her coffee and eat her pastry as though she was used to it, although even a cursory glance at her reddened, worn hands would have suggested otherwise.
‘So,’ Albert said, giving her a probing look. ‘How long have you been in York? Do you have news from home?’
Ella started to fill him in on her last few years, her time at Mr Ottershaw’s in Nortonstall and the hardships of life there, her chance meeting with Mr Ward and her good fortune in being taken on at Mr Ward’s house in York. She managed to intersperse a few questions for Albert, and very soon realised that his apprenticeship and almost immediate employment as a qualified stonemason had kept him fully occupied here in York, and in other cathedral cities. It appeared that he had not returned to Northwaite in all that time. He had sent word home, and frequent amounts of money, but had heard little in return, neither his father nor his mother being ‘much of ones for writing’ as he said ruefully. Ella knew this to mean that they had never learnt how.
The furrow in Albert’s brow had deepened as Ella told her tale, and she feared his next question. Her coffee was drunk and she was very conscious of the passage of time. Mrs Sugden would not be impressed at the idea of a servant meeting up with an old friend and passing the time of day with him in a tearoom. Ella knew she was going to be in trouble.
‘I really must go. It was lovely to see you, Albert, but I will be late back.’ Ella wound her scarf around her neck as she spoke, and pushed her chair back. Perhaps she could make her escape while he settled the bill? She felt a pang of regret. It had been so lovely to see a familiar face from home, but what use could they be to each other now?
‘Wait,’ Albert rose at the same time as Ella and handed her basket to her. Ella tried to ignore the contemptuous stares of their neighbours. ‘Alice. You haven’t mentioned Alice. How is she?’
Ella took a deep breath. She had dreaded this very question. ‘She’s dead, Albert. I’m really sorry. It happened within three months of you leaving. Alice is dead.’
And with that she hurried to the door, almost pushing the doorman out of her way in her haste to be gone. As she passed the window, she glanced in quickly. Albert still stood by the table, as if rooted to the spot, leaning forward slightly and supported by his rigid arms, fingers splayed and tense on the cloth, all colour drained from his face.
By the time Ella had reached the Tadcaster Road, a good mile and a half from the tearoom, she was regretting the manner of her departure. It was cruel to Albert, who didn’t deserve it. Her own grief over her sister’s death seemed to veer between a cold, hard nugget locked away deep inside, to an overwhelming, boiling rage that made her want to run and run, screaming aloud at the injustice of it all. It was partly the latter sensation that had made her want to leave the tearoom so suddenly. Whatever would Albert think? She knew he had been sweet on Alice, but too shy to ever express this to her. Only a little older than him in years, Alice had seemed vastly older than him in wisdom and had always treated Albert more like a younger brother. Ella sensed some sort of unspoken bond between them, which she put down to them having been playmates from a very young age in Northwaite.
Northwaite. It hurt her to think of it even now, high up above Nortonstall on the Yorkshire hills, with views for miles on a clear day, exposed to vicious winds, snow, sleet and hail in the winter. As a child, Ella had believed that the skies went on for ever, something that had only struck her once she was here in a city, where the sky seemed limited by the buildings all around her. Even if she climbed to one of the highest points in the centre, Clifford’s Tower, her view was restricted to the silvery stones of the ancient city walls and the trees that shaded the river path. York, sprawling along the river, was set deep within a vale and at times Ella’s spirit longed for the soaring open spaces of her childhood home.
The bustle of the city streets, the rattle of the hansom cabs and the calls of the street urchins, the constant passage of people going about their business from dawn until dusk and on into the night, had been both a shock and a source of delight to Ella when she first arrived here. Now she barely noticed it, except when on a hurried errand and she found her way impeded by the sheer number of people out and about. What would her mother make of it all? Ella smiled to herself.
She could hear Sarah’s voice as clearly as if she was standing beside her. ‘What is so important that they have to be going at such speed?’
Ella’s mother’s journeys through Northwaite had always involved stopping to talk to everyone she met and enquiring after their family’s welfare (even if she had only seen them the day before). It could take her the best part of an hour to travel a few hundred yards. More than anything, her mother would struggle to comprehend that the majority of people passing along these streets were strangers to each other, their houses spread over a wide area of the city or its surrounds, their acquaintance more likely to be a result of their business or family connections rather than neighbourliness.
She would be astonished by the traffic on the streets, too. Ella had seen the occasional motorcar as it passed through Nortonstall; indeed, that was how she had first met Mr Ward, her current employer. But Sarah would probably have fainted at the sight of a double-decker horse-drawn bus. Ella began to wish that she had thought to ride one of these from the centre of York; although she had walked fast it was so cold that her face felt as though it had been chipped from a block of marble.
The low wall around Grange House – topped with imposing iron railings, spike-pointed and painted black – came into view. Ella paused to catch her breath, puffed out after keeping up a fast pace on her route out of York. More than once she’d had reason to wish that the family still lived in their previous residence in Micklegate, so convenient for the centre of the city, rather than out here on the edge of the city. They’d moved before Ella had arrived in the household just over a year previously, joining the exodus of the newly wealthy who were building themselves the grand houses surrounded with fine gardens that they could never have within the confines of the city walls.
It occurred to Ella that she had no notion of how to contact Albert again, if for no other reason than at least to apologise for her abrupt departure. Seeing someone from her past like that had thrown her completely off balance and it reminded her that the security she was beginning to feel in her new life was easily challenged. Quite apart from that, Albert had been such a dear friend of Alice and indeed of the whole family. Ella had an inkling that his own home life was less than happy and that the Bancroft household, while often chaotic, was very appealing to him. She had a sudden flashback to his visit to the house not long after her niece Elisabeth, known to the family as Beth, had been born, his mixture of shyness and happiness at being included in their happy family gathering. He wasn’t to know that the celebration, inspired by his presence, wasn’t a regular occurrence, but it had lifted the spirits of the family, mired in bleakness by the chill of the winter and the desperation of their situation. In fact Sarah Bancroft, alone after the death of her husband, with five of her own children to bring up and now a grandchild too, often wondered how food was to be put on the table that night.
Albert had been deeply uncomfortable around Beth that day, being an only child and having no prior experience of babies, but Ella remembered that they had all taken a lot of joy from the evening. She felt sure, though, that his visit had more to do with a wish to see Alice, who was no longer his daily companion at the mill.
He’d changed such a lot in the intervening years, and it gave Ella pain to think of how Alice, too, would have matured if she had only survived her wrongful incarceration in jail. Although Albert had mentioned his work as a stonemason at York Minster, nothing had been said about where he was living now. She had no idea how to go about finding him.
Taking a deep breath, Ella skirted the wall to the servants’ gate set into the side, and pushed it open, only too aware of how late she was. As she hurried towards the heavy door that led into the servants’ domain she remembered how fearful she had been when she passed this way last year, clutching her worldly possessions in a worn cloth bag. Mrs Sugden, or Mrs S as Ella soon discovered she was known to all the servants, had been