A New Dream, Maggie Ford [books to read romance txt] 📗

A New Dream

Cover

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

About the Author

Also by Maggie Ford

Copyright

Cover

Table of Contents

Start of Content

One

Mrs Granby looked up from making fairy cakes for afternoon tea for the wife of her employer to regard their pretty twenty-one-year-old daughter.

‘Is there something wrong, Miss Julia? You don’t seem your usual happy self, not since you’ve been in my kitchen.’

Julia Longfield’s sweet features gave a half smile as she toyed with two small jelly molds in front of her where she sat at the food preparation table. ‘Of course I’m happy, Cook,’ she murmured.

‘So you ought to be with your fiancé and his family coming to dinner and you two about to announce your engagement an’ all,’ Martha Granby went on. ‘I say that’s wonderful, yet you don’t look all that excited.’

‘I am excited,’ Julia said, but to Martha it didn’t sound convincing.

She gave a humph and resumed beating together the eggs, butter and sugar for the light little cakes Mrs Longfield so enjoyed with her four o’clock tea, now almost a ritual in the twelve years Martha had worked here.

Her brows knitted beneath the line of her kitchen cap. ‘You do realize how lucky you are, Miss Julia, a young man like Chester Morrison to love you? With this country still in such a mess since the war finished, you don’t have any idea how fortunate the two of you are with both yer dads well off.’

Three and a half years since the end of the war, and things were still bad; a million out of work, maimed ex-servicemen begging on the streets. Pitiful it was to see some of them trudging along in the gutter playing an instrument for a few coins to feed a hungry family; pitiful and outrageous considering their sacrifice.

‘Marrying into money too, his father with that printing works, yet to me you don’t look like what a young girl in love should look like, my dear.’

After so many years of listening to Julia’s childish troubles and, as she grew older, her more adult problems, and giving advice, Martha Granby considered herself on sufficiently familiar terms with her employers’ daughter to address her as ‘my dear’.

‘I mean it,’ she went on, ‘a fine handsome young man like that with a good family background. Anyone with half an eye can see how much he loves you. The question is, do you love him?’

‘Of course I do,’ came the reply but to Martha it still didn’t seem to carry the special ecstatic sound of a girl in love.

She put aside the mixing bowl. As cook/housekeeper to the comfortably off Longfield family in their fine house in Sewardstone Road, overlooking Victoria Park, she’d known Julia since she was a little girl of nine who would creep downstairs to confide in her. The child’s parents had seemed too occupied with their own lives to listen to their daughter’s childish upsets.

Later, at private school, Julia had come home during term breaks to tell Martha all her news, little things about her friends at school, her worries and her joys. Martha felt she knew more about the girl than her own parents did.

Nothing of what she was told went any further, not to their housemaid Mary, certainly not to Annie the present scullery hand and especially not to Fred, Mr Charles Longfield’s gardener-cum-handyman and lately chauffeur, who drove him daily to and from his import/export business near London Docks. Fred would have ample opportunity to pass on words overheard about his employer’s eldest daughter.

Julia was the only one who ever came down here to the kitchen. Her two younger sisters and one younger brother never did. As a child it had been the little things; the slights, small hurts and rebellious thoughts that, too angrily revealed to her parents, would have had her being sent to bed.

On leaving college her confidences had taken on a more adult nature, often of some young man of whom her parents would have disapproved, or not being allowed to go out alone with friends to a party or dance. Even her taste for the new, fashionable, less figure-hugging dresses with their calf-length skirts was being frowned on by her mother. Victoria Longfield, with her old-fashioned ideas, maintained that nicely brought up young ladies should not be wearing such outrageous garments. She herself still wore the ankle-length skirts and high-necked blouses of 1912 rather than the fashions of 1922 and kept her hair dragged back in an outdated bun that made her look far older than her forty-odd years.

When Julia had wanted her own lovely long chestnut hair cut fashionably short, one would have thought from her mother’s horrified gasps that she was intending to smash a holy relic. When her daughter had finally rebelled and taken a pair of scissors to her hair, the woman had almost swooned and Julia’s father had gone into a rage. However, not even God could instantly restore what had been chopped off.

Martha had kept her smiles strictly under lock and key. ‘Good for you, my girl!’ she’d muttered that night in her little room off the kitchen.

This afternoon she regarded Julia severely. ‘You’re twenty-one and have a mind of your own now. The important thing is, if you’re not sure you love Mr Morrison, and to me you don’t sound all that sure, you shouldn’t go marrying just for money or to please your families. You could regret it.’

Julia lifted her gaze. ‘But I do love him. I feel happy when we are together. We laugh a lot and hardly ever stop talking and it’s lovely to have him kiss me. He’s so very handsome and tall. I love his fair hair and his blue eyes and I know I’d be devastated if anything were to happen between us. But I’ve never been in love before so I’m still not sure if that is love or not.’

So that was the trouble. The girl had been too sheltered, for all she was lively and had an outgoing nature, even if