Alice's Secret

by Lynne Francis

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Alys was very confused. ‘I’ve hardly seen Rob over the past month, since I’ve been in Nortonstall. And before that, well, he used to come into the café for coffee, and we went out one evening with his friends …’ She tailed off.

  ‘Well, he’s certainly been thinking about you! He said he first knew something was up when he lost his dog and found a water nymph, and then it all crystallised when he discovered the joy of eating cake for breakfast. I’ve no idea what he was on about.’ Hannah chuckled. ‘I think he must spend too much time alone in the fields.’

  Alys was silent for the rest of the short journey back, but Hannah didn’t notice: she’d slipped into a deep sleep and had to be shaken awake when they pulled up outside the door to the flat.

  Chapter Three

  The fire in the open hearth glowed brightly, warming the room while the wind whistled and howled around Moira’s cottage. October this year was going out in a stormy blast: the dry leaves swirling around outside sounded like flowing water. The weather forecast had warned of impending snowstorms, the forecaster marvelling over how early snow was blowing in this year. Arctic winds had battered Northwaite all day and Alys was glad to be cosied up in the sitting room, hands cupping a mug of tea. She thought of Moira, who’d braved the elements and taken the evening bus to Nortonstall. She’d been making the trip increasingly often of late – ever since she’d been to that jazz evening back in August. Alys hadn’t gone beyond some gentle teasing about what she might be finding so interesting in town these days; she would be only too delighted for her aunt should there be some romance in the air. ‘I wish I had a car,’ Alys had said. ‘I could give you a lift there and back. Save you waiting for buses and paying for cabs.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Moira had replied. ‘I’ve been thinking about staying over when I go out in Nortonstall and coming back in the morning in time to open up the café.’ She blushed when Alys couldn’t hide her startled expression and added hastily, ‘I mean, when you’ve properly moved into the flat over the café in Nortonstall. I can stay in the spare room there and catch the first bus back home the next morning.’

  Chapter was about to begin. The café in Nortonstall was coming along nicely. Moira had given Alys free rein on the décor, fittings and china. At first, Alys had planned to turn it into a replica of the Northwaite café and had begun to hunt for vintage china so that she could have a stock of it ready and waiting. But before she’d bought more than four or five pieces, she’d had a change of heart. She’d thought about it a while, then plucked up the courage to discuss it with Moira. To her surprise, Moira hadn’t been at all put out at the idea of giving the new place a different feel. So, it was now decorated in the Northwaite café’s signature shade of grey, but the vintage styling had gone into the heavy-framed mirrors and the ceramic lampshades, which were hung in clusters on wires of varying lengths. Lloyd loom wicker chairs, painted in muted shades of grey, blue and green were dressed with comfy cushions in art-print linens patterned with stylised fruit, flowers and birds. The china was sturdier this time – she’d fallen in love with a hand-thrown range produced by a potter in Nortonstall and had brokered a discount for a range of jugs, plates, mugs and bowls, in return for a credit on the menu and a display of items for sale inside the café. They’d even gone for a different name: ‘The Cake Company Café’ was emblazoned across the fascia. Without the angel’s wings, it had seemed pointless including ‘celestial’ in the name, and the look of the place was so different that it made perfect sense. One thing that hadn’t changed was the range of cakes – Moira and Alys had agreed that the two cafés should offer exactly the same, at least for the present.

  So Alys had good reason to feel a sense of satisfaction while she sat by the fire, cocooned from the storm, and contemplated the future. The Nortonstall café had been fitted out in record time, and she was about to concentrate on the flat above, so that she could move in properly and she and Moira could lead their own lives once more. Tonight, though, she was increasingly bothered by her failure to put what Rob used to refer to as her ‘Alice mystery’ to bed. She was ready to move on to the next stage of her life, but she’d left Alice somehow stranded, exactly where she’d been since the end of August.

  Following Julie’s advice, she had done another trawl of the newspaper archives and traced one further report relating to the fire. She’d been amazed to see it prefaced with a photograph, the only one that she had ever seen of her great-great-grandmother. Smudged and grainy, it was hard to make very much of it, other than an impression of dark clothing and wavy hair that had pulled free of its confines to frame a pale face seemingly wiped of expression by the camera’s flash. Alys had unconsciously twisted her own hair, also springing free from its clips, as she read:

  ‘It has been reported that Alice Bancroft, of Lane End Cottage, Northwaite, has died in the local jail at Northwaite, pending transfer to Leeds Assizes on the charge of setting fire to Hobbs Mill, Northwaite, on the night of 22 September 1895. The fire led to the death of Mr Richard Weatherall, son of mill owner Mr James Weatherall. The death of the accused has been attributed to natural causes: her mother Sarah Bancroft has spoken of a heart condition that had been exacerbated by her recent confinement. The trial will not now take place as all parties concerned consider the matter settled.’

  It felt to Alys as though an icy hand had clutched at her heart when she read of Alice’s death in prison, in such cruel circumstances. She didn’t fully understand the implication of the report, either. Did they mean confinement as in imprisonment, or pregnancy? There was no mention of baby Elisabeth – and if the matter was considered settled, then they clearly saw her as guilty …

  She couldn’t understand why she felt so determined to pursue the matter. Shouldn’t she just accept the fact, as the rest of the family seemed to have done over the years, that her great-great-grandmother had been a murderess, and an arsonist to boot, and try to forget about it? She’d tried to reassure herself that it was quite common for families to have skeletons in all sorts of closets that their elderly or long-dead relatives had thought were safely locked away. Yet something within her refused to let it rest. She didn’t know why she was so convinced that there was something more to the story, that Alice was innocent and had been harshly judged. She wished that she had the ability to look back into the past and discover the truth. For now, though, it seemed that she had exhausted all the possible avenues to explore.

  Alys gazed into the fire, her eyes growing heavy as she relaxed in the warmth. She had the delicious sensation of slipping in and out of sleep, hearing the stormy blasts outside from an ever-increasing distance. The howling of the elements diminished, replaced instead by a melodic humming, with words fading in and out of an unfamiliar and indistinct melody. It was soothing, and Alys was enjoying the sensation.

  A part of her knew that she must have fallen asleep, because she was having a dream. A young woman was sitting in a hard, wooden chair by an open fire, stitching and singing to herself as she did so. Her head was bent over her work and Alys could see the gleam of her reddish-brown curls in the firelight. She was absorbed in her sewing, working around the top of a small, plain, cream bag. As Alys watched, the woman stopped stitching and sat back, staring with unseeing eyes into the fire. Alys had the strangest sensation of actually being there, sitting on the other side of the hearth from the woman, so close that she could have reached out to lay a hand on her arm, but she could neither move nor speak. She wanted to turn her head and look around the room, to reassure herself of its familiarity, of her place within it, but she felt paralysed.

  The woman shook her head a little, as if to free herself of her reverie, then turned her attention back to her needlework. She turned the work through and Alys saw that, far from being plain, it had a sprig of lavender embroidered on the right side, in tiny stitches of emerald and lilac thread. The woman put her hand in her apron pocket, and at that moment Alys recognised something that he
r brain had only half acknowledged. The woman’s clothing was of a totally different era. She was wearing a long, full skirt of some rough cloth, partly covered by an apron tied around her waist, and a long-sleeved blouse, all in muddy, indeterminate colours. A pair of leather boots peeped from beneath the skirt and when she stood up and moved closer to the fire, Alys could see that they were well worn and patched. The woman stood a moment, hand resting on the mantelpiece, looking at some scraps of paper she had taken from her pocket. She hesitated, made as if to throw them in the fire, then appeared to change her mind. She took up her work, and her seat, again. Alys watched as she folded the scraps of paper, so nearly discarded, into squares.

  The scene in front of Alys started to dissolve and fade, and as it did, she discovered she could reach out to the woman, that she had been released from her spell. The woman looked up, as if startled, and a second later Alys realised that she was awake, in her chair by the fire in Moira’s sitting room, and alone. The logs still glowed brightly, although there was such a chill in the air it felt as if the room wasn’t heated at all.

  Alys sat for a minute or two, gathering her senses, trying to work out what was wrong. The room was freezing, despite the fire, and the source of the chill was elsewhere. She stood up, finding her legs unaccountably stiff, and went into the hall. The front door was wide open. Swirls of leaves had blown in on the stone flags and, if she wasn’t mistaken, a few flakes of snow were melting there too. Wondering how on earth it could have blown open, Alys hastily closed the door, making sure the latch clicked.

  She heard a window banging upstairs, presumably blown ajar by the door-opening gust as it swept through the house. Pausing only to snap on the light, she headed up the stairs. The chill of the upstairs rooms was even more marked. She closed the curtains in her bedroom to block out the rattling of the windows in the gale, then stripped the patchwork quilt from her bed as she turned to leave, welcoming the thought of wrapping herself in it until the sitting room warmed up again. Folding it over her arm, she stroked the folds absently, marvelling at the precise, tiny hand-stitches holding the patches together. A thought struck her. Those neat stitches, that little bag that the woman had been sewing – where had she seen it all before?

  Still struggling with the strangeness of the last half-hour, Alys stood and pondered, half expecting to find the woman seated by the fire when she returned downstairs. But now she had remembered where she had seen her handiwork. She retrieved the battered wooden box from under the bed, where she had stowed it away from Kate’s all-seeing eyes all those weeks before, and hurried back downstairs, filled with nervous anticipation.

  She raised the lid, taking the leather-bound herbal from its resting place, then lifted the drawstring bag, embroidered with a sprig of lavender, from where it lay beneath the ledger. As she did so, she felt something hard inside the bag. She pulled at the string that drew the top together, and upended the bag over her free hand. A brooch tumbled out – an enamelled depiction of a sprig of lavender bound with a cream ribbon. Pretty enough, although the enamel was cracked and crazed with age.

  Alys turned the simple piece of jewellery over in her fingers, as if looking for clues. Finding none, she stowed the brooch back in the pouch – and at that moment, her eyes were caught by something that had dropped unnoticed onto her lap from the bag. It was a photograph, tiny and oval, clearly cut down to fit a locket. The portrait was sepia tinted and faded, and showed the sensitive features of a young man with floppy hair, staring, unsmiling, straight at the camera. Alys turned it over, hoping for clues. On the back it had a single initial: ‘R’.

  ‘R’? Alys thought rapidly. ‘R? Who could it be?’

  She was about to return the bag and its contents back to the box, when a sudden thought made her stop. She shook the bag over her hand again. Nothing. She peered inside the narrow opening. Still nothing. Then, handling the fragile fabric very carefully, she turned the bag inside out. Again, there was nothing to be seen: just smooth, cream fabric, so soft it felt like a scrap of silk. Alys looked to see the back of the stitches – somewhere in the back of her mind she held a notion about the needlework skills of the past, about stitches so neat that the front and back would be virtually indistinguishable. But there was nothing to be seen. The bag was lined.

  Disappointed and about to give up, she spotted a small opening at the top, where the lining joined the bag. Once, it had been sewn with tiny, almost invisible stitches, but the thread had perished and frayed with time. She teased the stitches further apart, feeling guilty for destroying the workmanship, then managed to push her thumb and forefinger into the gap. She felt the edge of a piece of paper.

  Holding her breath, Alys carefully grasped the edge of the paper. Her fingers felt very big and clumsy in such a confined space – she was nervous of tearing the paper as she tugged. It must have been here for some time and she feared it would be brittle and fragile. She thought a moment, then went to the bathroom and retrieved her eyebrow tweezers. Inserting them carefully into the gap, she took a firm grip on the paper and pulled.

  The tweezers held several scraps of paper. These were creased where they had been folded, and the handwriting was the same on each one. The words were sparse. ‘Sunday 3 p.m.?’ appeared on more than one. Just one read ‘Deer pool, tonight 10 p.m.’ The final one that Alys looked at had a few more words, squeezed onto the scrap in tiny writing. ‘Caroline wanted to walk with me. So very sorry. Must talk. R.’

  Alys smoothed out the scraps and spread them around her. She frowned. Whatever could they mean? There were six of them in all. Five seemed to be setting up some sort of a meeting, but the scraps held no clue as to day or date, and only one suggested a place. The sixth was the note of contrition, with that initial again, R. And a mention of Caroline. Who was she?

  The wind was gusting even more loudly and Alys started to shiver. It was getting late, but her head was full of such jumbled thoughts that there was no prospect of sleep. She got up, put another log on the fire and made herself some tea. Picking up a pen and paper, she settled herself as close to the heat as possible and started to make a list. She needed to spell out what she knew, because currently it was just a tangle of thoughts in her head.

  An hour later she had too many questions – and no way that she could see of answering them all. But she had remembered a possible ‘R’: Richard Weatherall, the son of the mill owner, the man who had died in the fire, the one Alice was accused of killing. If he was the mysterious ‘R’, the notes seemed to imply that Alice had been seeing him at some point – but hadn’t the newspaper report about the fire mentioned that he was married?

  With a start, Alys realised that it was 2 a.m. There was no sign of Moira, which was a bit of a worry considering the weather. Fierce gusts of wind were still rattling the windows. ‘It’s as if someone is trying to get in,’ Alys thought uneasily. She needed to get to bed so she could be up in time to bake before opening up the Northwaite café tomorrow, and then to head over to Nortonstall once Moira had reappeared. But she feared it would be a restless night, and not only because of the gale blowing outside.

  Part Eight

  Chapter One

  It was cold. Bitter, damp, bone-chillingly cold. The darkness was unfathomable. They’d given Alice a candle, out of pity, but it was a poor stump of a thing and it had gone out long ago. Alice’s cheeks burnt with shame and indignation. She didn’t deserve to be here, crouched in the filth in the tiny village lock-up, a rat-infested basement beneath old Smithson’s cottage. She tried to drag her thoughts away from the night’s events: the horror of the mill on fire, great tongues of flame leaping up into the night sky, the heat driving back everyone who’d rushed to help, labouring to douse the flames with water from the stream. Her throat felt raw from the smoke. She could still smell it in her hair, on her clothes.

  Cautiously, she edged her toe forward, probing to locate the basket that lay somewhere on the floor. This was her evidence, her best hope. This was her proof that she’d be
en doing as she said, gathering herbs for her mother, looking for the skullcap that needed to be picked by moonlight before it was added to the pot, to effect the most potent brew. Her mother would be frantic, wondering where Alice had got to. She’d have seen the glow of the flames lighting up the sky, heard the commotion as people rushed up and down the road, trying to muster help, find buckets or anything that could be used to collect water to quench the fire that was devouring their livelihood. She’d have been soothing Elisabeth, made fretful by Sarah’s agitation. The water would have already been on the boil, everything ready for Alice to return with the precious herbs.

  Now Sarah would be standing anxiously at the garden gate in the dark, asking anyone who was passing by if they’d seen her daughter, waiting and waiting as the numbers of people returning from the fire became fewer and fewer, until the number dwindled to none. She wouldn’t know that Alice, who had been an early arrival on the scene once she’d recognised the fire for what it was, had been pointed out to the local constable by a smoke-blackened figure, wild-eyed and with a cruel twist to his mouth. She wasn’t there to see her bewildered daughter seized roughly and thrown into the back of a cart along with her basket. She didn’t hear her try to protest, or witness her struggle as her hands were bound roughly with rope and she was pushed into the bottom of the cart with a coarse blanket thrown over her.

  ‘Stay quiet, missie.’ The voice had been rough, angry. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble for one night. It’s lucky that Williams spotted you before you could scarper.’

  Chapter Two

  Each breath seemed like a cruel one. Each moment of waking, bringing with it the momentary belief that all was normal, a confidence trick. Alice wondered why her heart kept beating, forcing her body to carry on this charade of living.