Read Online Eden Falls by Jane Sanderson - Free Book Online Page A

Barnsley and Sheffield – it had a café for the leisured shopper and a counter for the hurried and the harried, and the bill of fare was the same too: pork pies, meat pies, steak puddings, fruit pies and a small, surprising range of Russian specialities, the legacy of Anna’s involvement in Eve’s life back when it all began. Six years ago, now. Six years and three months since Arthur Williams was killed at New Mill Colliery and Eve had had to find a way to keep herself and the children from the workhouse. It seemed like another life, another time. Anna – Russian, widowed, homeless – had pitched up at the little house in Beaumont Lane and had placed herself like a lucky charm at the centre of Eve’s existence. She had been Eve’s prop then: stronger and indefatigably optimistic. They had made an unconventional family group – Anna and Maya, Eve and her three – but those days, which began dark with sorrow, were also golden in Eve’s memory. Eve Williams and Anna Rabinovich, a force to be reckoned with, a winning team. Now, amid the trappings of their respective success, despite everything each of them had gained, Eve still sometimes felt a jolt of loss. On her dressing table she had a small inlaid jewellery box, the tiny key of which had long ago been mislaid. She didn’t need the key because the box was always open, but still, she felt the lack of it. That was how she felt about Anna.
    Certainly she would have been an asset in Harrogate. Not just as company, though the solitary train journey had been long and dull, but for her unassailable confidence. Anna was a stranger to inferiority; she had an air of Russian imperialism about her, Daniel always said: a touch of the tsarina. In Harrogate, Eve could have wished herself similarly equipped; the town’s mineral springs and noble connections had given it a very high opinion of itself. There she had been, representing meat pies and suet puddings in a town blessed by the patronage of princes and dukes. Of course, Eve had once cooked for the king; she told herself this as she stood by the railway station, feeling humble. But the driver of the hansom cab that took her to Crown Place had evidently held himself in high esteem, looking down his nose at Eve even as he took her business. She had over-tipped him to make a point, and then had immediately felt like a fool.
    The day had improved, though, and her shop had looked very fine. She had been before, of course: chosen it, supervised its renovation, appointed the staff. But this was her first visit for some weeks, and she’d forgotten what an imposing building it was: double-fronted, with an elegant iron porch at the entrance and a tiled floor pristine in black and white. Eve had stood a little distance away and watched as an arresting pyramid of produce in the windows and the irresistible aroma of hot pastry had lured customers through the door. It was early days, but the signs were promising. She had been thinking of this and smiling to herself on the train home when the ticket collector had accused her of looking happy.
    ‘Pies,’ Eve had said. ‘I was thinking of pies, and how far they’ve brought me.’
    ‘Is that so?’ He had taken her ticket, stamped it, handed it back. ‘Change at Leeds,’ he said.
    Lilly Pickering, a former neighbour and a miner’s widow, had known Eve since the days when a tin bath and a brick-built privy had seemed like a step up. Lilly held the fort at Ravenscliffe every day, to one extent or another. She was there when Eve and Angus arrived at their house on the common.
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I expected you sooner.’
    It was Lilly’s habit to scold. She didn’t always mean anything by it.
    ‘Ah well, ’ere I am now,’ Eve said. She took off her coat and hat and hung it on the stand in the front hall, and by the time she’d accomplished this Angus had gone: straight through the house and out of the back door to the hutch in the garden, from where his new rabbit Timothy