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Back Sisters of Gold Save as PDF
Chapters (64)
  1. Cover
  2. Title page
  3. Dedication page
  4. A Week’s Work in Birmingham
  5. I
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. II
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. Thirty-Nine
  46. III
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Forty-Three
  51. Forty-Four
  52. Forty-Five
  53. Forty-Six
  54. Forty-Seven
  55. Forty-Eight
  56. Forty-Nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-One
  59. Fifty-Two
  60. Fifty-Three
  61. Acknowledgements
  62. Further Reading
  63. About the Author
  64. By the Same Author

Annie, as she grew older, thrived on teaching. She had a towering personality and was happy to boss and command even when a number of the village children were nearly twice her size. Margaret liked the company of children. She was gentler and more hesitant, but she did her part, with Bible stories and nature walks. She wondered whether she should be a missionary teacher. They grew up with the idea that they were supposed to be something and when God had decided what that was, He would deliver His message.

Their mother fell ill before the Christmas of 1898. The doctor called every day, treading softly as his patient lay on white pillows, the nightcap sliding from her greying hair as she twisted restlessly. Her lungs heaved and rattled. She took the girls’ hands and smiled at them, hardly able to speak.

When the pneumonia stopped her breath, it doused the family’s joyful flame for good.

Margaret was thirteen, Annie eleven. Their father became silent, forbidding. He employed a housekeeper, Alice Lamb, a straightforward woman from the congregation who, in her late forties, was grieving her own lack of husband and family. The minister’s children were never a substitute she could love as her own but she did her best at least to feed and clothe and pay attention to them.

William Hanson wrapped the Lord about him. But he seldom seemed to feel any joy. Margaret, sensing all his sorrow and being in awe of her father, tried to reach him by pleasing him.

‘Father – would you like a little walk down by the river?’ she might ask on a Saturday afternoon. ‘The air would do you good.’

She would walk with him, trying to get him to talk to her. He strode in his long black coat, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes he spoke about his calling as a youth, standing in a summer field and feeling the mantle of God falling upon him.

‘I knew,’ was all he would say. That kind of knowing would brook no argument. ‘I felt God’s presence and I knew I dared not refuse.’

She would ask him things – about the grandparents in Shropshire that they had never known, about the Bible. Things which would please and soothe him.

But as the years passed, he became more rigid. Graces at mealtimes grew longer; he could not bear the girls to wear bright colours and insisted they reduce their clothing to seemly grey and black and read only religious books on a Sunday. He became overbearing and flew into a rage at the slightest sign of anyone crossing him – as, increasingly, Annie did.