Cover

RITA BRADSHAW

One Snowy Night

Dedication page

For Muffin, my precious little furry baby,

who helps keep his mum sane in this mad world.

Acknowledgements

The following books helped enormously with research for this story:

The Langhorne Sisters by James Fox

My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst

Tommy Turnbull, A Miner’s Life by Joe Robinson

Durham Miners’ Millennium Book by David Temple

PART ONE

Betrayal

1922

Chapter One

It was the first week of March. The bitter north-east wind was such that it sliced into flesh like a knife, and the young woman gingerly picking her way on the compressed snow was muffled up to the eyeballs, her felt hat pulled well down over her forehead and her woolly scarf covering the bottom half of her face. The deepening twilight was offset by the brilliance of the mantle of white covering the trees and hedgerow in the lane she was walking down, but Ruby Morgan was blind to the winter wonderland around her and the glow of the setting sun.

It was the eve of her wedding. She should be home dealing with the last bits and pieces that still needed to be done, she told herself, not tramping about in the freezing cold and getting chilled to the bone. Her mam had said much the same thing as she’d pulled on her outdoor things:

‘What on earth is your Adam thinking of, Ruby, asking you to meet him in Snowdrop Lane tonight of all nights? It’s a good fifteen minutes’ walk and the pavements are lethal. You’ll go a cropper and end up hobbling down the aisle with a stick tomorrow – that’d be a fine state of affairs, wouldn’t it! If he wants to see you, what’s wrong with him coming here? Barmy, this is, lass.’

Ruby hadn’t argued. She agreed with her mother. But it had seemed disloyal to Adam to admit it, and so she had merely shrugged and continued buttoning her coat.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ Her mother had appealed to the other two people sitting at the kitchen table, her tone sharp. Ruby’s father had disappeared behind his newspaper by way of reply, which hadn’t surprised her. Since he’d come home from the war he was a shell of his former self, having watched both his sons die in the carnage of the Somme campaign and sustaining serious injuries himself in the last months of the war in the heavy fighting on the Western Front. But – Ruby’s brow wrinkled – Olive had been unusually quiet. Normally her sister had an opinion about everything. Although Olive was only three years her senior she was as sour as an old maid and they had never got on. It was rare her sister missed an opportunity to add her two penn’orth to things, especially if Olive could side with their mam against her.