The Last Book

Was it too late for Maggie to find a way to help her lonely master open his heart again?

- Celia Bryce

Take you with me? Aunty Maggie, you must have lost your senses. You’ll lose your position... And I’ll get blamed for it. Might even lose my own job.’ Paul was a great one for bursts of outrage, yet just as quickly fell out of them. ‘Make you some tea, will I?’

Maggie pulled off her coat, flopped into the chair by the range and warmed her hands. ‘Maybe I have lost my senses,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll have no work to go to in the end, but I want to come with you. I can’t stand it, day after day, wondering about Miss Harriet.’ She shook her head. ‘And that poor man... so alone...’

There was a snort as Paul riddled the fire in the stove. ‘That poor man? I’m sorry he lost his wife so young but as for the rest of it – he’s brought that down on himself. If it hadn’t been for him being so rigid, his daughter wouldn’t have run off like that.’

Maggie sighed. The lad shouldn’t be saying such things about Mr Sheldon. One way or another, he employed both of them, and Paul’s father.

The boy went about making tea. He was only 15, but with the opinions of a man twice his age. She was inordinately fond of him, though. As she was of Harriet Sheldon who’d run off, got married and now lived miles away. She missed the girl, missed her smiles, her love of life.

‘And it’s him who should be going, not you, nor me,’ Paul said. ‘That’s what I think.’

Maggie wondered if this really was what he thought, or had his mother been filling his head? She was outspoken on a lot of things, had all sorts of strange and unsettling ideas, like votes for women. A miner’s wife. Who would have believed it?