by J. R. Ellis
‘Wow! Well, glad to be of help.’
‘I looked up the pub name, by the way; it’s named after the wife of the first owner, who was an orphan. She was working as a maidservant at the house of someone he knew and they fell in love and got married, much against his family’s wishes, not surprisingly in those times. Anyway, there’s a nice Victorian romantic story for you.’
‘Yes, and what you uncovered was the shadow side of that, wasn’t it? Lord whatever-his-name as the Victorian blackguard deserting the seduced girl.’
‘Yes. All he needed was the black twirling moustache.’
He finished his beer and put the empty glass on the bar.
‘I’ll be off, then. Enjoy yourself, but remember you’re serving not consuming: no one wants to be served by drunken bar staff.’
‘Get out!’ she laughed, and threw a beer mat at him.
It was still quite early in the evening as Oldroyd walked back across the town on a different route. The Harrogate Festival was under way and there were street entertainers: little theatre and music groups performing short pieces of drama and playing folk music up and down the town. As he walked down the pedestrianised Cambridge Street, he saw a group of adults and children gathered around a performer. As he got closer he saw that it was a magician dressed in a black cloak and a hat decorated with stars. He was wielding a wand.
Oldroyd stopped for a while and watched as the man made playing cards disappear, produced bunches of flowers from his sleeves and reconstituted a torn-up piece of paper magically into a whole sheet. The audience was ‘spellbound’ even though they – or at least the adults – knew that it was all trickery. The magic of magic was that you couldn’t explain it, even if you knew it wasn’t magic!
Oldroyd applauded after each trick and again when the magician took a bow at the end of his little show. Then he continued his solitary walk back to his flat on the Stray.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my family and friends for all their support and encouragement over the years, particularly those who read drafts and made comments.
The Otley Courthouse Writers’ Group, led by James Nash, has helped me to develop as a writer and given me the extra impetus to get things completed.
Some readers will recognise Newby Hall near Ripon as the model for Redmire Hall. I have spent many happy times with my family exploring the wonderful gardens there and riding on the train! I would like to thank the owners for their care in maintaining one of the finest estates in England.
The West Riding Police is a fictional force based on the old riding boundary. Harrogate was part of the old West Riding, although it is in today’s North Yorkshire.
J. R. Ellis
About the Author
John R. Ellis has lived in Yorkshire for most of his life and has spent many years exploring Yorkshire’s diverse landscapes, history, language and communities. He recently retired after a career in teaching, mostly in further education in the Leeds area. In addition to the Yorkshire Murder Mystery series he writes poetry, ghost stories and biography. He has completed a screenplay about the last years of the poet Edward Thomas and a work of faction about the extraordinary life of his Irish mother-in-law. He is currently working on his memoirs of growing up in a working-class area of Huddersfield in the 1950s and 1960s.