The Hat Shop Girl

Book 0: Durham City Series

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: Family Life; Sagas; Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Miss Appleby's Academy and Doctor of the High Fells comes a gritty novel of one woman's determination, perfect for fans of Nadine Dorries, Anna Jacobs and Ellie Dean.

Lorna Robson works long and tiring hours in her aunt's hat shop in County Durham. Although she tries not to complain, the genteel poverty her family live in depresses her. But when she discovers that a relation has left her a large but dilapidated property, her aunt is strangely furious, and they part on bad terms. Lorna knows she can never return to the life she has made herself. And it is only when she sees Snow Hall that her situation truly dawns on her: selling the house is unthinkable, but how can she survive without money or help?

Note: this book was previously published under the title Snow Hall.

Release date: April 7, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 194

Sample

1907 Castle Bank Colliery, County Durham

It was almost summer but for weeks and weeks it had hardly stopped raining and there in the back room of the shop it was as cold as November and almost as dark. Lorna Robson could barely see beyond her finger ends and it was not nearly time to stop work for the day. The lamps could not be lit, her aunt would be in the back of the shop in seconds if she saw such a thing, yet at the front, beyond the closed door, Lorna could see a line of light and knew that, with the neat and discreet windows such as benefited what her aunt called ‘an exclusive ladies’ millinery salon’, it would be ablaze with lights so as to attempt to attract ‘passing trade’.

That was another of her aunt’s sayings. As far as Lorna could tell there never had been passing trade and why would there be? They lived in a small pit village and of course there was custom because both men and women wore hats. They needed to buy them somewhere and they needed them mending but no fine lady had ever walked through the door of 51 High Street.

Lorna doubted whether her aunt’s dream would come true and sometimes she had noticed her aunt looking out through the rain at the long wide straight street, dreaming that someone would come past in a shiny carriage with matching horses or that down at the bottom of the High Street even now some well-dressed man would step from a cloud of steam by a soon to be departing train and would, in his long coat and trilby hat and gold-topped cane, make his way with neat soldier-like steps and would pause outside the shop and open the door and step inside and the bell would tinkle and he would order a hat to be made for a special occasion – a top hat for a society event in London.

Her aunt would sit him down and measure his head with polite dexterity meanwhile keeping up a flow of conversation about events of the day to amuse him. Perhaps he would order several hats over a period of time because he was moving into the area and he had a wife who would want hats for going to church and to parties and for visiting friends. Maybe she would even notice some of the hats which were already on display in the shop. Her aunt had made them years ago when she first began the business and her hopes were high.

There were close-fitting hats to follow the shape of the wearer’s head and wide-brimmed ones to keep off the June sunshine and bonnets in pink and blue for babies and round-brimmed hats for little girls and special hats trimmed with pheasant feathers glistening blue, green, black and brown, and some with tiny black veils for mourning and hats with cherries – not real, of course – and hats with long ribbons for gala days and winter wool hats to keep out the freezing north wind which cut across the high fells and hats with strings to tie neatly under old ladies’ chins and hats so wide and yet dipping that lovers could kiss in secret beneath their shadow.

As it was, the customers her aunt would have wanted, such as the doctor’s wife, the wives of the pit owners and the steel foundry and even the tradesmen like the butcher’s and the hardware store, went into Bishop Auckland or even further to Durham City, stepping on to the train early in the morning and coming back after tea, laden with parcels.

The pitmen wore cloth caps and her aunt said with some bitterness that she was glad of it, they were good customers, only because she sold men’s hats she had to employ a man to serve them and there were two sides to the shop for slight discretion in such matters and it was expensive to hire Mr Humble who came in every day though Lorna thought privately that Mr Humble was either miserly or was paid very badly for he was a shabby man of indeterminate age.

She thought he must be old because he complained that all the standing around played havoc with his varicose veins. Her aunt would not allow either Mr Humble or herself to sit down. She thought it made them look as though they were not busy even though Lorna suspected they might stand for hours before anyone entered the shop, she could hear the bell from where she sat.

Lorna was able to sit down as she sewed but then she was out of sight. Her aunt always sighed when she said that as though Lorna’s lot was a much easier one than her own, which Lorna thought was not the case. She saw nobody all day and did nothing other than repairs most of the time of which there were a great many. Men’s caps and hats were brought in by their wives and were often greasy with the odd hair attached and they smelled stalely of tobacco and sweat and felt sticky to the hands.

New hats for the local women never seemed to need a satin rose – which her aunt had taught her to make very early on in her career – or a neatly placed piece of good material to enhance the brim. A hat could be transformed by a band of colour. Among the matrons of the church and chapel the colours were always serviceable, black, navy or brown, and did not require ornament of any kind. It made for dull work. Lorna knew that had she had to keep the front of the shop as her aunt did she too would soon have been gazing into the distance, eyes searching the disappearing road for a carriage or the pavement opposite for a tall dark figure with a gold-topped cane.

She always went in by the back way so she had no opportunity to look for such things but she knew as well as her aunt that the sights on the front street were of pit wives in headscarves – the worst head covering of all, it made her aunt sigh to see such things – carrying their heavy shopping bags filled with flour and sugar and potatoes, the pitmen black from a long shift on the way home or small boys bareheaded and shouting their way towards broth over the kitchen fire.

All she could see was the darkness of the room around her and all she could hear was the sound of somebody calling across the back lane or the goods train puffing away from the little town.

It was well into the evening when Lorna finished. The lamps had been lit for three hours by then but the fire had been allowed to die down – her aunt was always afraid that she would daydream and set the building on fire and also, unlike the pit families, they had to buy their coal, so the fire had seen no new coal for at least two hours. Her fingers were numb with cold and because she had not moved since mid-afternoon when her aunt made tea, her body was stiff and unyielding when her aunt locked the outside door and came through and said, as she always did, ‘I think that’s enough for today, Lorna, don’t you?’ as though Lorna might protest and say with a flourish that she was not quite finished the creation she was working on, there was just a bow here and an ostrich feather there in pink and white to be tweaked.

She put down the last of the repairs, Mrs Tweddle’s Sunday best hat, which had been sadly torn when it blew into a gorse bush the previous Sunday on the way back from the Presbyterian church on the edge of the town where the High Street converged on the two roads, Bridge Street which led away to Bishop Auckland and Wolsingham Road which led down into Weardale.

Lorna’s aunt had tried to sell Mrs Tweddle a very good hatpin which would have made the repair unnecessary as she pointed out had Mrs Tweddle owned such a useful item in the first instance but Mrs Tweddle said she had two at home and had just mislaid them. The repair could barely be detected, Lorna thought with some pride, but her aunt merely looked at it, sniffed and said she felt sure Mrs Tweddle would have been a great deal better off to have bought something new as it must be ten years old, it certainly looked it.

They trod together up the chilly narrow stairs to their living quarters and Lorna wished as she did at about this time each evening that it could be fine and she might go out for a few breaths of air because it was still light. Her aunt rarely entertained it even in summer because she was convinced that the young miners stood outside the public house, drinking beer and making rude remarks in the light nights as ‘ladies’ passed by. Her aunt always called women ‘ladies’, even the least of them, as though calling them so would enable them overnight to become valued customers, the kind of women who could ‘carry a hat’. Her aunt longed for even one person who could ‘carry a hat well’, someone with a long neck and aristocratic bearing.

Lorna had never heard the young pitmen shouting remarks across the street but even if they had she would barely have understood it because they had a language which was all their own and she had never mixed with them and her aunt said that was not the point, that no decent woman should understand what they said but they must not be given the opportunity.

Unfortunately there were public houses in almost every direction except at the back, sometimes three or four to a street with names like the Victoria, the Colliery Inn and the Pit Laddie, and then Lorna had to walk past three or four streets to get clear of the town and her aunt was not convinced that the people who lived in Railway Street and Station Road were the kind of people you would want to encounter so Lorna’s walks were very often cut short unless she escaped beyond the shrillness of her aunt’s voice.

There was no chance of any of this now and as they reached the top of the house her aunt said, as she always said, that it was not too cold because heat rose from below and became trapped beneath the roof. They had three rooms up here, a small kitchen, a bedroom and a dining room cum sitting room where they sat to eat their supper. Tonight it was pie and peas and then they sat over the fire, drinking their tea before bed.

They slept in one bed in the room next door. Lorna sometimes lay awake thinking that if she should ever have enough money she would sleep in a bed by herself, perhaps even in a room by herself, so that she would not have to endure the somehow over-familiarity of her aunt’s warm and unpleasant breath, or the way that her mouth fell open as she snored or her freezing bare feet which were always on Lorna’s side of the bed since she contrived to sleep sideways.

If it had been warm Lorna might have got up and opened the window – her aunt didn’t believe in night air so Lorna would wait until she fell asleep – and then she could lie awake and listen to the silence or even an owl hooting away down past the station and along the lane in the vicarage garden. Sometimes there were two owls, calling to one another across the lawns while the town slept and out on the fells the pit wheels turned as the miners laboured.

Aidan Hedley had ended up going to the old man’s funeral. He told himself that he ought to go but the real reason was out of respect for his own father, and standing outside St Oswald’s Church in Durham City in the pouring rain he found that but for the Carlyles, a few old women who Aidan was convinced made it their hobby to attend funerals and a tramp who had come in to keep out of the rain, it was an empty church.

The Carlyles were a very old northern family and something like seven hundred years ago had been cattle-rustlers and sheep-stealers along the border and since then had risen to riches and prosperity. They owned a wonderful house, Snow Hall, in five hundred acres on a piece of land where they had lived for as far back as anyone could remember though they had not lived there for fifteen years since the old man had been taken ill and moved in with his son’s family to a much more modest house, Black Well Tower.

Snow Hall was the prettiest place that Aidan had ever seen. It sat amongst a wealth of fields which in the summertime were blue and orange with wildflowers waving in the warm wind. It had been there since thirteen hundred as far as he knew and had been lost by the family during the Rising of the North when many of the nobles of Durham, Northumberland, Yorkshire and Cumberland had thought to replace Elizabeth with Mary, Queen of Scots. They had been Catholics and wished to remain Catholic. Those of them who were not hanged, drawn and quartered did not go back to their inheritance for many a year but after that they had prospered somehow, as adventurers often did, he thought.

The house had a great hall at one side and a chapel at the other, outside staircases to extend the romantic idea. The staircases had crumbled, the family had done the same but you could not keep a Carlyle down, so the saying went, and they had risen. For a long time after the foiled attempt at altering history it had been a farmhouse but was won back and restored at least two hundred years ago and had been the envy of their many neighbours ever since.

There were people who gloried in the way that the grandfather would allow no one of his family to live there these last fifteen years and Aidan could not help but be curious as to what would happen now and also he had a vested interest because he was the Carlyles’ solicitor.

He had inherited this from his father and his father before him. The Carlyles and the Hedleys had history back so far that Aidan would not have hesitated to call it a thousand years though he thought it was only the romantic in him which allowed his usually accurate solicitor’s reasoning to waver that far.

The Carlyle family had had half a dozen paper mills on the River Wear and it was commonly known that the mills had been losing money for years. Foreign imports had been the downfall of a dozen local mills and the ones that were left were struggling. The mills had long since been sold for what Aidan didn’t imagine was a vast profit in a falling market.

The Carlyles didn’t look as if they were in a bad way if expensive clothes were anything to go by. The women wore furs against the cold rain and the kind of ridiculous hats which Aidan did not doubt had been handmade by Newcastle milliners. Leather gloves encased slender hands which he was sure had never worked.

Ralph Carlyle was still in his twenties but was already widowed. His wife had died two years ago after giving him a son. The child had been dead within the week, the mother soon after, falling from a second-storey balcony in midwinter. Some said grief had carried her there, others that it was an accident.

Ralph was tall and black-haired and dark-eyed and looked as though he had just come screaming down a glen, Aidan thought, kilt and hair flying, brandishing some sort of old-fashioned weapon in both fists, scaring seven kinds of shit out of the enemy. He was a border man and in this region you were often Scottish fighting English, Scot and Scot or English and English, for reiving had gone on sideways as well as across the border and nobody was free from it and many a woman bore the enemy’s child.

The other Carlyles were Henry, the older brother, who was fat and perspiring in his dark suit and tight collar, his wife, Camille, and older people, uncles and aunts, Aidan guessed, and other minor members of the family. Ralph’s father, Stephen, had died, supposedly of drink and excess, some years earlier.

St Oswald’s was a big church and with so few people in attendance it looked even bigger and emptier. Aidan could not help comparing the scene with his father’s funeral a year ago, his mother tight-lipped, his sister, Beatrice, singing hymns and how she had afterwards hidden in the hall cupboard when her emotions bettered her. He had stood outside, saying, in a soft voice, ‘Bea, will you please come out of there?’ so that the mourners in the drawing room would not hear.

Eventually she had emerged, blowing her nose with gusto and brushing him off.

St Cuth’s, as it was affectionately known, the local saint Cuthbert being of such importance that his name was always shortened, at the top of North Road, had been packed with family and friends and everybody who had known Aidan’s father whether he was their solicitor or not was there, his father had been so well liked.

It was unfortunate that his father’s partner, Cyril Jameson, had died almost two months afterwards, leaving Aidan in sole charge of the firm. Cyril Jameson had had neither wife, children nor relatives to inherit, had lived with Aidan’s family since a young man when he first came to Durham and then at the County Hotel and had left his share of the business to Aidan.

Having inherited everything with the proviso from his father that his mother and Bea should be allowed to stay in the house either until they married or died, Aidan was lost for words. His sister, however, was not.

‘What a wonderful prospect,’ she had said bitterly.

‘I’ll make half of it over to you,’ he offered.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, ‘you need money to run the offices and the house and I wouldn’t insult you even though I feel insulted myself.’

It was the more galling for her, he thought, because she was older than him.

‘You could study.’

‘At thirty-three?’ She looked scornfully at him. She did not say, ‘Besides, Mother needs me,’ but it was true. His sister ran the house. After his father died his mother had gone into what was popularly known as ‘a decline’. His parents had had the kind of marriage which had put off himself and Bea, that was the truth of it, his mother was never happy with anything and made her feelings felt daily, his father would hide at the office or go out without her and she would complain of neglect. His father had been a gentle, scholarly man who would fight like a lion for the people who came to him but was too tired to do so at home and they had all suffered for it.

Aidan had made both his mother and Bea allowances which Bea called ‘obscenely generous’.

‘Please, Bea,’ he said, ‘don’t make me feel any worse.’

His mother merely sniffed and said things had come to a pretty pass when her son dictated her income.

‘You could have a house of your own if you would like,’ he told his sister.

‘What, leave you here with Mother? You would strangle her within a week or do you suggest that we should both go and leave her alone?’

‘It’s a nice idea,’ he admitted, knowing that neither of them would do it.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘people would gossip if I lived alone and whatever would I do?’

There was however one thing which he thought his sister might like.

‘We could move. We could afford a much better house.’

His mother would not be swayed.

‘Why ever would we move? It’s close to the church.’

His mother’s only consideration, he thought, was the church and it was true. St Cuth’s was just across the road and a little way up past the Garden House Hotel. His mother abhorred drink and every time she went to church she looked beyond the hotel as though it did not exist.

The only thing she cared for about the house was that there should be no alcohol in it and he and Bea had taken to hiding wine, whisky and brandy in various places which his mother did not visit, as though they were drunkards, and all these things, instead of being something which could be taken moderately at table and when they liked, had taken on the delicious air of illicitness.

Bea, of course, could not sneak off to the Garden House and various other places in the town which Aidan frequented but Aidan went to pubs quite often in the evenings with his friend, Ned Fleming, who ran the local newspaper, the Durham County Chronicle, which was the weekly and of late the Guardian, which was the new daily.

The past year had therefore been a huge burden both at home and at the office. Now Aidan was almost afraid to sing among so few voices, he did not trust himself to manage the song or the words because of his memories but he did because it would be noticed if he did not.

Since his father and Mr Jameson had died Aidan had had nothing but female company at home so he liked to linger at the office, to say nothing of the fact that there was far too much work.

‘You might say when you’re not coming home to dinner,’ Bea told him as he arrived just as the grandfather clock in the hall struck nine. ‘Mother had the meal put back twice and the beef was kizened.’

He made no explanation and ventured into the study, only to find that she followed him there.

‘Old Carlyle’s funeral bad, was it?’ she asked.

He sighed with relief at her understanding.

‘Only the Carlyles, half a dozen women with nothing better to do and a gentleman of the road.’

There was a knock on the door and the maid brought in a tray. ‘Thank you, Heather, my brother is extremely grateful for your forbearance and tell Mrs Donald to try not to spit curses over the kitchen fire because of him.’

Heather laughed and went out. Aidan looked over at the tray.

‘Kizened beef sandwiches just for you,’ Bea said and she went o. . .