Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [33]
“Now I know he’s soft in the head over him,” Mrs. Morris said laughingly to Annie. “Sometimes I think if Josh said jump over the moon, Sammy would do it.”
Annie smiled back, but Mrs. Morris could see she was tired. She was twenty now, small and well-rounded with lovely brown eyes and shiny, rich brown hair, but everybody said how she had no life of her own. Sometimes, of a warm Saturday, she might escape for an hour or two, but always on her own because she had no friends, having left school and become a grown-up “mother” so young. She would take the tram to the end of the line and then go for a walk out in the woods, or if she felt more adventurous and had a little more time she might take a train out to Ilkley or Knaresborough and wander around the village and have tea in one of the small bow-windowed teashops. But Annie liked it best when she took Josh and Sammy out for the day to the moors or the dales, letting them run and clamber and shout from the top of the windy crags with no one to hear them and complain.
“I don’t know which I like better, Mrs. Morris,” she would say when she returned Sammy home, her cheeks pink from the fresh air, her brown hair wind-tossed and her eyes asparkle. “The dales in springtime when the rivers are rushing and trees bright with young yellow leaves the way they are now. And all the new lambs kicking up their heels in the sunshine and the calves hiding under their mothers’ bellies from the rainshowers, and the trout jumping in the beck at Durnsell’s Fell. Aye, it’s a grand sight, Mrs. Morris. But then I think of the moors in autumn and standing atop the crags with nothing for miles but gorse and heather and windy gray-blue skies thick with scudding white clouds like sailships.” She stopped and smiled at Mrs. Morris over her cup of tea. “Well, enough of dreaming,” she said briskly. “I’ve me dad’s tea to think of. He’ll have been all right of course, with the cold dinner I left him, but you know how fussy he is …”
“Aye, I know,” Sally Morris retorted crisply. “If you ask me, Annie Aysgarth, you should spend a bit more time thinking of yourself and less of your dad. It’s time you found yourself a nice young man. After all, lass, you’re a ‘catch,’ with your rich dad and your talents as a housekeeper. And pretty with it,” she added as an afterthought.
Annie smiled, embarrassed, throwing her woolen cape over her shoulders and gathering her things together. “Mebbe I will one day. When Josh is all grown up and ready for off.”
“When Josh is grown up and ready for off will be too late,” Mrs. Morris said bluntly. “You’ll be an old maid, Annie. A spinster. On the shelf.”
Annie blushed. “Mebbe that’s the way it’s meant to be, Mrs. Morris,” she said as she hurried to the door. “It’s just God’s will, that’s all.”
Sally Morris watched her go. It was a long uphill walk to Ivy Cottage and Frank Aysgarth wouldn’t dream of spending money on a pony trap for his daughter. “She’s got young legs and she’d best use ’em,” he always said. It was true enough, but it was also true that Annie’s youth was disappearing fast under the workload he imposed on her. She was lonely and she’d bet Frank was lonely too. She’d always said he regretted the move to Ivy Cottage and if it were not for his damned stupid masculine pride he would have sold up long ago and moved them all back again into Montgomery Street where they belonged. And then Annie might have a chance of meeting someone and having a life of her own. But it was no good, everybody knew Annie would never marry now because that would mean Frank Aysgarth would lose a good housekeeper and he was too selfish to stand for that.
When Annie got home that evening, her father was sitting at the oak table, smoking his pipe, waiting for her.
“Sorry I’m late, Dad,” she said, flinging her cape over the brass hook on the back of the kitchen door, hurrying to bank up the fire and put the big tin kettle on the hob to boil. “I’ll have your tea ready in a jiffy