Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [24]
Annie had stood by her mother’s chair, her round brown eyes as big as saucers, excitedly twisting her clean pinafore in her chapped red hands, while Bertie leaned against his father’s knee, listening raptly as he told them stories of San Francisco. “A city of hills above the most beautiful bay in the world,” he said. He told them of the blue-gray winter skies and unexpected white fogs that rolled over them without warning; and about how rich the people were, “From mining gold and silver,” he said as they “oohed” and “aahed” in wonder, thinking of the piles of precious golden coins the rich must have.
“There was allus plenty of building going on,” Frank said. “I started at the bottom again, but I soon worked my way up. I learned how to build houses for the rich and houses for the working folks. Now I know what they want and I know how to give it to them at the right price.”
Looking Martha in the eye, he took a thick wad of notes from his inside pocket and laid it on the table in front of her. “That’s all my wages for the past five years,” he said. “Less living expenses, of course, and the boat fare back home again. There’s enough there to buy our bairns what they need and something pretty for yerself. I reckon you’ve earned it,” he added with a glance at her worn dress.
Martha’s eyes filled with tears and Annie slid her arms comfortingly around her neck. “It’s just that I’m so happy,” Martha sniffed, mopping her eyes on a corner of her flowered apron.
“No need to take on so,” Frank muttered, clearing his throat, embarrassed as he always was by any show of emotion. “We’ll be out of this place and into something better tomorrer. But that’s only temporary—I’ve enough money now to start up in the building business for meself, and I promise the first house will be for you, Martha.”
He was as good as his word. They moved to a small rented workman’s cottage and then a year later, the next baby, Ted, was born. Just a couple of months after that, true to his promise, Frank moved them all into number one, Montgomery Street, the first in a row of houses he built and only the first of many he was to erect over the years.
Martha and Frank Aysgarth were a happy enough couple, folks said knowingly; they kept to themselves and didn’t try to live above their station now that Frank was making money, though there was a good deal of speculation as to exactly how much he was making with half of Harehills disappearing under Frank’s terraces of small, identical redbrick, slate-roofed houses. He had been right; he knew the business, he knew what people wanted, and he knew how to sell it to them at the right price. He was getting rich.
A third son, Josh, was born, but this time Martha did not regain her health and vitality so quickly. She was weak and tired, and Josh was raised on the best Ostermilk money could buy rather than at his mother’s breast. Everyone said he was the most beautiful baby in the world, and plump, brown-eyed, twelve-year-old Annie doted on him. It was she who gave him his bottles, changed his nappies, and washed and ironed his little dresses and bonnets. It was she who pushed his pram down the street, stopping to let the neighbors admire his blond, gray-eyed beauty. And it was she who shopped and cooked and kept the house clean, because Martha no longer was able to do so.
Annie would often pop next door to talk with Mrs. Morris about babies, because Sally Morris had a son just a few weeks older than Josh. They would place the two infants side by side in front of the fire on the clean rag rug made by Mrs. Morris from their old clothes and blankets,