Alys arrived a little early at the gate of Rob’s parents’ house. She felt a sense of nervous excitement, or was it apprehension? Could it be to do with meeting Rob’s parents? Rob clearly saw her as nothing more than a friend, didn’t he? So, she didn’t need to feel as anxious as she would have felt on meeting a new boyfriend’s parents, surely? Whatever it was, she had butterflies in her stomach and wasn’t quite sure why.
As Alys raised her hand to lift the door knocker, she took a closer look at the carved stonework arching around the front door. She registered how grand it seemed for a cottage. Garlands of leaves twined around fat seed pods and thistle-like flowers, each detail of the leaf veins and spiky flower heads lovingly carved. Seen in close up, it was even more apparent that the same hand that had carved Alice’s gravestone had been at work here.
She lifted the knocker and let it fall, trying to calm her jitters. Rob opened the door with a broad smile, and within moments her nervousness had evaporated, vanquished by the warmth of her welcome. Alys was ushered in, introduced to his mother, relieved of her jacket and box of The Celestial Cake Café macaroons, led into the garden and seated under the shade of a big cream umbrella, with a glass of chilled white wine pressed into her hand. Within moments, she found a dog at her feet, muzzle resting on her shoes and eyes fixed beseechingly on her.
‘Just ignore her,’ said Rob’s mum, who had introduced herself as Julie. She was petite with dark curly hair and had the sort of slim build that made Alys think that she was probably very energetic. A fell-runner, or a regular at the gym, maybe? Alys felt big-boned and clumsy beside her but Julie had welcomed her with such a lovely all-encompassing smile that she felt instantly at ease. ‘Derek was supposed to take her for a walk before lunch but he got waylaid by the cricket on TV. She’s hoping you’re a soft touch.’
‘Oh, she’s lovely.’ Alys bent forward to fondle the dog’s soft ears, and to chuck her under her chin. ‘Maybe Rob and I could take her out after lunch. What’s her name?’
‘Lola,’ said Rob, rolling his eyes. ‘Something to do with a song from way back when.’
Lola thumped her tail enthusiastically on the floor.
‘I see Lola’s found a friend, then.’ Derek had come out into the garden, having been dragged away from the cricket by Julie. Alys smiled. He was just an older version of his son: similar jeans and checked shirt, same build, same curly hair but greying a bit around the temples, same brown eyes.
Julie came back out from the kitchen and settled on a chair, glass in hand.
‘Right, five minutes while I wait for the vegetables to cook,’ she said, glancing at her watch.
‘Watch out,’ said Rob in a stage whisper to Alys. ‘Your turn now for the Spanish Inquisition.’
‘Now, now,’ scolded Julie. ‘Alys must have got used to Yorkshire folk by now. They’ll have your life story out of you within ten minutes of knowing you. They’re not being nosey, though,’ she said, turning to Alys. ‘Just friendly.’
‘Insatiably curious, more like,’ muttered Rob.
His mother shook her head. ‘Well, it beats the way they go on down in London. You get on a Tube packed with people and nobody says a word to anyone. If you try to chat to your neighbour, they look at you like you’re from another planet.’
Alys laughed. ‘I know what you mean.’ Although, privately, she felt that maybe city folk had enough interactions to get through in a day without chatting to their fellow passengers – she’d always found the Tube her chance to have some downtime. Time to think, catch up with a book, zone out from the invasion of her personal space by her packed-in fellow commuters.
‘So,’ Julie said, glancing at her watch again. ‘Rob tells me you’ve been doing a bit of family research while you’ve been here?’
‘Yes,’ Alys took a sip of her wine. ‘It looks as though my family go back quite a long way in the area. Well, at least, I’ve got as far back as my great-great-grandmother. Her name was Alice, too, and she worked at the mill down in the valley.’
‘Oh, that’ll be Hobbs Mill,’ said Derek. ‘In those days, just about everyone in the village worked there. Albert, my dad’s granddad, was there awhile.’
‘I told Alys about all the research you’d done,’ said Rob, turning to his mum. ‘Maybe there’s something in all those papers you have that might help Alys find out some more about her relatives?’
A beeping noise from the kitchen brought Julie to her feet. ‘Time for lunch now. But after we’ve eaten you can make some coffee to go with those wonderful macaroons that Alys brought, and I’ll get the boxes down from the spare room. Alys can have a rummage through and see if there’s anything there of any use.’
Rob chuckled. ‘You’ve no idea how happy that’ll make Mum,’ he said, turning to Alys. ‘Really, she should have been a historian instead of a school administrator. She’s never so happy as when she’s going through the Spencer family archives.’
‘Get on with you.’ Julie rolled her eyes.
‘It’s true. She even ordered up a map that shows this part of the country well over a hundred years ago. Fascinating, I’m sure.’ Rob affected a yawn.
Julie smiled. ‘All that research has kept me busy and off your case,’ she said. ‘But now that it’s come to an end, well – better watch out.’ And she linked arms with her son as they all drifted through into the kitchen, where a table was set overlooking the garden.
Alys liked the easy way that Rob and his parents related to each other. She felt a pang of envy: it simply wasn’t like this in her own family. Kate was permanently over-anxious, David impatient of his wife and overbearing with guests, and Alys would be torn between embarrassment and irritation. Her brothers seemed to just let it wash over them, but she had noticed that they were infrequent visitors, even more so now that they were married. It seemed to her that they used the excuse of their wives’ families’ commitments increasingly often to avoid Christmas, Easter and birthday gatherings.
The relaxed feeling in the Spencer household persisted throughout lunch. It was a relatively simple meal: roast chicken flavoured with herbs from the garden, new potatoes with garden mint, home-grown vegetables, blackberry crumble. Or rather, bramble crumble, as Rob said she had to call it, now that she was ‘up North’. Rob and his father expected a proper Sunday lunch, Julie pointed out, whereas she would have been happy with salad in the summer.
‘Salad!’ Rob and Derek both looked horrified. ‘Nothing there but air!’ added Derek.
Julie laughed. It was clearly the response she was expecting. ‘Right, time for the archives,’ she said. ‘Derek, Rob. You’re on washing-up and coffee duties.’
Alys’s offers of help were brushed aside. ‘No, guests come here to relax,’ said Julie. ‘Anyway, it’s a family tradition that the men wash up. That’s why I’ve never bothered to get a dishwasher. Got to give them something to do.’ And she led Alys along the hallway to the foot of the stairs. ‘You can come and help with the boxes, though. More than one, I’m afraid.’
Alys paused at the foot of the stairs, her attention caught by the large, framed family tree that she’d failed to notice as she arrived. ‘Oh, Rob told me about this,’ she said, peering, fascinated, trying hard to take it all in. Rob, an only child, and his parents were there right at the bottom of a beautifully executed plan, each box filled with italic script detailing the names and dates of birth and death of family members stretching back, as Rob had said, all the way to the thirteenth century. Alys’s eyes were drawn to the name she’d heard at lunch.
‘Here’s Albert,’ she said, pointing through the glass. She paused, taking in the dates. ‘He died quite young. And he only had one child? That was quite unusual in those days, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ Julie paused, hand on banister, poised to climb the stairs. ‘Bit of a tragic story. He died in the First World War. He was in his late thirties, almost too old to enlist, but it seems he insisted on going. There are rumours that he had an unhappy marriage he was trying to escape. He was a great craftsman – a stonemason at York Minster. If he’d lived, I think he might have made a name for himself. He did the beautiful stone carving around the door here.’
Julie headed up the stairs, Alys following. ‘We’ll just take a couple of the boxes that relate to the time you’re looking at,’ she said over her shoulder, pushing open the door to the spare room. Alys gasped. One long row of shelves was filled with box files, all neatly labelled in date order.
Julie looked a bit sheepish. ‘Rob was right. It did become a bit of an obsession. There’s nothing more that I can do really – it’s all fully researched. I so enjoyed doing it. Maybe I should have been a detective? It’s a bit like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It’s so exciting when you find a piece that’s been missing.’ She looked pensive, then brightened. ‘You know, maybe I could help you? I learnt such a lot when I was doing this. And there’s so much you can access these days via the Internet.’
Alys felt herself starting to blush. ‘That’s really kind of you. But I couldn’t take up your time. And really, there’s only one person I’m interested in. There seems to be a bit of a mystery surrounding her and she died really young, leaving a small baby. I don’t know why I’m drawn to finding out more – maybe it’s just because we share a name?’
‘Oh, now you’re making me very curious. Don’t worry, it’s no trouble to give you a few tips to help you get started. Here, give me a hand with the files and we can see if there’s anything there.’
By the time Alys and Julie were back downstairs, the sun had vanished behind dark clouds and the garden was no longer so appealing, so they headed for the sitting room, where coffee was already waiting on a tray with pink, green and lilac macaroons piled on a china plate. Julie caught Alys looking at the cups.
‘They’re lovely, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘I know what a fan you are of old china. These belonged to my mum and, I suspect, to her mum before her. There’s a full set – I think they always kept them for best and hardly ever used them. When Rob told me what you’d done at the café, I decided it was time they came out from the back of the cupboard and saw the light of day on a regular basis.’
Julie and Alys settled themselves on the thick rug that covered the flagstone floor and opened the box files. Derek and Rob took it in turns to peer round the door and offer more coffee or wine but, seeing the two heads bent over a sea of documents, they tactfully withdrew and settled themselves in front of the TV in the other room.
Alys pored over the map that Rob had been so scornful of, marvelling over how little had changed in the village of Northwaite, but struck by how Nortonstall, by no means large today, had expanded since the map had been drawn up.
‘It was all because of the mills,’ said Julie. ‘And the railway. Once that arrived, Nortonstall became a transport hub for cloth from Hobbs Mill, but also for all the mills the length of the valley – about fifteen of them in all. And I suppose these mills needed supplies, and as more workers came to the area, they needed services too, so a whole town grew up.’
Julie flicked through a stack of papers from the box in front of her. There were copies of certificates, of pages of newspapers of the era, lists of businesses and their premises, copies of house deeds and census printouts. ‘I got really drawn in,’ she said. ‘Trying to build a picture of what it must have been like to live here all those years ago.’ She paused. ‘Actually, in terms of the buildings and countryside, not a lot has changed in Northwaite. Transport, obviously, but the village layout and all the paths to the mill and the next villages are really much as they were well over a century ago. Now, I’m looking for something –’ She hunted through a few more documents. ‘Ah, here we are.’ She extracted a slim book from the pile and handed it to Alys.
‘Is it a diary?’ Alys asked, fearful of opening it as the cloth binding had split around the spine, exposing the brittle glue and stitching that held the pages together.
‘Sort of,’ said Julie. ‘More a kind of journal, I’d say. It belonged to Albert. We found it in a box of his papers, along with a war medal and some photographs of him in uniform. But I think it dates back further than the war. I had a go at reading it, but I couldn’t decipher that much. The ink’s faded and his handwriting is hard to read. Maybe you’ll have better luck? Since he worked at the mill too, you might find something useful in there?’
Alys turned the pages gingerly, trying hard to quell a growing sense of excitement. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Julie, struggling to her feet and massaging her legs where pins and needles had set in. ‘I don’t expect you to read it now. You need time and a better light than we have in here.’
With a start, Alys realised it was coming up to half past five. She scrambled to her feet too. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ve kept you too long!’ she exclaimed. ‘I had no idea it was so late.’
‘You see how addictive it is?’ said Julie, and laughed. ‘Let’s go and see what’s happening next door. Odds on, they’re both fast asleep.’
Julie knew her family only too well. Both Rob and Derek were, indeed, asleep side by side on the sofa, TV still on. Julie switched it off.
‘Good match?’ she said loudly. Both men snapped their eyes open, momentarily confused, then obviously wondering whether they could deny having been asleep. Seeing that they’d been rumbled, they yawned and stretched, looking rather sheepish.
‘Cup of tea, anyone?’ asked Julie, heading for the kitchen. Alys’s protestations that she really must be going were overridden and, fortified by tea and the macaroons that had proved to be too much to have after lunch, but now looked rather more inviting, she found herself heading out of the village with Rob, Lola bounding on ahead, delighted that the promised walk had finally materialised.
‘How did it go?’ asked Rob. ‘Find anything useful?’
‘You know, I think I just might have done,’ said Alys, patting her jacket pocket where Albert’s journal was safely lodged. She was looking forward to reading it, planning to hide it away in her bedroom at Moira’s and take her time deciphering the fragile pages with their faded script. She savoured the sense of anticipation, but for now the sun had returned and it was a glorious evening. It was the perfect time for a walk, the sky a soft blue, the sun still warm, and the whole of the countryside looking as though it was bathed in a warm glow. Or perhaps that was just a reflection of Alys’s mood? She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt quite so relaxed and happy. She turned to Rob.
‘Race you to Tinker’s Wood,’ she said, pointing to the band of trees some distance away down the lane. Rob groaned. He hadn’t fully recovered from his large lunch and afternoon nap. He would have protested, but he wasn’t going to let Alys get the better of him. She was already well on her way, flying down the lane. It wasn’t the most elegant of running styles, he noted: her arms were flailing and there seemed to be more upward than forward motion. Her hair was already starting to fly free from the clips that had held it relatively secure all afternoon. He grinned and set off, gathering speed with the incline of the lane. Alys shrieked as she heard his heavy-footed approach. Lola, made giddy by Rob’s behaviour, which was quite unlike his normal self, leapt and bounded around the two of them, deliriously happy to be out of the house, the scent of rabbits in the air.