Read Online Fortune is a Woman by Elizabeth Adler - Free Book Online Page A

none of these had suited him. Beneath his solid facade lay the heart of an entrepreneur and one thing he noticed wherever he worked was that factories always needed cardboard boxes to ship their goods in. With a few pounds in his pocket he rented his own "factory," a small drafty room in the arches beneath the Leeds railway bridge. Then he arranged to buy a quantity of cardboard and set himself up as "Aysgarth's Cardboard Box Manufacturers."
    When he met Martha he was making a living—just, but there was very little money left over for courting. Still, he couldn't resist her laughing brown eyes and found himself calling at her house several nights a week.
    Annie's mother always said that Frank never actually went down on bended knee and asked her to marry him, but one evening he came to her house carrying a mahogany mantel-clock she had admired in a shop window in the Calls. It had cost him ten shillings, more money than he had earned that week. He said, "Here, lass, it's for you. I saw how you admired it and it'll look good on our mantel shelf." Martha said she just assumed from that that they were to wed and went ahead with her plans, accumulating a small pile of cotton sheets and towels in her bottom drawer, sewing a simple trousseau and her wedding dress of soft white voile trimmed with satin ribbons and hand-crocheted lace.
    Everyone said how pretty Martha was and how lucky Frank Aysgarth was when she finally walked down the aisle on his arm, clutching a sheaf of tall lilies and smiling her dazzling smile. They spent their two-day honeymoon at a drafty boardinghouse on Scarborough's south side, which cost Frank his last fifteen shillings, returning, subdued, to their rented room on Marsh Lane. And the very next day Martha started work at her husband's side.
    They worked hard, cutting and sticking the cardboard boxes to order. Then Frank would stack them up on his homemade delivery truck—a wooden crate on a set of wheels, dragging his heavy load through Leeds, sometimes for miles, to its destination.
    When Martha fell pregnant she worked right up until the final week because they needed the money so badly, and a week after Annie was born she was back at the factory with the new baby wrapped in a blanket sleeping in a cardboard box at her side.
    Business grew worse and money became even tighter and the poor cold rented room seemed even smaller. Sometimes there would be no wages on a Friday night and just bread on their dinner table. Frank spoke less and less and the baby seemed to cry more and more. Finally Frank said it was no good, they just couldn't make ends meet. He had to do something about it. He borrowed a few pounds and sent Martha and the child back to her family while he went off to seek his fortune in America.
    Martha didn't realize she was pregnant again until he had been gone a month and again she worked until the final week, but this time there was no Frank around for his son's birth.
    In five years Martha never heard a word from him. He never sent home a penny and everybody laughed at her, stuck with two kids and no husband. She found herself a job cleaning at a big house up at Lawnswood and many a time she had to walk there because the children needed new boots or winter jackets and she didn't have the tramfare. There was no room for her and two kids at her folks' house and now they were crammed into one cheap rented room on a mean little back street.
    Then one spring day she was sitting on the doorstep shelling peas into a bowl and getting a breath of fresh air when she saw a man walking down the street toward her. He was smartly dressed in a brown suit and polished brown boots with a bowler hat on his gray head and he had a full beard and moustache. At first she didn't recognize him. Then, as he came closer she stood up, staring at him. She said, "It's Frank, isn't it?"
    "Aye, lass, it is." He looked down at the children clinging to her apron and he said, "And these are my bairns."
    Martha told Annie