Annie's Promise by Margaret Graham Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t need to nurse.’
    She pushed herself from him. ‘Don’t you call me bonny lass, Georgie Armstrong. You’re just messing up our lives so don’t you dare call me that.’ The words were quiet, strained, they hurt her throat, she was gasping for breath and she ran from him then, wanting to catch Tom, wanting to drag him back, make him talk to Georgie, down street after street, it felt like miles. The breath was catching in her throat as she pounded up the back alley, into the yard, into the kitchen. ‘Bet, Tom, Gracie,’ she shouted, leaning on the table, panting hard. She heard Georgie coming in behind her.
    She turned, there were so many words now, tumbling out, hurling themselves at him, ‘How could you. I thought you’d accepted the change. How can you be so stupid, how can you do this to us and what about my plans, how dare you just push them aside when they make so much more sense?’
    Georgie was leaning against the doorpost grinning, breathing easily and she couldn’t bear the thought of the dust and the grime, the weight of the coal above his body. She couldn’t bear it and so she went to him then, leant into him pleaded with him, wanting him to be safe, wanting him to be as far from the pit as possible.
    He pulled her back out into the sunshine, the smell of geraniums strong as the early afternoon sun beat against the brick wall, and told her that she was to start off the business and forget the letter. Everyone was allowed a mistake.
    ‘Not in the pit, Georgie. Mistakes kill you – they are not allowed, for God’s sake.’ She was shouting so loud that her throat ached.
    He asked her to remember that they had promised one another a future and now they were there, in that future and he needed to earn his place back here in Wassingham, heneeded to prove that he hadn’t run away from the pit, only from life without her. He’d had the ears and eyes of a pitman, he wanted to know he still had and that he could still read the old sow like a book. He wanted their neighbours to know that they were the same as them, that they weren’t just piling back into the area on the side of the bosses.
    He was stroking her hair and the words made sense, in some ways they made so much sense but what about the danger for him, what about the days and nights of worry she and Sarah thought they’d left behind? What about her nursing?
    She looked into his face, his eyes and there was so much love, always there was love, but there was need too, now, just as there was in her own.
    She leant back on the wall, closing her eyes, feeling the heat on her face.
    ‘It’s got the edge I had in bomb disposal. I miss that, I know now that I need it,’ Georgie said quietly. He said nothing more as Annie heard the humming of the bees, the distant sound of children and the pigeons fluttering in the loft in the next yard. He had let her go when Sarah Beeston came, it had broken his heart but he had let her go, just as he had let her leave India, so what could she do? She could only agree and pretend that she was not afraid.

CHAPTER 3
    The next month passed quickly. Annie sold most of the Gosforn furniture to Don because there was so little room in Wassingham Terrace.
    ‘Don’t let him have it,’ Georgie said on their last night but she shook her head.
    ‘No, he’s so sorry, you can see he can’t even look us in the eye. If we don’t let him have it we’re being petty and vindictive and it will only lead to a real breach between us all.’
    As well as the walnut hall table she kept the small tables, the pictures, all the things that were Sarah Beeston. She arranged to keep on the Gosforn stall, and took on two others on the route to Wassingham, talking another stallholder into trying her goods, sale or return. Soon there would be more, there must be more.
    ‘It’s too much,’ Georgie murmured into her neck as the moonlight played on his body, on his scars.
    ‘No, not enough,’ she whispered, holding him close, touching