Voice of the Heart by Barbara Taylor Bradford

Author:Barbara Taylor Bradford [Bradford, Barbara Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-79-533874-8
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Three months later, Terrence Ogden walked briskly across the ancient Market Place in Ripon, dropped a large manilla envelope in the post box and went into the first tobacconist’s shop he saw. He bought a newspaper and a packet of cigarettes, exchanged a friendly word with the girl behind the counter, and swung through the door of the shop, whistling under his breath.

He headed out of the Market Place, past the Town Hall and the Wakeman’s House, and down the hill at a rapid pace, returning to the Spa Hotel at the edge of town where the cast and crew of Wuthering Heights were staying.

It was a Saturday morning in late June, and the kind of glorious summer day he remembered so vividly from his childhood, but which had been sadly infrequent in the ensuing years. Or so it seemed to him. Terry wondered absently if, in the way that memory can play peculiar tricks, he had simply imagined those golden days of his early boyhood. Perhaps the summers had been as inclement then as they were now. A faintly ironic gleam flashed in his light blue eyes. It was odd how the lovely weather, whether real or a figment of his imagination, was the only pleasant thing he remembered about those poverty-stricken years of growing up in Sheffield. All his other recollections had a desperate, almost Dickensian flavour to them. Empty belly. Patched clothes. Socks so darned they were all darn. Broken-down shoes letting the snow and the rain seep through. Dad on the dole. And when he was working, it was down the pit, filling his lungs full of coal dust. Mam scrubbing and cleaning, washing, ironing, charring for the rich. Old before she was young.

Terry shrugged and blinked and discarded these thoughts. They served no purpose now. Those days were long gone. Times had changed in merry old England and he, thank God, had been able to change his parents’ lives. And for the better. He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders, feeling healthier than he had in years. Terrence Ogden was also a somewhat chastened man after his drunken brawl with Rupert Reynolds earlier in the year. He was fully conscious that he had had a close call, a brush with death, and he had taken himself in hand, with firmness. If he was not exactly abstinent, he had cut down on his drinking considerably, and had thrown all of his energies into his work. Now he wondered vaguely where Reynolds had skipped off to, where he was hiding. Norman had said he was most likely on the Continent. Not far enough away for me, Terry mumbled under his breath.

‘Hey, Terry, what’s the hurry, me old cock?’

Terry swung around. Jerry Massingham, astride a bicycle, was pedalling down the road as if his life depended on it, his red hair mussed by the light breeze, his coat flapping out behind him. Dressed in an unsuitable heavy tweed suit, a Viyella shirt and a canary-yellow wool tie, Jerry looked like a country doctor on his morning rounds.

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