Forever Yours by Rita Bradshaw Page A

Twilight had long since come and gone and the night was raw, a bitter wind swirling the odd snowflake in its midst. Wrapped up as he was in a good thick coat which would have cost the average miner a month’s wages, Vincent didn’t feel the cold, neither was he really aware of his surroundings as he took the familiar route home. In his mind’s eye he was seeing Constance as she’d looked when the shawl covering her head had slipped and her golden hair had gleamed in the lamplight. She was Hannah to a T, or Hannah as she had been before she’d let Shelton get his dirty hands on her, and she looked much older than her age. If he hadn’t known, he’d have put her down as fifteen or sixteen.
    A feeling he’d long since thought was dead stirred in him, a mix of desire and hope and fear and a hundred and one other emotions he couldn’t put a name to. He stopped dead as it caused his heart to beat faster, surprise that he could feel this way etched on the features which had coarsened since his youth. Hannah’s daughter. Excitement caused him to sweat under his greatcoat and brown tweed jacket lined with silk, both of the best quality. He always dressed as well as any fine gentleman. It denoted his position, and furthermore got up the nose of his former class-mates who had taunted and rejected him as a bairn and made his life hell. One of them had muttered something about folk who ‘aped their betters’ when he’d been walking past a group of miners outside the colliery office once. He hadn’t said anything at the time, but John Potts had been one of the men evicted from their homes last year and he hadn’t been sniggering when he’d walked the road with his pregnant wife and six bairns.
    Vincent strode through the village as he always did, eyes straight ahead and face set, although at this time of night there was no one about and lights shone behind closed curtains. He didn’t glance to the left as he passed Cross Streets although he was vitally conscious that Hannah’s daughter was there living in the grid of streets as her mother had once done. But much had changed since then. The site to the east of Cross Streets had been built up in latter years and this area – Elliott and Hunter Streets, which were named after the colliery owners, and Victoria, Gregson and Blackett Streets – was referred to as ‘New Town’ by its inhabitants.
    He paused, when after passing the Methodist Chapel and the Queen’s Head Hotel he reached the crossroads, the right branch of which would take him home. He turned, looking back at the way he had come, and had the mad impulse to retrace his steps and bang on the Grays’ front door then demand to see Constance.
    What was she to Heath? The thought which had been there since he’d seen the girlish figure with her arms round the man’s waist and her head pressed against his chest burned in his brain. What was their relationship? Knowing the story of her parents’ demise and Heath’s part in her own deliverance she’d be grateful, of course, and likely she’d grown up thinking of him as a kind of hero, a brother figure perhaps? Or was it more than that?
    His teeth ground together, his thick black brows meeting as he turned abruptly and began to walk along Witton Street towards Fulforth Wood.
    Heath hadn’t responded to her as a man would to his sweetheart, he reasoned in the next moment. There had been no meeting of lips, nothing intimate. He had merely hugged her and then his mother in much the same way before other family members had hidden the two from his sight. When the group which had included the brother and his wife and bairns had walked away, the girl had been holding Heath’s mother’s arm, and if his memory wasn’t playing tricks there had been another lass with Heath. His frown deepened. Aye, he was sure there had been, although he had been so taken up with Hannah’s ghost that he hadn’t paid too much attention to anyone else.
    He continued to mull the matter