She didn’t know whether her father was right about William knowing a side to her uncle that the rest of them were unaware of, but he was certainly right in saying that even people near and dear could take you by complete surprise. Harry and Nina had, for instance. And Micky certainly had. Even now, several hours later, she couldn’t quite believe the savagery with which he had turned on her.
Outside of her family she only had two close friends, and he was one of them. How was it, then, that she had never previously realized how he felt where Harry and William and her Uncle Walter were concerned? And were there other things she hadn’t realized? His kiss, for instance. She had simply thought it a ridiculous aberration, but that was before she had come to a realization of her own feelings where Harry was concerned. For the first time it occurred to her that Micky might feel about her as she felt about Harry. And if he did so, then she must have hurt his feelings unbearably.
She sighed. Growing up was proving to be a very complicated business – far more complicated than she had ever envisaged.
“I thi … nk it’s ti … me for two mugs of milky co … coa, little love,” her father said tenderly, aware of her dejection, though not of all its causes. “Co … coa’s the best comforter in the wo … rid when you’re feeling a bit low.”
She rose to her feet, smiling down at him. “With a ginger biscuit to go with it?”
“Aye, li … ittle love,” he said, smiling with stroke-stricken lopsidedness, “a gi … inger biscuit would go do … own a tre … eat.”
From out of nowhere Rose felt tears spring to her eyes. No matter how confusing the rest of life might prove to be, there was one thing that would always be constant her father’s love for her. That would never change; not in a million years.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this!” Lottie said crossly as Harry drove the open-topped Renault up the hill towards the moor. “We can’t really be driving out into the middle of the moor to meet some mill girl William daren’t bring to Crag-Side! Some mill girl he wants to introduce to us as our future sister-in-law!”
“And cousin-in-law,” Nina added darkly.
They were squeezed with Rose on the Renault’s rear seats, a large picnic hamper on their knees.
Noel, seated in the front passenger seat, grinned. William’s announcement to them all, that he had been courting a Bradford mill girl for the past two years and intended becoming engaged to her on the evening of his twenty-first birthday, had amused him vastly. What was it with the Rimmington men? Was it some sort of subconscious desire to retain a foothold in the class old Caleb had dragged them out of? Whatever it was, with Walter again embroiled in the relationship Caleb had once thought he had terminated, and with William well and truly embarked on a copycat relationship, Caleb Rimmington was surely turning in his grave.
He looked wryly across at Harry, aware of how much more satisfactory it would be if Harry, not William, was heir to Crag-Side and the mill. William possessed a socialist fervour that could bring nothing but improvements into the lives of Rimmington’s workers, but Harry wasn’t without a social conscience and his interest in the day-to-day running of Rimmington’s was far greater than William’s. And Harry was in love with Nina. If Harry and Nina were to marry, and from the besotted way they kept looking at each other and the way they could hardly keep their hands off each other, it was certainly a possibility, then the day would surely come when a Rimmington with Sugden blood would inherit Crag-Side and the mill.
As the Renault swept onto one of the narrow moorland roads and gorse and heather stretched out on either side of them as far as the eye could see, Noel reflected there would be a certain rightness about such an event. Seeing one of her grandchildren inheriting everything she had been disinherited from, would surely give his mother deep happiness. And lording it over everyone as a wealthy mill owner’s wife would suit Nina down to the ground.
“It’s all Papa’s fault!” Lottie fumed, hating the way the others had insisted she at least meet Sarah Thorpe. “If he hadn’t set such a bad example—”
“If Sarah Thorpe’s a quarter as nice as Polly, William will be very lucky,” Rose interrupted tartly. “It’s what people are, that matters Lottie. Not the way they talk or where they live.”
Nina’s beautifully curved mouth was as tight as it was possible for it to be. For the first time ever, she was in complete agreement with every word Lottie uttered. Of course what they were doing was utterly ludicrous. Whoever heard of anyone being introduced to a future sister-in-law and cousin-in-law at a moorland picnic? That Noel and Rose had been adamant they fall in with William’s plans had made her mad enough to spit.
Worse than her anger, though, was the shock she still felt. She had, after all, had romantic hopes of William herself. And to know that those hopes had come to nothing because he was in love with a mill girl from Lutterworth’s, a mill girl who, if he married her, would one day be mistress of Crag-Side, had shocked her to such an extent she had thought she was going to have a heart attack. Even now, days later, she still felt a tightness in her chest and a dizzying sense of utter disbelief.
“They’re here before us,” Harry said, trundling the Renault off the high track and bouncing it onto springy turf. “She doesn’t look like a Yorkshire girl, does she? At least not from a distance. She looks almost Italian.”
“Then maybe she’s brought some ice-cream with her,” Lottie said caustically and then, as the Renault rocked nearer to where William and Sarah were sitting on a tartan travel rug, Minerva parked in lonely grandeur nearby, she added, “She isn’t wearing a shawl. Too hot I suppose.”
William had already risen to his feet, waving cheerily. Rose saw Sarah rise with easy grace to stand a little to one side, and a little behind him. She didn’t look overly nervous, nor did she look brazenly overconfident. She was slenderly built and of average height, with a mass of smoke-dark hair caught up in an elegant, loose knot, and there was an overall look of quiet composure about her that reminded Rose of someone, though who, she couldn’t quite think.
Harry knew immediately who it was Sarah Thorpe resembled. As he brought the Renault to a shuddering stop and he saw Sarah more clearly, surprise almost robbed him of breath. She possessed the same easy grace as his Aunt Lizzie. Her hair, too, was like his aunt’s. Dark and abundant and upswept in exactly the same uncomplicated, yet elegant manner.
He stepped from the Renault in Noel and Nina and Rose’s wake, watching as William introduced Sarah to them, aware that his first impressions of her had not been overly fanciful. The quiet dignity and attractive composure with which she was facing Nina and Lottie’s open hostility were an exact carbon copy of his Aunt Lizzie’s attractive manner. There was a sweetness in her smile, too, that immediately caught his liking.
He moved forward to shake her hand, aware that though Nina and Lottie might be determined not to like, or approve of her, he already instinctively did so, and was certain Noel did also.
“William told me you were partial to mint and currant pasty,” she said to him in a voice which, though typically Bradfordian and flat-vowelled, was pleasantly pitched, “and so I’ve brought one with me that I made specially.”
There was lurking laughter in her eyes, as if she were aware of his thoughts. Answering amusement licked through him. Miss Sarah Thorpe was telling him he needn’t worry on her account about Nina and Lottie’s hostility; that it was a hostility she had expected and was well able to handle; a hostility she had every hope of eventually overcoming.
“Terrific,” he said, smiling broadly. “I understand you live only a few streets away from Rose. Do you know each other by sight? Her ginger hair is rather hard to forget once seen, isn’t it?”
Sarah, aware from the instant she had shaken Rose’s hand and looked into her friendly, amber-brown eyes that there was at least one female member of William’s family she could count on as a friend, smiled back. It was an intriguing smile, revealing an inner serenity almost Mona Lisa-like, and the last shreds o
f Harry’s doubt as to the wisdom of William’s decision, vanished.
“I didn’t know who she was until today, but I have seen Rose before,” she said as Noel and William manhandled the picnic hamper from the Renault’s rear seat and across to the travel rug. “She goes out with the Porritt’s on their removal cart sometimes, doesn’t she?”
Lottie looked as if she were going to choke. Nina, one hand holding a very broad-brimmed, very expensive, cream straw hat in place, resisted the urge to there and then throttle her sister. It was bad enough that as a child Rose had ridden shotgun with the Porritt’s on their rackety horse-drawn cart, but that she was still doing it …
“It’s a grand old horse the Porritt’s have, isn’t it?” Harry was saying companiably, for all the world as if he, too, had enjoyed similar days out. “And they’ve a grand little dog as well – a little Staffordshire called Bonzo.”
Lottie marched over to the travel rug and sat down on it next to the hamper. She had taken very great care with her dress, far more than she would have usually done for a family picnic. Her pale mauve voile frock skimmed button-boots of ivory kid and she was wearing a rope of pearls that had once belonged to her mother.
Hoping fiercely that Sarah Thorpe, mill girl, would no longer be under any illusions as to the depth of the social gulf dividing them, she began unpacking the hamper.
“Tablecloth, lunch napkins, cutlery case,” she said in a cut glass accent bereft of even the merest hint of Yorkshire flatness. “Cucumber sandwiches, egg and cress sandwiches, a game pie, a pork and apple pie, a cheese and onion flan.”
As Nina smoothed out the lace-edged tablecloth for her, she set the dishes William had asked Crag-Side’s cook to prepare down upon it, crossly reflecting that Sarah Thorpe wouldn’t be labouring under any false illusions at all if it weren’t that Rose lived so near to her.
“A sherry trifle, a chocolate cake, a fruit cake,” she continued, wondering how she could best get Sarah to understand that Rose’s living in Beck-Side Street was an eccentricity that was none of her business.
She placed a plate of scones next to the fruit cake, following it with a plate of vanilla slices.
Sarah, who was accustomed to egg sandwiches, mint and current pasty and sarsaparilla when it was a special picnic such as a birthday treat, and paste sandwiches, jam tarts and a flask of tea when it wasn’t, remained prudently silent. If Lottie was hoping she would betray naive awe at the sight of such a splendid spread, then Lottie was going to be disappointed for she wasn’t even slightly awed, and she didn’t think it at all splendid.
Instead, aware of the hunger in homes where men were out of work, or laid off work because of sickness, she thought the amount of food shockingly excessive. There was enough cramming the tablecloth to feed half a dozen destitute families for a week and she was amazed that the Sugdens, at least, didn’t realize it.
“Don’t worry about anything going to waste,” Rose said, settling herself companiably next to her. “Anything left over and not half demolished will be on the tea table at the local children’s home within half an hour of it being taken back to Crag-Side.”
“A thermos of hot chocolate, a thermos of coffee, a bottle of lemonade, a bottle of shandy,” Lottie said crossly, heaving the last of the picnic items from the hamper. Why on earth had Rose brought up the subject of the orphanage? Of all the many local charities her father generously supported, the orphanage was her own particular favourite. She enjoyed going round there, holding the small babies and playing with the toddlers, and she didn’t want Sarah asking William if she, too, could visit it.
“You’ve just crushed a clump of harebell with the shandy bottle,” Noel said laconically.
It was unheard of for Lottie’s short temper ever to be directed in Noel’s direction but she said now with crosspatch sharpness, “No, I haven’t. Harebells don’t grow on moorland.”
As Harry began slicing the game pie and Nina began passing around china plates, Noel slapped his forehead in mock despair. “Poor Emily Brontë,” he groaned theatrically. “How could she have got it so wrong?”
Lottie flushed. She didn’t know what he meant, but she did know he was making fun of her and she didn’t like it. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said stiffly, unhappily aware of how closely Sarah and William were sitting together, and the almost sheening happiness shimmering between them.
“The last paragraph of Wuthering Heights,” Noel said, helping himself to a slice of richly-filled pie, “when Lockwood comes across Cathy’s and Edgar Linton’s and Heathcliff’s graves in the moorland churchyard. There are harebells growing there. How does it go? ‘I lingered round them, under that benign sky…’” He came to a halt, unable to remember just what followed.
“‘Watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells,’” Sarah continued for him in her attractively gentle voice, “‘listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’”
It was so unexpected a contribution that no one spoke for a few moments and then Noel said, “That’s it, Sarah. It is a pretty memorable piece of writing, isn’t it?” He bit into the pie, saying awkwardly with a full mouth, “I’ve never been able to understand why everyone refers to Wuthering Heights as a love story. It’s so macabre it gives me the shivers.”
Nina could have slapped him for talking with his mouth full. It was a commonness she couldn’t imagine Sarah Thorpe committing. A light breeze had blown up and was tugging annoyingly at her hat. She took it off, laying it beside her feet. Sarah Thorpe was not at all as she had assumed she would be. She wasn’t intimidated by them, as would have been only too understandable. And she wasn’t defiantly brazen, as might also have been expected. Instead she possessed an unnerving sense of quiet self-confidence; was relatively well-spoken; obviously intelligent; and last but by no means least, when her mother, Lizzie, had been Sarah’s age, she must have looked disquietingly like her.
Rose still couldn’t place who it was Sarah reminded her of, but she did know that she liked her enormously. She was also sure that, given time, Lottie would grow to like her too. Even now, Lottie looked slightly less on her high horse than she had when unpacking the picnic hamper. Was that because she couldn’t help but be aware of how deeply in love William and Sarah were? Or was it because she was impressed by the way Sarah had so effortlessly, and without the least degree of showing off, finished Noel’s quotation from Wuthering Heights?
There was no way of telling and Rose didn’t trouble to ponder over it. All that mattered was that dinner at Crag-Side on Saturday was not going to be a disaster – and that as far as the present was concerned, Harry was sitting companiably next to her, his hand occasionally brushing hers as he reached for a sandwich or a piece of pie.
“And how’s my little Yorkshire Rose?” Walter Rimmington asked genially, beaming at her down the length of the opulently set, white-naperied table. “It’s grand to have you here on a Saturday evening, I only wish your mother and father were with us as well, but your father’s never happy about visiting Crag-Side, is he? I don’t understand why, when we now get on together like a house on fire, but I respect his feelings. He’s a fine man who has battled disablement with a dignity that’s truly heroic.”
Rose was just about to tell her uncle how her father had taken up photography again, doing so, of course, with her help. As she opened her mouth, however, Harry’s eyes caught hers warningly. Rose’s eyes widened. What on earth was the matter? Had something been said that she’d missed? Seeing her bewilderment, Harry flicked a meaningful look towards William and back again, and her bewilderment died, understanding dawning.
Even though the dessert had been served William was still tensely waiting for the right moment in which to announce his, and Sarah’s, intention of marrying and his father, in talking about her own father, had given him exactly the kind of lead-in he had been waiting for.
“Don’t you th
ink it’s a shame that Grandfather was so implacably bull-headed about Uncle Laurence not being of the right class to marry Aunt Lizzie?” he asked, his glass dish of grape jelly untouched in front of him. “I mean, if Grandfather had taken the trouble to meet Uncle Laurence and to get to know him, he would have quickly understand what a very special person he is, and he would have enjoyed his company.”
Walter never liked talking about his father. It always awakened memories of near-choking intimidation. Even now, when he thought what his father’s reaction would have been to his renewed affair with Polly, he felt almost faint. Not that his father’s worst fears had come to pass, or ever would come to pass, for Polly was adamant she would never make Crag-Side her home. “Scarborough,” she had said in her cheery, practical way. “When you can hand the mill and all the trappings that go with it over to William, I’ll marry you and we’ll live at the seaside, at Scarborough or Brid.”
Scarborough, he had long ago decided. They would live at Scarborough in a house overlooking the north bay. And as far as he was concerned, the day they did so couldn’t come a day too soon.
“Aye,” he said now to William, “when it was business, I doubt if your grandfather made a single wrong judgment throughout his life, but where your Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Laurence were concerned …” He shook his head regretfully. “Your grandfather’s fixed ideas let him down badly there, I’m afraid.”
“And they let him down badly where you were concerned as well, didn’t they? And all for no real reason. I mean, it isn’t as if we’re landed gentry, is it? Three generations ago we Rimmingtons were no different to the Ramsdens, were we? Or to the Thorpes.”
Walter blinked. What on earth had got into William? The kind of family history he was referring to, while no secret, was also no fit subject for a family dinner table. As for Ramsdens and Thorpes … Ramsden was a direct allusion to Polly, for Ramsden had been her maiden name, but who the Thorpes were was anybody’s guess.
Yorkshire Rose Page 15
