1

London 1886

Mary Ross sat down at her bureau and pulled a piece of paper towards her. The July sun streamed in through the window and for several minutes she put off what she intended to do. Instead she looked out into the familiar street. For nearly twenty years she had looked out at the plane tree rooted in the opposite pavement, casting its shade across the road, and at the modest houses lined up on the far side, all reflections of her own. She had lived nearly all her married life in this house, looking out at this street, and it was in this house that she would die... and soon. She had battled against the illness which was now consuming her and she knew it was a battle she had lost. Her own mother had succumbed to the same disease at a similar age and Mary had recognized the signs well before anyone else. She had been nineteen when her mother died, a year younger than her own daughter, Sophie, was now, but somehow she felt Sophie was younger than her remembered self. Brought up in a house where love flourished, Sophie seemed to her mother ill-prepared for the chilly winds of the outside world. Even as she was thinking these thoughts, the sound of the piano drifted up the stairs from the drawing room below; Sophie practising as she did every afternoon. ‘For,’ as she pointed out, ‘I can’t begin to take on more pupils, Mama, if I’m a stumbling pianist myself.’

Listening to her now, Mary was well aware that Sophie was anything but a stumbling pianist. She played with a fluidity and expression that she, Mary, had never achieved, despite the encouragement and the long hours of practice demanded by her own mother. Sophie had surpassed her several years ago and was well able to instruct the two little girls to whom she gave lessons twice a week. Sophie’s intention was to take on more pupils to help supplement their slender income.

‘I’m sure if I asked Emma and Harriet’s mothers they would recommend me,’ she’d enthused. ‘I shall build a list of pupils and start a music school.’ Her mother had smiled fondly at these ambitious plans.

Dear Sophie, Mary thought now, as she listened to the melodies wafting through the house. So keen to help, to make life easier, but it would be no good. Since John had been killed, run over by a hansom in one of London’s famous pea-soup fogs, they had been living off the small capital inherited from his mother, all that he had left behind. It was meagre enough, but as a younger son he was entitled to little of his father’s modest estate. He might have inherited more but he had died before his father, and his share of the inheritance had returned to his brother, Harold.

With only a small annuity, a legacy from Mary’s mother, and without John’s regular income from his work in the City, Mary and Sophie had been left in decidedly straitened circumstances.

The annuity paid the rent, but Mary knew that it would cease with her death. When she died Sophie would have only the last of the dwindling capital to live on. When that had gone she would have to go out and make her own way in the world... unless.

Unless I eat humble pie and ask the family to look after her, Mary thought. That, she knew, was the situation in a nutshell, and it led her back to her decision.

Reluctantly she again turned her attention to the paper in front of her and, picking up her pen, began to write. She had delayed writing this letter for too long and now that she faced imminent death, she knew it had to be written before it was too late.

She hadn’t been in contact with those at Trescadinnick for over nineteen years. Not since Sophie was born. She had written to her father then to tell him he had a granddaughter, but there had been no reply, not even an acknowledgement that her letter had been received. Now, though, she must either leave Sophie almost destitute or she must swallow her pride and beg the family to provide for her. Was her father even alive still? she wondered. He’d be an old man now. She knew her brother Joss had been killed in an accident, but what about her sisters? Surely they’d still be there; Louisa running Trescadinnick, Matty married to George Treslyn. Surely they would see Sophie was looked after. However, it was to her estranged father that she knew she must address herself.

Slowly Mary wrote, Dear Papa... More than once she tore the page across and started again before she was satisfied with the result. She had told him she was dying, explained the position in which this would leave Sophie and asked for his help. At last the letter was finished and having read it through once more, she slipped it into an envelope and sealed it. Would it be ignored like her last letter, when Sophie was born? Well, if it were, Sophie need never know it had even been sent. She put it in a pigeonhole in the desk and closed the lid. It was done.

Suddenly she was exhausted and with the familiar pain coursing through her, she crawled onto her bed and lay back, closing her eyes for a minute before she reached for the bell at her bedside and rang for Hannah.

Hannah she could rely on. She had been employed as a nursery maid when Sophie was a baby and somehow she had stayed on as cook-housekeeper, almost one of the family.

Moments later Hannah came into the room, opening the door softly and pausing on the threshold in case her mistress had dozed off again, as she did sometimes these days. But as she stood by the door, Mary’s eyes opened and she beckoned Hannah inside.

‘I want you to do something for me, Hannah,’ she said. ‘Without question.’

‘Of course, ma’am. You just say what and I’ll do it.’

‘There’s a letter in my bureau, in the right-hand pigeonhole, addressed to some people in Cornwall. When I die... and not before, mind... you’re to post that letter immediately. But you’re not to say a word about it to Miss Sophie, you understand?’

‘Just post a letter for you? I could do that now if you want me to.’

‘No, not till... after.’ Realizing she had to give some explanation, she went on, ‘It’s just a letter to... to some friends that Sophie doesn’t know about. A final farewell. They live a long way away and I don’t want them to come visiting.’ That much at least was true. She had set aside her pride to write and ask help for Sophie, but she would ask nothing for herself.

‘Well, ma’am, if you say so,’ Hannah said, pleased to promise anything that would ease her mistress’s mind and happily unaware of the consequences of that promise.

Later that evening, Sophie sat by the bed, her mother’s hand in hers no heavier than an autumn leaf, blue-veined, transparent, but an infinitesimal pressure from her frail fingers proved that she was not yet asleep. Sophie returned the pressure, knowing if she tried to speak she would break down and weep. As she sat there, watching the evening sun mellow the familiar wallpaper, Sophie found herself thinking about her father.

Unlike her mother’s, his death was entirely unexpected. He had taken the omnibus to the City one dull, November morning – an ordinary morning, the start of anything but an ordinary day. He had dropped a kiss on his daughter’s head as she sat eating her breakfast before she too left the house to go to school; he’d paused at the front door to tip his hat to his wife, a familiar gesture of respect given every day as he left, and stepped out into the street. They never saw him alive again. As he’d alighted from the omnibus and started to walk to his office, the morning fog had swallowed him. He had collided with another, unseen pedestrian and had been tipped into the path of an oncoming hansom. Sophie had not been allowed to see him. His coffin had been closed, the damage to his head making him almost unrecognizable. Now, Sophie’s thoughts were of his funeral. She had not been allowed to attend that either. She had watched as the coffin was carried out of the house and laid in a hearse drawn by black-plumed horses. His brother, her Uncle Harold, attended, following the hearse in a black-swathed carriage, while other friends followed the cortege on foot. After the burial, with a brief handshake and words of condolence to Mary, Harold had returned home. The friends, with murmured sympathy, had dispersed and Mary had walked alone through the chilly November streets to the home where Sophie and Hannah awaited her.

Sophie had never seen her mother shed a tear, though on occasion a bleakness in her expression told of her private grief. Sophie gradually became used to her father’s absence. Sometimes a jolt of reality hit her when she longed to tell him something, wanting to share some excitement or piece of news, and she had to accept again that he would never walk back through the door. But the ordinariness of daily life took over as she went to school, took her piano lessons, walked with her mother along the towpath by the river or across the common, and the fact of his absence became the ordinary.

Will that happen when Mother dies? Sophie wondered as she looked down at the frail form, now asleep in the bed. Tears sprang to her eyes and she bit her lip to stop herself from crying out. How will I manage when she’s not here any more? How can I watch her simply fade away? Will living without her become ordinary?

The end came a week later in that same sunlit bedroom. Mary lay motionless in her bed, no longer aware of her surroundings. She had taken no food for two days; no water since the night before. Sophie was sitting holding her hand, hoping that Mama knew that she was there with her, that she was not alone, but with a gentle relaxation of her hand, Mary slipped into her final sleep.

On a hot August day, with sun burning in a cloudless sky, the coffin was carried in a plain black carriage pulled by a single, black-plumed horse, first to the church and then to the cemetery. This time it was Sophie who led the little knot of mourners who followed on foot.

Sophie had written to her Uncle Harold to tell him of her mother’s death and had received a black-edged card of condolence, but he had not come to the funeral, pleading pressure of business. Mr Phillips was there, as was Dr Hart, but when they left the graveside, Sophie and Hannah walked quietly home and Sophie was left to mourn her mother alone.

Since the death of her father five years earlier, Sophie and her mother had only each other, and Mary’s last illness had bonded them closer than ever. Now Sophie was left surrounded by an infinite emptiness, achingly alone. Her life seemed to stretch out bleakly in front of her, a grey wasteland full of pitfalls that she would have to negotiate by herself.

On the day after the funeral Hannah took the letter from Mary’s bureau to the post. It was only a letter to some distant friends, she had reasoned. There was no hurry for them to receive it; they lived somewhere in Cornwall and would hardly be coming to the funeral. Sophie might hear from them some time in the future, but as far as Hannah was concerned the important thing had been to get the funeral over and consider what to do next.

Hannah was no fool and she knew well that they’d been living on a shoestring for the past couple of years, and there were certain things that needed to be decided upon, and sooner rather than later. She was relieved when the lawyer, Mr Phillips, came to see Sophie, bringing the simple will that her mother had left. Surely a man like Mr Phillips would know what they should do, Hannah thought as, having served them tea, she retreated to the kitchen and left them to it.

‘Everything of your mother’s is left to you,’ Mr Phillips told Sophie. ‘There’s a little money and a few pieces of jewellery. She mentions a ring and a necklace.’

‘I know about those,’ Sophie told him. ‘They were given to her by my father. I’m sure there used to be a bracelet that matched the necklace, but I can’t find it. I think Mother must have sold it.’

‘If that’s the case,’ he suggested gently, ‘you might think about selling one of the other pieces, just to tide you over until...?’

Until what? wondered Sophie. Until I get a job? Until I get married? Until I have to sell the next piece? But she gave utterance to none of these things, simply saying, ‘I don’t intend to sell those if I can help it, Mr Phillips.’ She managed a smile. ‘I know things are going to be difficult from now on. For a start, I shan’t be able to last long on the money I’ve got now. Mama’s illness was long-drawn-out, you know, and the doctor’s fees mounted up. Then of course there was the funeral... We’ve been eating into capital, I’m afraid.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘And there wasn’t much in the first place.’

‘What about the house?’ asked Mr Phillips. ‘Not yours, I believe.’

Sophie shook her head. ‘No, it’s rented. We pay the rent quarterly. It’s due in a month or so.’

‘Well, let me know if you have any difficulties, my dear,’ Mr Phillips said as he rose to leave. ‘Only too happy to help. Good friend of mine, your father.’

Sophie saw him to the door and then sighed as she returned to the parlour. The rent of the small house in Hammersmith was indeed paid up until the end of the quarter, but that was only a matter of weeks away. Despite Mr Phillips’s offer of help, Sophie knew she must move to a cheaper place and find some form of employment.

‘There are two possibilities really,’ she sighed to Hannah. ‘Finding somewhere much cheaper to live and taking more piano pupils to pay the rent, or becoming a governess somewhere so I’ve no living expenses at all... unless, of course,’ the thought struck her, ‘I could get work in a shop.’

‘A shop!’ The redoubtable Hannah was horrified. Having come to look after Sophie as a baby and continued with the family ever since, she had very definite ideas of what was right and fitting for her beloved Sophie and she was never afraid to speak her mind. She did so now. ‘That’s not what your ma would have wanted, Miss Sophie, and that’s a fact. A shop girl indeed, the very idea.’

‘Well, I’ve got to do something,’ Sophie pointed out reasonably. ‘I can’t afford to go on as I am.’ Reaching out, she took Hannah’s hand and said gently, ‘But whatever I do, Hannah, I’m afraid you’ll have to find another position.’

Hannah stiffened. ‘You’re never turning me off, Miss Sophie? Not after all these years.’

‘Oh, Hannah, dear Hannah, of course I’m not,’ Sophie cried. ‘It’s just that I can’t afford to pay you any longer, and from now on I’ll have to fend for myself.’

‘That you will not, Miss Sophie,’ Hannah asserted hotly, ‘not while Hannah Butts is here to look after you. It isn’t proper for a young lady to live alone. Don’t you worry about wages. We’ll manage.’

‘But, Hannah dear, I can’t take you with me if I go for a governess,’ Sophie said gently, touched by Hannah’s determination.

‘Then you’d better not go for one,’ returned Hannah stoutly. ‘We’ll get by, Miss Sophie, you’ll see.’

But Sophie was not so optimistic. She knew that despite Hannah’s determination to do without wages, they would be hard pressed to live on the tiny income they had left, and secretly she began to scan the advertisement columns of ladies’ magazines to find a suitable family seeking a governess.

‘After all,’ she said to Hannah, ‘it’s not as if I’m not well educated. Both Papa and Mama were determined that I should go to a good school, and even when Papa was killed and money was tight, Mama insisted I stay on. I could teach small children to read and write, to learn their numbers, perhaps a little history and geography. I love children. I know I could do it, if only someone would give me a chance.’

‘’Course you could,’ Hannah said encouragingly, ‘if you had to. But maybe it won’t come to that. Never know what’s round the corner, do we?’

Sophie was pretty sure she did know what was round the corner, and it wasn’t very much. They certainly couldn’t afford the rent of the little house where they’d lived ever since she could remember. Come quarter day they would have to move.

She set out to find lodgings of a cheaper sort, but the rooms she could afford were so dreary and depressing, she didn’t commit herself to any of them, though as the days dragged by, she realized miserably that she must make a decision, and make it soon. How she wished her mother were at hand to advise her, or that she had a close friend in whom she could confide. She considered going back to Mr Phillips with her problems, but hesitated, and finally decided against it. He would tell her to sell Mama’s necklace, or worse, her wedding ring, neither of which she was prepared to do... at least not yet. So, short of lending her money, there was not a lot that Mr Phillips could do. Sophie was determined not to get into debt, but unless she found work of some sort soon they were going to be out on the street. With only Hannah for company in those dark days, her spirits sank lower and lower.

She had answered several advertisements in ladies’ magazines, families looking for a governess, but had only been invited for interview once. That interview had been extremely short. Lady Carson of Ovington Square had taken one look at Sophie and decided against her. Her fifteen-year-old son, Rupert, was at such an impressionable age and here was Miss Ross, perfectly acceptable from the answers she gave, but too attractive by far with her dark auburn hair, her delicately clear skin and fine dark green eyes. Her pale beauty, of which she seemed entirely unaware, was set off by the severe black of her mourning. To have such a person living in the house with Rupert, and indeed her own husband, Henley, would be tempting providence. Lady Carson looked down her aristocratic nose, bid Sophie good morning and sent her away.

‘Lady Carson didn’t find me suitable,’ Sophie told Hannah when she returned from the unsuccessful interview. ‘It looks as if I may have to try and get work in a shop after all. I’ve got to find something.’

‘Woman must be mad not to give you the job,’ sniffed Hannah, secretly pleased that she hadn’t. ‘Can’t see a good thing when it’s right in front of her, if you ask me. Any answers to your own advertisements yet, Miss Sophie?’

Sophie shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘Still, as they only went in this week, we must give them time.’

Sophie had advertised her services as a music teacher, offering to work in the pupils’ own homes, teaching piano, singing and music appreciation. Her fees would be low, but with these to supplement her tiny income she and Hannah might just manage, provided they found the cheap lodging they’d been seeking.

It was Hannah who found a place eventually, two rooms in Putney, with a private parlour and the use of a kitchen.

‘It’s not much, Miss Sophie,’ she said sadly. ‘But at least it’s clean and the woman there seems a decent sort of a body. A Mrs Porter. She tells me too that there is a seminary for young ladies down the road, which might need a music teacher.’

Sophie went to see the rooms and to meet Mrs Porter, who led her upstairs to view what might become her new home. The two tiny bedrooms, cramped and dark with small windows, looked out onto a backyard filled with an accumulation of junk and a privy standing against the wall. The parlour faced the narrow street and the blank wall of a factory opposite, but at least it was south-facing and blessed with sunshine for much of the day. The kitchen was downstairs and they would have to provide their own pots and pans, but there was a stove that could be used by arrangement.

‘Don’t you worry, Miss Sophie,’ Hannah said as she surveyed what it had to offer. ‘I’ll arrange with Mrs Porter for our cooking. We’ll manage.’

With great reluctance, Sophie agreed to take the rooms and paid two weeks in advance to secure them. It was the best they could do and they arranged to move in at the end of the quarter. Sophie also approached the girls’ school Mrs Porter had mentioned, explaining to the rather formidable principal, Mrs Devine, that she was looking for work as a music teacher. Mrs Devine looked at her critically and with a sniff, regretted she was in no need of a music teacher at present, adding as she rang the bell to have Sophie shown out, ‘You’re too young for such a position, Miss Ross, scarcely older than my girls themselves.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if I couldn’t do the job properly,’ Sophie complained bitterly to Hannah over a cup of tea when she got home again, ‘but they never ask me to play or anything, so they’ve no idea if I’m any good or not. They always use my age as an excuse.’

‘Never mind, Miss Sophie. It’s their loss, that’s what I say. We’ll manage, you’ll see. Now you just relax over your nice cup of tea, and I’ll run down to the market and find some good fresh vegetables to go with dinner.’

Hannah disappeared down the road and Sophie wandered from room to room, to make final decisions as to which of her parents’ cherished furniture and other possessions she would have to part with.

‘For we’ve no room in Putney for Mama’s bureau or Papa’s chair, or the grandfather clock. Still,’ she had told Hannah, trying not to sound too depressed, ‘I’ll keep the piano because I’ll need that, and if we sell the other things it’ll give us a little more money.’

With the house silent, she stood motionless in her mother’s bedroom. She’d known no other home and now she was about to leave it.

‘What else could I do, Mama?’ she asked aloud, and as misery and frustration overtook her, she flung herself onto her mother’s bed and wept. Gradually her sobs subsided, and exhausted by the tensions of the last few weeks and her bout of weeping, there, on the bed, her head pillowed on her arms, Sophie drifted into an uneasy sleep.