‘Mam, Mam, just wait until you see this.’ Excitement sparkled in Hettie’s dark eyes as she thrust the open page of the Liverpool Post underneath her mother’s nose. ‘They’re advertising for a “young lady” to sing to people during afternoon tea at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool. It says you have to write to this address here. Oh, Mam, I’m so excited. It would be the perfect job for me. Just imagine – I could sing every day and get paid for it!’
Ellie Walker looked at the advertisement her step-daughter had shoved in front of her, her face clouding slightly. ‘Oh Hettie, love.’ Ellie said uncertainly. ‘I don’t think…’
Immediately Hettie’s excitement gave way to anxiety. ‘But Mam, you know how much I love to sing and everyone said how good I was when I sang in The Mikado. Miss Brown said I had the best voice of any girl she had ever taught.’
Ellie sighed. ‘Yes, Hettie I know that, but singing in a small private theatre to help raise money for charity is a very different thing to singing in public and,’ she hesitated, ‘and for money.’
Ellie hated to see the excitement dying in Hettie’s eyes and being replaced by mutinous disappointment. But Ellie was very protective of all her children and even though Hettie was eighteen, she was still a child in so many ways. In so many ways, but not in all. Ellie glanced discreetly at her step-daughter’s body. Although slim and delicately boned, Hettie nevertheless had a very well-developed bosom. And then, of course, there was her unusual, sultry beauty – that mingling of the delicate bone structure Hettie had inherited from her Japanese mother together with some features from the Englishman who had been her father and Ellie’s first husband.
Ellie had waited until she had felt Hettie was old enough to understand properly before explaining to her step-daughter the troubled circumstances surrounding her own birth and her parents’ deaths.
Hettie had never known her father, having been born after he had left Japan to return to Liverpool. Her Japanese mother, as Ellie had explained to her, had pined so much for the English lover who had sworn undying love to her, and promised he would return to her, that she had set sail for Liverpool with her baby to find him. To arrive there and discover that her beloved Henry-san had taken his own life had broken her heart, Ellie had told Hettie gently, adding that two such sensitive people as her parents had suffered dreadfully because of the separation imposed on them.
‘But my father was married to you,’ Hettie had pointed out unhappily.
‘Indeed, Hettie,’ Ellie had concurred. ‘Unfortunately, as sometimes happens within families, both your father and I were pushed into marriage with one another even though our hearts lay with other people. Naturally, as Henry’s widow, I felt responsible for your mother and for you…’
‘You were kind to us,’ Hettie had interrupted her, remembering the comforting warmth of Ellie’s voice and arms.
‘Your poor mother had no wish to live with your father gone. She went out one cold winter night and accidentally fell into the dock and drowned there, poor lady.’
‘And then you married Gideon and he adopted me and I had a new mother and father,’ Hettie had stated matter of factly.
‘Indeed you did,’ Ellie had agreed tenderly. ‘And you must never forget how much we love you, Hettie.’
And Ellie did love Hettie, even though she sometimes feared for her a little, as all mothers must for a pretty, sometimes wilful daughter. With those flashing, faintly almond-shaped eyes, the rosebud fullness of her mouth, the thick poker-straightness of her long black hair in striking contrast to her pale, almost sweetly doll-like round face, it was no wonder the people of Preston turned their heads to look at her beloved Hettie.
Stubbornness now flashed in Hettie’s eyes, causing Ellie’s maternal heart to suffer fresh misgivings. She could well remember the turbulence of the early years of her own young womanhood, and the pain they could bring. The love of her own life at Ellie’s age had been her beloved Gideon, now her husband, but at that time he was the young man her mother had forbidden her to see.
‘But I want to do it so much. I have to do it. I need to sing.’ Tears glistened in Hettie’s eyes. ‘It’s all I want to do,’ she continued passionately to Ellie. ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, you know that.’
Ellie sighed. Hettie was such a fiercely intense girl, her emotions like quicksilver, changing from laughter one minute to tears the next. Ellie couldn’t help but worry for her. She seemed to feel things so much more than other people, especially when it came to music, and her singing. Ellie had seen her reduced to anguished tears when listening to a particularly sad song and then the next minute dancing around happily when she heard a more gay one.