A Time Like No Other Read online

  A TIME LIKE NO OTHER

  Audrey Howard

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Audrey Howard

  The Skylark’s Song

  The Morning Tide

  Ambitions

  The Juniper Bush

  Between Friends

  The Mallow Years

  Shining Threads

  A Day Will Come

  All the Dear Faces

  There Is No Parting

  The Woman from Browhead

  Echo of Another Time

  The Silence of Strangers

  A World of Difference

  Promises Lost

  The Shadowed Hills

  Strand of Dreams

  Tomorrow’s Memories

  Not a Bird Will Sing

  When Morning Comes

  Beyond the Shining Water

  Angel Meadow

  Rivers of the Heart

  The Seasons Will Pass

  A Place Called Hope

  Annie’s Girl

  Whispers on the Water

  A Flower in Season

  Painted Highway

  Reflections from the Past

  Distant Images

  As the Night Ends

  Rose Alley

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Hodder and Stoughton

  An Hachette UK Company

  Copyright © Audrey Howard, 2007

  The right of Audrey Howard to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN: 9781444716870

  Book ISBN: 9780340895382

  Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  A Time Like No Other

  Also by Audrey Howard

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  1

  Amalia Fraser felt herself sway slightly as they lowered the coffin that contained her husband’s body into the ground but the touch of Biddy’s hand on her arm steadied her.

  ‘Bear up, my lass,’ Biddy whispered, the words heard by no one but Amalia and she bore up as Biddy knew she would. Biddy was her rock, her anchor, her life-raft in this nightmare and she clung to her, for there was no one else. Biddy had been with her for as long as she could remember, giving her strength, giving stability in her unstable world, always there, comforting and yet standing no nonsense in her care, for she was a plain-spoken, level-headed Yorkshire woman with what was known as a heart of gold that she did her best to keep well hidden except to the girl beside her.

  The weather was raw. It was November, which was usually dismal in the dales and on the moorlands of the Pennines. Though not exactly raining, the damp clung to the mourners like cobwebs so that they felt the need, as if they were real, to brush them away from their faces. They stood, heads bowed, hands clasped respectfully, the gentlemen in their black top hats and gloves, the ladies in black crepe and mourning veils, so many of them that the church would not hold them all and some were forced to wait outside until the service was over. After all, the eldest male Fraser had for generations been the closest thing to a squire the small town of Moorend and its surrounding parish had ever known.

  ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord . . .’ the parson intoned, and from several ladies sniffles could be heard and black-edged handkerchiefs were lifted to tearful eyes. From beneath her own veil, from her own tearless eyes, Amalia looked about her. She, like the others, was in deepest black as she had been since they brought him back to her on a gate from Higgins’s Farm. He had been at the front of the field as he always was, on his coal-black gelding and everyone behind him had seen him come off at the ditch surrounding Higgins’s mangold field. Jack Hodges even claimed to have heard his neck snap, though he had the good sense not to repeat it in the company of the widow. The dead man was twenty-three years old, Amalia was twenty and had just risen from childbed after the birth of their second son, otherwise she would have been racing just as madly beside him in the hunting field. She could feel their sympathy, all those who, three years ago when she and Chris had fallen wildly in love and against all opposition had married in this very church, had shaken their heads at the folly of youth. At seventeen she was of marriageable age but he, at twenty, was far too young. A gentleman was supposed to sow his wild oats before he settled down, make his way in the world and then, when he was perhaps in his thirties, marry some slip of a thing who would bring him a good dowry and a brood of sons to inherit.

  ‘It’s over, lass.’ She came from her detachment to feel Biddy’s hand drawing her away from the grave, guiding her round the freshly dug soil and on to the grass verge beside the path. The path was lined with faces bearing every expression from sadness, sympathy, curiosity, to the downright avid.

  Harry Sinclair was there to assist her into her carriage, his face stern on this sad occasion but his deep brown eyes were soft with sympathy and from behind her veil she managed a small smile for his benefit. He did not return it. Biddy climbed in beside her, knowing that half the men among the mourners would have offered their arm, their strength, their manly support for the fragile little widow if only their wives had not been present. Harry Sinclair was a bachelor, twenty-seven years old, his own master in his flourishing mills since the death of his father and could do as he pleased, which he always did but he was also a careful gentleman who had no desire to change his unmarried status. His brother had been a close friend of the man they had just laid to rest and, at a time like this, with Roly Sinclair abroad on business, selling Sinclair cloth, it would not be out of place to give assistance to the widow of his brother’s friend.

  The carriage headed off in the direction of The Priory, the Fraser family home, moving along the curving, narrow road which led to a wide stretch of gorse moor, the other carriages following on, for there were to be refreshments for those who had come from some distance. Biddy hoped Jenny and her sister, Clara, had carried out her instructions in laying the table with the custard tarts, ham sandwiches and pickles she herself had prepared before getting the lass into the carriage. She was still not right, her lass. She had suffered a grievous shock. Especially so soon after giving birth to Master Alec, three weeks old and
at this very moment shouting for the nipple, no doubt, and Master Jamie getting in the way of poor Jenny and Clara who would be all at sixes and sevens without her to bully them. What was to become of them all? she had time to wonder as she watched Mr Sinclair swing into the saddle of his bay and tack on to the end of the cavalcade of carriages.

  Harry had decided to ride over from Mill House on his bay. Though it would have been more appropriate in the circumstances to use the gig it would have meant keeping to the roads between his home and the church where poor Chris was being laid to rest. Mounted, he could gallop across the fields and the bit of moorland which would save him time. He would, naturally, be expected to return to the Priory for the formalities that followed an interment, but he had a piece of cloth ready to come off one of his new looms which demanded his attention and though Mather was a splendid overseer he wanted to see it himself. It was well known by his shrewd, hardworking competitors in the woollen industry that you only had to let your eyes wander for a fraction of a second for the business to grind to a halt. Take Chris Fraser’s father as an example, and Chris Fraser himself who had both been concerned with pleasure rather than the business of running an estate and had spent the family’s wealth in the space of two generations, the wealth built up by the first Fraser, also called Christopher, 200 years ago. The sooner Harry was back at his weaving and spinning mill at High Clough the better. A glass of decent wine, if such a thing was to be had at The Priory, and he’d make his excuse to leave. No more than an hour. He begrudged the time but it was his duty to attend the funeral of the lad who had been a frequent visitor at Mill House, sometimes bringing his pretty second cousin, Amalia, with him. The boys had attended Moorend Grammar School together, played together, fought together, been wild together as young men are and when Chris had announced his intention to marry Amalia Atkins he remembered how thunderstruck Roly had been. Mind you, they had both been a little in love with Amalia or Lally as they had called her, for she was extraordinarily lovely. It was hard to describe her in the usual way as her looks were exceptional. Dark, glossy hair cut in a tumble of short curls about her head, because even then she had defied the conventions of her class. Her face was like that of a kitten, with a pointed chin the colour of ivory and she had startling translucent green-blue eyes which changed colour with her mood and the weather. They were surrounded by long, thick lashes which meshed together when she laughed which was often, for she was a madcap who revelled in all the mischievous things Chris and Roly got up to. She had fought with them, laughed with them, ridden her small pony in a mad explosion of movement in an attempt to keep up with them. She had climbed trees, splashed in the busy waters of the moorland streams with them, chased Max and Dandy, the two Mill House Labradors, with them, and when they went to school waited for them to come home to join in whatever scheme they had thought up.

  They had noticed at the same time, with the suddenness of boys almost grown into young men, that she was not, in fact, one of them at all, but an exceptionally lovely young woman with whom they had, as they did everything together, fallen in love. It was Chris Fraser who captured her wayward heart.

  She was mercurial, sunny-natured, wayward and wilful, fun-loving and wildly reckless even after her marriage, which everyone thought would surely calm her down, particularly with two babies in rapid succession. It had not, even the birth of her two sons failing to keep her occupied by the things that young married women were expected to be busy with and why it was so sad to see her as she had been drooping at her husband’s grave today. Harry had stood on the other side of the gaping hole, ready to leap across it if necessary to give her his arm to cling to, wondering why he should think thus. He supposed it was because she had no one but a servant, the woman who had come with her when she married Chris. There were many there who would have been more than willing to do the same if there had been money in it, sons of the millocracy and even the lesser gentry who had known young Chris Fraser as a good sort. But there was nothing left of what had once been a fine estate, for Chris had been feckless and reckless as his father had been before him. Joe Fraser could have lived comfortably on the rents of his farms had he taken more interest in them and the farmers who rented them but Joseph had attempted to live grandly and had kept a mistress in Halifax. He had spent his time with her and at the gaming tables when he should have been overseeing the running of his estate. He ran up huge debts at his tailors – his fancy waistcoats were the talk of Moorend – and at his wine merchants and it was said that the scandal of it killed his poor wife. He followed soon after, leaving little for his only son, his only child, Christopher. And now would you look at the result! A dead landowner, a young, impoverished widow and two babies.

  Harry handed the reins of his bay to a lad at the front entrance of the house, wending his way through the tangle of open carriages, gigs and broughams that were standing on the gravel drive. Coachmen muttered oaths, flustered by the confusion, for there seemed to be no one in charge of ordering their places on the drive. There were a couple of equally flustered servants, a groom or perhaps a gardener doing their best to make some sort of order out of the press but then that was typical of the Frasers, their servants as hapless as they themselves had been. It was said that until Lally married Chris and took the woman whose arm she clung to at the interment to her new home there had been nothing but chaos in the Fraser house. Servants, most of them unpaid, lolling about the place, pots unwashed, beds unmade, gardens untended, the dairy smelling of sour milk, but all as happy as the lark, comfortable and time-wasting. That is until this woman who now stood at the entrance to the house had taken control and brought order where there had been confusion. Since she had returned from the church she had tied a pristine white apron over her black dress and on her head where there had been a deep-brimmed black bonnet was now a fluted white cap. She was greeting the mourners and directing them to the drawing room. She was tall, stately, immensely dignified, her face quite expressionless. As she indicated the way he was struck by her proud, easy carriage, her clear skin and excellent teeth, and wondered where she had come from. Servant to Lally Fraser’s own mother until the day she died, he had heard, and the one who had brought her up as if the girl were her own. Lally’s mother had been known as a somewhat odd woman who had mixed with a literary crowd, artists and writers and admirers of Goethe, Schiller, Herder and such, which was not to the taste of the plain-spoken, strait-laced manufacturing folk of the district. They supposed that was from where she got her daughter’s fancy name.

  Lally was seated on a sofa by the enormous fireplace in which a fragrant applewood fire blazed and beside her a thin thread of a woman nodded and murmured at the ladies and gentlemen who approached Lally with their condolences. This was the aunt, or rather a distant cousin, who had, on the death of Lally’s mother, taken her to live in a modest villa in Skircoat on the southern perimeter of Halifax. The woman to whom Lally had clung had gone with her. A maiden lady, was the cousin, Harry had heard, who had had no control whatsoever over her unconventional young relative.

  Two young maidservants were moving about the room offering sherry – no decent wine then – and on a table were the refreshments. Lally toyed with a glass of sherry, smiling vaguely as each of the mourners came to pay their respects. Sympathy oozing, ladies held her hand for a moment and gentlemen bowed over it, wondering, Harry was certain, what to say to a widow so young and helpless. It was not to be borne, they whispered among themselves, thinking no doubt of the man just buried in the ground and his two baby sons who were upstairs. In whose care? they wondered, for it was well known that the Frasers had been unable to pay the wages of even the most inexperienced nursery maid. The house was probably mortgaged to the hilt and there would be debts, gambling debts run up by Chris who, at twenty-three, had believed he had all the time in the world to pay them off.

  The house had indeed once been a priory, an Augustine priory, parts of it dating back to the thirteenth century and added on to it was an eighteenth-century m
ansion. It was extremely beautiful, built from the honey-coloured sandstone quarried in Yorkshire and dissected by tall flat windows across its front. A cluster of trees stood before it, old oak trees which looked as though they had been planted when the monks glided about the now derelict cloisters, the stables part of the main building with an arch that led through to the stable yard. There was a small, overgrown formal garden enclosed by ragged box hedges and to the side of that a paddock in which several animals grazed, among them the black gelding that had flung Chris to his death. An ancient donkey, a small pony and a lovely chestnut mare, probably the animal Lally rode, lifted their heads to stare at the visitors at the front of the house. A small lake lay directly in front of the old house on which ducks paddled, darting in and out of the weeds that surrounded it. The grass, a vast stretch of parkland as far as the eye could see, was uncut but an air of peace and serenity prevailed, in marked contrast to the character of its owner who had been buried this day. The front door was massive with worn stone steps leading up to it and across the facççade of the old house a mantle of creeper ran wild like everything else on this dilapidated estate.

  She would remember that day for the rest of her life, the day they had brought Master Chris home and Miss Lally had sat down in the rocking-chair in her kitchen, remaining there like a broken doll until she herself had taken charge.

  ‘Get up, Miss Lally.’

  ‘I don’t think I can, Biddy.’

  ‘You must, lass, for your children need you. Come on, my lass, you can’t sit there for ever. They’ve taken . . . Master Chris upstairs and there’s things to be done.’

  ‘What things, Biddy?’

  ‘Miss Lally, get up and do as you’re told . . .’ and she had done as she was told, for her lass, though so delicate-looking, was made of strong stuff and here she was after putting her husband in the ground getting ready to greet those who had come to pay their respects.

  Lally Fraser shook hand after hand, whose she didn’t really know, since they all looked the same except some were gentlemen and some were ladies, friends of Chris’s family, she supposed. The first hand that made any impression on her was slender, brown, strong-looking as though it were not unaccustomed to manual work, but the nails were clean and well manicured. The hand extended from immaculate white cuffs which protruded from the sleeve of a black jacket. It grasped hers firmly with none of the tentativeness of others and when she looked up she found herself gazing into the eyes of a man she recognised.