Free Eden Falls by Jane Sanderson

skirmish or a siege she would have been an asset.
    ‘Are you going to say ’ello, then?’ Eve said.
    Ellen crossed the garden and gave her mother a stiff-armed hug, but Eve caught her and held on, kissing the top of her head, then, with one arm still around the child’s shoulders, she tried to pick out the dried leaves from her tousled brown hair. Ellen submitted to the attention, but only briefly. She pulled away and bared her teeth dramatically, to show Eve a new gap in the top row.
    ‘Another one gone?’
    Ellen nodded. ‘Feels nasty,’ she said, poking her tongue into the space. ‘What’s for tea?’
    ‘Eggs and bacon, I expect. But run on to t’Co-op for me first, fetch some milk.’
    ‘Can I get some sherbet?’ She held out her hand for money. Just seven years old, but she’d been driving a bargain since she learned how to talk.
    ‘No. Oh, go on then. And find Angus on your way back; bring ’im ’ome with you.’
    The child turned and ran. Ellen Williams never walked unless there was absolutely no avoiding it. She went through life at full tilt.
    ‘Be careful,’ Eve said, thinking of glass bottles and milk, but she spoke to an empty garden.

Chapter 7
    T he letter on the hall table hadn’t been from Eve, though Norah had been right about the Barnsley postmark.
    ‘Alderman Simpson,’ Anna said to Amos, handing him the folded writing paper. ‘He wonders whether I might stand for Ardington town council.’
    They were sitting on the Victoria Embankment, a short stroll from Westminster Bridge. The bench was one that they had used so often they considered it their own. Amos had been sitting there when Anna arrived, and had already sent away three other perfectly entitled citizens, begging their pardon but making it plain that the bench could not be shared. It amused Anna that her husband always managed to get away with this: it was the element of surprise, Amos told her. No one expected to be moved on from a public bench, and therefore they always obliged.
    From the wicker basket on her lap from which she had produced the letter, Anna now brought out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. This, too, she handed to her husband.
    ‘Bread and dripping?’ he asked, and she laughed.
    ‘Bad luck. Cheese and tomato.’
    He placed the package on his knee and opened the letter, scanning its contents and smirking at Greville Simpson’s copperplate handwriting. ‘You’d never know ’e were dragged up in a Grangely slum,’ he said.
    Anna, who liked the alderman, tutted. ‘Nothing wrong with an elegant hand,’ she said. ‘And we can all improve our lot.’
    This was true, and Amos conceded the point with a nod of his head. But Alderman Simpson’s cursive was the least of his affectations, in Amos’s view. There was a rumour that since being elected to the council, he had spent a few bob on elocution lessons and, certainly, when he addressed committee meetings in the town hall his aitches were these days very much in evidence, though not always in the right place.
Halderman
Simpson, Enoch Wadsworth called him, pillar
hof
the community. Enoch was Amos’s agent, friend, adviser and confidant: Enoch was the reason Amos was an MP. And if he couldn’t laugh at Greville Simpson with Anna, whose Russian ear, Amos was convinced, prevented her from hearing the comedy in the alderman’s voice, he knew he would be able to laugh with Enoch later.
    ‘Will you stand, then?’ he asked Anna now, because that, after all, was the purpose of the letter and the reason she had shown him. ‘They could use you on that education committee.’
    ‘Of course not.’ She took the letter back, suddenly irritated. How did he imagine she had time to run for the council? As it was, she barely had time to play the MP’s wife in Amos’s Yorkshire constituency.
    ‘What?’ Amos said.
    She looked at him. ‘How do you think I can be councillor, when so much of my life is in London? I’d have to be always in Ardington.’
    ‘Well,