Dreams Can Come True Read Free

they owned or chuckling over a happening in their day. That was what their relationship was all about. Maggie and Betty, as she called Miss Rosemary, Maggie and Betty against the world. There had been a forty-year age gap between them, but they had been soul mates, caring for each other as good friends should. Now there was no one to fill that gap. She had her husband and there were the children, but they all got on with whatever interested them and only met up in the evenings for meals.
    Jack, her husband, had become involved in the horse racing business. Mikey, her son, was the front man for the company they ran. Hannah, her stepdaughter, attended college in nearby Chester. It was a sort of finishing school for young ladies, but they learnt to do household accounts as well.
    Maggie toyed with the silver ink well that Betty had given her one time as a present. Such a long time ago now – nearly twenty years. The dressmaker had been the only one in the village of Neston to give the raggedy Irish immigrant girl a chance. Without her, Maggie would never have risen to the status she was enjoying now. She would probably still be a farm labourer’s wife, giving birth to a child each year.
    Poor Betty. The harsh winter had brought down the young and the elderly. Though Selwyn Lodge was quite a warm place, Betty would still insist on venturing out in her dog cart to play canasta with her elderly friends from the church. She had caught a chill and too weak to throw it off and she had died. Maggie had felt like a wounded animal; she had felt her friend’s death more than she had mourned when her own dear mother had gone. She still looked at the chair that Betty had sat in, expecting her to be sat in it, still thought she heard Betty’s tread on the stairway, still expected to greet her friend at breakfast each morning and still looked out into the garden to see if she was pottering there.
    It had been the company that Maggie and Betty had started, that had kept her sane over that following year: that and the inheritance that her friend had left her. So much to sort through and so much to gain. Selwyn Lodge had been given to Maggie, with a request that it be loved as much as Betty had loved it. A thousand pounds from the good lady’s bank account and every thing that was Betty’s share, in all that they owned together. Thus, Maggie became the outright owner of the Sheldon Loan and Property Company. She couldn’t believe how her initial investment had grown.
    At seventeen, she had entrusted Miss Rosemary with the secret contents of the feather mattress that she had brought with her from her old home. Little did she know that the mattress held her ex-employer’s Granddad Filbey’s savings, until she came across the money while stitching up a loosened seam. The dressmaker had started a small company for Maggie which had gone from strength to strength, giving her protégé’s money out as loans. Then she had merged it with her own rental interests and the Sheldon Loan and Property Company had been born.
    “ Mrs. Haines,” Olive, her maid, knocked urgently on the door.
    “Cook wants ter know if the Master will be in for supper. Do yer know if he’s coming back tonight?”
    Maggie opened the door to her maid, glad of the interruption. Maybe she should go and wallow in a hot bath, then lay herself down for an hour.
    “I think so, Olive, I didn’t ask him this morning. But he probably will be, he’s only gone to Chester today.”
    The maid bobbed a curtsey and ran off down the stairs to the kitchen. She had only been working at Selwyn Lodge for a week or so and Maggie felt she had a lot to learn. Mary, the maid before Olive, had been a faithful servant from the start, but had gone back home to nurse her mother. Things had changed so much since Betty had died. She felt bereft now that her friend wasn’t there.
    Maggie lay in her comforting bath and thought back to when her husband had made his reappearance. It had been a few