Eleanor stood shivering in the chill autumn air, the pavement slick beneath her boots. It had been a cold, dull November, the whole world still gripped in the awful depression that had hit almost exactly a year ago. Yet today Eleanor felt nothing but hope.
The last ten years had not been easy. With Katherine’s help, she’d applied for a place on a typing course, and been accepted. Her parents had reacted to this change of plans with some chagrin, but in the autumn of 1921 they had allowed her to leave Goswell and take up a position as a typist for a solicitor, down in London. She had lodgings in a perfectly respectable boarding house and wrote to her parents every week.
And for nine years she’d worked hard and gone once a month to visit Jack – she could only think of him as Jack – in Reading Gaol.
In the last ten years much had changed. James and Katherine had reconciled, and moved into their own house in Whitehaven. They now had three children, and Eleanor had travelled up on the train to visit them as often as she could. Her mother’s health had broken down over the last decade, and two years ago her grandmother had died. Last year her father had retired, and Bower House was empty now, the vicarage about to be occupied by the new vicar, a single man named David James.
And Eleanor’s life was finally about to begin. The doors across from where she waited on the street corner opened, and her heart lurched. She started forward, only to stop when she saw it was a stranger. She stepped back, her heart still beating hard. She’d been waiting a long time. She could wait a little longer.
Another ten minutes passed, and it began to rain a needling sort of drizzle. Eleanor pulled the brim of her cloche hat further down and hunched her shoulders against the cold.
The door opened again, and here at last he was, looking older and thinner in the street clothes he hadn’t worn in a decade, his coat hanging off his shoulders. He was no longer the robust young man, healthy and hale, who had given her a garden, but he was still the man she loved. He glanced around, and Eleanor stepped forward.
He turned, and recognition and relief softened his haggard features. He smiled and began to walk towards her.
“Jack,” she said, and stepped into his arms.