never let him see how much that jibe had hurt her, but she had made sure that he paid for it. Only through her could he have grandsons, the male heirs he longed for, and she had decided that he would never have them. She would never marry; never put herself in a position where he could boast and torment her that he had bought her a husband. Mary was every bit as stubborn as her father had been, and she had stuck to her resolution.

It had shocked her to learn that he was dead, and it had shocked her even more to discover that she was his sole heir. She had expected that he would cut her out of his will – that he would rather leave his wealth to the foundling home, whose occupants he so brutally used and destroyed working in his appalling factories, rather than allow her to see a penny of it.

The factories were sold now. Horrocks’s had made her father an offer he couldn’t refuse, and Mary was glad of it. They represented everything she most hated.

Perhaps her father would have redrafted his will if he had realised that he was facing death. Mary felt ironically amused to learn that he had died of a chill on the lungs. Her mother had suffered a long agonising decline and a painful death from tuberculosis, brought on, Mary was sure, by her husband’s refusal to allow her any home comforts. She had lived as poorly as any of the workers in her husband’s mill.

Yes, Mary reflected, her father had been a hard man and a cruel one, but now he was dead, and she had decided to move back to Preston. She knew people would question her decision, but she had her own reasons for being here.

Frowning, she studied the huge oil painting of her father that hung at the top of the stairs.

‘I want you to take that down,’ she instructed the removal men.

‘That’s fine, missus, but where will you be wanting us to put it?’ the foreman asked her.

‘Anywhere you like, just so long as it is gone from this house,’ Mary responded coolly.

She had ordered coal to be delivered ahead of her arrival, but it seemed that her late father’s housekeeper had not received her instructions to light fires in every room. Ringing for her, Mary stood in the hallway and watched as the men struggled with the huge gilded frame.

She had been eighteen years old when the portrait had been commissioned and her father had been at the height of his power. He had paid the man who had painted it more than he had spent in feeding and clothing her mother and herself in a dozen years. Mary knew because she had seen the bill.

‘You rang for me, miss? Oh, the master’s portrait…’ The housekeeper, Mrs Jenkins, placed her hand to her throat in shock as she saw what the men were doing.

‘Yes I did,’ Mary confirmed. ‘It seems that a letter I sent you from London, requesting that you have fires lit in all the rooms, went astray. And –’

‘Oh no, I got the letter, miss,’ Mrs Jenkins confirmed, ‘but the master would never have allowed anything like that. Why, even in the week he died he refused to have a fire lit in his bedroom, despite the doctor saying that he should.’

Mary could tell from her accent that the housekeeper was a countrywoman, and she suspected that, like everyone else who had ever worked for her father, she had been in terror of him.