Angel Meadow Read online

  But they were very far from the society in which Nancy Brody, Nancy Hayes, would move; could she deny her daughter her chance to be included in that society and better herself even further? To mix, hopefully, for the test was still to come, with the children of the millocracy, or even higher, since many hard-up young men of the gentry class, the squire class, the landed gentlemen, were looking for well-dowered brides who might provide the wherewithal to keep and maintain that land, and where better to look but among the newly rich merchants and manufacturers of Lancashire. With this in mind a girl-child was taught from the nursery to be a lady and Nancy dearly wanted her daughter to be one of those. There would be nannies, tutors, governesses, a pony, the privileged life of the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist and could Nancy deprive her of that? She was well aware that the child might fret for Annie, Jennet and Mary and they would be bereft without her, since they all doted on her. Only Mary had said so, being more open with her affections, and also less aware of the advantages Josh’s family could give her niece, but it was true nevertheless.

  Almost up to the day of the wedding Nancy had still been torn in two by the dilemma. Kitty would adapt, children of her age did, and, of course, she had taken instantly to Freddy. Even as young babies on the first day they met they had been drawn to one another like a couple of babbling magnets and been vociferously indignant when they were parted. To reintroduce them Kitty had been taken in the Hayes carriage with Nancy, an exciting diversion in itself, to play with Freddy in his nursery on the top floor of Riverside House.

  Kitty was a bold child with great charm when she cared to display it, confident in her belief that, naturally, she would be the centre of attention as she was at home. She had marched into the plain, unadorned nursery which had been the same since Josh was a child, since it was believed that children needed nothing more than safety and warmth, gazing around her with great interest at the plain pine table, the four pine chairs that stood about it, the big cupboard from which toys spilled, the books lining the low shelves, the drab curtains, the bit of drab drugget on the floor. There was a blackleaded fireplace in which no fire burned but which was guarded by an oppressively polished firescreen and seated on Nanny’s knee in front of it having a story read to him was Freddy Hayes.

  At once, sure of her welcome, Kitty was across the room, leaning both elbows on the arm of the chair, her chin in her hands, her eyes on the story book.

  “Say it to me, too,” she ordered Nanny loftily, absolute in her belief that Nanny Dee, as Josh had told Nancy the nursemaid was called, would instantly do as she was told, just like everyone else did in Kitty’s life, with perhaps the exception of her mother.

  “I beg your pardon,” Nanny Dee said mildly, while Freddy stared with great interest at this rude little girl who had the nerve to give orders to his nanny.

  “Say it to me as well.”

  “Read it to me . . . what do you say?”

  “Please.”

  “That’s better, but now you are here” – for Kitty’s visit had been expected – “I think you and Master Freddy might . . .”

  “But I want to hear the story and Freddy does too, don’t you, Freddy?” turning blue and brilliantly imploring eyes on Freddy.

  “Yes, Nanny, please,” Freddy affirmed obediently, reacting for the first time, as he was to do so often in his future life, to Kitty Brody’s blandishments.

  “Very well, but . . .”

  “I want to sit on your knee. I always sit on Aunty Jennet’s knee when we read a story.”

  “Well, I’m not sure there’s room for two.”

  “Yes, there is, see.” Kitty gave Freddy a shove and another gleaming smile, almost unseating him and obligingly he moved over to make room on Nanny Dee’s lap, which luckily was capacious. The hapless nursemaid cast an appealing look at this challenging child’s mother who still hovered in the doorway, wishing she would leave since she was readily aware that if she didn’t gain the upper hand immediately with the little girl there would be trouble, and she could hardly begin at once to administer correction with the future Mrs Hayes smiling from the doorway, could she?

  But she had not reckoned on the future Mrs Hayes’s lack of the usual doting fondness mothers normally have for their offspring.

  “Don’t stand any nonsense, Nanny,” Nancy told her cheerfully. “She’ll twist you round her little finger given half the chance. Start as you mean to go on.”

  “Thank you . . . er . . . ma’am, I will, but for now perhaps . . .” Nanny Dee shrugged, indicating that she was prepared to give her new charge some small leeway, while in her mind was the determination that the first thing she would tackle was that almost black mop of tumbled curls which fell halfway down her new charge’s back. A decent plait seemed to be the answer!

  Nancy left Kitty comfortably ensconced on Nanny Dee’s knee, leaning against Nanny Dee’s deep bosom, shoulder to shoulder with Freddy at whom, from time to time, she smiled triumphantly. Nancy and Josh had taken the opportunity thoroughly to inspect the luxurious rooms they were to occupy when they were married, spending more time than was proper on their own, in Millicent Hayes’s opinion, coming downstairs to the drawing-room for afternoon tea looking somewhat more flushed than Millicent liked, her sister-in-law-to-be with her hair leaping in escaping ringlets about her rosy cheeks. Millicent’s hair never sprang about her cheeks, or even her forehead. It was too closely confined for that and really, those glances her brother and his future wife exchanged were quite disgusting! It made her go hot under the prim front of her bodice, really it did.

  It had been decided on that day, as she seemed well disposed to settle with Freddy, that Kitty should accompany her mother to Riverside House, which was really only right and proper, Annie told Nancy stoically, for a child should be with its mother, doing her best to be cheerful about it. Nancy had promised her that she would bring Kitty to visit Grove Place, perhaps on a Sunday morning and she’d just have to make the best of it, she told herself, but it was hard when she’d practically brought the child up single-handed. Spoiled her, too, Nancy might have added if she could have read Annie’s mind, though Jennet and Mary had a hand in it as well. It seemed to Nancy that Nanny Dee – whose surname was Dallington, a name Freddy could not get his baby tongue round however he tried – would soon have the measure of Kitty Brody. She was a kindly woman, fair, cheerful and unflappable but with a strict belief in discipline and, though Nancy suspected there would be tantrums in the nursery for a while, Kitty would soon settle down to it. She had Freddy after all.

  From the very first Kitty Brody loved Freddy Hayes with a strength and passion that was amazing in a three-year-old child and quite unsuitable in one so young, so Nanny Dee believed, but then, what could she do about it. She was too kind-hearted and conscientious to try to separate them or turn them against one another, even if she could, and then they were neither of them what you might call ordinary children. Born out of wedlock, at least Master Freddy was, so the story went, and if the new Mrs Hayes had had a husband none of the servants had heard of it. Not that Nanny indulged in gossip, but the others did when Mrs Harvey the housekeeper wasn’t about and she could hardly help but overhear it when she went down to the kitchen. Come from a poor part of Manchester, Mrs Hayes had, called Angel Meadow, but as Nanny Dee had been born on a farm up near the Trough of Bowland, she did not know the area. The others seemed to think it was appalling, but then it seemed to her all the more to the new Mrs Hayes’s credit that she should have come so far, and brought her sister with her, too. Nanny Dee had a lot of time for fighters. She had had to fight to escape the drudgery of her father’s farm and had it not been for her mother’s brave intervention on her behalf would never have managed it.

  All the same she became very concerned when she discovered that, after she had put the two children to bed in the night nursery and returned to the day nursery to get on with the mending, Miss Kitty left her bed and hopped lightly across the linoleum, joining Master Freddy under the b
edclothes in his. She found the pair of them, faces rosy with the sleep of the innocent, twined together like two puppies in a basket. She had disentangled them and lifted the sleeping girl, putting her back gently in her own bed; but two hours later, checking on her charges on the way to her own bed, she found Miss Kitty was back with Master Freddy, this time with her arm firmly about him as though defying Nanny to prise them apart.

  “Leave them, Nanny,” Mrs Hayes told her, quite casually Nanny Dee thought, not at all concerned. She knew that in the sort of household Mrs Hayes came from, or so she had heard, children, whatever their sex, slept five or six or seven to a bed and indeed she herself had shared with four of her sisters but her brothers, five of them, had their own strictly male quarters in the barn. The sexes just did not mix and it was Nanny’s belief that if this wasn’t stopped while the children were no more than babies who knew where it might lead?

  But Nancy Hayes was too enchanted with her new life to show a great deal of concern over what to her was no more than a childish whim. Kitty was still strange in her new environment, she told Nanny Dee, so what was more natural than that she should seek warmth and comfort in Freddy’s bed, Freddy who was to be her brother, after all. When Nanny knocked peremptorily on their sitting-room door to inform her of this tricky situation, she and Josh had been lounging on the sofa before the fire, just about to embark on one of their lingering, languorous, totally satisfying journeys of shared passion and like young lovers fumbling behind the kitchen door had hastily leaped apart, patting themselves back to decency, struggling with buttons and tapes and belts, with cravats and collars, doing their best to hold in the almost hysterical laughter her stern appearance had caused. They had not been long married and it seemed that the moment they were alone they were in one another’s arms as though it were months since they had made love instead of that very morning. Nancy had discovered, to her own delight and amazement, after what had been done to her by Mick O’Rourke, that not only was she in love with Josh but with the act of love itself. She adored what they did together in their bed. She adored his nakedness, and her own, the wonder of unconfined limbs, the sensation of his bare skin against her own. She could not get over the marvel of his male body, the smooth and rough textures of it, the coarseness of the scattering of dark hairs on his chest and belly, the odour of his masculinity, the satin-like width of his shoulders, the leanness of his waist and hips and long legs. His emotion and desire filled her with joy and she was convinced there was nothing so wonderful as the sudden flood of his release into her own body which responded so eagerly, so intensely, so blissfully to his.

  Nanny Dee’s sudden entrance, though she had knocked, startled them.

  “We’d best lock the door in future, my darling,” Josh whispered into her tumbled hair after Nanny had left, his eyes a pure silvery grey with mischief. “We might have been . . . er . . . further along and poor Nanny would have been mortified to find me in a compromising position with a woman even if she was my own wife. Now, where were we? Here, I think, or shall we start from the beginning again?”

  So Kitty Brody and Freddy Hayes were allowed to continue their growing attachment to one another and Nancy was gratified with the way her child had settled into the nursery at Riverside. She gave no deep thought, beyond a vague surprise at how easy it had been, to her daughter’s careless relinquishment of those who had loved and cared for her during the first three years of her life, only thankful for Freddy and Nanny Dee who had made it possible. Nancy had not yet realised the full potential of her daughter’s strength of character. She was a baby still, but what nobody understood, least of all her mother, was that from a very early age Kitty Brody had learned to manipulate those about her and that her child, Mick O’Rourke’s child, was well able to recognise even from infancy what would be to her best advantage.

  Nancy was busy from dawn, when she rose from the bed she shared with Josh, stretching with the suppleness of a cat, flushed and satiated with love, until dusk, and even beyond sometimes. She lived in a constant whirl of activity, busy with the fitting out of the smart new premises Josh’s money had enabled her to lease in St Ann’s Square. The square was the smartest, most noteworthy shopping area in Manchester where the upper middle-class ladies of Higher Broughton and Cheetham, the exclusiveness of residential estates such as Victoria Park, and even from as far as Alderley Edge and Wilmslow came to purchase their hats and gowns and every other luxury garment ladies such as themselves required.

  These were the customers Nancy was after. It had been Hetty Underwood who had given her the idea.

  “With your head for business and your obvious flair for fashion, with Jennet’s cleverness with a needle and, may I add, that certain air you both have of being ladies—”

  “I’m no lady, Hetty. You should know that.”

  “So you are fond of saying but that does not matter, since you give the impression you are which is all that matters. And that being so I don’t know why you don’t open a good-class dressmaker’s. And I mean really good class. Somewhere a lady can, with others of her sort, shop for an outfit exclusively designed for her. Are you able to sketch a design?”

  “Hetty!” Nancy was so taken aback she was speechless. She had been planning to find a decent-sized workshop, hire or even buy half a dozen sewing-machines, employ half a dozen young machinists and take up again the manufacture of shirts and baby clothes, waistcoats and trousers to be sold on her market stall at Smithfield, in Hetty’s drapery on Market Street and in any of the small shops along Deansgate, King Street or Exchange Street who had once bought her goods. With a husband well able to supply her with cotton cloth, when it was available, of course, for the war still raged in America, she was optimistic she could regain all she had lost. Expand even, when the war ended and cotton once again came flooding back into Manchester. Though she herself was secure now as Josh’s wife it would be a means of support for Mary, Annie and Jennet. But a dress shop! A dressmaker’s and milliner’s! Designing and making the gowns, evening gowns, wedding gowns, perhaps, for the élite of Manchester and its surrounds. Employing clever seamstresses, perhaps a designer, a good shop in a good position with well-lit rooms at the top where . . . where . . .

  “I can see you’re taken with the idea,” Hetty said with a ghost of a smile.

  “But I’m not a—”

  “A dressmaker? You could employ those who are.”

  “I know nothing about the business of—”

  “You could learn. You knew nothing about spinning frames or sewing-machines a few years ago, but you learned.”

  “But, Hetty . . .”

  “Nancy dear, do close your mouth. There are flies about. And let me add that there is no need for you to give up the idea of a workshop producing . . . well, for the lower end of the market. Mary has become a competent young woman quite capable of running it, under your guidance. It is always wise to share out your eggs into more than one basket. You have a ready market. Your stall could be run by a reliable young woman. Heavens, there are enough of them about with so many out of work because of the cotton famine. I myself would be glad of good-quality baby garments. With your husband’s backing and your mother-in-law’s position in society, for where she leads her friends will follow, I would imagine a dress shop, providing the merchandise was what they wanted, could not fail. Just look at you. You’re like a fashion plate and what woman would not sell her soul to look like you? To be as elegant and well dressed as you. Oh, I realise there are other dressmakers in Manchester, you go to one yourself, as I do, but with your brains, your talent, your determination never to be beaten you could be the smartest of the lot. You know you could.”

  Nancy stared into Hetty’s eyes, hypnotised by the bewitchment of it, her mind scurrying from one brilliant possibility to another, then back to the first, turning over this idea and that, discarding this notion and scrutinising another, poring over the wonder of it, her thoughts like a flock of swooping starlings at dusk, unable to settle into anythin
g that might be described as coherency.

  Hetty watched her for several long minutes then laughed, breaking the spell.

  “It really is a delight to watch your brain ticking away like an overwound clock, my dear. It could not be more plain if your head were made of glass and, of course, you must be aware that I would not have put forward the idea if, first, you were to be in direct competition to myself since I am a businesswoman too, and, second, if I had not heard of the very premises in St Ann’s Square that would be perfect for you. The lease on—”

  “Good God, Hetty, let me draw breath.”

  “Certainly not. You have no time for such a thing. Come with me right now and we will inspect the place. Miss Jenkins can take charge of the shop,” and with a nod to Miss Jenkins she had handed Nancy her bonnet, put on her own and led her imperiously into Market Street, telling Miss Jenkins that they would be back “presently”.

  The shop was not large and the previous occupier had left it in a state of some disrepair. It had a single frontage, three floors, the top one having direct daylight from the tall windows at the back and the front and from skylights set in the roof. It was perfect.

  A small army of women – women being readily available to perform even the most servile of tasks in this era of desperate unemployment – had scrubbed it from its deep cellars to its lofty attics. As they moved out, a small army of painters moved in, transforming the drab, bottle green walls, in what had once been a bootmaker’s, to a pale peach picked out on the mouldings and cornices in white. In the main showroom, on the stairs and in the rooms where her ladies were to be fitted into their gowns, a pale carpet the colour of the sand at Lytham was laid. Pretty gilt chairs upholstered in velvet of the same colour were scattered about on which her clients might sit and drink a cup of her best orange pekoe tea, her finest Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee, her sweet sherry or even a glass of chilled white wine should they care for it. There were small, glass-topped gilt-legged tables on which she casually, but tastefully, displayed exotic fans of lace and ivory, plaster heads on which the bonnets made by her clever milliner were set out. There were embroidered gloves, lace caps and collars, parasols and exquisitely draped shawls, ermine muffs – for winter was coming – sashes of velvet sewn with pearls, gold hairnets, Spanish mantillas and dashing military caps with gold tassels. Not all at the same time, naturally, but with such taste it would be a strong-willed lady who could resist them. They came once to see what was on show, and then a second and a third time when it was discovered her displays were changed every single day. The same with her window, for in it she displayed a “ready to wear” gown of cream silk with a high-crowned straw hat to match or a plain, pastel-tinted afternoon gown contrasting exotically with a richly patterned crimson shawl, all tastefully put on show by the young woman, introduced to her by Hetty, whose sole job it was to show Miss Brody’s goods so irresistibly not one lady could resist them.