Alice’s Secret: A gripping story of love, loss and a historical mystery finally revealed. Lynne Francis
draped with wisteria, that swept down from the back of the shop towards the river. Alys took to bringing along a slice or two of cake from the café, ones that she thought Claire might appreciate. She learnt that she could rely on Claire for candid comments on new recipes that she had introduced, appreciative or otherwise. The courgette cake got a thumbs-up for being surprisingly moist, but the beetroot cake had an odd texture and Claire declared a preference for not mixing vegetables with cake too frequently. She would make a pot of Earl Grey and bring out slices of lemon in a dish along with the bone-china plates, cups and saucers that had belonged to her grandmother. They were much-coveted by Alys but she wouldn’t dream of mentioning it to Claire. With the sign on the shop turned to ‘Closed’ they’d sip tea while they soaked up the sun and took in the view down the valley. Alys would try to imagine life back in London, but it was hard. It might as well have been a million miles away, rather than a couple of hundred.
Back in the Northwaite café, the china collection grew until the shelves could hold no more. Moira used the beautiful vintage jugs to decorate the scrubbed tables that the warmer weather had encouraged her to set up in the courtyard. Meadow flowers, such as cow parsley, poppies, cornflowers or whatever happened to be in season, were combined with aquilegia or old-fashioned scented roses from Moira’s garden, all spilling over the sides of the jugs in profusion. The villagers exclaimed with delight whenever a new item of china appeared and soon took to bringing in offerings of their own. ‘We’ve had this old thing sitting in the back of the cupboard for years,’ they’d say, holding out a beautiful sandwich plate with shaped and gilded edges, decorated with flower borders of yellow-and-white daisies threaded through with forget-me-nots. Or ‘This was Mum’s Sunday-best cup. She kept it to drink her tea from after church. We know she would have liked you to have it for the café,’ as they handed over a bone-china cup and saucer, so delicate you could almost see your fingers through it.
A slice or two of Moira’s best chocolate chiffon cake, or a couple of freshly baked scones and tiny pots of homemade jam and clotted cream, neatly parcelled into a brown box, would be waiting when it was time for the donor to leave the café.
Alys persuaded Moira that it was time to release some of the china from the overflowing displays, and use it to serve the customers. At first, Moira was reluctant to make the café reliant on delicate china that had to be washed by hand. But her customers’ delighted reactions to the pieces soon persuaded her otherwise and within a day or two her regulars had already earmarked their favourite cups. Matching cups and saucers to the people she was serving soon became a favourite pastime for Alys. Moira still kept a supply of the practical white china on hand though, so that they could offer their customers a choice. She’d realised that the dainty cups with their delicate handles made some of them nervous and clumsy, fearful of breakages.
Alys was disappointed when the café’s china collection had reached capacity and Moira had to beg her to stop buying. ‘There’ll be no room for our customers at this rate,’ she said, laughing. But Alys simply couldn’t bear to pass by when she saw a particularly nice piece of vintage china or porcelain for sale and the collection of cups, saucers, plates and bowls continued to grow. Her delight in vintage styling had tapped in to something she hadn’t even suspected about herself, and she was hungry for a further challenge. Her disappointment at being urged to stop collecting was relieved a little when, following up on a customer’s tip off, she took the train from Nortonstall to Saltaire, and paid a visit to the vintage clothing and fabric stall in Salts Mill. There she snapped up starched white cloths, lovingly preserved and intricately decorated with crocheted panels, lace and embroidery. They were too fine to be laundered for daily use in the café, but Alys had a plan – she was going to offer to supply vintage china and complete table dressings to the weddings for which Moira created towers of cupcakes, or tiered iced sponge cakes, garlanded with sugar-paste roses and iced tendrils and vines. Before long, crates of linen and china were packed and held at the ready in the store room, ready to dress the tables at the many summer weddings for which Moira had already taken orders that year. Alys felt her creative spirit unfurl and spread its wings, rather like the angel’s wings that she was hoping to persuade Moira to introduce to the company logo and the cake boxes. It seemed as though each day her brain was buzzing with a new idea to try out and Moira, now back at work full-time, had to suggest quite forcibly that she should take a day off that didn’t involve anything at all to do with the café or with baking, in an effort to get her to switch off and relax. So, as spring turned into summer, Alys went less frequently in search of vintage treasures and began to explore the countryside all around Northwaite, as she had started to do on her very first evening in the village.
‘Bogbean and myrtle. Pulmonaria,’ recited Alys to herself as she meandered down the path to the bathing pool. It was her favourite path, the one with the stone she called the fairy slide, where the granite had been worn so smooth by the passage of feet that it was scooped in the centre, with raised sides. It undulated down the hillside, reminding her of the long slide at a theme park somewhere in Cornwall that she’d been to many years before, as a child.
She knew that she was mixing up common and Latin names for plants, but the sound of the words pleased her, making their own kind of rhythm to accompany her as she went along the path. Her aunt had been teaching her, surprised by her lack of knowledge of anything other than the most basic garden flowers. Alys made a point of taking photos of flowers on her phone when she was out and about, then taking them back to Moira so they could check them out against the hand-drawn illustrations in Moira’s battered copy of The Concise British Flora in Colour.
The pool was in sight below, glinting invitingly through the trees on this late-spring morning. The water would be freezing, fresh off the moors. She shivered in anticipation. It should be just the right depth at the moment. Any deeper, and she would start imagining moorland monsters lurking down there, their presence protected by the locals who told not a soul about them. Alys smiled to herself. First fairies and now monsters. Her imagination was definitely running away with her. There was something about this area, this valley, though. It felt as though it held so much history, so many secrets.
She shivered again, and shrugged her shoulders in an attempt to break free of the spell it had cast over her. It was a beautiful day, the sort that May offers to seduce you into thinking that summer has truly arrived. The sun was high, the sky all but cloudless and a bright clear blue that stretched upwards into infinity.
Alys crossed the bridge over the stream and stretched out on her back on the grassy bank a little way from the pool. She’d discovered it two or three weeks ago, on one of her walks along the river bank. It was located a little further than she had travelled during her previous explorations, but she soon realised that it could also be reached via the path down the hillside, although this route was less appealing for the journey home when it seemed unaccountably steeper. The pool was a perfect natural formation: a basin formed by rocks, before the water funnelled away and tumbled over stones downstream to Nortonstall, a couple of miles away. The pool always seemed to be calm and still, the water dark and peaceful, and it had suggested itself as the ideal spot for a swim to Alys one day when she realised that the only thing she missed about her trips to the gym back in London was the chance to go swimming. Hauling around sacks of flour, baking, carrying trays of dirty crockery and sweeping the café floor gave her enough of a workout, she reasoned. Swimming would offer some of that nice, gentle relaxation that Moira was recommending.
She gazed up at the sky, watching swifts dart across her vision on high, then swooping low, scooping up insects and shrieking to each other with their high-pitched calls. She was looking forward to the shock of plunging into the pool’s icy water, but she wanted to lie there a while first, warming herself in the sun. Bees buzzed busily around the gorse bushes that were scattered around the edge of the grass and on the hillside, which stretched up behind her. Moira had told her about gorse’s coconut scent, and she hadn’t believed her at first. But now she could smell it quite clearly, wafting over her as she lay there, relaxing into the ground and soaking up wellbeing in every fibre of her body.