A Home for Maddy

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: Family Life; Sagas

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Miss Appleby's Academy comes the third book in the popular Black Family trilogy. Perfect for fans of Catherine King, Katie Flynn and Dilly Court.

Maddy Grant is a country girl, living high up on the fells above the small town of Sweet Wells, where her family has lived for hundreds of years. But when her father dies, Maddy learns the land has been sold to businessman Jonas Ward, who evicts Maddy and her mother from the house. As they scrape to make ends meet, Maddy finds herself slowly falling in love with Jonas' handsome nephew, who is also the local solicitor's son. But can she ever truly be with him, knowing how his uncle has treated Maddy's family?

Note: this book was previously published under the title Sweet Wells.

Release date: April 7, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 168

Sample

1918

The snow was never bad in the city. Jonas Ward had to remind himself of this as he watched the big square flakes falling past his office window and turning the pavement white in the small city of Durham. It was much more low-lying than the Durham dale where his family had lived for generations.

The snow melted faster on narrow pavements than it ever did in the fields and on the tops of moors; it did not linger up the cobbled streets of the small city where the houses were often close at either side, old streets with tiny twisting back lanes. The River Wear ran in a loop around three sides, making the city a fortress in older times with the castle on its remaining side effectively keeping out the enemy, keeping the people inside safe.

It did not feel safe now to him; it felt like the snow he had seen which remained in the dale from December to April, when it hid behind the big grey stone walls right through until Easter and sometimes beyond.

He loved the city. He was the first of his family to live there though they had had an office there for many years. His family were solicitors, but they had always travelled back to the little town of Sweet Wells, close to Stanhope, as though the office here in Old Elvet was just an afterthought.

His older brother, Edgar, would have nothing to do with the office in the city. He hid in the dale with his lovely Scottish wife, taking care of the familiar safe petty legalities, whereas Jonas was more ambitious. He was determined to expand the business and had brought his bride here to live in the city.

He and Edgar had both come back from the war early because of wounds when hundreds of thousands of men had died in France. He had been first back with a bad leg which still gave him a slight limp but had probably saved his life. Edgar too had been invalided out. Bradley had never gone to war. His health had been delicate since he was a child. It was that bloody damned house, Jonas thought. The freezing winds up on the top which had left him with weak lungs. It was typical of him.

Jonas had been determined, having gone through so much, to lead the life he had so much wanted and had thought about it when it seemed to him that he would never come home.

Thinking about it now, he moved uneasily in his chair. Catherine was a girl from the hilltops; her family were tenants of a sheep farm way out from any town. She and her sister, Rose, had been brought up on five hundred acres of the kind of land where you could see nothing but tiny square fields and moorland for miles and miles.

Jonas and his friend Bradley Grant, who was an accountant, had met the girls at a dance in Stanhope and married them before the war. Bradley and his wife lived in the hills beyond Sweet Wells, in Bradley’s family’s huge country house, a bleak solitary place which was the very opposite of the house to which Jonas had brought Catherine, a pretty little terraced house in Hallgarth Street in the heart of the small city, and she was now seven months pregnant with their first child. Rose’s baby was due soon.

Rose had written to beg her sister to return for the birth of her own child so Catherine had gone back to be there with her. As Catherine’s baby was not due for another two months there was no reason why she should not go, and Jonas had not liked to argue with her, for fear she should think him selfish and unfeeling. Her family thought it bad enough she had left at all. For him to prevent her from returning on such an important occasion would have looked and sounded ill-natured at the least.

Though she had not said so, he knew that she had not taken to life in the city and had gone back to live with her parents when he was fighting in France. He blamed himself. It had been a dream that did not take wing, something that had existed only in his mind. A girl who was used to the moors could hardly be expected to enjoy the confines of a house which had nothing but a tiny lawn at the back. In fact she had stood out there the first spring that they were married and they had been happy and laughed over the rectangle of garden with the neat little hedges beyond their back door.

‘Is this all the land we have?’ she had said, and he had been obliged to tell her that he could afford nothing better.

His father would make him a partner in the practice later he felt sure, as he had with Edgar, but first he had to prove himself and his father was not given to the kind of generosity which would have bought them a fine house in the city. Everything was more expensive in town and his father, while glad at the idea of the business expanding, could not understand why Jonas should want to live there and had begrudged any money spent.

‘There are plenty of specialist solicitors in Durham,’ his father had said. ‘Our speciality is in helping people we know.’

Jonas liked the city. He liked that the law courts and the prison were here as the very heart of the business in his eyes was criminal law. He had specialized in it and loved it. He was not interested in the kind of general practice his brother and father were involved in: the buying and selling of houses, the farmers’ disputes, the petty squabbles that they sorted out, the legalities of the dying. He was tired of the neatness of it all, he had wanted more serious things and had got his way. Now, however, he got up from his suddenly uncomfortable chair and went to the window.

Old Elvet, the broad street which led to the courts and the prison, was covered in snow which was beginning to blow about with a cutting wind behind it. He could see by the way that the few passers-by shielded their faces with bowed heads, hats, and thick scarves. A wind like that would have had the farmers in Sweet Wells worrying about their livestock.

Jonas stood at his office window, waiting in vain for it to stop, thinking of his bed at home, his dinner and his fireside. They had only one maid; a young girl called Mary. She went home to her mother at the afternoon’s end, to Atherton Street up by North Road, beyond the bus station, near the viaduct where the trains roared across the top.

He had taken her home the first couple of nights when he got there and since then had told her not to wait. He was always late, there was nothing to go home to and there was no reason why Mary should stay on. She would leave him his dinner on the side of the stove to reheat. She did her work well and in the winter it was not fair to keep her beyond dusk. He did not trust the city streets, especially the men who lingered outside the pubs and in dark corners. Mary was to go home in the daylight he insisted, though she protested that at this time of the year it was dark by four.

‘Then go home at four,’ Jonas had said.

‘But, sir …’

‘No buts,’ Jonas said. ‘Your mother would stop you coming at all if I didn’t make sure you got back safely.’

This was true. Mary’s mother had only let her daughter come to them on condition that she was not ‘put upon’ as she called it and Mary was too good at the household work and the cooking for him to consider losing her. She was at the moment all he had.

Twice he had written asking Catherine to come home. She had ignored his letters. He remembered the haste with which she had left him.

‘My sister needs me,’ she had said, pushing the letter under his nose, but he knew that she hungered for the dale.

He had grown jealous of her sister and of Bradley and the big grey stone Grant House where the Grants had lived apparently for ever. It was the nearest to the house the girls had known before they were married. Bradley came from a very old family, well established and respected, whereas Jonas’s branch of the Wards were only third generation solicitors and it was nothing in the dale where some people had lived for a thousand years under the same name. His great-grandfather had been nothing but a farm labourer. Only in the dale, he thought, wincing, would people remember such things.

Jonas had wanted to move away from the clutching fingers of the small society where everybody knew everybody, talked about one another, watched and judged. He had seen Catherine and himself in the city going to dinner parties with city friends, enjoying musical evenings – he loved the violin.

He wanted to laugh at himself now. His wife had made no friends, and he could remember his disappointment right from the beginning as she had rebuffed the invitations they had had, either pretending she was busy doing something else or simply not returning an answer in time. She never went anywhere. The shopping was delivered, Mary did everything in the house, and the little back garden, rather than being somewhere Catherine would cultivate flowers and they could sit together on summer evenings, was a tiny jungle, the grass knee-high, the shrubs around it overgrown and the flower beds clogged with weeds.

He hated looking out on it and seeing its neglect, but when he had attempted to clear the weeds from the tiny beds, Catherine had sat by the window in the dusty living room as though she would stay for ever watching the road which led away from the city. He was convinced that she sat there hour after hour when he was at work and Mary scurried around doing everything so that he should not notice or think things were left undone. As if he cared any more.

He had thought that things would be different when he came home. He imagined she would have accustomed herself to being his wife by then, but the long partings had made things worse. Sometimes, he thought uncomfortably, she put up with his embraces, she endured him in the bedroom and that was all. It was a great grief to him that his wife tolerated his touch and nothing more.

He wished he didn’t love her as it made him ashamed, but he loved her so much while he had the feeling she didn’t overly care for him. How simple it would be if you could withdraw your feelings, take back the needs and his affection. His marriage had become a very lonely place. The trouble was that on his part he wanted to go on, convinced that it would get better. They would spend more time together when she came home, he would make more money, buy her pretty things and in return he hoped she would turn up her face for his kisses, something she hadn’t done in years.

He was hoping the child would improve things. She had seemed pleased. It would be so different. He didn’t care whether it was a girl or a boy as long as they could become a real family at last. He had been struggling for so long but even now, having been without him for so many months, Catherine had gone back to the dale as though she needed to be there no matter what the consequences were.

Darkness was falling. The fire in his office was down to its last embers and he must trudge his way home through the snow. The little house would be so uninviting with its black windows. Perhaps he would go to one of the pubs after he got home and find the company of other men. The snow would stop.

His father had reported that Rose’s child was almost a fortnight old so soon Catherine would make her way back to him and all would be well. He admitted to himself finally that he could not manage without Catherine. He loved her too much and was afraid of his feelings for her.

He knew now that she did not love him, that she had married him because it was a good match and her parents had been pleased as they had nothing to give her, nothing to leave her. Perhaps they had even persuaded her into it. He had been too young, too naïve to know, and he wished he could stop loving her because he knew that she felt suffocated.

She would turn from him in bed and refuse to speak at the table when they had meals together. It made no difference; she was the love of his life and she always would be. She would come home, she would have their child and after that they would be a family, they would be happy.

The snow was worse now. There was nothing to stop it up here on the tops. It had snowed almost constantly for three days. It felt like a lot longer, it was beginning to feel like for ever.

At first Bradley Grant had been pleased, grateful somehow that winter had shown itself properly. After weeks of nothing but wind and rain and sleet the big white flakes had turned the fields into blankets, the hedges into cotton wool, the trees whitened so that the evenings were ghostly. The wind had made intricate shapes against the garden walls and even Rose had smiled and been glad.

Bradley resented Catherine being there. He felt pushed out and knew that Jonas, not long reunited with his wife, was unhappy in Durham by himself. Jonas would write and beg his wife to go back to Durham, but the two sisters would not be parted and if Catherine wanted to go back to her husband she never said so. Though perhaps she did not say so because Rose begged her so hard to stay on, said that she could not manage without her.

It began to snow harder. After two days Bradley could not get down the fields to work and there would have been little point as there was no way he could reach Stanhope, where his office lay, in such weather. He was almost happy sitting there by the fire, thinking of the two women and the child in the kitchen or in the bedroom, laughing together and making cakes in the afternoons and dinner for him later. But after four days he just wished the snow would stop, but it didn’t. It got deeper and deeper.

That night Catherine went into labour. It was too early, he knew it was, he knew that he should get help, but by then the snow was so deep that he could not have got down the track without losing his way in the blizzard. There was no means of contacting the doctor even if he could have helped.

The child was not due for another two months. Telling himself this did not help. Rose’s pain was hard to listen to, her voice was full of fear and despair. He wished that he could run away. His wife’s white face betrayed her, even though she said it must be false labour, it would soon be better, the contractions would stop, they must stop. She sponged Catherine’s face and neck but the contractions did not stop, the pain did not ease and the snow blew across the tops.

Rose came downstairs, moving softly as though any more noise might make things worse.

‘She isn’t getting any better. I don’t think this is false labour. We must get help,’ she said.

Bradley didn’t want to panic her, he had been reassuring and she in her turn had tried to be confident but it had gone beyond that.

‘We’re going to have to manage,’ he said, and he thought back to Rose’s own labour. It had gone on for two days but she had been fine in the end. The doctor had been there, but he thought probably if they had had to they would have been all right. He remembered how he had spent most of those two days pacing up and down in the sitting room and that recollection was no help at all.

‘I’m frightened,’ his wife said.

‘You mustn’t let her know that.’

She went back upstairs. Bradley shut out the weather, pulled thick velvet curtains across the windows, built up the fires in the bedroom, in the living room, the stove in the kitchen. What help they had, a maid and a general labourer, had not turned in for three days and when he went outside, wondering whether there was any way in which he could get to the village in the storm he knew with a countryman’s undeniable knowledge that he would never make it.

The drifts were as high as the house, the little town below was blotted out, the snow was blowing horizontally so that he could see nothing. He ventured beyond the door and straight into a drift so deep that he had difficulty in extricating himself from it. It would be of no help if he died on the way to the village, men had done so, been lost in such storms, not knowing their way, walking blind before the whiteness without direction.

He went back inside and reluctantly up the stairs, hoping vainly that Catherine would be better or that they would at least be able to deliver the child and relieve her of her burden. In the other room Rose’s new daughter, Madeline, was silent. She was sleeping peacefully, but he still went across to her cot and checked. Her tiny round pink cheeks were perfect, her long eyelashes closed and her small fists clenched.

Somehow with the sounds of pain from one room and the silence from the other the house was full of suffering. There was to be no relief. The snow did not stop; he could not go for the doctor.

The baby was born, they did what they could but it was dead. Catherine sweated and burned all through the night, crying out for her child and then for her family. She imagined she was in Durham and wished and sighed for the house on the tops, for her parents, for the endless moor which was her home. She imagined it in August with the heather bright and the bees buzzing and the sunlight in the sky. She tried to get up and go outside to see the moors. Bradley had to stop her, to hold her as she panicked and fought, though she was too weak to leave her bed.

Even when he had extinguished the fire and let the room grow cold her face was shiny with heat and her body swollen as her ravings grew worse. She cried out hour after hour and he knew that he would never forget these terrible days and how Rose had stayed there with her, had not reacted even when the baby did not move. She said nothing to him, it was almost as though he did not exist, she talked to her sister, soothed and comforted, bathed her, held her, tried to calm her.

Catherine died the same afternoon. Rose was inconsolable. She finally broke down, begged of her sister not to leave her, kissed her all over her face long after Catherine had stopped breathing. Bradley said nothing, he stood by and waited for the grief to pass.

When the snow stopped there was still nothing he could do. He had to wait for three days until the sun had melted enough of it to allow him to wade down to the doctor’s house in the village. He was exhausted, soaked, the snow had been up to his waist all the way. He did not want to go back there, he didn’t ever want to go back a. . .