Daisy’s Betrayal
Rescued from destitution and poverty…but at what price?When charming Lawson Maddox asks Daisy Drake to become his wife she jumps at the chance to better herself. But with the honeymoon over he shows his true colours, and Daisy’s life descends into loveless chaos.The appearance of John Mallory Gibson, a sensitive and idealistic painter, offers Daisy the prospect of real happiness, which she finds hard to refuse.But Lawson will not let go of her, and he embarks on an unscrupulous quest for revenge that threatens to shatter Daisy and her entire family . . .
Читать Daisy’s Betrayal онлайн беплатно
NANCY CARSON
Daisy’s Betrayal
Published by Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2016
Copyright © Nancy Carson 2016
Cover illustration © Debbie Clement 2016
Nancy Carson 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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008166908
Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780008134853
Version: 2017-11-13
Table of Contents
Daisy Drake had always been able to summon up a picture of the man she might eventually marry. Apart from the essential virtues of being tall, lean, excessively handsome, kind and, of course, gentile, he would be reasonably well off and never inhibited about showing his affection – even in public. He would also be a patient man; patient not only with her but with her family as well. Such high marital expectations for a lowly working-class girl like Daisy might have been unrealistically optimistic, but her self-esteem was high and she never doubted that such a man existed and would eventually emerge through the Black Country’s industrial murk. By the time she was twenty-two however, her imagined bridegroom still had not shown up and the thought had already crossed her mind that maybe she was destined to be an old maid.
Daisy was born in Dudley in Worcestershire on 18th May 1866 to Mary and Titus Drake. Mary had wanted the baby named after her own mother, Rhiain who was Welsh, but Titus would have no further truck with anything that came out of Wales. Better to call his new daughter after his own mother, Hannah. After some spirited – but never serious –arguments when Welsh and English forebears had been equally disparaged, they settled on neither, and Daisy emerged as the favourite. ‘There’s ne’er another wench like thee, our Daisy, yo’m a one-off,’ he used to tell the little girl proudly in his dense Black Country accent, tousling the dark ringlets that hung down her neck in thick coils. It irritated her to death but she loved him, and he loved her; small, wiry Titus Drake, iron puddler.
Titus told his young daughter casually that while he was at work, sweating over a searing hot hearth, puddling iron, he could sink eighteen pints of beer on a hot summer’s day.
‘Eighteen pints?’ Daisy queried, wide-eyed with incredulity.
‘Eighteen pints and I never get sozzled! We sweat it out, see. All the blokes drink like fish, working in that heat. The gaffers gi’ it us free. We even have a beer boy to keep we topped up.’
‘Why don’t you drink water, Father?’
‘Drink wairter? You couldn’t drink the wairter, my angel. You wouldn’t dare drink the wairter. It’d gi’ yer the ballyache and the squits. Yo’d be off th’ooks for days and lose time at work.’
From the point of view of other folks Titus Drake was nobody special, just an unskilled ironworker. To Daisy, though, he was everything. On Saturday afternoons he would say, ‘Come on, our bab, we’m off somewheer,’ and he would take her over the Oakham woodland, known as the Dingle, and show her the bluebells in spring; they were so dense you couldn’t walk anywhere without treading on them. In the autumn, they would take a basket and gather mushrooms and make mushroom soup when they returned home. Everything they saw, every bird, every nervous animal, every swaying flower, every gnarled tree, he had something to say about and made it all so interesting and vivid. Life was always exciting. There was so much to see, so much to learn about. Once, they gathered blackberries to make wine and, when they returned home with baskets full, he asked Daisy to help him make it.
‘Pour the sugar in now, my wench,’ he said stirring the must.
Unfortunately, washing soda came in blue bags identical to those the sugar was packed in and … Well, it was an easy mistake … But together they just laughed and laughed.
