A Daughter's Wish

Book 0: Durham City Series

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: Family Life; Sagas; Historical Romance

Synopsis

From the author of An Orphan's Wish comes a tale of love and destiny perfect for fans of Nadine Dorries, Anna Jacobs and Ellie Dean.

When Thomas Grant - one of the most eligible young men in London - proposes to Annabel Seaton, she can't say she's surprised, but she is delighted. He's been her best friend since she was a child, and she can't imagine life without him. What shocks her, however, is the reaction of her mother and father.

Annabel knows that her parents disapprove of her forthright opinions, but their displeasure is both unexpected and unaccountable. As they permit the engagement, however, she decides to put it out of her mind. But before she can be married, tragedy strikes, and only then does Annabel learn of the shocking secret that her parents have kept from her. Determined to learn more, she travels to Durham on a personal search that will change everything.

Release date: March 3, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 190

Sample

1878 Durham

Al had not been able to go out that day. Such a little thing to make such a difference, Sarah thought when she looked back at it. It had been a lovely day, one of those spring days in March which you rarely got and which this time had come in number. There had been more than a week of warm sunshine. People took off their coats as they walked by the river, and lingered there in the winding cobbled streets of the small city. The shopkeepers left their doors open. She had wanted to go for a picnic. The daffodils were beginning to show yellow, the crocuses were purple and white on the roadsides and the snowdrops were just about finished.

She had been desperate for a free day because she worked so hard at the dressmaker’s in the back of the shop in the market-place. She hated the work there. In winter she had to strain her gaze and furrow her brow to see at all during the dark days because Mrs Cheveley who owned the place would not provide the light which her workers needed and all day they sat there in the little light there was and she watched over them so they should not stop.

It was Sunday. On Sundays she had to go to chapel with her parents, was allowed to do nothing, in fact it was just as boring as the rest of the week and she had finally rebelled and said to Al that it was lovely weather and they should run away just for an hour or two and take the consequences and then Al had had to work, that was what he said anyhow.

But that had not been the start of things going wrong. The beginning had been when Fergus Seaton saw her and she saw him. Until then she thought she had loved Al but she fell in love with Fergus. She knew that it was stupid, she had not known that she could do such things, she thought stuff like that only happened in stories but he was so dark and brown-eyed and good-looking that she couldn’t help herself. She wanted to be with him all the time, she wanted to run to him at every opportunity. She lay in bed and thought about him and she knew that she would never love like that again. They were meant to be together. She could not think how she had come to be as lucky as to find him, nor he to find her.

She could not believe that he had noticed her. He was a fine man from London, he owned pits, had come there, he said, to see how things were going as he occasionally did and he had seen her in the street and he had taken a shine to her and when she stopped in the middle of Elvet Bridge he had gone up to her and very politely told her his name and asked for hers.

She knew that she was very pretty, many men had noticed, many men had come up to her but she had always brushed them off and then she had met Al and he was respectable, he was better than the rest but he was not like Fergus. Nobody in the world was like Fergus.

Sarah had gone into hiding, down here in Paradise Lane. What a name for such a place. Perhaps once it had been green fields but it was right in the middle of the city so she could not think why it was named in such a way. She had lived in the city all her life and never seen this part of it and it was not a big city but only the likes of thieves and prostitutes and those so poverty-stricken that they had nothing lived in such a place and she had dreaded the knowing of it, never thinking that she would end up here.

The name was so ironic and yet everybody in Durham knew of it. She remembered her mother saying to her when she had behaved badly when she was little, ‘Anybody would think you’d been dragged up in Paradise Lane,’ and yet every Sunday the minister would talk of paradise and say how people who believed in God and Jesus would end up in such a place where there was no pain or suffering, the sun shone all day and there were wonderful things to eat. In fact, she had thought then, it would be like Christmas when the house was decorated with paper chains and everybody got a present and a big dinner or Easter Sunday when she got new summer clothes and she and her sister would decorate hard-boiled eggs with their paint boxes and brushes and roll them down the hill in Wharton Park.

But Paradise Lane was the place where people went to when there was nothing left. Her mother had found her being sick and she had said it must have been something she ate and her mother scoffed and said, ‘What, two mornings running? It’s that man, isn’t it? I’ve heard of him and I didn’t believe the gossip, I didn’t think that you would do such a thing, I thought you had more sense but I should have known that no good would come of it. I was so proud, I thought I knew my daughters. Wait until your father finds out.’

She listened to their raised voices when he came home in the late afternoon and he had not said anything though his face changed as she had not seen it change before. All he had done was take her by the arm and walk her to the front door, put her out of it, close it and lock it. She stood there for a long time sure that they would think better of their action and let her back in. She could not even remember what her mother had said, her voice high and shrill, and her brother and sister had gone upstairs for fear they should somehow get the blame just by being in the room. She had had to go away, the neighbours had heard the noise and people were surreptitiously at their doors, peering out at her and going back in, taking another look and then another until she could bear it no longer and was sure that she would not be let back inside and she thought about trying the door and hammering and shouting but she had known that it would do no good so in the end she walked away.

When you had nowhere to go, that was the worst feeling in the world. Because of the condition she was in and she did not doubt even for a moment that her mother was right, nobody, neither friend nor relative, would take her in, they were too afraid of the shame being somehow on them as well and they would not dare to trespass on her mother and father’s decision because they would be sure that it was right. She had been respectable, that was the word for it. She had not realized what a small way it was from that kind of respectability to this. She had had her head turned, that was what they called it.

She thought of the comfortable little house under the viaduct on the hill above the town. Her parents and her sister would be sitting around the fire now. It was only a few minutes’ walk away yet she would never go there again. They had been so ashamed of what she had done. The worst thing a woman could do was to become pregnant when she was not married and her parents were good chapel-going people.

She could not even think now how she had got herself into such a predicament. You did hear of loose women but it seemed to her that they were just unfortunate and that men had made them so. Fergus had certainly done so to her. He had lured her to a shady spot by the river on a fine day, they were going to have a picnic and then he had kissed her until her body was on fire.

What had happened after that had not been something she had wanted to happen but neither had he forced her. She had not known what he was doing, she was carried away by the feel of his mouth and hands.

It seemed amazing that people should have to pay such a high price for something which felt so good and so natural and she – it made her laugh bitterly to think of it – she had thought he would marry her, that having done such a thing any man would marry the woman, why else would he want to be with her that way?

She had not known that there were men who did such things and had no honour, that all they wished was their own pleasure with no thought for the consequences and he knew what could happen and he had gone ahead anyway. He had not thought about her, he had only thought about her body.

She had dreaded her thoughts. She had imagined the horror which came upon her when her monthly bleeding stopped and her breasts hurt and the sickness began and her clothes began to tighten. At first she had lain in bed and thought God could not visit such things upon her but gradually it became obvious to her what was happening.

Fergus was not interested, she finally admitted this to herself, he did not care, they no longer met. Once he had had her half a dozen times at various secluded places he had lost interest, he spent time with other people, no doubt with other women. She was astonished that men of money, property and pit-owners, could do such things.

She had been brought up to believe that they were right, that they knew better than the people who worked for them. Fergus was so important that he had agents to run his pits, he didn’t go near them most of the time, yet having come to the town – and how she wished he never had – he seemed reluctant to leave and stayed there in a big house just outside the city with friends and went fishing and shooting and away for the weekends: he had told her of these pleasures and she had envied the people concerned – but he had never thought of her like that, she was just there for use.

The time spent with her, the picnic which she had packed so carefully went uneaten, the beer which she had brought undrunk and he had left her there, he said he had somewhere to be, she could not even remember where it was.

She tried to tell him that she was having a baby and he made a joke and asked her how many other men she had pleasured and she had been obliged to hide her condition as well as she could for as long as she could and it was not long because the sickness was so bad almost from the beginning.

When she mentioned marriage he had laughed and said he was married already so she couldn’t catch him that way and she said her father would kill her and he said he was sure that nothing of the sort would occur, such things happened every day, her family would take in the baby and they would get over it, just like everybody did.

She left. She knew that there must be some place in the small city where she could hide successfully, where people lived who were cut off from respectable society, from those who went to church and chapel.

She had no money and only the clothes she had left in and it rained and the other girls on the street corners down there had done nothing but laugh at first and then she knew that all the women who went there ended up on the street just like they did, enticing men to dark corners for money. She stood in a shop doorway for a while, unable to believe what had happened, and she tried to get work. She had gone to the shop where she sewed but somebody had already told Mrs Cheveley because she came to the door, pushed Sarah back out of it, locked it – she heard the key turn – and told her not to come back.

‘I’m owed wages,’ she protested.

‘Sluts are owed nothing,’ Mrs Cheveley said and that was when Sarah realized that she had become the subject of gossip all over the town. This was confirmed when she went to the offices and shops to ask for work and it was like she had a sign on her saying that she was expecting or could they see it in her face? She was turned down everywhere.

When the day grew dark and cold the owner of the shop where she was sheltering from the rain came out and told her to move and gradually she drifted, as no doubt, she thought, many of the other girls had done, further and further away from her house and the respectable places in the town. The poor and the abandoned and the hopeless congregated down by the river here.

The shadows of people waited in the doorways, the women made themselves visible as the light died from the day.

A man found her beneath Elvet Bridge when the river was running swiftly and offered her a small sum so that what she had once thought she was doing for love she now did for money. It was the same and it was different and then she saw herself somehow reflected in the dark shadows. She had never thought of herself much at all, they were not encouraged to look into mirrors, beauty was something of a sin somehow. Humility was the thing. Loveliness brought on sins of the flesh and that resulted, she knew very well now, in degradation.

Each girl had her spot and men soon got to know hers. Under the bridge she earned her money and she found a room nearby in a back alley. It was not a lot of money but that plus a hot pie or two from the nearest pub was what she could afford and as the weeks went on and she got bigger the men objected to paying as much so they got her cheaply.

She made no friends though the other women were friendly with one another. She was too ashamed to speak to anyone and she found that she had nothing to say.

She deliberately didn’t look at the men. She did not know whether they were young or old, how they smelled. She turned her face from them when they got that close. To taste them would finish her off, she thought. And the feel of them. She held them as lightly as possible while they did what they wanted and only seemed to let go of her breath again freely when it was over.

She eked the money out day after day and each day she felt more worthless and despised herself more for getting herself into such a state. Often and often she almost went to Al but she knew that he would be unforgiving, what man could forgive what she had done, what man would take another man’s child and if she did not tell him that she had had to give her body in return for money – what would happen then?

It was a long, long time before the baby was born and each day she hid there in the room which came alive with insects at night. If she was there they dropped on her when she slept, making her scream so at least during the daylight hours she did not have that to endure but the nights, especially the cold nights with the wind blowing off the river, seemed to last forever and there was always a fat ill-dressed man with rough hands and breath she would turn away from as he took what he had paid for.

When the baby was born, after what seemed like years the woman from upstairs heard her screams and came down and helped her.

She had been glad of any help she could get by then, the pain went on and on. And now the baby was born and there was nothing else for her to do. She had taken a note to where Fergus was staying. She thought he was there still. She tucked up the baby as best she could and took a last look at the room which had been all her home during the months after she left Atherton Street and then she slipped on her coat against the weather and left the house.

Everything had changed now. She had tried to think what she would do. She could not take the child with her when she went to what she thought of as work. Nor could she leave it alone in the room. She ventured up the grimy broken stairs to see the woman who had helped when the baby was born but she had known it was no good. She went through her explanation and already the woman, older than she was with a deeply lined face, was shaking her head.

‘Please help me, there’s no one else,’ but the door was already closing.

She had been in that one room with her baby for almost a week and the money had run out. She suspected that her milk was not enough for her child, who screamed constantly. She thought about going home, about the little house where she had been brought up and the job she had hated so much. She thought back now to all the things that she had had and could not believe she had thought herself unhappy. It seemed to her now like paradise indeed.

She wondered whether she should leave the baby on her parents’ doorstep and go somewhere different but it seemed like such an awful thing to do. She had the feeling they would not take it in and then what would happen to it?

That was when she made her decision. There was nothing else to do. She would take a note to the house where Fergus was staying.

It was a long walk and she made sure that she went in the dim light. She did think of leaving the baby there but then everybody in the house would know and perhaps he would even refuse and say it was not his and would not take the responsibility for it. She could not guarantee that he would come to Paradise Lane either but it was the best that she could do.

There was even a very bad moment when she considered taking the baby with her. What if he didn’t get the note, what if he ignored it? What if her baby was left in that room alone and died? Would it not be better to make an end to both of them? A risk. She could have smiled – had she had the energy left she would have. Even at this stage she was prepared to take a risk?

None of this was the child’s fault. Should she not have even a small chance? Otherwise this would be a total defeat. The baby slept inside her shawl, quiet for once as Sarah trudged all the way through the town towards Shincliffe, the little village which lay just beyond the city. Fergus had been staying at the big house just to this side of the village. They would know where to find him.

The front of the house was in darkness. At first as she trudged up the drive she thought it was just because of the trees, because it was totally without life. She panicked. What if he was not here? What if they had shut up the house and would not be back for weeks, pleasing themselves with sport and parties as people like that did, she thought savagely, but she went on and up the long wide stone steps and she pushed the note through the letter box in the front door.

The first part of her plan was completed and now that she had put it into operation it seemed to carry its own momentum. She was glad of that, it was as though she did not have to make any decisions, it was all done. She went wearily back to the room which was the only home she had known in almost six months and there she fed the baby for the last time and held her until she slept and put her down and wrapped her up for comfort and warmth and then she slipped out of the building.

Even the whores had gone home, the weather was so vile. It was freezing and foggy, she could barely see the pavement and when she reached it she could only just see the river.

They said drowning was an easy way to go. She thought people only said it because they had not done it but there was nothing else for her now. She found stones down there and filled her pockets with them, her coat and her skirt, and then she walked towards the black, oily water.

It was so cold, worse than she had thought it would be and the bottom was uneven as she had not imagined it, there were rocks and lower places and the fog seemed to come down even further to meet the water.

Above her she could hear the sound of three o’clock as the cathedral bell struck and she imagined the great shadows of the castle and the cathedral. In the morning the sun would come up, maybe it would even get past the fog, it would rise round and golden but she would not see it. She would never see another day. It was such a relief to think she would not have to worry any more.

1902 London

Annabel Seaton had been expecting Thomas Grant to ask her to marry him. That sounded awful. It wasn’t like that, it was just that she couldn’t think what she might do other than be his wife. It was right, it was meant to be, it was their future together. They had been best friends since they were children and it was the most important friendship of her life. Somewhere in among all that was her sister, Millie, less than two years younger than she was, it had always been herself and Millie and Tom, somehow she could not leave out the sister who was so precious to her.

It was winter, it had snowed and they had spent a silly morning firing snowballs at one another across the park, running away and coming back and helping various children to build snowmen. At one point Millie had even gone home and come back with five round pieces of coal, three for his buttons and two for his eyes, filched a scarf and red woollen hat for his neck and head and they had given them to the children and watched the snowman take on an appearance so real to Millie that she hung on to Annabel’s arm for a second or two and laughed, still breathless from her trek into the house and said, ‘Oh, dear, I’m afraid that he is real and will come to us in the night and scare us half to death.’

To which Tom had said, ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that, it’s thawing already.’

‘Don’t spoil it, Tom!’ Annabel said.

‘It’s true,’ Tom insisted, ‘he’ll be nothing but a puddle by morning.’

They went back as the day grew dark and in the late afternoon the icicles in the guttering at the top of the houses began to drip but later the relentless cold came down again across London. Annabel and Tom were sitting over the fire and when Millie . . .