The Cuckoo's Child Read Online Free Page A

the garments was superb. Up here, in the wilds of Yorkshire, might it not be considered . . . a little too smart? It was too late to do anything about that now, however. The train, precisely on time and in great clouds of steam, was already panting and hissing into the station, where she had been told someone would be waiting to meet her and convey her to Wainthorpe.
    Laura had never before been further north than St Albans, to spend occasional weekends at the home of her college friend, Cicely. This part of Yorkshire they called the West Riding was a mystery to her, despite some conscientious revision of what she’d been taught about the northern woollen trade of which Huddersfield was a great centre, and what role the West Riding had played in the Industrial Revolution. She had listened to Ruth Paston on the iniquities of the old child labour system in the textile mills. She’d read again about those machine-breakers they had called the Luddites, who had believed those first machine looms would rob them of their livelihood. She had also done her best to disregard the comments of all those who had learned she was to pass some time here, to the effect that its inhabitants were hard-headed folk who called a spade a shovel and lived years behind the times.
    Now, however, as she emerged from the station in Huddersfield, she was taken aback by an immediate impression of the town’s solid Victorian prosperity. Surrounding her were substantial buildings of dressed stone, heavy with importance, and a railway station that would have rivalled London’s Euston in its neoclassical splendour. The place was busy with motor-driven delivery vehicles and motorcars, one of which had broken down (as motors everywhere were still apt to do) impeding the passage of several more reliable horse-drawn vans and carts. Smartly painted dark-maroon and straw-coloured double-decker electric trams, crackling and sparking from their overhead poles, rhythmically clanged and swayed their way down the tracks set in the road, just like London trams. And as it became obvious the people in the busy streets were no less well dressed than similar people in any other large town or city, she could see her own fears about being overdressed as ridiculous and rather patronizing.
    But then, there came the matter of her mode of transport to Wainthorpe.
    She stood at a loss beneath the station’s Corinthian columns, her luggage at her feet where the porter had dumped it. No one appeared to be waiting for her. But within a minute or two an elderly man approached, wearing a black coat turning green at the seams, with an old-fashioned billycock on his head, a large red-spotted handkerchief round his neck and a pipe stuck in his mouth. Without removing the pipe, he asked her if she was Miss ‘Arcourt, and when she said she was, with an unsmiling nod he picked up her luggage and took it towards – not one of those up-to-date motorcars she might have expected from a rich man with a library full of books – but a little horse-drawn trap. Was this the mode of transport deemed suitable for one who was after all, only to be an employee? An indication that Mr Beaumont, her new employer, was tight-fisted – or merely one of those northerners she’d been warned about, who hadn’t yet entered the twentieth century and felt that hardiness was next to Godliness?
    Oh, well! Gamely, she clambered up beside the driver, a surly individual whose uncouth accent she had difficulty in understanding, who gave his name as John Willie Sugden and after that seemed to feel he had no need to prolong the conversation further. The trap was open to the elements, and he made no move to pull up its hood, but it was smartly painted, the chestnut coat of the little horse between the shafts was glossy and well-groomed and there were leather cushions on the front seat next to the driver. Morosely, Sugden indicated a folded woollen rug, evidently intended to