A Brighter Tomorrow - Maggie Ford (thriller novels to read .txt) 📗

well as Tuesday, Doctor Lowe being eager to see her expand her talent as an artist. She hadn’t seen him yesterday either, it being Christmas Eve, when his family had expected him to be with them. They did not consider what he did here as work and therefore an obligation.

‘I come as a favour to my father’s old friend,’ he’d once told her. ‘I studied medicine at university and am now with my father’s practice.’

His father practised in Harley Street. Why Doctor Lowe himself didn’t Ellie was left wondering but of course never asked, though his work here in the East End seemed to pay well enough.

‘It was my father’s wish that I study medicine,’ Michael had once told her. ‘I had an interest in art and found I had a talent for it. I would love to have been an artist, but it wasn’t to be. I was never that good. So now I am teaching you.’

He had smiled wryly at that, a smile she had from the first found very attractive. The smile fading, he added, ‘I really haven’t the talent you have.’ He’d waved away her protest. ‘I know enough, technically, to teach a little, but one day you’ll have to find a tutor who can give you more than I ever can. Eventually you’re going to have to move on, Miss Jay.’

He no longer called her Miss Jay, but Ellie, and had asked that she call him Michael rather than Mr Deel. ‘It’s silly to be so formal,’ he’d said.

She missed him today – could hardly wait for Thursday to come – and was sure he must be feeling the same about her. No word had ever passed between them of such feelings, but it was the way he looked at her, the way he guided her hand, would stand close to her as they surveyed the results of her evening’s efforts.

It was nice to have him call her Ellie, since everyone else called her Miss Jay, apart from Doctor Lowe, who mostly used the term ‘my dear’. He had once asked what the name Ellie stood for, and when she had told him it was her mother’s derivative from Elizabeth, he’d said he preferred that; but he seldom, if ever, spoke it. It was usually, ‘my dear’.

He had no idea that she and Michael seemed to be growing slowly closer to each other, merely being glad that tutor and pupil were getting on so well. Today she caught herself time after time thinking of Michael Deel and how he was enjoying himself, wondering whether he was thinking of her in the same way. She would never have dreamed of asking him, but with her thoughts came recollection of his words: ‘Eventually you’re going to have to move on.’

Suddenly she didn’t want to move on; but common sense told her that it was inevitable, some time or another. She had no fancy to stay with Doctor Lowe all her life and she had to find her father. That meant she’d need to be independent, which would mean earning her living. The only thing she knew was being in service and that she refused to contemplate.

One way was to develop her talent as an artist, enough to earn some sort of living, necessitating her moving on and losing touch with Michael. That thought made her sad – sad enough to almost ruin her evening. But then, who was she? No one. If their interest in each other did develop, his well-to-do family would never countenance a union with someone of no account. They probably already had in mind the right sort of wife for him, when he was ready.

Shutting her mind, Ellie took a quick sip of the drop of port Doctor Lowe had given her despite his wife’s frown, and turned her thoughts to the party – Mrs Jenkins chatting with Dora and Rose, Mrs Lowe with her sister and brother-in-law. They seemed amicable enough, despite having had that falling-out, perhaps because now she wasn’t in their household any longer. Next to Ellie, Doctor Lowe was talking of famous paintings and old masters – quite boring, but it would soon be bedtime and then she could dream of Michael.

As she had hoped, he arrived on the Thursday, though little work was done, with the time mostly spent talking of their separate Christmas experiences. She hardly stopped talking of the wonders of such a full table, the mounds of food there had been.

‘When I was at home,’ she said, as she attempted to make something of the picture she’d been required to paint, ‘we weren’t all that well off, so we just had what we could afford.’

She’d never told him of her real upbringing. It would have shocked him. But he knew her family hadn’t been well off. After all, anyone who had been employed as a housemaid wouldn’t have well-off parents. But, refusing to be ashamed of her roots, she had always been open with him, at least up to a point.

He in turn surprised her by saying how boring his Christmas had been. ‘Just me and my parents and my sister and her husband. We all went to bed quite early, actually.’ He made it seem such an ordinary day that she felt privileged to have enjoyed such a hearty time at the Lowes’.

‘But I’m glad you had such a nice time,’ he went on. ‘I thought of you and hoped you’d be enjoying yourself.’ Suddenly he rounded on her. ‘Ellie, would it be possible for me to ask Doctor Lowe if I could take you out one evening?’

‘Take me out?’ she echoed, a brush full of yellow paint in her hand in the act of adding tints to a sunset she’d been attempting under his guidance.

He had in fact taken her out before, with Doctor Lowe’s permission. It had been a Monday, the twenty-ninth of October. With the Boer War having come to an end on the thirtieth of September, the soldiers had