Ellie Pride Read Online Free PDF Page B

question.
    Ellie wasn’t ignorant of the way in which a child was conceived; their father’s family, for one thing, had a much more vigorous and salty approach to life than her mother’s, especially their Uncle William, the drover for whom Gideon sometimes worked.
    William Pride was the black sheep of the family; a rebel in many ways, who had still managed to do very well by himself materially. And in doing so he also ensured that their father was supplied with the best-quality meat on offer, since it was William who went to the northern markets to buy fat lambs and beasts, as well as poultry in season, driving the animals back from the Lakes and Dales markets to sell to several butchers, including his brother.
    Ellie knew that her mother did not approve of her husband’s brother, and she always tried to discourage her husband from spending any more time than necessary with him when he was in town.
    As they hurried through the smog-soured streets,keeping their scarves across their faces to protect themselves from its evil smell, out of the corner of her eye, Ellie saw a group of young millworkers huddled in a small entry that led into one of the town’s ‘yards’.
    The houses, crammed into these places to accommodate the needs of the millworkers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before the mill owners themselves had put up new terraces of cottages to house their workers, had no proper sanitation and were deemed to be the worst of the town’s slums. Even through the thick choking smog, Ellie had to wrinkle her nose against their nauseating smell.
    A man crossed the street in front of Ellie and her mother, causing them to step into the gutter to avoid him as he stood in front of the girls, leering at them. Drunk and unkempt, he made Ellie shudder in distaste. Her mother tugged sharply on her arm, drawing her firmly away. But Ellie already knew that the place they had just passed was one of the town’s most notorious whorehouses.
    Grimly, Mary Isherwood studied the dark and dank hallway of her childhood home in Winckley Square. Despite his wealth her father had been a notoriously mean man. Fires were only to be lit when he himself was at home, and her mother, the poor thin-blooded woman he had married when he was in his fortieth year, had shiveredceaselessly from November until April, her hands red and blue with cold.
    Mercifully, Mary had inherited her father’s sturdier physique. It had been common knowledge that her father had only married her mother because of her connection with the landed gentry – and that having done so he had mercilessly bullied her and blamed her for the fact that she had not given him a son.
    Mary had grown up hating her father even more than she had despised her mother. Naturally scholastic, she had infuriated her father with her ability to out-argue him, shrugging aside his taunts that she was too clever for her own good and that no man would ever want to marry her unless he himself paid him to do so.
    She had never let him see how much that jibe had hurt her, but she had made sure that he paid for it. Only through her could he have grandsons, the male heirs he longed for, and she had decided that he would never have them. She would never marry; never put herself in a position where he could boast and torment her that he had bought her a husband. Mary was every bit as stubborn as her father had been, and she had stuck to her resolution.
    It had shocked her to learn that he was dead, and it had shocked her even more to discover that she was his sole heir. She had expected that he would cut her out of his will – that he would rather leave his wealth to the foundling home, whose occupants he so brutally used and destroyed working in hisappalling factories, rather than allow her to see a penny of it.
    The factories were sold now. Horrocks’s had made her father an offer he couldn’t refuse, and Mary was glad of it. They represented everything she most hated.
    Perhaps her