Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [25]
Three months later, when Martha Aysgarth faded from life, Annie became “mother” to her whole family. Her father told her she was finished with school for good and she would take her mother’s place. “Your mam taught you well enough,” he said gruffly, “and I’ll not have any other woman coming into my house and telling me what to do.”
Mrs. Morris felt sorry for Annie, having so much responsibility and still only a child. She often minded Josh while Annie struggled to keep up with the housework and the washing, the marketing and cooking and baking, because Frank Aysgarth expected it all to be just the same as it was when his wife was alive. And Frank became more silent and taciturn; he never ever embraced his children or showed them any affection, but he never took a strap to them either.
The years moved slowly by with scarcely time for Annie to take a breath, let alone think of herself. Josh and Sammy Morris were such close friends now, they practically lived in each other’s pockets. They started Back Road Council School on the same day and moved slowly upward through the classes together, and they were constantly in mischief and constantly in and out of each other’s houses, cadging a slice of fresh-baked bread slathered with delicious beef drippings from Annie, and sitting on the steps watching the world go by on Montgomery Street while they ate it. They stole burning-hot jam tarts from the wire tray where Mrs. Morris had left them to cool, or a hunk of feather-light Yorkshire pudding, fresh from the roasting tin. And they were always together for Annie’s huge, tasty Sunday dinners of roast pork with crackling and roast potatoes, crisp and golden on the outside and soft as pillows on the inside, and her hot treacle pudding with creamy custard that was enough to melt the coldest heart. She was the best cook on Montgomery Street bar none, though Frank Aysgarth grumbled about her all the time.
“Treats her just the way he did his wife—like a slave,” Sammy’s mother said with a disparaging sniff. She didn’t like Frank and he didn’t like her; she thought he was a selfish old tyrant and he thought she was a lazy slattern who kept a rough-and-ready house and was too often at the Red Lion drinking port and lemon and keeping her husband poor, when she should have been home looking after her bairns.
“Frank Aysgarth’s allus been a man’s man,” her husband commented. “He’s got no time for women.”
“Aye, not even his own daughter,” she retorted bitterly. She’d heard him often enough through the adjoining wall, berating the poor girl, and God knows Annie did her best. She was always working. She would be outside first thing in the morning, scrubbing the front steps, rubbing on the bright yellow scouring stone and rinsing down the flagstones with buckets of water so that when Frank stepped out his front door it was as clean outside under his good leather boots as it was inside. She blacked the cast-iron range until it shone and you could fairly see your own face in the fireback. There was always something appetizing in the oven when the boys came home from school at dinnertime, and when she sent them back again in the afternoon, they were clean and with full bellies. Annie’s wash would be strung across the street and blowing in the wind before anyone else had even got started, and at six o’clock every evening when Frank Aysgarth came home the table was set with a clean, starched white cloth with his dinner ready and steaming on the plate. As soon as he sat down Annie would take a jug and hurry to the Red Lion on the corner and fetch him a foaming pint of best Yorkshire bitter and then she’d sit quietly in the corner while he ate silently.
When he was finished, Frank would walk from the table without so much as a “thank-you” and sit himself down in the big burgundy plush