‘I hope you have known kindness.’ Alice thought back to her mother’s words as she huddled in the cold, dank cell. Indeed, she had. She had known cruelty too, but she had mentioned nothing of this to Richard. Nothing of the humiliating tussles that took place when Williams lay in wait for her as she left work, or cornered her in some storeroom, where he had sent her on some pretext or another, right in the middle of the working day.
She had told Richard none of this because she hoped the fact of his existence would help her erase it from her mind. That first night as she had made her way home from the deer pool, part of her in a desperate hurry because she feared that she had lost track of time; and part of her lost, suffused in a glow that both energised her and reduced her to inertia, it was then that she had thought that there might be some happiness to look forward to in her life.
Richard’s marriage had almost done for her. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel such pain. Such confusion, such abandonment. Amidst this madness, she still didn’t know why she had thought it a sensible plan to marry Williams. A belief that he was the one man in the area capable of giving her security for Elisabeth, she supposed. Nothing could be further from the truth. She shuddered. Williams’s basic nature was so dark, so damaged, it was hard to see how she could have ever believed he would protect another man’s child.
She felt sure that Richard had loved her, and wondered whether, given time, he would have broken the news to Caroline, and to his family, told them of his child and of his wish to be with Alice. God hadn’t seen fit to grant him that time, and Alice feared that time had run out for her, too. She closed her eyes, trying to conjure up the faces of those that she loved the best, the faces of Sarah, of Elisabeth, of Richard, of Ella, Thomas, Annie and Beattie, of Albert.
With her last remaining strength, she fought to hold fast to memories of her mother and her daughter and to wish them a future together, a future with as much happiness as her imagination could conjure out of her desperate situation. Her fingers sought the locket, still secure on its chain around her neck. She’d removed Richard’s photograph when he married so it was empty now, the case bent and damaged when she had been manhandled into the cart on the night of the fire. But it was Richard’s gift to her, the one thing of his she had apart from Elisabeth and she held it tightly, feeling him close as her breath faded and her thoughts pulled her back down the dark avenue of time, to her days in the mill, to the bustle and chatter and the noise of the machines as the thread spooled back and forth across the width of the cloth, the threads pulled taut, warp and weft, ever-growing, ever-changing.