Off the Rails by Beryl Kingston Read Free Book Online

a week for the next early closing day before he could wear it. But the result was so satisfactory he was preening all the way to Monkgate. And what a happy moment it was when he handed his card to that snooty butler and told him that Mr Bottrill was expecting him. Now sneer if you dare, he thought.
    This time he was admitted straightaway and led in due and proper style to the drawing room on the first floor, where his uncle was waiting for him.
    ‘We’ll have our coffee now, Joshua,’ he said, and when the butler had bowed and left them. ‘Still doing well, I see, young George.’
    ‘We’ve trebled our trade in the last two months,’ George told him happily.
    ‘Aye. I don’t doubt it,’ his uncle approved. ‘I’ve been watching. And all your doing if I’m any judge.’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ George said, trying to look modest and making a poor fist of it.
    ‘You’re a good lad,’ his uncle said. ‘A worker. Which is more than can be said for the others. Been here with their begging bowls only last week, so they have. Not that it’ll do ’em any good. I’ve got their measure, don’t you worry.’
    George had no desire to hear about the others but there was no stopping Uncle Matthew once he’d started and his complaints against his avaricious family went on and on until the coffee was borne steaming into the room and he had to pause from his diatribe to drink it. George watched his disagreeable face as he scowled and sneered, and those bony hands clutching the cup and that long nose dipping towards the coffee, and decided that he would endure being bored and try to look as though he were interested. If this was the price he had to pay for being the favoured nephew then he would pay it. He’d be rewarded in the long run.
    He stayed with his uncle for nearly an hour and parted with him in apparent good humour, even though he was inwardly twitching to get away. But it was a job well done, he thought, as he walked back to Goodramgate and he was eased and pleased when he began to gather admiring glances again.
    ‘Well, bless my soul,’ a familiar voice said as he emerged from the crowded arch of Monkgate, holding onto his hat. ‘If it’s not George Hudson. You do look well. Quite the swell.’
    ‘Mrs Hardcastle, ma’am,’ he said, giving her a courteous bow. ‘I trust I see you well.’ It was always sensible to keep in with the local gossip.
    ‘Visiting my cousin,’ she said.
    ‘Ah!’
    ‘Do ’ee work hereabouts?’
    ‘At the drapers,’ he told her. ‘Nicholson and Bell’s.’
    ‘And doing well, I see.’
    He laughed at that. ‘Aye, ma’am, but give me a year or two and I shall do even better.’
    She gave him her shrewd look. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘Happen so.’ They wereheading in opposite directions or she would have walked with him and discovered more.
    ‘Pray give my regards to my family,’ he said as he turned to stride away from her. And that was such a happy moment he was grinning all the way back to the shop.
     
    Mrs Hardcastle went straight to Home Farm as soon as the carter had set her down by her own gate. This was too good a piece of gossip not to be spread and besides she wanted to see how Philadelphia was because the poor girl had been quite ill these past few weeks.
    She was sitting in her chair by the kitchen fire darning stockings and looking extremely pale and tired but she greeted her visitor in her usual gentle way and when Mrs Hardcastle asked her how she was she smiled and said she was ‘fair to middling’ even though it was plain to the midwife’s experienced eye that she was no such thing. But she was visibly cheered when she heard how well her brother was doing.
    ‘Fallen on his feet, sithee,’ Mrs Hardcastle told her. ‘Allus knew he would. Great strong boy like that.’
    Philadelphia covered her mouth with a kerchief and coughed into it for a worryingly long time. But her mind was still on her brother and when she’d recovered her breath she questioned her