Free Fortune is a Woman by Elizabeth Adler Page A

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 armchair in front of the fire. He would pick up his copy of the Yorkshire Evening Post she'd bought for him and say, "Where's our lads, then?"
    "Out," she'd reply, briskly clearing the table, "playing in't street." Or if it was raining, "Next door with t'other little lads."
    And then she'd go quietly to the scullery and wash the dishes before calling the boys in and getting them ready for bed.
    "Bloody hard labor, that's what Annie Aysgarth's doing," Mrs. Morris grumbled to her husband. "And she's only sixteen. She's a better mother to those lads than anybody on this street—and a better wife to her father too."
    "In all ways except one," her husband replied darkly, sucking on his pipe and filling the poorly furnished room with sickly-sweet tobacco fumes.
    Mrs. Morris glared at him, indicating the listening boys. "Little pitchers have big ears," she reminded him sharply. "But still, if you ask me she's nothing but a slave for the man. He'd have to pay two servants ten pounds a month to do what she does—and then he'd not get it done as well!"
    Annie knew her father was a hard taskmaster, but she put up with it because she had never known anything else, and because she loved her brothers. It was true, as Bertie and Ted grew up they grew away from her, becoming like their father, shutting her out from their masculine lives and expecting their dinners on the plate as soon as they walked in the door, their Friday night bathwater hot and ready in the tub that was kept under the wooden slab in the scullery, and their shirts perfectly starched and neatly ironed with all the buttons sewed on for Sunday church. But young Josh was like her own son.

CHAPTER 6
    1895
    For her mother's funeral Francie wore an expensive new black silk dress with a white lace collar purchased from the smart Paris House store on Market Street. She had new black boots made of the finest kid leather, a black velvet cape lined with ermine and her long blond hair was brushed to shining perfection and tucked into a black silk bonnet. She rode with her father and her brother Harry in a black satin-lined carriage behind six black-plumed horses at the head of a procession of sixty carriages of mourners and civic dignitaries, and she stood pale and trembling by the graveside as Dolores's coffin was lowered into it.
    Her little brother, Harry, in black velvet knickerbockers and jacket, his cap held respectfully to his chest, sobbed loudly, and her father, handsome and sartorially correct in striped trousers and black jacket, dabbed at his eyes with an immaculate white linen handkerchief. But Francie never shed a tear. She stared straight in front of her, gritting her teeth together and willing herself not to scream. She wanted to cry out how unfair it was that her mother should die, that she was so young, so beautiful, so sweet and gentle and so kind-hearted. She wanted to tell the three hundred mourners who had also been guests at Dolores's wedding that she loved her mother, that she missed her dreadfully, and that she would just die, too, without her. But she knew they would not have understood, so she just locked the emotions deep inside her, refusing to let a single tear drip down her cheek onto her new black silk dress.
    It was a raw January day and a cold mist lingered around the gravestones. Moisture dripped from the naked trees, turning the grass into a sea of brown mud. The elaborate floral tributes bound with purple ribbons, and piled around the open grave, looked garish in the