Free The Prince and the Quakeress: (Georgian Series) by Jean Plaidy

she would look at him with wide-eyed innocence and after a few such occasions she too took to flushing. It was clear that she was as conscious of him as he was of her; and this fact delighted him.
    His mother might rage about the fiends who wanted to take her son from her; he would always answer her mechanically. Even when Lord Bute spoke to him he scarcely heard. His thoughts would be occupied by the beautiful young woman in the linen-draper’s shop.

The Quakeress of St James’s Market
    HANNAH LIGHTFOOT HAD been about five years old when she and her mother had come to live with Uncle Henry Wheeler in St James’s Market. Memories of life before that were vague, something to dream of with horror, to awake from shuddering in the comfortable bed in the room she shared with her mother, for her father’s shoemaker’s shop in Wapping had been very different from Uncle Henry’s prosperous establishment in St James’s Market.
    She could not remember her father; perhaps life had been easier when he was alive; she had been two when he died. Her mother told her of how her family – the Wheelers, always spoken of with awe – had not been very pleased with the marriage. Matthew Lightfoot had not been a good Quaker and it had been against the advice of her family that she had married him; they were not surprised that she had lived so poorly in Wapping.
    But Matthew had died and Uncle Henry being a deeply religious man and a Quaker had, after giving his sister Mary three years in which to struggle on in expiation of her folly,come to her rescue and offered her a home in his linen-draper’s establishment.
    So as a child Hannah would lie in the big bed beside her mother and listen to the sounds outside the shop which never failed to delight her – the voices raised in bargaining, the lowing of cattle brought to the market for sale; the grunting of pigs, the reedy voice of the ballad singer; the shouts of the pieman; the street traders’ songs.
    ‘Won’t you buy my sweet blooming lavender
    Sixteen branches one penny  . . .’
    Or:
    ‘Three rows a penny pins,
    Short whites and middilings.’
     
    She would sing the songs to herself – quietly because singing was frivolous – as she dressed in the warm sun of summer or the cold of winter, for it was bitterly cold in winter. It was not that Uncle Henry could not have afforded a fire; but he believed in the Spartan life. In spite of prosperity they must live simply.
    In the bad dreams – which grew less as the years passed – she would hear the scrape of a boat against the stairs; she would smell the slimy, tarry smell of the river; she would hear men whistling tunes or singing river songs, shouts of abuse, the voices of men and women raised in anger as they fought each other. She would remember the vague empty feeling which was hunger; the numbness which was cold – not the healthy cold of Uncle Henry’s house but the cold which came of insufficient covering, insufficient food. They had stepped over a bridge it seemed to Hannah from hunger and poverty and want to the well-being which came from righteous living – thrift and piety. Uncle Henry was like a beneficent god – a knight of old who had rescued them from dragons, and carried them away from the dungeons of despair into the castle of comfort.
    Her mother shared her pleasure, she knew. Mary Lightfoot could not do enough for her brother.
    Uncle Henry had been a bachelor of thirty-one when Mary and her daughter came to live with him. Mary therefore could be of use to him, for she was an excellent housekeeper and she began to transform his house into a home as no servant coulddo. Henry was fond of his niece, for she was a charming girl and indeed grew prettier every day. Not that as a Quaker he believed in stressing those charms. The dark curls should be severely strained back from the oval face and neatly braided. The child should be attired in a simple gown of grey cloth.
    ‘Clothes are meant to keep the child warm,