Free The Favourite Child by Freda Lightfoot

she still was in a way: an irresistible combination of emotional vulnerability coupled with a worldly wisdom beyond her years. She seemed so frail and tiny in the huge bed, arms flung back upon the pillows, elfin face with its violet bruises beneath the closed lids seeming even more marked in the dim light cast from the lamp Bella carried.
    ‘Mother would not hesitate to throw you out on the streets if she knew about the abortion,’ she told the sleeping girl. Bella couldn’t even be certain how Edward would react when he learned the truth about the “accident”. Yet it couldn’t be kept from him indefinitely, not if he truly meant to marry her. He was sufficiently conservative to want a traditional family life, something which Jinnie could never provide.
    ‘You must tell him in the morning,’ Bella whispered, before quietly slipping out of the room and softly closing the door.
    Whether or not Jinnie would have summoned the courage to reveal the truth about herself the next morning was not put to the test. Sometime during the night Bella awoke to find her father shaking her by the shoulder in obvious agitation.
    ‘It’s your mother, lass. She’s not well. Not well at all. She’s taken a bad turn in the night. I’ve sent for the doctor.’
    It seemed that when Simeon had finally gone to his bed, after a stiff whisky or two in the quiet of his study, Emily had again started raging and railing over her inconsiderate son. She’d complained bitterly about Edward’s utter selfishness, the lure of evil women and got herself into such a lather of distress that she’d fallen back onto the pillows jabbering nonsense, her twitching body suddenly gripped by a seizure.
    Emily Ashton had apparently suffered a stroke. The doctor who issued this damning diagnosis was not their usual family practitioner but his new partner, Dr Nathaniel Lisle, and for that reason alone Simeon refused to accept it.
    ‘Utter poppycock!’ was his immediate reaction. ‘My wife is as fit as a flea and always has been.’ Then he turned upon his son, standing bemusedly by the bed in his dressing gown and carpet slippers. ‘This is all your fault, you and your damned notions of fancy weddings to some guttersnipe you know nothing about. Look what a proper pickle you’ve got us all in.’
    Edward recoiled, as if he’d been struck, beside himself with guilt and no matter how much Bella assured him that the seizure may well have happened anyway, he refused to be comforted. It was only when he found Jinnie on the front doorstep, attempting to sneak away that he pulled himself together sufficiently to beg her not to leave him, for how could they be blamed for falling in love?
    ‘I need you more than ever now, Jinnie.’
    ‘But you’d be better off without me,’ Jinnie told him though her tears. ‘I’ve brought nowt but trouble, like your ma says.’
    ‘Stuff and nonsense. I mean to buy you an engagement ring and marry you just as soon as you’re old enough. Bella thinks we should wait till you’re eighteen and I’m not against the idea, now that I’ve had time to think on it. Can you wait that long? We could walk out together, get to know each other better. I’ll take such good care of you, dear Jinnie. Do please say that you will. How could I face life without you beside me.’
    ‘You don’t ever have to try,’ Jinnie said, and the pair clung together, kissing away the tears as they held each other tight in a warm embrace. In spite of his mother’s stroke, not for one moment was Edward prepared to risk losing her.
    Over the days following, the nature of Emily’s plight became all too apparent. She lay in her bed quite unable to move, hands curled into furious fists, mouth twisted in a macabre leer, above which blazed a pair of eyes dark with anger.
    Not knowing how to put things right, Simeon sat day after day in his study, head in hands, refusing even to go to the mill. Anxious-looking clerks hovered in the hall but he refused to