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.
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