Alice's Secret

by Lynne Francis

  ‘Do you mind if I hang onto this for a bit?’ Alys asked as they sat down to eat.

  ‘No, just take care of it. It’s the only copy,’ said Moira. She was feeling unaccountably tired today and looking forward to an early night. She was thankful yet again for Alys’s presence – without her she certainly couldn’t have kept the café running. Alys had gone way beyond the call of duty, not only proving herself to be a good baker, but also having a fine eye for how to enhance the business. It wouldn’t be long before she would be wanting to be on the move, Moira thought, and she was dreading the day, although she realised that it wasn’t fair to try to keep her here. She dragged herself out of her reverie as she became aware that Alys was speaking to her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ her niece was asking, concerned. ‘You’re looking a bit pale, you’ve barely said a word and you haven’t eaten very much.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Moira said, and smiled. ‘Just a bit tired this evening. Think I need a long bath and an early night.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure that’s all? I hope you’re not overdoing it.’ Alys rose from the table and started to clear away. She paused, then turned to Moira. ‘I’d like to find out more about the history of the area, the mills and such. Get a feel for what it might have been like to live here a hundred or so years ago, now that I’ve discovered we’re all from this area. Have you got any books about it?’

  ‘Local history, do you mean?’ Moira settled herself on the sofa. ‘No books I’m afraid, but there’s a little museum here in the village, and another one over in Nortonstall. There’s a lot in both of them about the area. You need to remember that it wouldn’t have been like this then.’ Moira winced and adjusted the cushions behind her back, which still played up if she had been on her feet all day. ‘It would have been an industrial landscape down in the valley, not the beautiful countryside we see now. I expect that the paths that you’ve been walking are much the same as in the past, though,’ she said. ‘The workers would have used them to get to the mill from all directions. Lots of children worked there, too. They were employed in the mills because they were small and had nimble fingers. They had to go under the machines to retrieve things, do jobs that adults were too big for. The hours and conditions were awful in the mid-nineteenth century. You should definitely take a look at the museums – you’ll learn a lot there. I found it all a bit upsetting, to be honest, but it’s worth knowing about, especially while you’re here.’

  Alys’s next half-day off brought more dark clouds and bursts of heavy rain. The thought of exploring the countryside, her normal half-day occupation, didn’t appeal. So, she made her way over to Nortonstall and spent a few hours in the museum there. It was housed in an old mill, now mainly given over to workshops and studios, but it gave her an idea of the scale of the place, the forbidding walls and the towering chimney, all set in a cobbled courtyard that must once have rung with the clatter of clogs and the bustle of business. She was sure that the Industrial Revolution must have been on the curriculum at school, but clearly it hadn’t stuck in her memory. Now that she was in the landscape that was home to so much of it, her imagination was fired up. She pored over the old black-and-white photos of the area, staring hard at the people captured in them and wondering whether one of them was Alice. She devoured the information about the canals, the weavers’ cottages, the different kinds of mill in the area, how Northwaite had declined in importance as Nortonstall had grown, its importance fuelled by the arrival of the railways. She’d found the depiction of a typical working day particularly startling, especially the length of the journey that so many workers in the outlying parts undertook each morning and evening on foot, before they even started their ten-hour day. And once they were at work, they were under constant pressure, bullied by the overlookers to meet deadlines and targets. So that wasn’t a new thing, she thought to herself wryly as she lingered over a cup of coffee in the mill café, watching the rain puddling in the courtyard. Life must have been such a struggle in those days. She just hoped that there had been some recompense, something to make life worth living.

  Part Two

  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 th
em 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.