Free Snow Angels by Elizabeth Gill Page A

there.’
    ‘I did. Things like dresses only matter when you have little else, don’t you think? I used to love Allendale Common. Now, I would give almost anything to get away.’ She stopped and let the others troop past and it seemed only polite to stay with her.
    She stood looking out across the River Wear, taking great breaths of fresh air as though she needed to store them. When the others had gone up the semicircle of stone and in by the French windows at the front of the house, the quietness waspleasant, only the birds in the trees. Later they danced together at the ball that was held that evening in a huge hall at a nearby college. Gil danced with Helen, but she was so happy she couldn’t speak. He asked Abby, but she refused.
    ‘I’d rather chop my feet off,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go and ask your sister-in-law? You seem to like her well enough.’
    ‘I suppose you’re going to marry Robert Surtees.’
    Gil couldn’t believe he had said this, but they were far enough away from the music and other people so he didn’t need to be discreet. She turned cold blue eyes on him.
    ‘He hasn’t asked, so it would be indelicate of me to say much other than that he’s a gentleman and you’re a stupid boy!’ She turned with a swish of her skirts. Gil was angry. He went after her even when she ventured outside. Snow was starting to fall in big, dangerous flakes.
    ‘That’s not fair!’ he said and, when she wouldn’t stop, he got hold of her bare arm and pulled her around. ‘I came to you.’
    ‘To me? Oh yes, I remember. Sunday afternoon in the dene. You bothered to come into Newcastle to see me and then you ignored everything I said.’
    ‘You say too much.’
    ‘You love Helen.’
    For months now, ever since the moment he had seen her, Gil had denied to himself that his regard for his sister-in-law was love. He had called it misguided, immature, inexperience, all number of things, but he had not called it love and he did not expect to hear it on anybody’s lips, least of all from Abby. He tried to think. He tried to be truthful and the images of the warm country and the white room flooded into his head.
    ‘It’s – it’s in the past,’ he said.
    ‘What past?’ Abby laughed and her eyes glinted with fury. ‘You haven’t got a past, not that kind. I’m not blind. I saw you when you met her. I saw how you looked at her.’
    ‘I recognised her.’
    ‘From where?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Desperation got Gil further. ‘Please, Abby, I do care about you. I have always—’
    ‘No, you haven’t. You’ve always ignored me.’
    ‘I didn’t know what to say, what to do. Give me a chance, please.’
    ‘This is just because you can’t have her. Do you think that’s what I want? Some other woman’s leavings? She could have had you if she had wanted, couldn’t she? She didn’t have to marry your brother.’
    ‘She loves him.’
    ‘Does she? Well, good luck to her. I’m glad it’s not me, marrying a Collingwood.’
    *
    Abby remembered later the things that she had said to him and she thought that her mother would have been ashamed of her, but at the time it felt as though Gil deserved everything she threw at him. And she did throw it. Words were such horrible weapons and he was defenceless; he had always been defenceless in that way. She thought he was a product of a cruel upbringing. He had never learned to talk his way out of anything because he had always been physically hurt. He waited for the blows in that kind of situation, he expected them, and whereas if she had been a man he might have defended himself with his fists, he couldn’t do it so he had nowhere to go.
    ‘You’re common. You’re not a gentleman.’ Robert and his friends and their company were to blame for this, Abby thought. It was true that Gil’s grandfather had been a poor man, that his father had built a monstrosity of a house, that they cared for material things such as people of quality did not, but it