A Woman’s Fortune
The new novel from Sunday Times bestselling author Josephine Cox – the master storyteller.Finding a new beginning means taking the hardest road…but the journey is where you find your true courage.Torn away from their beloved home, the journey for the Carter family has just begun…In the middle of the night, Evie is torn away from her beloved home and close-knit community, as her family run away to the south. Her father's luck has finally run out but, what should mark a hopeful new beginning, is just the start of young Evie’s troubles.With the weight of her family's future on her shoulders, Evie has no-one to turn to. Her mother, worn down by life, runs off with a new man, and with her grandmother's sight failing, it's left to Evie to earn their keep and run the house. Holding her family together is only made harder when tragedy strikes at its heart.A lost letter from home means that Evie's only hope of a happy ending has been dashed, but she's determined to make a new future for herself and find her own fortune in life.Praise for Josephine Cox‘Cox's talent as storyteller never lets you escape the spell' Daily Mail‘Family secrets threaten to ruin everything in this beautiful tale of love and sadness’ Woman’s Own 'Another masterpiece' Best
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Josephine Cox 2018
Jacket design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Jacket photographs © Sandra Cunningham /Arcangel Images (background),
Magdalena Russocka /Trevillion Images (woman), Shutterstock.com (sky)
Josephine Cox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008128234
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008128586
Version: 2018-09-21
For my Ken – as always
Table of Contents
Shenty Street, Bolton, Lancashire
She’d seen him around here only a couple of times before, a scruffy-looking man with his cap pulled low and his collar raised high. He had a furtive air, not looking directly at anyone in the street and skulking in the shadows instead of greeting folk with a cheery ‘All right?’ in the usual way. Round here, everyone knew everyone else – and their business – so Evie was certain this man was a stranger. And, from his manner, he was up to no good.
The question was, what did he want with her dad?
She’d now come into the kitchen to make sure her brothers, Peter and Robert, were getting on with their homework, leaving her mum and Grandma Sue folding the dried clothes ready to be ironed. Now, standing just inside, the back door partly closed to conceal her, Evie watched her father and the stranger. The two men faced each other in the shadowy alleyway between the Carters’ house and the next row of terraces. Evie could plainly see both men in profile, her father taller, younger and more handsome than the weaselly-looking fella. The stranger was saying something in a voice too low for her to hear and then Dad, who had been smiling, no doubt laying on the charm, muttered something in return and began to look less happy. The next moment the man, his expression aggressive, was wagging a finger in Dad’s face. Evie was surprised to see her father’s shoulders slump and he no longer met the other man’s eye. She was half ashamed to be snooping and half afraid that here was bad news on the way and she ought to see if she could do something about it before her mum heard. This wouldn’t be the first time Dad had got in a bit of a tight corner, and Mum had lost a bit of her sparkle of late.
Since Evie had left school to help her mother and Grandmother Sue with the washing business she was more aware of what everyone in the family was up to. It wasn’t always bad news with Dad, but there had been some weeks when money was especially tight after he’d had a long evening at the pub, celebrating or commiserating some event with ‘the lads’, especially if the bookie’s runner had been there collecting the stake on some nag that Dad had been told was ‘a certainty’ to win and make his fortune, and which had eventually cantered in well down the field.
Michael Carter was never down for long and, with his irrepressible high spirits, would shrug off his setbacks and carry on regardless, sweeping aside any difficulties as if they weren’t happening. But Mum was sometimes impatient with him these days, and the older she got the more Evie could see Mum’s point of view. Somehow Dad’s jokes weren’t as funny as they used to be, and Evie understood why her mother was beginning to look worn down and her smile had grown, like herself, thin. You couldn’t live on laughs, after all.
What was that word Mary had used when Evie had once confided how annoying Dad’s charm could be when you recognised how he worked it on you? Exasperating. Mary Sullivan, Evie’s best friend, was clever. She always had her head in a book and knew a whole dictionary of good words. She even
