Alice’s Secret: A gripping story of love, loss and a historical mystery finally revealed. Lynne Francis
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.
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