Shining Threads Read Online Free PDF Page A

cared nought for convention, which perhaps explained her carelessness with her own daughter’s
upbringing. She had ignored the observance of the standards of her own class, flaunting her beliefs that all men were equal in the radical cause.
    Charlie believed that the only reason Jenny married the man she did was that he was as weak as she was strong. Joseph Harrison was not a man who had it in him to command his wife to stay at home
where she belonged, to mind his hearth and the girl child he gave her, and it was precisely this quality in him which made Jenny choose him. The son of a weaver the same age as herself he was the
shadow who followed her footsteps wherever they led but without the spirit to challenge her will, let alone the congestion in his chest which carried him to his death. It was as though he had never
existed, Charlie considered, if it were not for the vital daughter he left behind and who was cast, thankfully, in her mother’s image.
    Tessa Harrison. She wore the simple white tulle which was considered suitable for a young unmarried lady, chosen for her by Laurel, no doubt, since Tessa herself showed no concern for the gowns
and ribbons, the embroidered fans and shawls, the frilled parasols and flowered bonnets which were considered to be the sole interest of young ladies. She was heiress to her mother’s fortune,
made in service to the mills, a girl who, when it suited her, could be as docile as a kitten, as sweet as a gillyflower, but who, as everyone from the maidservants to Joss Greenwood himself knew,
had the wildest temper, the most self-willed and obstinate disposition of any of them. The trouble was, of course, that her own mother was seldom at home and whilst she was absent, Miss Tessa
Harrison, determined to follow the path along which her male cousins walked or ran shouting with high-spirited laughter, simply ran with them.
    The house in which they all lived was named Greenacres for obvious reasons. It stood in a splendid twenty acres of land some miles north-east of Oldham. When it was built almost eighty years ago
by Kit Greenwood’s grandfather it had been surrounded by woodlands and, at its back, the magnificent hills of the South Pennine chain. Since then the industrial factories and chimney stacks,
the dwellings built to house the millworkers had fanned out from the centre of Crossfold which had then been nothing but a cottage or two, a church, a forge and an ale house, until they reached
almost to the high stone wall which surrounded the Greenwood estate.
    Greenacres was built of stone, mellowed now to a soft shade of silvered grey. The windows at ground level rose from floor to ceiling allowing in the luminous northern light. Some were flat to
the wall, others had deep bays, the rooms they illuminated richly panelled and high. The roof was steeply sloped with two dozen tall chimneys and on the south-facing wall was a conservatory,
burgeoning from glass wall to glass wall with gardenias, orchids, magnolias, camellias, all mixed with cascades of trailing ivy and tall ferns. There were hanging baskets of verbena, fragrant all
year round, singing birds in cages and wicker chairs stuffed with fat cushions in which to sit and enjoy it all.
    The house was square and solid, with a look of permanence and steadfast reliability, but though it lacked the elegant lines of houses built in Georgian and Regency times, it had a pleasing
symmetry overall. James Chapman had liked what he called a bit of ‘style’ about him and had commissioned delicate rosewood for his hallway and staircase, soft, glowing. Yet in
comparison the fireplace was enormous, burning great logs on most days of the year for he also liked warmth and comfort. The drawing-room had not been changed since the day he and his son, Barker,
had filled it with comfortable velvet sofas and chairs, rich, deep carpets of Axminster, oil paintings and water colours, porcelain of Sèvres and Meissen, Wedgwood and Spode,