For Many a Long Day by Anne Doughty Read Free Book Online Page B

heard her name.
    Yes, someone was calling her. For a moment, she didn’t recognise the speaker. She picked up her box and staggered down the steep stair. The voice called again and she realised who it was. Miss Walker, of course. Who else? She was in the shop and the voice was her shop voice, so there must be a customer present.
    ‘Miss Scott. Do come down please. Mrs Richardson is here and she would like your assistance with some of our new material.’
    Miss Walker beamed at her as she stepped into the well-lit rear of the shop and looked around the cardboard shield of
Ladies Knickers, Large
.
    ‘Oh Miss Scott, do leave that box for one of the young gentlemen. Really, my dear, that’s much too heavy for you,’ she said, smiling across at MrsRichardson as Ellie put it down and came up to the counter already strewn around with swathes of fabric.
    Ellie said ‘Good Morning’ smiled politely and took a deep breath. The working day had begun in earnest. Whatever problems she or Daisy might have, there would be no rest or comfort for either of them till it had ended.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Charlie Freeburn, the owner of Freeburn’s High Class Drapery was an unprepossessing figure. Short, with a well-rounded stomach, a thick neck and bulging lens in his gold-framed spectacles, he closed his own front door firmly behind him on Saturday afternoon and set off across the wide tree-lined road outside. He took in his surroundings with a customary sideways glance which seemed to suggest that, by avoiding a too direct approach he would see something other people would miss. However limiting his short sightedness, Charlie missed nothing. That indeed was the secret of his remarkable success.
    Left an orphan at the age of six when he was too unwell to join the rest of his family on the ill-fated Sunday School rail excursion to Warrenpoint in June 1889, he had been brought up by his aunt and uncle in the domestic part of the premises to which he now proceeded briskly on this pleasant afternoon. It had not been an easy childhood. Charlie preferred not to remember how difficult his aunt and uncle had foundit to make a living despite his aunt’s long hours making mourning clothes for their shop customers and providing for her lodgers, two young men from a rival drapery business who slept in the attic rooms and ate with the family.
    As soon as he left school, Charlie went into the business and served his time. He hated the rudeness and arrogance of the customers, the confinement of living over the shop and even the smell of fabric. Having no other option, he began to plan for the day when his uncle would retire and he himself would become the boss. The time passed slowly, his only pleasures the books he read and the activity of increasing his small resources by trading on the Stock Market. Then came the flu epidemic of 1919 and his uncle died suddenly. By then Charlie had equipped himself not only with a formidable financial knowledge and a respectable amount of capital, but over the years had privately conducted a survey of all the other drapery establishments in his native city.
    Along with thirteen churches and thirty-nine public houses, the number of these establishments in Armagh appeared out of proportion for a city of only some eleven thousand inhabitants. Unlike his rivals, Charlie did not wonder where all the customers came from, he made it his business to find out. And find out he did, from his aunt’s former lodgers, or the young men who lived over Lennox’s shop, or the many relatives of his wife, the formerMary Hutchinson, a Richhill girl from a large family whose prolific offspring and matrimonial links put him in touch with the senior servants, the housekeepers and the dressmakers of the local gentry and aristocracy.
    Within the space of five years, Charlie had bought the adjoining property and doubled the size of the ground floor shop. In the next five, he increased his staff and removed his wife and daughters to a handsome,