The Journey Home

Chapter 1 - A Grudge Not Forgotten September 1862

She stood at the window watching the activity of servant below her, tending the stamp sized kitchen garden, just recently gone past peak in the waning days of summer. The Mistress was awaiting the arrival of her brother, John, who had business to discuss with her related to their mother, but what he could want of her, she could hardly guess. John lived with their mother, who for so many years served as the matriarch of the Milton mill masters. It was only right, that her brother should have responsibility for their aging mother. He had never married, and required mother's services as mistress and hostess of his house within the dreary stone walls of Marlborough Mills. Mother, the house, masters and Marlborough Mills; it reminded her that the grand dinner party that Mother once hosted, so long a tradition of Milton mill owners, would not take place this year, due to Mother's failing health.

Scanning her own heavily fringed sitting room, the Mistress recalled one dinner party in particular; the image of that dark haired girl and her bumbling father, who came from the south and caused so much commotion in their town. The girl and her father had attended a dinner party at their home many years ago, dressed in the latest London fashion, a dream of white silk and coral, set off against unusually dark hair. The envy and inferiority still rose in the Mistresses throat. This haughty creature of a girl had little to say to anyone, but stole the evening away - a stranger among Milton's first families - was the subject of all the corner conversations of the evening.

In the Mistress' mind, it was a moment of great embarrassment for herself as that year's party was intended to showcase her own refinements and draw in eligible husbands. At 19 years old she was set on landing Mr. Hamper, the youngest mill owner other than her brother; but the evening was wasted, as Hamper was preoccupied with some business about a strike and she was too busy explaining to others her family's relation to this girl and her father. "Poor as church mice, and him keeping a family on a tutor's salary - hmmmf!" she would whisper to the ladies. Wasn't her brother a pupil of the old parson? Oh! such an embarrassment, trying to explain why a grown man would spend time with an old, dusty southerner and his daughter, who never seemed to be happy unless they were spending their time among the filthy, striking workers and their grimy children. Too snobby to do as the rest of Milton, working for a living, and earning their keep. Then there was that awful business rumored around town, that her brother had made the girl an offer and she had the audacity to turn him down. "Tsk tsk, it ruined him,'" she thought "condemned him to the fate of a life long bachelor. No children to carry on the name of Thornton, no successors to his business."

"Margaret Hale," she whispered to herself. What ever became of the wretched girl with her arrogance, who was so full of herself that she actually turned down an offer from her brother John, the best catch in Milton. She had heard that the girl had fled to Spain, once her mother and father had died. Such mystery surrounded that girl. Could she possibly have secreted away looking for that man she was having an affair with all those years ago? Likely a wrinkled up old maid, too coarse and brown from the sun for the likes of any proper society. "I told you so, John," she said outloud and smiled to herself. "Margaret Hale would never have you."