Ellie Pride. Annie Groves

it’s just that lately you seem to be forever comparing our life to that of your sisters – and finding ours wanting. Do you find it wanting, Lyddy?’ The simple directness was so much a part of his character and his strength.

      Lydia felt a touch of shame and remorse. ‘Oh, Robert, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…it’s just that with the girls growing up, especially Ellie…Robert,’ she swung round eagerly to face him, ‘she is so very pretty. Prettier than any of her cousins – prettier, I think, than I was myself, and she could have so much. I don’t want her to…’

      ‘To what? To marry beneath her, like you did?’

      Lydia bit her lip.

      ‘Lyddy, I don’t know what’s happened to you just lately. I thought I’d made you happy; seen to it that you wanted for naught. Why, I’ve built the business up to four times what it was, and you wait and see, we shall see it increase even more after today.’

      ‘Oh, Robert,’ Lydia protested guiltily, ‘it isn’t for myself that I…worry. It’s for the girls. I want them to be –’

      ‘Young ladies! Yes, I know. But they are a butcher’s daughters – my daughters – and that should be good enough for anyone. And all these airs and graces you’ve insisted on giving them! Piano lessons; dancing lessons…’ He shook his head.

      ‘It’s no more than my sisters’ daughters have. No more than I had myself!’ Lydia pointed out passionately. ‘I don’t want to see either Ellie or Connie wasting herself on some…some going-nowhere apprentice, Robert. I wouldn’t be doing my duty to them as their mother if I allowed that to happen.’

      ‘Has it occurred to you that who or where they marry will be out of our hands? Love’s like that, Lyddy, as you and I have good cause to know.’

      ‘Love…’ Lydia moved restlessly in her chair. Yes, she had loved Robert. Passionately, violently, wildly. But the experience of those emotions, of being held in thrall to them and being overwhelmed by them, was not something she wanted for her daughters. No, for them she wanted what she herself had disdained – especially for Ellie, whose beauty, even if Ellie herself was unaware of it as yet, was truly out of the ordinary.

      ‘Yes, love,’ Robert repeated, his voice thickening. ‘Our kind of love, Lyddy, and I’ll bet that that is something that those posh sisters of yours won’t ever have had!’

      Lydia stiffened a little as he slowly edged her low-necked, lace-trimmed ball gown even lower down her arms to expose the soft flesh of her breasts.

      ‘Robert!’ she protested. ‘You know what we were told, what Alfred said the specialist said. That I should not have another child.’

      She had lost a child at birth eight months after Robert had first learned he was to be on the Guild Committee, and they had been told then that it would not be safe for her to conceive again. The lost baby, a boy child, had damaged her inside. Since then Robert had been acutely careful but Lydia still worried.

      ‘There won’t be a child,’ Robert assured her thickly. ‘I shall see to that. God, but I want you, Lyddy…’

      He had always been a vigorously sexual man, which was part of what had attracted Lydia to him in the first place, even if she had been too naïve then to recognise her feelings for what they were. He had been very different from the other young men she had known: the sons of her parents’ friends, destined to enter either the legal or medical professions, like their fathers and their grandfathers. Robert had been a breath of dangerously exciting fresh air, blowing through her sheltered world and catching her up in it.

      ‘Marry Robert Pride! My dear, no, you can’t mean it!’ her mother had protested, shocked.

      But Lydia had meant it. She had been of age, and she had had her little bit of money left to her by her grandmother and, more important so far as she had been concerned, she had had love and Robert.

      And, of course, she still loved him, but now she had her daughters’ futures to think of, and now, ironically, she understood just how her own mother must have felt because there was no way she wanted her daughters to follow her example. No! What she wanted for them was what she herself had so recklessly disdained: the house in Winckley Square like her elder sister, Amelia; or the elegant vicarage like Jane, her second; or the handsome mansion in Hoylake on the Wirral, like the elder of her twin sisters, Lavinia, who had married a solicitor. Her twin Emily’s husband was the headmaster of Hutton grammar school twenty miles away.

      The futures of their sons and daughters, unlike her own, were assured. Their sons, unlike her John, would automatically go to Hutton, as her father had done; her daughters, like theirs, might have been educated at Preston’s Park School, but, once adult, the world of their cousins would be closed to Ellie and Connie, unless they married into it.

      Robert’s hungry, demanding kisses distracted her. It was a hot night; the sounds of the revelry outside echoing into their bedroom.

      ‘Robert, please be careful,’ she pleaded with him as he slipped her dress off her shoulders and started to unlace her.

      She always worried when, as now, he was in one of his ebullient, boisterous moods, filled with energy and excitement, just in case he should forget himself and the precautions they were obliged to take. She gave a small moan as she felt him touching her, her body tensing and then quivering as the aching sensation of wanting him began its familiar dance with her fear. Outside, the raucous laughter of some late revellers masked the small groan of pleasure she gave as her own need overwhelmed her fear. It had always been like this between them for her; her own secret cause of joy and shame. She had no idea where it had come from, this deep, dangerous chord of sensuality, so strong that it could override everything else.

      Calling out to Robert, she dug her nails into the strong muscles of his arms, lifting her body against his, driven by her own hunger. Wrapping herself around him, she drew him down against her and into her body, glorying in the hot, strong feel of him inside her.

      No, her sisters would never have known anything like this. Even now, Robert still had the power to make her want him with a ferocity that shocked her in the cold light of day as much as it thrilled her in the sweaty, secret, dark heat of night.

      And it had been so long. Weeks…Passionately she bit at his mouth, and felt him shudder as she urged him to thrust deeper.

      ‘Lyddy…’ Robert tried to protest, but he ached so much for her – as much now, after nearly twenty years of marriage, as he had done when they had first met. But they had to be careful. There must be no child…he must not…

      Gritting his teeth, Robert made to withdraw from her, but Lyddy refused to let him, moaning in protest, clinging to him, locking her muscles and writhing frantically against him.

      ‘No. Lyddy…we must not…’ Robert repeated, but the words were lost, torn from him by Lydia’s passionate kiss.

      It had always been like this between them, and Lydia desperately hoped that she might not have passed on to her daughters this wanton strain in her nature of which she was so ashamed.

      As the sensation inside her swelled and grew, it became impossible for her to think any longer – only to feel, to ache, to want…

      She was almost there. Almost…

      ‘Robert!’ As she cried his name and clung to him she felt him groan and jerk back from her.

      The spill of his completion fell hot and sticky against her thigh.

      Shuddering, and gripped only by her own sense of aching frustration, Lydia reached out to guide his hand to her body so that he might complete what he had started.

       TWO

      ‘Now remember, we are all to stay together,’ Robert warned his family as they stepped out into the street to join the crowds already there, intent on watching