by Annie Groves
She paused, and Gideon’s chest tightened as he witnessed her exhaustion. ‘You should be resting,’ he began.
‘No, Gideon, please. I must do this. I have to tell you! My father was a very successful businessman but he was also very suspicious of others. He was a man who could not abide to be outdone by anyone in any way. When one of his fellow mill owners boasted about the portrait he had painted of himself, my father sent for the young artist who had painted it and told him that he wanted him to paint one of him, but, of course, bigger and better than his rival’s. The portraitist’s name was Richard Warrender.’ Mary gave a sad sigh, her mouth trembling.
‘I cannot go into details, Gideon. Even now, the pain of speaking about him…But he was the most…Predictably, I suppose, I fell in love with him, but, not so predictably, he returned my love. I knew, of course, that my father would never agree to us marrying and so we made plans to run away together. I had my mother’s jewellery and a small amount of money, and…but…’
Gideon could hear the emotion in her voice as she pressed her handkerchief to her mouth.
‘He deserted you, is that what you are trying to tell me?’ he demanded.
The look of anguish in Mary’s eyes made him catch his breath.
‘In one sense, yes, I suppose you could say that,’ she acknowledged. ‘You see, there was an accident and Richard was killed. Or at least I was told by my father that there had been an accident.’ Her voice shook. ‘I have always feared that my father guessed how we felt about one another, and that he was implicated in Richard’s death but, of course, I could never have dared to say so, especially when…I was so afraid, so alone. I had no one to turn to other than my nurse. She herself was due to be married and was going to leave my father’s employ. With her connivance I…I managed to escape from this house, and go to London to seek the protection of a great-aunt who lived there.’
‘Surely if this Richard was already dead, there was no point in you leaving?’ Gideon questioned her bluntly.
Mary lifted her head and looked at him. ‘On the contrary, Gideon, there was every point,’ she told him quietly. ‘You see, I was carrying Richard’s child.’
Now she had shocked him and his expression betrayed that shock. But Mary ignored it, pressing on determinedly, ‘You were that child, Gideon. My child.’
‘No, that’s impossible.’ Gideon got to his feet, almost overturning his chair in his furious denial of her words. ‘My mother…’
‘Was my nurse,’ Mary told him simply. ‘When I told my great-aunt of my condition, she suggested that we approach her and ask her and her new husband to accept you as their own. Do not look at me like that, Gideon,’ Mary pleaded. ‘I had no other option!
‘You cannot know how much it hurt me to have to part with you – my child, Richard’s son, all that I had left of him – but I was so afraid for you, so afraid from the moment I knew that my father had arranged the death of my beloved Richard, so afraid that he would find out that I was carrying you and that you would be destroyed in turn, either whilst you were still within my body or afterwards, when you had been taken from me at the moment of birth, and I was unable to protect you. I do not exaggerate, Gideon,’ she warned him starkly. ‘My father was more than capable of such an action. To him you would have been a disgrace, a slur on his public image he could not tolerate.’
Mary stopped speaking, too overcome with emotion to continue, turning her head away from him and, against his will, Gideon felt the sharp burgeoning of an unfamiliar emotion. Not pity, and certainly not understanding, but something sweet and piercing that pushed through the darkness of his furious anger like the green stalks of spring flowers pushing through the winter frost. ‘That first time you came here, I so wanted to tell you everything, Gideon, and to claim you as my son, but I was afraid that you would reject me and that if the scandal of our true relationship became public, it would drive us even further apart. You can’t know how many times I…’ she stopped to cough again, but Gideon was oblivious to her distress.
Standing up, he told her violently, ‘I do not believe you. How can you be my mother? It is all a lie.’ Then, before Mary could say anything further, he wrenched open the door and left.
An hour later Will Pride saw him in The Fleece, staring bitterly into his empty glass and obviously the worse for wear.
‘Eh, Gideon, lad, I thought thee’d given up drinking. In fact, I heard thee ’as become a man o’ property,’ he added jovially.
Ignoring him, Gideon went up to the bar and bought himself another drink.
Mary Isherwood was not his mother and that tale she had told him was just a pack of lies.
He was drunk when he crawled into his bed two hours later, and he remained drunk for the following three days, whilst war raged inside his head and his heart.
‘Henry, please will you try to eat something?’ Ellie begged her husband. ‘You have barely touched a meal these last three days.’ She bit her lip as she looked anxiously at Henry’s gaunt face.
‘How can I eat,’ Henry responded wildly, ‘when the men of the Antareas are lying dead at the bottom of the sea?’
Ellie put her hand on his arm and asked him, ‘Henry, would it not be better if you were to confide in some person, someone of authority your…your fears regarding the Antareas? If indeed you are right and your father has –’
‘If? Do you not believe me then?’ Henry raged bitterly. ‘If you do not, then why should anyone else? No, I cannot tell anyone. And you must not either, Ellie. You must promise me that. You must speak to no one of what I have told you. No one at all! Do you promise?’
Reluctantly Ellie did as he was insisting, fearing that she might agitate him further if she refused.
‘You think that I am deluded,’ Henry told her morosely, ‘and sometimes I wonder if I am myself. I feel that there is a curse on me at times, Ellie, and that I must pay for the sins of my father.’
‘Please don’t talk like this, Henry,’ Ellie begged him, wishing she had not given him her promise and wishing also that she might confide in Iris and seek her opinion.
Sighing, Ellie broached a subject she had not yet had time to discuss with him.
‘Cecily telephoned me today. Her mama-in-law is hiring a house in the Lake District for the rest of the summer, and Cecily is going to go up there with the baby. Iris will go too when she has time and Cecily has invited me to join them. It is to be arranged that the gentlemen, including you, Henry, will drive up to join us when they can –’
‘No, no, Ellie, you must not leave me. You cannot. If you do –’
‘But, Henry, it will only be for a few days. And –’
‘No, no, you must not go.’ Henry began to pace the room in agitation, wringing his hands. ‘You cannot go, Ellie. Please, I beg you, do not leave me. I cannot bear this house if you are not here. You cannot go and leave me here. You must not. I shall not allow it.’
He started to cry and, suppressing her own disappointment, Ellie went to comfort him, assuring him that she would not accept her cousin’s invitation.
It didn’t take Gideon very long to walk to Winckley Square, Rex trotting busily at his heels. The maid who answered the door to his knock looked at him in bemusement, but he ignored her flustered response to his arrival, and asked for Mary.
‘Miss Isherwood’s in her room,’ the maid responded unhappily. ‘Doctor’s orders and…’ His heart pounding, Gideon told Rex to ‘stay’ and took the stairs two at a time, rapping briefly on Mary’s bedroom door, his stomach clenching as he had to strain to hear her feeble ‘Come.’
The look of disbelief and joy suffusing her face when she saw him made him stiffen warily.
‘Oh, it’s you, Gideon. I thought you must be the doctor. He said he would call this morning. I am so pleased to see you!’ Tears filled her eyes and shimmered like rainbows before falling to run down her sunken face.
It shocked Gideon to see how much she had deteriorated in the three days since he was last here, and so
mething twisted painfully round his heart at the thought that he might have been too late. Somehow he found he was standing beside the bed, taking the hand she reached out towards him.
As her thin fingers curled round his, she exclaimed softly, ‘You are so like your father, Gideon. Your hands…’ Her face clouded as she touched his damaged hand. ‘I would not have had this happen to you for all the world!’ Before he could stop her, she raised his hand to her lips and pressed a maternal kiss against it. ‘You have your father’s gift, and I wish so much that you and he…I have kept all the little drawings you have done for me and put them with your father’s sketches. I must show you those…’ Her eyes misted and Gideon felt his heart lurch against his ribs as her breathing became shallow and laboured.
There was a rap on the door and the maid came in, announcing quietly, ‘The doctor is here.’
When the doctor had finished his examination Gideon was waiting downstairs for him.
‘Miss Isherwood – how is she?’ he demanded.
‘Not good, I’m afraid. The damage caused by the force-feeding, combined with an existing weakness…’ He paused, aware of the tension emanating from Gideon. He had been a doctor for twenty-five years, and this was a part of his job that never got any easier.
‘The situation has, I fear, gone too far for an operation, and besides…’ He looked away from Gideon. Mary had been very specific about her wishes.
There was a small pause in which the ticking of the clock had such a sharp distinctiveness that Gideon wanted to pick it up and hurl it across the room to silence it ticking away the seconds of Mary’s life.
‘She really is dying, isn’t she?’ Gideon burst out harshly.
The doctor inclined his head in a brief nod of assent.
‘How much…how long…?’
‘It is hard to say. A week at most, I suspect.’
‘A week!’ Gideon went grey.
After the doctor had taken his formal leave of him, Gideon made his way upstairs. There was something he had to say to Mary, a decision he had made, which nothing and no one could change.
She was propped up against her pillows, a tiny shrunken figure whose flesh clung tight to the bones of her face. Only her eyes were still her, still Mary.
‘You’ve seen the doctor?’ she asked him.
Gideon nodded.
‘He says I shall have a week, maybe more, but he is over-optimistic,’ Mary told him, giving a small gasp as a rigor of pain shook her body, and she reached for a handkerchief, holding it pressed tight to her mouth as she tried not to cough.
‘You must not talk. You must save your strength,’ Gideon said, with the gentleness of a son. ‘I will stay with you now – until you don’t need me any more.’
‘Gideon.’
Even though it was almost two o’clock in the morning, Gideon was awake immediately, getting up from the chair where he had been sleeping, to go to Mary’s bedside.
Automatically he took the hand she lifted towards him and held it in his own, trying to warm its coldness.
‘It’s time now, Gideon,’ Mary told him softly. ‘I can feel it.’ Her voice was little more than a breathy whisper, each word a painful effort.
Over these few final shared days she had talked to him continuously, even when he had urged her to save her strength.
‘I want to do this, Gideon,’ she had told him softly. ‘I want to share with you my precious memories of your father and our love, the plans we made.’
Her voice paper thin, she told him now, ‘I have made you the main beneficiary of my estate, Gideon. No,’ she stopped him when he began to object. ‘You do not know how it grieves me even now not to be able to acknowledge you publicly as my son, but I have made a statement to my lawyer telling him of the true relationship between us and of your true parentage. When the time comes and you meet, as I hope you will, the woman you can love as I loved your father, I want you to tell her that I was your mother and that I loved you dearly – so dearly that, for your sake, I chose to give birth to you in secret and hardship instead of taking my own life and yours with it so that I could be with your father. At last I can soon be with him, Gideon. I wonder if he will recognise me, grown old whilst he still has his young handsomeness – and he was so handsome, so gifted. You have his gifts. I have seen it in your drawings…
‘I pray that when you have a son, Gideon, he will inherit that gift and that you will cherish it in him for your own sake and for your father’s.’
She died ten minutes later, her hand clasped between Gideon’s, shocking him as she suddenly sat upright in her bed, her whole face transformed with joy, transfixed on something, someone beyond his sight. She trembled as though her whole body was reaching out to a waiting lover.
He saw her great joy as she said his father’s name, spending her last breath on it. But he could not see whoever it was she had looked past him to smile at with so much love.
Stiffly Gideon closed her eyes, and kissed her still-warm lips, his voice thick with tears as he whispered to her, ‘Goodbye, Mother.’
THIRTY-FIVE
‘What a pity it is that Henry will not change his mind and allow you to go and stay with Cecily and my mother,’ Iris commented as Ellie kneeled at her feet, pinning the hem of her gown. Iris had brought it round to Ellie announcing that she had torn the hem whilst riding her bicycle.
‘I attended a lecture by Annie Kenney this week, Ellie. It made me realise how much has changed in the way we live our lives, even in the short time we have known one another,’ Iris commented, adding with candour, ‘and you have changed a great deal yourself! You have become a very independent and strong-minded woman, whom I am proud to call my friend, Ellie, and whose opinion in all things I value – especially,’ she added with a rueful smile, ‘in matters of dress!’
Ellie laughed. ‘Well, I am certainly not the same girl who left Preston,’ she acknowledged.
‘Preston! Oh, I knew there was something I meant to tell you! How could I have overlooked it? Ellie, the saddest news. You remember Mary Isherwood? She has been one of the movement’s longest-standing supporters. I’ve heard that she has died. She was a neighbour of Cecily’s mother’s, I know, and Cecily said that according to her mother, the funeral was very quiet, at her own request, and it seems that she has left everything to that young man – what was his name?’
‘Gideon Walker,’ Ellie told her mechanically.
Her pale face and set expression caused Iris to look queryingly at her, but Ellie ignored the question in her eyes and said expressionlessly, ‘I have repinned the hem, Iris, and it shouldn’t take me long to repair the tear.’
Once Iris had gone, though, all the emotion Ellie had been forced to suppress surged up inside her. Gideon had, it seemed, been well rewarded for the role he had played in Mary Isherwood’s life. An acid feeling of helplessness swirled through Ellie. Gideon…Had he ever thought of her when he held Mary in his arms? Had he ever wondered, wanted…? An ache so fierce and sharp that it caught her breath arced through her, a tormenting, fierce thrust of hot female need, unfamiliar and shocking.
Where had that come from – and why? Panic brought tiny beads of perspiration up along her forehead and beneath her breasts.
Gideon stared blindly out of the window and into the garden beyond. It was over. Everything had been done as Mary had desired. Everything! Mary…In his thoughts even now she was still Mary, and not…
He swallowed and turned and walked up the stairs, pausing before turning the handle of the bedroom that had been hers.
Gideon’s hand lay on the bed, flat now without the thinness of Mary’s body beneath its covers.
Of course, there had been talk once the news of his inheritance had become public, but he had never once wavered in his determination to keep the truth of their relationship private.
Only he knew how rawly it had rubbed his emotions to open the albums she had left for him, albums that, he realised, she must have taxed herself to prepare during the last month
s of her illness – filled with her mementoes of his father, his letters to her declaring his love, the little sketches he had drawn for her and which she had treasured, a lock of his hair, as night-dark as his own. He had also discovered, with a surge of shock that had caught his emotions in dragons’ teeth of pain, the small baby gown she had given them to dress him in after his birth, a book of prayer in which she had written his name and a blessing for him, and, most painful of all, some rough work sketches he had done for her at various times, on which she had written, obviously for herself and not for him, alongside their date, ‘Our son has your gift, my darling one – I pray he may achieve his ambitions, for his sake and for the sake of my own unbearable guilt.’
His ambitions! Well, he would never be an architect, but he was wealthy – extremely wealthy, in fact.
But his wealth was not a ripe juicy fruit whose flavour one wanted to linger on the tongue. Instead it held a tainting bitterness.
It was too soon yet for him to admit to himself how much he yearned for Mary, how much he yearned to be able to share with her the relationship they had both been denied, and so instead he directed his pain towards that segment of the town’s matrons, especially those with marriageable daughters, who had suddenly decided that he was now socially worthy of their recognition.
He would never find the love Mary had told him she wanted him to have; he would never find it because he did not believe it existed! One day, no doubt, he would marry – he was now a man of property and means, after all, and as such it behoved him to provide himself with a son or two to pass it on to – but his wife, when he came to choose one, would be picked as carefully and clinically as a shepherd choosing his breeding stock. Of course, there were those who deliberately shunned him, despite his newly acquired wealth, and one of them was Mary’s neighbour Dr Gibson’s wife, and Ellie Pride’s aunt.
