All That Glitters Read Online Free PDF Page B

forget Haydn for five minutes and go to bed.’
    ‘Here’s where you sleep. It’s clean. I made sure the last girl left it as she found it.’
    Panting from the exertion of climbing three flights of stairs, Mrs Bletchett opened the door to the small attic bedroom. It was undeniably clean. Clean and bare except for a rickety wooden chair and a metal-framed bed. The mattress was stuffed with horsehair; Jane knew because brown fibres oozed from the side seams. A pair of threadbare sheets and a single thin, grey blanket lay folded on top. The floor had been scrubbed almost white, the boards dried and bleached by successive applications of washing soda and water. Jane could smell the soda: a dry, astringent odour that caught the back of her throat and reminded her of the workhouse.
    ‘I’ll expect you to wash the sheets when you wash the lodgers’ bedding. There’s a chair for your spare dress.’
    Jane obediently laid her bundle on the seat. At the head of the bed was a small uncurtained window. She glanced through it. She was higher than she’d thought. Below her stretched an undulating sea of slate roofs and smoking chimney pots.
    ‘Now you’ve seen where you’ll sleep, you can start earning your keep.’
    The lodging house was vast. Larger than it looked from the outside, and it had appeared daunting then. Crushed to learn she was the only ‘help’, Jane followed her new mistress down warrens of corridors into dormitories that reeked of male sweat, soiled clothes and stale air. Washrooms and toilets flooded with pools of foul-smelling water were situated at the end of every passage, and everything she was shown looked as though it hadn’t been given a thorough cleaning in years.
    The ground floor was little better. An ill-ventilated, smoky kitchen, filled to capacity by an enormous table and dresser that might have been made for the ogre in Jack and the Beanstalk opened into a dingy bar furnished with round tables and rickety chairs. A counter was set at one end, barrels of beer and cider ranged behind it, the gleaming china handles of the pumps polished – no doubt by the previous skivvy.
    ‘You served beer?’ Mr Bletchett demanded.
    Jane shook her head.
    ‘I’ve yet to meet a workhouse girl who’s good for anything besides scrubbing floors,’ his wife sneered. ‘Well, we’ve no time to teach you how to pull a pint now. Into that kitchen and peel all the potatoes in the basket. You have peeled potatoes before?’
    ‘Yes ma’am.’
    ‘Then what are you waiting for?’
    ‘You’re the last person I expected to see here.’
    ‘Why’s that. Eddie Powell? Think I’m not good enough for the New Inn?’ Jenny Griffiths flirted provocatively.
    ‘Of course not,’ he apologised, anxious not to upset her. She certainly looked different to the everyday Jenny who served behind the counter in her father’s shop. Her long, blonde hair had been crisply waved and styled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she was wearing a shiny blue dress that showed the creamy skin on her neck and arms to fine advantage. He found himself wishing they were alone.
    ‘You here to celebrate your Haydn’s homecoming?’
    Eddie’s hopes of making any headway with her were dashed as they glanced over to where his brother was holding court at the head of the table that Andrew John had booked. The look in Jenny’s eye told him everything he would have been happier not to know. She had been Haydn’s girl before she had been briefly – very briefly – his. And she couldn’t have made it any plainer that she still carried a torch for Haydn if she had screamed it from the band’s microphone.
    Oblivious to everyone who wasn’t sitting at his table, Haydn’s laughter echoed around the room, cutting Eddie to the quick. Although Eddie would sooner have died than admit it to anyone, he loved his brother. But standing next to Jenny Griffiths he wished Haydn a million miles away, or at least back in London.
    ‘Do you want to talk