Shining Threads Read online

  Also by Audrey Howard

  The Skylark’s Song

  The Morning Tide

  Ambitions

  The Juniper Bush

  Between Friends

  The Mallow Years

  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

  A Time Like No Other

  The Long Way Home

  The Flight of Swallows

  About the author

  Audrey Howard was born in Liverpool in 1929. Before she began to write she had a variety of jobs, among them hairdresser, model, shop assistant, cleaner and civil servant. In 1981, while living in Australia, she wrote the first of her bestselling novels. She lives in St Anne’s on Sea, her childhood home.

  Shining Threads

  Audrey Howard

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Audrey Howard 1991

  The right of Audrey Howard to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted 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

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 74509 2

  Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 56236 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Again,

  for Howard and Janet,

  with my love

  Contents

  Also by Audrey Howard

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Dedication page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  1

  She was like a young queen in her hauteur. The warm honey of her skin, the pale, cat-like grey of her eyes, the sweeping burnished darkness of her hair which flowed unconfined down the length of her straight back promised a stunning beauty to come. She had on a white cambric shirt, frilled down its front, with full sleeves which were caught in a narrow band at the wrist, and, amazingly, pale buff riding breeches of the finest doeskin. Her knee-high boots were brown and of the very best leather, polished until they gleamed, and she wore brown kid gloves and carried a riding crop.

  Had it not been for her hair and the knot of scarlet ribbon with which it was carelessly tied back she might have been taken for a boy. She sat astride her small chestnut mare with the regal grace which spoke of generations of majesty, of the divine right to rule stretching back into eternity, and yet her grandfather had been no more than a humble handloom weaver.

  Her two companions were as attractive as she, with the same magnificent seat in the saddle. Dark as gypsies with eyes as blue as a cornflower with a touch of violet in them, they possessed the wide, laughing mouth which was so eternally female in her, but which in them was firmed into masculine arrogance. Their hair was thick and curling, tumbling in boyish disorder above fiercely swooping black brows. They were dressed just as she was but where her breeches were buff theirs were dove grey, clinging to their strong young thighs and buttocks.

  It was a bright and pretty day. The sky was a high, placid blue and the sun fell in a brimming haze on the three young riders. They were laughing. Their heads were thrown back, their brown throats arched and smooth and the noise they made disturbed a scatter of magpies. The birds scuttled about a stretch of tussocky grass for a moment before lifting above the bracken and into the air, drifting away on almost motionless wings.

  The slight breeze was warm and soaked in the fragrance of heather and gorse. It moved the shadows cast along the track by the shoulder-high bracken and rippled through the hair of the riders. A curlew took flight in alarm, its liquid, bubbling song rising into the clear air, and the high-stepping, mettlesome mounts rolled their eyes and tossed their fine heads. Around their feet quarrelled a pack of dogs, tall and black with brown markings and no tail to speak of, glossy and well muscled and as healthy and vigorous as the youngsters and the horses they rode.

  ‘Do you think my mother believed you?’ the girl said. Her voice still quivered with laughter as she spoke. She lifted her gloved hand to push back the heavy weight of hair from her forehead, an impatient gesture implying she would dearly love to be free of it, as she was free at this precise moment of every other female constraint which hampered girls of her age and obvious station in life.

  ‘Lord, I don’t know, but what could she do about it? It’s not the first time we’ve made that excuse to Aunt Jenny but short of sending a message to old Wilding to check that he had actually summoned us to the schoolroom she was forced to accept our story. Anyway, what does it matter? We’re out now and it will be worth the flogging we’re bound to get from Charlie when they discover where we’ve been. And we did ride into the schoolyard and out again so we’re not lying when we say we’ve been there, are we?’ The boy who spoke grinned impishly. ‘And, by God, I would submit to half a dozen beatings to get away from that damned mill for an hour. We’ll be there soon enough one day, I suppose, when we have done with lessons. But now we are on holiday and I fail to see why we should be forced into the weaving shed, don’t you agree, brother?’

  He turned to laugh in the direction of the second boy and he might have been looking at his own reflection in a mirror: the same arrow-straight back and broadening young shoulders, the same eyes and smiling mouth, firm white teeth and tenacious jaw, the same look of sleek and graceful high spirits, and it was plain there was no more than a minute or two between them in age.

  ‘But what did she say?’ the girl demanded to know.

  ‘Oh, the usual stuff. She could quite believe our schoolmaster was not satisfied with our performance as scholars and that we needed to do extra schoolwork to help keep up with the rest but that in her opini
on we were wasting our time and his.’

  Drew Greenwood grinned broadly and his boyish face glowed. ‘Aunt Jenny’s not taken in by us, you know. She realises that if we can manage it we’ll not go into the mill with her and Charlie. She understands too, whereas our mother doesn’t. Mother believes that anyone with the blood of Chapmans and Greenwoods in their veins could not fail to be intoxicated with the idea of being a millmaster, as she was, but Aunt Jenny’s a good sort and she’ll not press us yet.’

  The girl sighed. ‘I wish she was the same with me. I had to slip out of the side door while Laurel’s back was turned. Then Walter refused to saddle my mare saying he’d been given orders not to and that if I showed my face in the stables he was to send for Miss Copeland at once.’

  Tessa Harrison’s face was indignant. Her clear skin flamed to poppy at her cheekbones, the reminder of the stable boy’s outrageous behaviour so incensing her she moved her mare to a faster gait as though to escape it.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I had to saddle her myself.’

  ‘Did Walter try to stop you?’

  She turned to grin lazily, lifting an amused eyebrow.

  ‘Oh, come now, Drew Greenwood, would he dare lay a hand on me?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he would. Silly question, really.’

  The three young riders had reached the summit of Badger’s Edge where, it was said, a ‘badger’ or travelling salesman had fallen to his death in a snowstorm many years ago. With fluid grace both boys sprang from their saddles and with a word to their horses, two tall bays with impeccable bloodlines, to stand, they sauntered across the uneven spiky grass to stare, shoulder to shoulder, over the sprawling town which lay far below in the valley. The girl dismounted more slowly, speaking softly to her mare, rubbing its nose affectionately with a strong, slender hand before moving to join the others.

  All three were tall. The girl was a bare six inches shorter than her companions who were exactly the same in height and size and colouring and so compellingly identical it was impossible to tell them apart. Pearce and Drew Greenwood then, twin sons of Joss and Katherine Greenwood, and beside them their cousin, Tessa Harrison, only daughter of Jenny Harrison, their father’s sister, and all three of them would inherit a share in the fortune, the great estate, the mills, the railway stock and every other asset which made up the wealth of one of the most influential and affluent families in south Lancashire. Endowed from birth with not only the shining good looks of the superior beings they so obviously thought themselves to be, they possessed too the glorious belief that they were unique in their world, and in every other come to that, and had the financial provision which made other, lesser mortals reluctant to disagree.

  ‘They should have let us go away to public school at Arnmoor with Nicky Longworth and Johnny Taylor instead of to that damned grammar school in Crossfold.’ Pearce said moodily, flicking his riding crop against his leg. ‘We might have been taught something other than two and two makes four and how much profit a successful manufacturer may realise before breakfast, which, as far as I can make out, must be at least double what other manufacturers are capable of. Mother can’t see it, of course, nor Father, as we are to spend our lives in the mills, they say. What use would the education the Squire’s son receives be to us, she asks, for we are to be industrialists and not landed gentry as Nick is. Our grandfather and his father before him did not slave to make money merely for Drew and I to spend. I nearly said “why not?” I’ll tell you this, if we are to be cotton manufacturers as she says, I’ll not do it without a fight.’

  Pearce Greenwood shaded his eyes from the sun, looking towards the west and the thick pall of smoke which lay like a sour blanket over the town below. A great sweep of wildly rolling moorland stretched between, rough and uneven, patched with wide folds of growing bracken, gorse and heather which, in a few weeks’ time, would be thick and verdant with colour, yellow, green and purple, as summer reached towards its peak.

  Tessa stood between the two boys, all three with their backs against a grey-veined rock. A skylark sang high above them and they turned to stare upwards into the great vault of the blue sky until their sharp eyes detected the black speck which was the bird. She sighed gustily then lowered her gaze to scan the familiar landscape which lay at her feet and stretched as far as the eye could see on either side of her and high at her back where the south Pennine heights rose up and away towards Yorkshire. She had roamed these hills with her cousins ever since she had been able to sit a horse, trailing far behind them at first since she was younger and had not the strength nor expertise to keep up. But it had not taken her long to be as swift and as skilful as they in guiding her mount across streams with dangerously unstable wooden footbridges, following narrow lanes winding in long curves up steep slopes and on into the misty distances of the packhorse routes which had once carried goods to outlying hamlets and isolated farmhouses. She learned to go over stony paths which led nowhere but to huge outcroppings of rock, stretches of moorland which were steep and identical to a dozen others and in which a man could lose himself for days, or forever! It was damp for the most part, with grey-topped hills reaching into the clouds, peopled by none but the starving, itinerant families who moved from town to town looking for work, or mischief, and often not caring which they found, ruffians some of them who would knock a man senseless on the chance of a farthing.

  ‘What will you do then?’ she questioned her cousins. Her eyes were half-closed against the brightness of the sun. ‘Aunt Kit has set her heart on at least one of you going into the mill. She doesn’t much care which as long as there is someone to carry on the dynasty as she did.’

  ‘Like hell she did! She got married and passed it over most conveniently to your mother and Charlie and followed Father up to Westminster as fast as the coach would take her. She doesn’t really give a damn about any of the mills as long as there is enough money to support him as a politician. I can scarcely believe the stories we are told about her when she was a girl. Obsessed with the mills and as determined to do with them as a son would, they say. Learning to be a manufacturer just as though she was a man, and making more of a success of it than any other millmaster in the valley, we’re told. Can you imagine anyone, man or woman, being consumed with the tedious task of spinning and weaving cotton when one could be far more enjoyably employed elsewhere? And yet Mother did it until she was twenty-five or six and married father. Can you believe it?’

  Tessa found she couldn’t, really. Joss and Katherine Greenwood were notorious in the Penfold Valley for their absolute devotion to one another, to the exclusion of everyone, even their own sons. Some would have it that there had never been a more mis-matched pair: Joss Greenwood, a radical, a revolutionary in his younger days, it was rumoured, much concerned with strikes and machine breaking; and Kit Chapman the daughter of the very millowner whose machines he had wrecked.

  Pearce Greenwood lowered himself to sprawl on the springing turf, his back resting against the grey-pitted rock and the other two did the same, stretching out their legs and crossing them at the ankle.

  From behind them there was a sudden snapping of dogs quarrelling amongst themselves. They were only half-trained and excitable, curiously like their young owners, ready enough, it seemed, to be amiable providing no one interfered with them but with a snarl of temper just beneath the surface. They lay down, lowering their splendid heads until their muzzles rested on their paws, but their eyes were never still as they kept watch against anything they might not greatly approve.

  They all lounged indolently in the early summer sunshine: healthy, thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful, high-spirited, dangerous when crossed, with very little difference, it seemed, between the well-bred horses, the magnificent dogs and the handsome young people. They were arrogant in their complete belief in themselves and their place in life, which was privileged and secure. They were defiant of fetters which might attempt to bind them to a life which was safe and tedious. They cared o
nly for freedom, the freedom to go where they pleased, to do as they pleased, a desire which was, as yet, sufficiently met up here on the high moorland.

  They did not speak for several minutes. Drew held his face up to the sun, his eyes closed and the luxuriously thick fan of his eyelashes forming a shadow on his brown cheek. Pearce chewed a blade of grass as he gazed reflectively at the slender ribbon of the river which could just be made out through the thickening foliage of the trees in the valley bottom. The dogs moved restlessly: one stood and lifted its leg against a rock, while the others sauntered across to sniff where he had left his mark, then lay down again waiting for the signal which would herald the wild race across the tops in which all such days ended. Minutes passed and still nothing was said. They all dozed in the soft spring sunshine, the dogs’ eyes opening and closing in that half-sleep into which animals fall, the youngsters graceful and lounging, even the horses, heads drooping, seeming to nap a little in the peaceful warmth.

  ‘I wonder if the millhands are to have a day off next week when the branch line from Oldham to Crossfold is opened?’ Pearce’s voice was lazy, quite unconcerned, really: he was to see the celebrations so what did it matter if the lower orders did not? In fact he, his father and brother were to ride on the railway train from Crossfold to Oldham and even on to Rochdale, if they had the fancy for it, since Joss Greenwood, as Member of Parliament for Crossfold and a man of substance in Lancashire, was to be one of its most important guests on the occasion of the opening. There was to be champagne, Pearce had been told, bunting and bands playing, the train filled with the town’s leading industrialists, those who were to make even more profit with this marvellously rapid method of speeding their cloth and their piece goods to the Exchange in Manchester. It was 1853 and the age of ‘railway mania’, it was called. Each week new railroad schemes were announced in the Press. So far there had been 357 of them, inviting subscriptions from 332 million pounds’ worth of stock. Many of them were entirely bona fide, and astute men of business such as the Greenwoods had made themselves even wealthier: but some who had invested in companies which had been floated merely for the purpose of extracting money from the gullible, had subsequently gone under in their eventual collapse.