Ella. Alice felt pierced to the heart. She had always held on to a fantasy that none of the rest of the family would have to follow her into the mill, without really thinking about how this might be achieved. Now she had brought down on Ella the very thing that she had so wished to prevent. An unwelcome thought surfaced, and no matter how hard Alice tried to block it out, it persisted. ‘Williams,’ a voice whispered in her head. ‘Williams and Ella.’ Ella had only just turned thirteen, so she was eligible for mill work, but the thought of any man taking a predatory interest in her struck a chill to Alice’s heart. She reasoned with herself that Ella looked young, and her attitude to life was definitely that of a child. But Alice could even now recognise the hint of a blossoming from girlhood to womanhood, and it looked as though Ella would be striking in appearance as she grew up. Not beautiful: the Bancroft girls would never be called that, but they had strong features, slender limbs and delicate hands – all the better for mill work, Alice thought in despair. Although it was obvious that Ella and Alice were sisters, their curly, flowing hair marking them out instantly as related, Ella had a dreamy demeanour in contrast to Alice’s busy, sharp mind. Her family teased Ella that she must be a woodland sprite who’d adopted their home as hers. When she came back after vanishing for hours on end amongst the woods and fields, she always seemed vague and puzzled as to where she had been and what she’d been doing.
‘Ella’s away with the fairies again,’ was a common refrain in the Bancroft household, but Alice had a very real fear that the mill would crush her restless spirit, and that Williams would prey on her fragility.
‘If only I’d thought to teach Ella to read and write, to train her to take over from me as a teacher,’ thought Alice, filled with despair. It was too late to remedy this now. Alice had never imagined that she would find herself in such a situation and, although her whole being shrank from accepting it, she resolved to work for as long as she could. In the meantime, perhaps she could think of something that would save Ella from a future in the mill?
Chapter Four
The valley view that Richard beheld each day from the window of his bedroom could scarcely have been more beautiful. In the early light of this late-autumn morning, a wisp of mist still hung there, and a dark shadow sliced across the trees on the other side of the valley: blue-green where the sun had yet to strike, a warm golden colour where the sun was already warming the scraps of autumn foliage still clinging to them. The window was slightly ajar, the crisp, clean scent of a fresh morning wafting in. Ordinarily, it would have lifted Richard’s heart and raised his spirits, but today he was troubled. He knew that he should leave his desk by the window and go downstairs to join his father for an early breakfast, before heading for the mill. On a normal morning, he would have been in a hurry to do just that, his eagerness to see Alice for a precious hour or two in the schoolroom presenting itself in a boyish enthusiasm that his father mistook to be an eagerness for all things mill-related. As Richard helped himself to breakfast from the covered dishes laid out on the dark-oak sideboard – eggs, cold cuts from the night before, perhaps a slice of pork pie – his father would attempt to engage him in discussions regarding mill business. The cost of transporting their goods by rail from Nortonstall was increasing – did Richard think it would be politic to consider transporting them to a larger town, Manchester, say, in the interest of driving a harder bargain? Would it be worth a trip to Leeds to look at the newest range of looms available, to replace the ones in the western shed that needed to be repaired so frequently?
In the last week, encouraged by what he perceived to be signs that his son might be suitable for grooming to take over the reins of business, his father had started to make bigger plans.
‘Time to marry that fiancée of yours,’ he said gruffly, never at ease when discussing personal matters. ‘You’ve been betrothed over a year now, so your mother tells me. You can use the top floor here for a time, while we build on the land beyond the stables. I’ve asked Clarke to come over in the week, to draw up some plans. There’s room enough for a house and small garden there – it will be fit for you while there’s just the two of you, maybe even three or four. By that time, I’ll be ready to retire and this house will be yours.’
Richard had stopped eating, hands resting on his knife and fork at each side of the plate, his breakfast suddenly unappetising.
Caroline. He’d pushed the thought of her from his mind, pleading increasing business duties to excuse the paucity of his letter writing. He had a sudden vision of her, framed against the window in the sitting room of her parents’ house in Cambridge, head bent in profile as she read his letter, turning the page back and forth as though she hoped to find some words of intimacy or love secreted somewhere, instead of the stiff prose more in keeping with a business letter. He felt a pang, but nothing more. Not the stabbing, searing, nervous excitement that made him hurry from the house each morning, Lucy at his side sniffing the air for the cocktail of aromas left over from the previous night, while he anxiously anticipated the day’s first sighting of Alice. Her pale, often serious face as she talked to the class, the quick smile as she turned towards him, the way her hair curled and sprang free from the clips that were hopelessly inadequate to contain it.
It had seemed no time at all since he’d first seen her, that awkward introduction from Ramsay, yet it was over a year ago now, after he’d reluctantly agreed to do the couple of hours’ daily teaching that his father had grimly suggested. By the end of the first month, he’d taken to spending three hours a day in the schoolroom, persuading his father that with the large number of pupils it made sense for him to split the class with Alice, each teaching half, then swapping over. His father, mindful of changes in the law enjoining the need to have children in school, and keen to appear an enlightened employer, was happy to acquiesce.
In any case, now that there were over fifty children in the schoolroom, the task of delivering anything beyond the most basic education lay beyond the skill of Alice alone. She had seemed pleased to have the extra help, and once her initial shyness at the presence of ‘gentry’ in the room had worn off, she started to treat him as her equal. In fact, it was clear that Richard’s expensive and extensive education hadn’t equipped him terribly well for the task before him. Alice was the better teacher, with the added advantage of having a rapport with the children. Richard observed her at work, and resolved to learn from her.
He found it hard that she should be forced to take but a short break when her teaching work was done, before she had to take her place on the mill floor. When Richard saw her unfold the cloth from her basket and produce a piece of bread spread with dripping, often the only sustenance she had to see her through the day, he felt deeply ashamed to be heading home to the lunch that awaited him. He dined at a table spread with a white linen cloth, his food was served to him, and washed down with wine in a crystal glass if he so desired. He had quizzed Williams, now the mill manager since Ramsay had retired, as to whether she couldn’t take a longer break, since teaching a class full of children was demanding work for a morning.
‘Nay, Master Richard,’ said Williams. ‘It don’t do to be soft on her. She’s a strong lass, and able. And now she has thee to help her, why, her work load is even lighter.’ Richard didn’t like the man’s manner, the pleasure it seemed to give him to deny his request. It was clear that the only way he could help was to try to lighten the load; to get there early to help set out what few books there were, plus chalk and slates, and to stay behind to help set the room to rights.
He increasingly found himself thinking of the schoolroom when he wasn’t there, at odd hours of the day and night. At first, he laboured under the misapprehension that he had found his true vocation, as a teacher. It wasn’t long, however, before he had to acknowledge that the draw was Alice. Her good humour, her gentle chivvying of the tired faces in front of her, her concern for their wellbeing and those of their families, gave him a glimpse into a way of life he had known or cared li
ttle about until now. He felt that he was being taught just as much as the children, but on an entirely different set of subjects.
Soon, a meagre three hours a day didn’t supply Richard with sufficient oxygen of the type that Alice seemed to provide. Although under no obligation to present himself for work on a Saturday, which was a normal working day for the rest of the mill workforce, Richard found that the weather often meant that his usual lengthy walk with Lucy was out of the question, and he would make better use of his time if he spent it in the classroom. Afternoons, previously spent with his sisters and his mother by the sitting-room fire in genteel pursuits such as reading and writing poetry until the tea tray made its appearance, now found him offering to make himself useful in the mill office, one window of which gave onto the mill floor and allowed him frequent glimpses of Alice, distinguishable from her workmates by her unruly hair that spilled from her cap as she concentrated on the spinning thread.
Despite the punishing pace that the machines forced them to keep up, Richard would frequently catch sight of her, head flung back in laughter at some remark made to, or by, one of her fellow workers. He noticed how their demeanour changed when Williams made one of his regular circuits of the room. Heads were bent demurely, fingers flew twice as fast. Perhaps it was only because Richard was being particularly observant that it seemed to him that Williams lingered as he passed Alice, pausing to address a word or two to her, to which she would respond with that open, fearless look that he, Richard, had come to know so well.
James Weatherall, observing in his turn Richard’s developing interest in the goings-on on the mill floor, concluded that the time was right to start drawing him into the plans for expansion, perhaps into a second mill, that he had been brooding upon.
So now the weeks had flown and turned into months, and today Richard was facing a crossroads. It felt as though he had lost Alice from his life forever. She had left the mill and withdrawn up the hill to Northwaite, her kinfolk around her and as cut off from him as if she had moved to London. If he ventured into Northwaite, tongues would wag and, in any case, he had no clue as to which of the cottages was home to Alice. He’d never thought to ask her. His life was mapped out for him: a safe, sensible and desirable marriage to Caroline. He’d met her while he was studying at university and thought she would suit him well, being the daughter of a wealthy Cambridge businessman, who met with his parents’ approval. He’d proposed to her before returning home to Yorkshire, without thinking a great deal about it. But what would become of his walks over the moors, the poetry and the music? How would this fit into the life of a mill-owning gentleman? And what of Alice? He was finding it hard to think about her. He skirted the edges of her, only half daring to think of her face, her voice, her hair, her hands, her laugh. How could he go to the mill each day without any of this to sustain him?
He could hear himself duly acquiescing with his father. ‘Yes, it would be a good idea to let Clarke draw up the plans.’ ‘Yes, he must invite Caroline to stay so that more plans could be made, and at her earliest convenience.’ ‘Yes, he would very much like to see his father’s plans for the new mill.’ Plans, plans, and yet more plans. All with him at their heart and yet he had no wish to be a part of any of them.
Richard felt as though he was suffocating. He flung the window wide, gasping in breaths of chilly air, trying to still the suddenly panicked beating of his heart. Alice had shown him a way of being different, but it was impossible. Had he the courage to break away? Or was he just caught up in one of those ‘interludes’ that his Cambridge friends had so often enjoyed?
Richard sighed, closed the window and latched it, then turned to the door. He couldn’t stay up here any longer – the day had to be faced. The first working day without Alice at his side. Richard headed down the stairs: breakfast must be endured first. His life was changing and he must decide whether to steer that change, or allow it to overtake him. The day ahead would be long; one of many long days to come, he feared. Days in which he must keep up a pretence. And there was yet another issue to consider – a problem so big he hadn’t as yet allowed himself to dwell on it for even a moment.
Chapter Five
Elisabeth’s birth had coincided with the coldest start to a new year that anyone could remember. Snow had carpeted the ground for weeks, but Alice hardly noticed. Her thoughts and time were taken up with Elisabeth and the strange routine that she brought to Alice’s days. Alice had recovered quickly from her confinement, with the help of tonics prepared with great care by Sarah, designed to strengthen her without affecting Elisabeth while she was being nursed. Sarah, though, was troubled that Alice’s heart tonic wasn’t suitable for a baby, even in the diluted doses that she would have received, and so it had to be withheld. Alice had been taking it for nigh on two years now and Sarah watched her anxiously for evidence of fatigue above and beyond that involved in meeting the demands of a small baby, but the weather and Alice’s youth was on her side. Alice was forced to stay at home and rest, and by the time that the snow had eased its grip in early March, she appeared fully recovered.
Life was less easy for Ella, however, who found herself having to negotiate the steep paths, made treacherous and difficult by snow, from the village to the mill. At first, it was the depth of the snow that proved hard to manage, with the journey taking twice as long, and the workers arriving at the mill already exhausted from the effort of the gruelling walk, their clothing dripping wet and their feet frozen. Parties of men were deployed by Mr Weatherall to clear the main paths of the worst of the snow, banking it high on either side in dirty grey mounds, studded with leaves and flecks of soil. Each night, as the temperatures dipped, the paths froze hard where the passage of many feet the night before had turned new snowfall and wet mud to slush. Each morning, the workers were faced with sheets of ice, far too dangerous to traverse even for foolhardy, young mill lads. When they tried to slide down them, they found themselves flung off the path into hard-packed and icy snow, too close for comfort to the encroaching tree trunks, standing black against the white landscape. For the first time in its history, Mr Weatherall had to shut the mill, while he worked out a way for his labourers to get to work that didn’t involve them breaking their necks.
Ella was delighted at the news: not only was she spared the arduous journey and the energy-sapping day, but she got to spend precious hours with her new-born niece. Alice and Ella and Elisabeth spent the day snuggled into Sarah’s bed, piling on the patchwork quilts from the other children’s beds to make as cosy a nest for Elisabeth as possible. Sarah tutted disapprovingly and went about the usual business of the household, stoking fires and preparing food.
‘Come and sit with us,’ Ella called down the stairs. ‘Come and see what baby Elisabeth is doing now.’
‘I’ve no need to see, I can hear her well enough.’ Sarah banged pans down, then took up the broom and swept the floor vigorously, scraping chairs against the stone flags while Elisabeth wailed on.
Ella appeared in the doorway, barefoot, hair wild and uncombed, clutching her arms around her chest and shivering dramatically in her long nightgown. ‘Come and sit with us, do.’
‘And who will get the food ready to feed us on a day like this, with not a vegetable to be had from the garden all week?’ Sarah snapped.
Ella came over and stroked her back. ‘I’ll come and help you in a minute. But first come and see baby Elisabeth.’
Sarah sighed and let herself be led upstairs to the bedroom where the little ones had tucked themselves into the bottom of the bed and were entertaining each other with nonsense stories. Thomas, the eldest of the three, barely had to say more than a few words, or make a face, to set his younger sisters snorting and choking and covering their faces with their fingers. Meanwhile Alice, propped up on pillows, cradled a wailing Elisabeth. Ella dived back beneath the covers, prompting an even fiercer outbreak of crying.
‘Here,’ Sarah said, and took Elisabeth from her mother, nestling her into her shoulder and falling
into an automatic soothing rocking motion. After a few minutes, as Elisabeth started to settle, Sarah walked up and down, patting her gently on the back.
‘Look at you all,’ she scolded. ‘What if we have visitors? Whatever will they think of us? Still abed at this hour of the day!’
Alice laughed. ‘I don’t think anyone will be stirring from home today. Look, it’s snowing again,’ and she gestured at the window. Indeed, it was: thick white flakes were falling hard and fast, swirling against the window as the wind gusted.
Ella patted the bed. ‘Elisabeth’s asleep. Come and lay her here, and then sit with us.’
Sarah huffed and puffed about floors to be scrubbed and beds to be made, but her token efforts at resistance were overruled and she gave in. The snow did its worst outside, piling thick white drifts high against the walls and the kitchen door. The day never seemed to get beyond the strange half-light of dawn before it plunged back into darkness again, albeit one studded with stars and lit by a frosty moon. Inside, the family were blissfully happy. They built up the fire in the tiny grate, told stories, nursed the baby when she woke, and dozed in the firelight when she slept. Sarah conjured soup from the few wizened vegetables still remaining in the larder and everyone, enchanted by the unusual atmosphere of the day, declared it to be the best soup they’d ever eaten.
As the others dozed around her, Alice smoothed the worn patchwork coverlet, looking at the individual scraps of fabric and remembering. Here was a piece from a dress worn by her mother when Alice herself was small. She had a vivid memory of clinging to Sarah’s leg as she stood at the stove, burying her face in the folds of her skirt and staring at the sprigs of cream foliage on the soft blue background. The blue was even more faded now. Sarah had cut the dress down once it became too worn, and turned it into pinafores for the little ones. She’d used the leftover scraps to furnish patches for the quilt.
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