Hettie of Hope Street. Annie Groves

       ONE

      ‘Mam, Mam, just wait until you see this.’ Excitement sparkled in Hettie’s dark eyes as she thrust the open page of the Liverpool Post underneath her mother’s nose. ‘They’re advertising for a “young lady” to sing to people during afternoon tea at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool. It says you have to write to this address here. Oh, Mam, I’m so excited. It would be the perfect job for me. Just imagine – I could sing every day and get paid for it!’

      Ellie Walker looked at the advertisement her step-daughter had shoved in front of her, her face clouding slightly. ‘Oh Hettie, love.’ Ellie said uncertainly. ‘I don’t think…’

      Immediately Hettie’s excitement gave way to anxiety. ‘But Mam, you know how much I love to sing and everyone said how good I was when I sang in The Mikado. Miss Brown said I had the best voice of any girl she had ever taught.’

      Ellie sighed. ‘Yes, Hettie I know that, but singing in a small private theatre to help raise money for charity is a very different thing to singing in public and,’ she hesitated, ‘and for money.’

      Ellie hated to see the excitement dying in Hettie’s eyes and being replaced by mutinous disappointment. But Ellie was very protective of all her children and even though Hettie was eighteen, she was still a child in so many ways. In so many ways, but not in all. Ellie glanced discreetly at her step-daughter’s body. Although slim and delicately boned, Hettie nevertheless had a very well-developed bosom. And then, of course, there was her unusual, sultry beauty – that mingling of the delicate bone structure Hettie had inherited from her Japanese mother together with some features from the Englishman who had been her father and Ellie’s first husband.

      Ellie had waited until she had felt Hettie was old enough to understand properly before explaining to her step-daughter the troubled circumstances surrounding her own birth and her parents’ deaths.

      Hettie had never known her father, having been