A Child of Jarrow by Janet MacLeod Trotter Read Free Book Online Page A

the arm. ‘It’s good to see you’re still keeping a watchful eye on the place as ever, Mrs Bates. Just like you did when I was a boy.’
    She clung on to him. ‘Always enjoyed your visits, Master Alexander. Not the same without children about the castle -you were always the liveliest, a right little handful, but a loving nature. Didn’t I always say that, Mr Bates? A loving nature. Now there’s no children - just parties and balls and the like when the mistress is at home. Crying shame His Lordship has no son and heir—’
    â€˜Mrs Bates!’ Mr Bates growled.
    Alexander tipped his hat at them both, waved a cheery goodbye and strode off up the track before Mrs Bates could waylay him with offers of tea and a further hour of gossip. She had been equally garrulous as a housemaid, easily distracted from her work when he had stayed at the castle as a boy. The orphan. ‘That poor baim’, as he had often overheard the staff describing him within earshot.
    Nobody had known quite what to make of him, Alexander thought with familiar discomfort. He was a Liddell through his mother. But she had eloped with a handsome Scots coachman, been outcast and then died, leaving the itinerant Pringle with a small boy on his hands. His father had handed him straight back to the Liddells and disappeared out of his life too.
    Alexander did not like to remember the painful, confusing years of being tossed around his mother’s family like a hot coal that no one wanted to handle. He had felt like one of the gentry, but the world had looked on him otherwise. He was classed as a wild Pringle and had played up to their disapproval, behaving as badly as he knew how. Only the intervention of His Lordship’s coal agent, Jeremiah Davies, had saved Alexander from his nomadic life and given him a home and education. Widowed and childless, the lonely businessman had offered to take on the troublesome boy as his own.
    As Alexander walked on the soft drive, breathing in the scent of pine needles and freshly cut logs, he felt a stirring of the old resentment. Then he mocked himself for his self-pity. He might be lumbered with the names of Pringle and Davies - half wayward Scot, half upright man of business - but he felt in his bones he was an aristocrat.
    â€˜I am a Liddell!’ he cried at the trees and waved his walking cane at a pheasant that flapped in alarm across his path. He laughed his quick, deep-throated laugh. That was why he had the audacity to turn up at Ravensworth and expect Lord Ravensworth, his distant cousin, to offer him hospitality. He would not stay at the local inn like any ordinary commission agent or merchant. It was his birthright to stay in a place like Ravensworth. The earl was an amiable, generous man who had shown him kindness as a boy.
    Yet once he was in the care of Davies, relations with the Liddells had cooled, for it was socially awkward to have the adopted son of an employee holidaying at Ravensworth. Once more he had been rebuffed. Then the earl’s wife had died and to family surprise, Lord Ravensworth, at the age of seventy-one, had got remarried to a vivacious widow, who had breathed new life into the mournful estate and set little store by social convention.
    Alexander smiled at the thought of the handsome middle-aged widow Emma Sophia, who so relished life. She loved entertaining; lavish dinners, dances, picnics, hunts and a houseful of guests. She loved her new husband and his magnificent Gothic castle and she loved to fill it with lively young women and attractive young men who shared her appetite for society.
    When Alexander had first come on business on behalf of his adoptive father, Lady Ravensworth had insisted he stay on for a few days’ riding. The few days had turned into a fortnight, until Jeremiah had called him home to the south of the county and reprimanded him for outstaying his welcome. But Jeremiah was ageing and Alexander was quick to take up