Rags to Riches Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Maggie Ford

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Read more heart-warming sagas from Maggie Ford

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In the 1920s, nobody is safe from scandal…

  Amy Harrington leads a privileged life out in London society. Her maid, Alice Jordan, lives in the poverty-ridden East End. But when a disgraced Amy is disowned by her parents and fiancé, Alice is the only person she can turn to…

  Forced to give up her life of luxury, Amy lodges with Alice’s friendly working class family. But while Amy hatches a plan to get revenge on her former love who caused her downfall, Alice finds herself swept into the glittering society her mistress has just lost. And when Amy meets Alice’s handsome older brother Tom, they can only hope that love can conquer all…

  Will the two girls ever lead the lives they dream of?

  About the Author

  Maggie was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.

  She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.

  Also by Maggie Ford

  The Soldier’s Bride

  A Mother’s Love

  Call Nurse Jenny

  A Woman’s Place

  The Factory Girl

  A Girl in Wartime

  A Soldier’s Girl

  An East End Girl

  The Fisherman’s Girl

  To Rosemary and David, with gratitude to David for all his help and advice

  There is a tide in the affairs of men,

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  On such a full sea are we now afloat,

  And we must take the current when it serves,

  Or lose our ventures.

  Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  Chapter One

  ‘Marry me, Amy darling.’

  The girl sitting beside the earnest young man in the driving seat of the stationary Riley Tourer turned her pretty, oval face towards him and burst into a spasm of tinkling laughter that entirely upset him.

  Dicky Pritchard, who preferred Dicky to Richard which made a rather silly alliteration of his full name, frowned and shrugged his narrow shoulders in a dramatic gesture of offended pride. ‘If that’s how you feel about it, then forget it!’

  The huffy remark sobered her. ‘I thought you were joking.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t.’

  ‘You sounded as though you were joking.’

  ‘I said I wasn’t,’ he persisted, still nursing umbrage.

  Piqued by his stupid attitude, Amelia Harrington, Amy to all her friends, turned to gaze through the late November drizzle at the small exclusive nightclub from which they had not long emerged, and for something better to do deciphered the wording on the rain-spattered placard beside the well-lit door: NEW YEAR’S EVE, it read, SPECIAL LATE EVENING – SEE 1926 IN – WITH STYLE.

  More people were emerging. It stayed open to the small hours, but some preferred to go home earlier or go on elsewhere. Out they came in couples and groups, chattering, laughing, brollies unfurled as the rain was discovered; men in evening dress and shiny pumps, most of them slightly tipsy from two too many champagne cocktails, while their ladies, with shingled hair and knee-length silk and chiffon dresses, handkerchief-pointed or fringed hems of uneven lengths fluttering and dancing below brocade or silver lamé wraps, hung giggling on their escort’s arm to huddle closer beneath the wavering umbrellas as they scuttled along the shining pavement on Cuban heels to waiting cars and taxis.

  ‘I wasn’t joking,’ Dicky said again. ‘After what happened last night.’

  The reminder brought Amy’s hazel eyes back to glare at him, her thin pencilled eyebrows arching to disappear beneath the brim of the cloche hat that hid her brown hair. She didn’t wish to remember last night. ‘All right, you weren’t joking. But I don’t see why I need marry you just because we got carried away.’

  His slim elegant form slumped in his seat. ‘You didn’t say that last night.’

  ‘That was different. I wasn’t thinking properly.’ She should have been thinking properly, now she was regretting every second of it.

  Dicky had sat up straight again. ‘I love you, Amy. If I didn’t love you, I would never have done what I did. I assumed you’d want to marry me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’ At eighteen why ever would she want to get married? She was having too much fun to settle into stuffy old marriage. ‘Come on, Dicky, start up your motor and take me home, there’s an angel.’

  ‘But we made love last night.’

  ‘And you forgot to be careful,’ she shot at him. ‘How do you think I feel? I wish it had never happened in the first place. Now take me home.’

  ‘Don’t you love me, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But last night …’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Take me home!’ Her exasperated cry made heads turn in her direction and she hastily lowered her voice. ‘If you don’t want to take me, I can get a taxi.’

  ‘There’s no need. I’ll take you.’ His face was a study in the glow of The Golden Turkey’s electric sign as he leaned forward and viciously punched the starter button, throwing forward the handbrake as the engine came to life with a deep rich roar. ‘You’ve made a fool of me, you know,’ he hissed.

  ‘You’ve made a fool of yourself,’ she hissed back and fell silent, remaining so for the rest of the journey through the shiny-wet streets with the West End traffic becoming slowly more sparse as they approached Bayswater and Queensway Terrace, one of the nicer parts of London where she lived with her parents, her younger sister Kay and twelve-year-old brother Henry, who was away at public school.

  Still annoyed by Dicky’s silly attitude, she didn’t even say good night as she got out of the car and hurried on through the wrought-iron gate, heels clicking angrily on the tiled path and up the steps to the porticoed front door. She knew he was still sitting there watching her as she pushed the bell for one of the servants to let her in, but she didn’t turn round.

  She’d see him again, of course. He’d soon get over this evening, all that maddening attentiveness as they danced, hardly giving her a chance to dance with anyone else, mooning over her even to the point of ignoring the couple of friends they had gone there with.

  He could be good fun if he would only stop being so possessive. It would do him good to stew a
little over what happened last night. It had been at Marjory Broome’s coming-out party. She and Dicky, borne off on the warm wings of a very potent punch, had found themselves in some maid’s attic bedroom in the quietening hours of early morning, the girl being occupied downstairs with the guests. Under the influence of punch and a variety of cocktails, lovemaking had been a new and wonderful experience, and terribly wicked for someone who had never done such a thing before. But he’d insisted she could trust him. And then he had got carried away and she, even with her inexperience, instinctively felt that something had gone horribly wrong.

  Embarrassed, he had apologised profusely, hastily adjusting his dress while she lay on the maid’s bed aware of the damp place beneath her and becoming more angry and frightened by the minute, hardly able to think straight. Since then she had been thinking very straight. It was said that a mistake on one’s first-ever affair seldom came to anything, and although there was a chance that it might, she had grown more and more sure that it wouldn’t, had made up her mind that it wouldn’t. Then had come Dicky’s silly proposal, bringing it all back.

  He should have known by her angry reaction at the time it happened that she would want nothing more to do with him, that way. Obviously he hadn’t – to the extent of his ridiculous offer of marriage. He was fun to be with. But marriage? To narrow-shouldered, slightly-built, fatuous if marvellously wealthy Dicky? Not in a million years. If something had happened to her, God forbid, she wouldn’t marry him, not even to save her good name. How she could have let him do what he’d done last night, him of all people … But she had been pretty squiffy at the time.

  She heard the car pull away as Alice, the parlour-cum-housemaid, opened the door to her, but she didn’t turn to watch it go.

  He was making himself scarce. Sulking no doubt. Whether he was really keeping out of her way or was genuinely unable to see her, she did hear that he’d gone up to Scotland for Christmas and would be staying until well after the New Year and might not be back in London for weeks.

  ‘He’s avoiding me,’ she told Polly Brooke who was on the point of becoming engaged to the tall, handsome and rich Meredith Quinn-Martin.

  ‘Why should he be avoiding you?’ Polly’s cornflower-blue eyes regarded her from the huge gilt-framed mirror as they retouched their make-up in the powder room of the Grosvenor where everyone was attending the Christmas Ball.

  ‘Because he proposed to me,’ Amy supplied.

  ‘Lucky old you.’ Polly’s eyes were concentrating on the rouging of her lips. ‘His family are stinking rich. Titled too. You heard his father was knighted last year. By King George himself. Something to do with industry – munitions or something during the last war. But, darling, what makes you think sweet, fascinating Richard Pritchard is avoiding you?’

  ‘Because I refused him.’

  Polly stopped rouging her lips to stare at her from the mirror as though Amy had lost all her senses. ‘My dear – you didn’t! You must be stark staring mad!’

  ‘I’m not in love with him – not in the least.’

  ‘Who cares? It isn’t as if he’s not good-looking. In fact he’s extremely good-looking. Those lovely shaped lips of his, and those gorgeous brown eyes, like almonds. And his eyebrows – they make a person tingle all over. He’s divine.’

  Amy’s own rouged lips pouted. ‘I suppose he is, in a limp sort of way.’

  Polly busied herself fishing in her gold lamé envelope bag for face powder. ‘I admit. But he’s only twenty. He’ll fill out after he’s twenty-one. They do, you know. All that little boy look gone. Pity. Though I imagine sweet Richard will always be slim and boyish and have every girl falling at his feet. You can’t allow it, Amy. You simply can’t. To miss a chance like that, refusing such a marvellous offer.’

  Amy didn’t reply. She was visualising the man of her dreams – tall, broad-shouldered, slender-hipped, strong handsome features: a man who’d pick her up in a pair of muscular arms and sweep her away with him. Someone like Rudolph Valentino, or better, Ramon Novarro, whom she considered far better-looking. But even her giddy young brain under its shingled light brown hair told her that such men existed only on the silver screen. Dicky was good-looking even if no one could call those ever-so-well-bred features strong, but she didn’t love him. Not really. And wealth could never compensate for the lack of love. For all his father, now Sir John Pritchard, was wealthy and Dicky as his eldest son was heir to everything, she just couldn’t see herself accepting him as a husband. Not that he was here, of course, to renew his offer, sulking up there in the Highlands of Scotland.

  By the time he did return to London, however, circumstances that had nothing to do with his being heir to pots of money had her reconsidering his offer of marriage.

  Over Christmas she developed a nasty cold, most annoying when one needed to look one’s prettiest. She managed to weather it with paint and powder and a cheery smile, but four days, into the New Year it developed into ’flu, putting her to bed. She lay there with every limb aching, praying Dicky wouldn’t come back to London and take it into his head to pay her a call. As much as she still had no intention of accepting his absurd marriage proposal, the last thing she wanted was to have him see her with a face all mottled and ugly beyond belief and a thermometer sticking out of her mouth, which Dr Lombard seemed to be coming daily to do as though it were his sole delight in this world.

  ‘He says you must stay there for at least another three weeks,’ her mother said after he and his beastly thermometer had departed for the umpteenth time.

  Dr Lombard was their elderly and fussy Harley Street physician who charged the earth for each visit. With him it was two pounds a sneeze.

  Not that his sizeable fees bothered them much – Daddy a City stockbroker with his Clubs, Mummy with her Good Causes rubbing shoulders with people such as Lady Harper and quite a few other titled ladies; a country retreat in Berkshire (a four-bedroomed ‘cottage’); summer holidays in France, in Provence mostly; here in Bayswater employing almost as large a staff as anyone in the area. It was just that, her thoughts inclined to ramble in her feverish state, she found herself dwelling on the fact that just one of Dr Lombard’s fees would be a fortune to someone like their parlourmaid Alice – would probably keep her type of family in food for months.

  The girl had been with them for about four years and she often noticed the girl’s peaky looks spoiling her otherwise extremely pretty face, but it had hardly concerned her until now. She knew little about her. Employers didn’t concern themselves with the lives of their employees outside work. It was fatal, as Amy had found out after having once had a chat with the girl. For a while she had become beset by thoughts of the poverty her family apparently endured in the East End of London, though in a totally different way to the Good Causes her mother indulged in with meetings and fétes and charity dinners. She’d even slipped Alice a shilling on odd occasions, but after a while it had died a natural death, and just as well. Her mother would have had a fit had she known. Tipping servants in secret – Mummy would have made something out of nothing, just as she was doing now.

  ‘Dr Lombard says it could be quite serious, similar to the epidemic in nineteen-nineteen. It carried off thousands, especially the poorer classes.’

  Amy grimaced. ‘Don’t be silly, Mummy. It’s just ordinary ’flu. I shall be fine in a week’s time.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ her mother said firmly, ‘Dr Lombard says you have to stay in bed for three weeks. By the way, that young Richard Pritchard called. I told him you had ’flu. He asked me to convey his sympathy and loving regards.’ She gave Amy an enquiring smile. ‘Is there something between you two, my dear?’

  ‘He’s just a friend.’ Friends had been calling all the time during her illness. The telephone had hardly stopped ringing.

  ‘He sounded more than just a friend, dear. So dreadfully concerned for you.’ Her tone was eager – the names of her daughter and the young Pritchard heir coupled together would be something to boast about to
her own friends. It didn’t do to tell Mummy too much. She always made so many mountains out of molehills.

  She frowned as a ’flu spasm made itself felt, her feverish head throbbing. ‘Just friends,’ she said. ‘I’d like to sleep a little now, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Yes, of course, dear.’ Quietly her mother tiptoed from the room, leaving her alone to nurse her thoughts about Dicky’s call and its implications.

  She was becoming worried. Her monthly period, which should have arrived, most inconveniently, around Christmas, hadn’t. In a way she’d been relieved at the delay, then without too much concern, had put its total absence down to her horrid cold. Her next usual should have begun two days ago, but again nothing. Probably ’flu was at fault this time she told herself, more occupied with the illness, and dismissed it to concentrate on overturning Dr Lombard’s predictions of three weeks in bed.

  She was in fact out of bed in two weeks – one in the eye for Lombard, she gloated. But with more time to think, the two missing periods had now begun to concern her a little. It had to be just being ill for so long. She pushed the more unutterable thought, pregnant, from her mind and prudently fell short of disclosing their non-appearance to her mother, but there was no hiding such things from her.

  ‘Is there anything wrong, dear? You are all right, aren’t you?’ she asked as Amy sat at her dressing table applying a little colour to her still-wan cheeks. Her mother, wearing a rather out-of-fashion afternoon dress of slate blue stood tall and dignified above Amy. Her brown hair, with only slight traces of grey, drawn loosely back into the same sort of chignon she’d probably worn as a girl of Amy’s age before the War, made her face seem far more narrow and gaunt than it really was. Amy lowered her eyes from her mother’s anxious regard in the mirror.

  ‘Of course I’m all right, Mummy.’

  ‘You would tell me if you were not?’

  ‘I’m quite recovered.’

  The hollows in Constance Harrington’s high-cheekboned face became even more hollow. ‘I am not referring to your recent illness, my dear. I mean in …’ She hesitated and then continued more firmly, a hint of distaste and disapproval in her tone. ‘In other ways.’