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Alice’s Secret: A gripping story of love, loss and a historical mystery finally revealed
Chapter One
Alice always tried hard to avoid looking at the clock that hung over the door of the tiny schoolroom at the mill. The room had just one small window, high in the wall at one end, opposite the door. It let in a bit of light in the summer, but the room was gloomy in the winter, so the paraffin lamps were always lit. At least it meant that Alice’s pupils couldn’t gaze idly out of the window. In fact, they were mostly pleased to be there, away from the noise of the mill, the humid heat, the impatient shouts of the overlookers, and the ever-present danger of the machines.
The room had been turned from a storeroom into a classroom when a new law obliged the mill owner, Mr Weatherall, to school the children employed at the mill for half the day. With the village school a long walk from the mill, it made sense to Mr Weatherall to have a schoolroom on site, to make sure that the children were on hand to work all the hours available to them. By the end of the week, the younger ones often fell asleep at their desks, faces cradled on scrawny arms that didn’t look strong enough for the work that they had to perform, dazed with fatigue, for hour after hour.
Alice would gladly share small scraps of her lunch with whichever of her pupils looked the frailest and most hollow-eyed that day, even though Alice rarely had enough food for herself. Her income was all they had to support her family. Yet it hadn’t always been like this. Alice could remember a time when life wasn’t quite such a struggle. A time when her father Joe was around, and Sarah, her mother, had seemed somehow lighter, brighter and more carefree. Alice had an abiding memory from childhood of a gift of a little frog that her father had found by the roadside. Caught unawares, it had been pretending to be a stone, steadfast in its belief that no one could see it, until he had picked it up in his handkerchief and carried it gently home. She hadn’t been sure whether to be pleased or alarmed by the gift, reaching out with a hesitant finger to poke the creature, then squealing when it hopped. Sarah came through from the kitchen to see what the fuss was about.
‘Take the horrid thing out of here,’ she scolded, as Joe tried valiantly to recapture it. ‘Whatever were you thinking of, bringing it into the house?’
When Alice’s father cornered the frog, he seized it by its hind leg and chased Sarah back into the kitchen, threatening to put it down the back of her dress. Alice squealed again and ran after them.
‘Get off with you! What do you think you’re playing at?’ protested Sarah. Joe held the frog behind his back and leaned in to kiss Sarah. Momentarily distracted, he loosened his grip and away hopped the frog, across the kitchen floor, to take refuge behind the mop.
Alice had few other memories of her father apart from this vivid one. She remembered him as small and wiry, with bright blue eyes in a tanned face. She knew that he had worked away from home a lot, and that there seemed to be hardly any time when Sarah wasn’t either pregnant or nursing a small baby. Then, with a family of five to feed, suddenly he wasn’t there any more. Alice was so used to her father’s absences that it wasn’t until the littlest one was starting to walk that she realised that he hadn’t been home since she was born. She tried to ask Sarah about it, but her face became shuttered and she turned away. Alice grew up not only unsure whether her father had died or just left them, but with a sense of the impermanence of happiness.
Alice’s childhood had been scented by the smell of herbs cooking together in a pot over the fire. From an early age, she’d helped her mother plant and tend coriander, garlic, marigolds, rue, spearmint and tansy in the garden, providing the basic ingredients for the decoctions, pills and potions she prepared so carefully for all those who sought her help. Some of the other herbal ingredients – skullcap, bogbean and bog myrtle – were better collected from the wild, needing the damp conditions down amongst the woods in the valley, where they thrived in the secret places known to Alice’s mother Sarah and the generations before her.
When she was a child, it was normal to Alice that the evenings, whether in the cold depths of winter or the dusky twilight of summer, would bring visitor after visitor to the kitchen door as the workers made their way home from the mill. It was Alice’s job when she was small to light the candle that stood in a jar beside the door, to act as a marker for those in search of a remedy for a persistent cough, or for ‘spinning jenny sickness’, the lung affliction caused by the fine fabric fluff filling the mill air that left them gasping for breath. They came in search of something to ease nervous complaints or for rheumatic joints made painful by long hours held captive at the mercy of the machines.
Sarah patiently spooned potions and creams into the glass jars and pots that her customers brought with them to save a few farthings, offering soothing words to help comfort the distress that was apparent to her on a daily basis. Her skill and sympathy brought visitors to her from beyond the immediate village and she never turned anyone away, day or night. She was driven by something apart from her wish to help others: she had a need to make enough money to be able to keep her family out of the mill where she herself had suffered so much for a time a few years previously. Now the local doctor, made angry by Sarah’s success in treating the villagers and therefore taking away what he saw as income rightly belonging to him, had threatened her with investigation by the local magistrate. This uncertainty over her status had driven even loyal customers away, her regular clients now making the trek to Nortonstall for their remedies instead, or trying to trust the local doctor, who favoured mercury and bleeding as cures for most illnesses. Sarah, laid low by illness and exhaustion, was unable to make enough to feed the family. So, it was with a heavy heart that Alice had approached the mill in search of work. An educated pauper, and a girl at that, stood very little chance of any other gainful employment in the immediate area.
On her worst days, when it poured with rain all day and the journey to work left her sodden, mud-spattered and wretched before she even began, Alice would wonder about the living hell that they had all found themselves in, and what the people of these hills and valleys had done to deserve it. On other days, in spring or autumn, when the sun shone and the birds sang as she walked the path to work, life seemed almost tolerable. Hot summer days brought a hell of their own, the temperature inside the weaving shed unbearable, the doors flung open only to allow more sultry heat inside.
Alice knew, however, that she was one of the few fortunate ones at the mill. Her mother had sent her at a young age to be taught how to read and write by a retired schoolteacher who lived in the village. Elsie Lister had once taught the children of the local landowners at the grammar school. She had seemed an enormous age to the young Alice, but she was probably no more than fifty, worn down by illness, and then by poverty after she became too ill to work. Sarah, Alice’s mother, had struck a bargain with Elsie: lessons for Alice in return for herbal remedies, and the deal had stuck over the years it took for Alice to learn the alphabet, perfect her letters, understand punctuation, spelling and all the other things that had enabled her over time to become her mother’s scribe and record-keeper. She kept details of Sarah’s remedies, transactions and recipes in a hand that matured from a round, childish script to a confident, flowing copperplate. Even when Alice’s writing education was complete, she had continued to visit Elsie, reading to her as her eyesight failed, helping with errands and small chores now that she had no other family. She had missed her when she died, for Alice’s education had taken her to a place that none of her family could comprehend, and left her isolated there. All she had left to remember Elsie by was a little brooch, an enamelling of a sprig of lavender. Having never seen anything so fine, it had fascinated Alice as a child and Elsie, who must have been aware that the end was close, had gifted it to Alice just before she died. She’d pressed it into her hand, closing Alice’s fingers around it, and brushing away her protest.
‘What use is it to me, bed-bound all the day and night? Am I supposed to wear it on my nightgown? It needs to be worn – you must take it and be sure to wear it every day, to remind you of what you have learnt and who you are now.’
Alice felt lucky that her period of full-time employment in the mill had been limited and she had been given the chance to teach for part of the day. She loved the time that she spent in the classroom and dreaded having to usher her pupils out, sending them all, herself included, into what she often thought of as the jaws of hell. Alice knew that the mill exploited her. She received very little extra in her pay packet for all her hours of teaching, far less than they would have had to pay a trained teacher to come in from outside. But she so relished the time that she didn’t have to spend on the mill floor that she didn’t challenge the situation. Which is why she tried hard not to look at the schoolroom clock – not because time was dragging, but because it went by too fast.
Chapter Two
Alice suffered mixed emotions when Ramsay, the mill manager, told her that someone had been appointed to teach arithmetic to her pupils. This topic was the least favourite part of her morning and she’d often guiltily allowed reading and writing to expand into the allotted arithmetic hour, simply because she enjoyed teaching these subjects much more. Although she could teach basic sums, she felt unqualified to go much beyond that. She didn’t appreciate that her work with Sarah on remedy calculations and costings were as valuable as the hours spent in Elsie’s company had been in advancing her reading and writing. But, as Alice realised with a heavy heart, having someone else come in to teach arithmetic would mean that she would have an extra hour or so each day on the mill floor.
For all his brusqueness, Alice had found Ramsay a fair and thoughtful manager, enquiring after her mother’s health and occasionally sending a small gift home for her.
‘The wife’s been jam-making again. Can’t abide the stuff mysen. But mebbe the goosegogs will do your ma some good,’ he said, thrusting a small pot of delicate-pink gooseberry conserve into Alice’s hands as she left for home. Or, ‘The hen’s been doin’ a second shift wi’out us asking it. The wife can’t keep up,’ handing over half a dozen eggs packed into a straw-filled box with an equal quantity of freshly baked scones on top.
Alice blushed as she stammered her thanks. The gifts were not only kind, but thoughtful. Sarah’s illness had left her so low in energy that she could no longer go beyond fulfilling the basic household duties. The fruit and vegetables went unpicked, so the pies, jams and chutneys that had seen the family through previous hard times no longer filled the larder shelves. Alice did her best to fill the gaps when she got home from work, or on her precious day off, taking over all the chores on that day so that Sarah could simply rest. Try as she might, though, she didn’t seem to find time to fit in all the extra work. Four-year-old Beattie was too young to help and while Annie and Thomas, who were eight and ten, did what they could, cooking was beyond them. Alice had her sights set on training up her younger sister Ella but, at the age of twelve, she showed no signs of being anything other than the most basic cook or housekeeper. She’d rush through her chores and, before anyone noticed, she’d slipped away through the back door, down the garden path and was off through the back gate, roaming the fields and woods, her thoughts always away somewhere else and no eye on the time at all, except when hunger drove her home, tired and dishevelled at the end of the day. No amount of scolding had any effect. Alice, envying her sister this freedom and having never enjoyed it herself, berated her all the more.
Alice wasn’t sure what caused these acts of kindness by old Ramsay and his wife. She tried to hazard a guess at his age – could he be the same age as Sarah? Or older? Maybe they had known each other when they were growing up? She’d mused on it for a while, but there seemed to be no inclination on either side to follow up the gifts. Eventually she’d asked Sarah, half-wondering whether Ramsay was perhaps an old sweetheart of hers. Sarah had laughed, then stopped short, her breath caught.
‘No, they’re from beyond Nortonstall. I never saw them until a few years back when they came to see me with their daughter. She’d been treated by the doctor out their way, but by the time I saw her there was nothing I could do except give her lobelia syrup and suggest ways they could make her comfortable. Molly was such a pretty girl, but as frail as thistledown by the time she came to me. She’d have been around your age if she’d lived. You’d have transcribed her remedy. Do you not remember?’
Alice didn’t, but that was no surprise. She just listed what her mother told her to, and didn’t feel as involved with each and every patient as Sarah did. She remained puzzled, but knew that her mother’s care and patience in listening to her patients often gave them as much comfort as the remedy prescribed. The doctors, on the other hand, tended to adopt an overbearing approach to their patients, brooking no argument or questions, and expecting them to do exactly as they said. Sarah’s approach was a gentle concern for all issues surrounding the patient’s health, with a series of questions designed to probe but not distress, in order to produce a clearer picture of the treatment required. Two patients might seek help for the same complaint, but they rarely left with the same remedy. Sarah’s success was the result of seeing beyond the illness to the person and their individual needs, and prescribing accordingly.
Chapter Three
Barely a week after Ramsay had told Alice that a new teacher was to be appointed, she found herself being introduced to him.
‘This is Richard Weatherall. He’ll be teaching arithmetic. You’re to show him yon classroom,’ and with that Ramsay turned on his heel and was gone, in search of orders to issue on more familiar territory, relating to equipment, cloth orders, and work force.
Alice had expected to find a retired teacher from Nortonstall waiting in the office, happy to have an hour’s paid work a day. Instead, the person silhouetted against the window had the bearing of a much younger man. Indeed, as he stepped forward, Alice saw that he wasn’t much older than she was. He was slim and pale, with light-brown hair that flopped forward, refusing to hold its shape in the severe style expected of it. His clothes instantly marked him out as a gentleman. Alice’s practised eye noted the cut and cloth of his jacket and waistcoat, the fine linen of his shirt. As her eyes travelled the length of him she was surprised to see that his trousers were mud-splattered, his shoes a pair of walking brogues. Richard followed her gaze and laughed.
‘Ah, excuse my appearance,’ he said lightly. ‘I walked Lucy over the moor first thing, then made my way here at once when Father summoned me. There was no time to change, I’m afraid.’
Lucy? Father? Alice was puzzled, and no doubt her face showed it, for Richard smiled and clicked his fingers. Hearing a scrabble and a muffled bark, Alice swung around towards the fireplace where a grey lurcher had been dozing peacefully by the hearth. She bounded up to Richard and butted his leg with her nose until he bent down and fondled her ears. Then she turned her attention to Alice, gazing up at her with beseeching eyes. Alice couldn’t help but smile, and stooped to repeat Richard’s actions.
‘There, best friends already,’ said Richard. ‘Lucy doesn’t take to everyone, you know. It’s quite an honour.’ He moved on swiftly, seeing Alice blush. ‘Do you think it would be all right to bring her into the schoolroom? She goes everywhere with me, you see.’
Alice found her voice at last. ‘I’m not sure.’ She was doubtful. ‘She’s rather large. I think some of the smaller ones might be afeared.’ As the words came out, Alice wondered at herself for slipping into the local dialect. Was it an instinctive reaction to the ‘lord-and-master’ situation? She fingered the brooch that pinned her shawl together, a gesture she used to calm herself. Without a doubt, ‘Father’ must be James Weatherall, the mill owner, and Richard must be his eldest son, recently returned from Cambridge and not proving to be the enthusiastic businessman that his father had hoped for, or so it was rumoured. Rather, he loved to walk the hills, play the piano with his mother and sisters, and write poetry. At least so said Louisa, their neighbour in Northwaite, who was a maid at the big house.
For his part, Richard saw a pale, slim girl with a mass of reddish-brown curls that her work cap failed to contain, dressed in the usual working uniform of the mill girls: a rough long wool skirt and a shirt of a nondescript colour, faded from numerous washes, topped with a knitted shawl pinned tightly at the front. The brooch that held the shawl wasn’t the usual cheap and shiny affair, though, but a rather fine enamelled sprig of lavender. Her eyes, first glimpsed when she raised them directly to him whilst fondling Lucy’s ears, were the most extraordinary green. Or were they blue? He was fascinated. They seemed to subtly change colour as he looked. Then she blushed again, and he realised that he was staring, as well as babbling some nonsense about the dog.
‘I should get back to my class,’ said Alice. ‘You’d better come and meet them. I set them some reading to get on with.’ They would probably have lost interest by now, she reflected, stumbling over difficult words, one or two of them taking the chance for a nap, Charlie Wilmott no doubt teasing Edith Parker and then sulking when she cut him off with a clever remark that earned her the laughter of her classmates at his expense.
Richard signalled to Lucy to return to her fireside spot, then followed Alice down the narrow corridor, away from the peace of Ramsay’s office, past the noisy hubbub of the mill floor, revealed in a flash as a door opened, then hidden again just as quickly as the door snapped shut. Richard suppressed a shudder. The brooding presence of the mill in the valley filled his every day. No matter how far he walked over the moors and through the woods, the chimneys of the valley mills seemed to be always in his sight, even from his bedroom window. Each evening, Father would inform the dinner table of some mill problem or success, of the fluctuating price of cloth, of the need to update the machinery, glancing at Richard to see if he was listening, involved, interested. Richard knew that he was a disappointment. In effect, the mill had paid for his education and was keeping the family in comfort, and his father looked to him to carry on the tradition. But the education that was meant to have prepared him to step into his father’s shoes had simply driven him as far as possible in the opposite direction.
‘Esther would be far better suited to running the business,’ thought Richard ruefully. Trained in the art of home management by her mother, his sister Esther was immensely capable, practical and forward thinking. Richard possessed none of these qualities – his thoughts as he roamed the countryside with Lucy were of a more philosophical nature, and he was far more likely to return home and write poetry than to draw up a plan for the future expansion of the mill. Getting him to teach in the schoolroom was his father’s last despairing attempt at getting Richard involved. Mr Weatherall was only too aware that Richard shied away from contact with the workers and locals, nervous of their roughness and down-to-earth demeanour after the rarefied atmosphere of Cambridge. Perhaps meeting the children would help him to understand the mill life a little better?
The chatter from the schoolroom, clearly audible outside, stilled the moment that Alice turned the doorknob. She pushed the door open and stood aside to let Richard enter. Stepping forward, he faced rows of inquisitive faces, feeling his heart sink as he did so. He felt no more connection with the schoolroom than he did with the rest of the mill, but Alice was already introducing him.
‘Children, I want you to meet Mr Weatherall. He will be your teacher for arithmetic, starting tomorrow. He will sit with us for the rest of the morning, so he can get to know you a little.’ Alice took the teacher’s chair from behind the desk and set it at the front of the room, indicating that Richard should sit down. She then stood behind the desk and Richard found himself watching her, rather than the children, as she instructed them on a handwriting exercise, then moved around the room, pointing out lazy loops and sloping verticals, crouching down to a child’s level to show how a different way of holding the chalk and the slate would make a difference to the final result. By the end of the hour, Richard had an inkling of the skill involved in teaching a class, and of the love and respect that the children had for Alice. He feared that he would be of very little use in the classroom – he had never taught and had no experience in dealing with children – but his father expected it of him and so it must be.
Chapter Four
Alice had been wary of Richard at first, worried that he had been sent by his father to spy on her, to make sure that she was fulfilling her duties in the classroom and teaching the children to a proper standard. She was painfully conscious of her deficiencies when she compared herself to Master Richard, and his fancy education, the likes of which she could barely comprehend. It hadn’t taken her long, however, to discover that, fancy education or not, he was totally at sea in the classroom and, it would seem, in life in general.
‘Could you help me hand out the slates?’ Alice said. Within two days, she had had enough of Richard helplessly watching her, or following her around the schoolroom, hanging on her every word. She no longer worried that he had been sent to report back: rather, she feared she was minding him until James Weatherall had decided what to do for the best with regard to his future in the mill. Alice’s time with the children was limited and precious, and she resented having to waste any of it on Master Richard. She was going to have to come up with a plan.
‘Today, Master Richard will work on arithmetic with half the class, while I work on handwriting with the rest of you.’
The children started to mutter their discontent. They wanted nothing to do with either arithmetic or Master Richard.
‘Then, halfway through the morning, we will change over,’ Alice announced firmly. ‘I want you all to listen very carefully to Master Richard. We are very lucky to have him here to help.’
She’d felt shy at first, suggesting that he might devise a lesson, thinking herself presumptuous and hoping he wouldn’t take her request amiss. It didn’t take her long to discover that he had as little experience of teaching as she had of life at Cambridge. The noise from his group swiftly reached such levels that she had to break off, leaving her group to practise the loops of their ‘g’s’ and ‘f’s’ and intercede before it got too far out of hand.
‘I wonder if you might start with something a little more basic?’ she suggested, once she realised that Richard had set himself the challenge of explaining long division to his group. Richard looked blank.
‘Perhaps if you went back to simple addition or subtraction you could build on that to show how multiplication and division work?’
Richard looked embarrassed and hopeful at the same time. Alice could see he was wondering whether she would step in and take over.
Her cheeks flushed pink, partly at the frankness of his gaze, and partly with annoyance at the difficult position she had been put in. Should she speak to Ramsay? Explain to him that Richard was not well-suited to this role? That he was, in fact, a hindrance to her?
