The Emma Harte 7-Book Collection: A Woman of Substance, Hold the Dream, To Be the Best, Emma’s Secret, Unexpected Blessings, Just Rewards, Breaking the Rules. Barbara Taylor BradfordЧитать онлайн книгу.
cloths that were shipped all over the world.
Emma looked lingeringly at the village where her mother lay, and which was also the last sign of life until she reached the Hall, and then she turned abruptly. She had rested long enough and now she must hurry if she was to reach the Hall by six o’clock, which was when Cook expected her. Emma hitched up her skirts, climbed over the stile, and jumped down into the field with agility. The ground under her feet was unyielding with frost and the mist floated and rolled in front of her, obliterating the dead gorse bushes and the few paltry, frost-bitten trees as it drifted over the landscape. Now and then banks of snow became visible, the fantastic glistening shapes illusory in the vaporous air, and to Emma there was something fearful, almost menacing about the moors at this hour. She shuddered but she pressed on bravely. She could hardly see the path, but she had been working at the Hall for two years now, and she knew it well, and her feet followed it with a degree of sureness. The crunching of her footsteps on the frosty earth was the only sound in the early-morning air.
Her thoughts turned to her father as she tramped along. Emma loved her father and understood the nature of him, but he had disturbed her not a little in the last few months. Her dad just wasn’t the same since he had returned from the Boer War. It seemed to Emma that all the spirit had ebbed out of him, and he was given to quiet withdrawn moods, yet conversely, he would often erupt into sudden almost uncontrollable anger, when Winston, or anyone other than herself or her mother, exasperated him.
These inconsistencies in her father’s behaviour and his wildly contrasting moods baffled Emma, and when he stared at her vacantly he seemed like a lost child. Sometimes she wanted to grab hold of him and shake him vigorously, in an effort to rouse him to renewed life. She was too small and fragile for that, so instead she would attempt to shake him out of his dejection with her questions, badgering him about money, reminding him of her mother’s sickness. His face always remained immobile and closed, but his eyes filled with pain. It was Elizabeth’s sickness and his sorrow for his wife that had changed Jack Harte and petrified his spirit, and rendered him virtually useless; it was not the war which had wrought the drastic upheaval in his nature.
But Emma, in her youthful naïveté, did not fully comprehend this. Passionately devoted to one singular pursuit, that of changing the constrained circumstances in which they lived, she was solely concerned with their survival, and this blinded her to anything else. All she knew was that her dad had no answers for her, no solutions to their problems. In an effort to placate her he would resort to the same old phrase he employed so often lately. ‘Things’ll get better soon, luv,’ he would say. Her brother Winston was always duped by this confident and optimistic mood of their father’s and his eyes would instantly shine with anticipation of better days. He would ask excitedly, ‘When, Dad? When?’ Emma’s pragmatic brain would scream, ‘How, Dad? How?’ although she never uttered a word. She was afraid to throw out this challenge when her father was attempting to reassure Winston and she also knew, unquestioningly and from past experience, that there would be no genuine response and that no practical ideas would be proffered. Emma, realist that she was, had acknowledged this inevitability months ago and she had come to accept it with resignation, since she did not know how to combat her father’s inertia and impotence, his procrastination and his lack of enterprise.
‘Nowt ever happens ter change our lot because me dad never does owt ter change it!’ Emma said aloud and with vehemence, as she scrambled over the low wall and out on to the moorland path beyond the field. Emma had not yet come to understand that when hope is taken away from a man he is left with nothing, sometimes not even the will to live. And all the hope had been kicked out of Jack Harte long ago.
She blew on her frozen hands and then pushed them back into her pockets, as she began her ascent up the lower slope that would lead her to Ramsden Ghyll and then on upwards, to the top of the moors and the road to Fairley Hall. Emma had not mentioned money to her father lately, but it never left her thoughts. They must have more money if they were to survive, if her mother was to regain her strength and her health. Emma knew that without money you were nothing, just a powerless and oppressed victim of the ruling class, a yoked and shackled beast of burden destined to a life of mindless drudgery, and an existence so wretched and so without hope, so filled with terror and despair that it was hardly worth the contemplation let alone the living. Without money you were susceptible to all the capricious whims and moods and fancies of the careless, thoughtless rich, to all the vicissitudes of life. Without money you were vulnerable to the world.
Since she had worked at Fairley Hall, Emma had come to understand many things. Blessed with acute observation, she was also innately shrewd and amazingly perceptive for her years. She had quickly seen and noted the outrageous and monstrous discrepancies between life at Fairley Hall and life in the village. The Fairleys lived in luxury, even splendour, pampered and totally isolated from the harsh realities of the lives of the workers, whose pitiless and endless toil financed their velvet-lined world of ease and privilege.
Observing the Fairleys and the way they lived, Emma had begun to comprehend that money did not only buy necessities, but so much else as well. She had come to realize that the possessor of money also possessed power, a most desirable asset to Emma, because she knew now that power made you invulnerable. It made you safe. By the same token, Emma had come to bitterly accept the fact that there was no justice or liberty for the poor. But she suspected, with the beginning of cynicism, that you could buy both quite easily. Just as easily as you could buy the medicines and nourishing food they needed for her mother, providing you had the right amount of shillings to place on the counter. Yes, she thought, money is the answer to everything.
There must be a way for me to earn more money, she decided as she made her way up the path. There were poor people and there were rich people in the world, and if some people could be rich then obviously so could others, she reasoned. Her father always said it was a question of birth and of luck. Emma was scornful of these ready answers, for she doubted their veracity, and so she refused to accept them. If a person came up with a brilliant plan and worked hard, harder than anyone else, then surely that person could earn money. Lots of it. A fortune perhaps. Emma had kept her eye on this goal for some time, never wavering, never truly discouraged, for what she lacked in experience of life she made up for with traits perhaps of greater value – intuition, imagination, and ambition. Instinctively Emma understood many things, and one of these was the cold hard fact that money was not necessarily always inherited or acquired by chance. She knew, in spite of what her father said, that there were other ways to amass a fortune. She sighed. It seemed to Emma, as she hurried along, chilled to the bone and full of despair about her mother, that she was all alone and friendless, battling the world without a helping hand or an encouraging word from anyone. But she had determined months ago that she would not let this defeat her. She would find a way to make money, lots of it, for only then would they be safe.
Her feet followed the narrow path and in spite of the denseness of the fog, she knew she was reaching the top of the lower slope, for she was panting and her legs were aching from climbing. She shivered under the rising wind that whistled down from the high fells, and pulled up the collar of her coat. Her hands were frozen stiff, but her feet were warm. Her father had repaired her boots just the week before, buying strong leather from the tannery and thick felt for the inner soles. She had stood by him and watched as he had cut the soles and hammered them firmly on to the worn uppers, cobbling the boots on the old iron last in the kitchen. She thought, too, of the steaming hot broth Cook would have waiting for her, and the warmth of the huge kitchen at the Hall, and these incentives made her hurry.
A few skeletal trees loomed up in front of her in the relentless environment, stark and spectral against the glassy green sky. Her heart began to pound rapidly, partially from exertion, but also from dread, for beyond these lone trees the path plummeted down into Ramsden Ghyll, a dell between the hills. The Ghyll was the spot Emma hated most on her journey to the Hall, for it was an eerie place, filled with grotesque rock formations and blasted tree stumps. The mist, trapped as it was between the twin peaks that soared above the dell, gathered and coagulated into heavy grey darkness that was almost impassable.
Emma was nervous of this place, but nonetheless she hurried on, chiding herself for her nervousness as she plunged down the path into the Ghyll. She was afraid of the beasties and the goblins and the spectres