Convenient Women Collection
Box Set
Delphine Woods
Pepper Pot Publishing
Copyright © 2019 by Delphine Woods
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Volume 1
THE CRADLE BREAKER
Inspired by
Part I
Bonnie
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part II
Luella
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Volume 2
THE PROMISE KEEPER
Inspired by
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Volume 3
THE BUTTON MAKER
Inspired by
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Volume 4
THE LITTLE WIFE
Inspired By
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Free Delphine Woods Starter Library
Afterword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Also by Delphine Woods
Volume One
THE CRADLE BREAKER
Inspired by
Rock-a-bye baby,
on the treetops,
When the wind blows,
the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks,
the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby,
cradle and all.
Part I
Bonnie
Chapter 1
August 1865
My mother named me Bonnie, for I was born on a Sunday. She told me this often when I was sulking, my lower lip jutting out. She would say, I called you Bonnie, and I expect to see you act like it. And then her hand, which always seemed so soft and weak in her husband’s hands, would hit me, and it would be as hard as wood.
When I was little, I would cry after she’d hit me. But when I realised all I needed to do to make her happy – and so make myself happy – was smile, I smiled all the time. Bonnie and blithe, good and gay. I thought of that little rhyme as others thought of their bibles; I lived by it. I had a fixation for a few years, and I would ask anyone I met on which day they had been born, and I would decide if I liked them or not depending on their answer. Not many of them knew, of course, and so, after a little while of speaking with them, I would guess which day it had been.
I guessed when I saw her standing outside the house, the sea breeze catching at the loose hair which had escaped her bonnet, that Luella had been born on a Monday. Of course, I did not know her as Luella then. I was dusting in the drawing room, picking up all the stupid little knick-knacks, polishing them off, wiping away the tell-tale grey ring on the windowsill on which they sat, when I happened to straighten my back. I felt a sharp stab of pain after bending for so long and let my eyes rest on the view outside.
She gave me a bit of a fright standing on the edge of the green all in white, her skirts thin and cage-less and billowing in the wind. She looked how I imagined a ghost would look, how the novelists write them. But as she stared at me, I could see the prettiness of her: the blush on the pale of her cheeks, the structure of her bones underneath her flesh, the plump youthfulness of her skin. If I tell you to think of a pretty English girl, you will think of Luella. Monday, fair of face.
She watched me. The sun was high above her, and her white dress dazzled me. I had to blink and wipe the wetness from my eyes, and when I squinted down at her again, she was still staring at me, her face in the shade of her bonnet. She was gloveless, and her fists were clenched tight.
Behind her, women in twos walked on the green with prams or little short-nosed dogs on leads. Some of them noticed the strange girl, dressed so differently from themselves, but most of them did not glance in her direction. Behind them, Stowmouth’s wattle-and-daub buildings shone, and its church spire rose into the blue sky like an arrow.
It felt like minutes had passed as we watched each other; in truth, now I think, it must only have been seconds. There was a noise somewhere below in the house – Cook, probably, chopping some dead animal’s head off its body – and the sudden sound startled us both; she must have heard it through the opened windows. She dropped her gaze and looked to the floor, and the rim of her old-fashioned bonnet hid her face from me. Without looking at me again, she turned and strode away. She walked straight across the green and almost collided with a perambulator; the woman stopped short and said something, but I could only see the tight working of the woman’s lips rather than hear the words. Luella did not falter. She continued to march until she reached Stowmouth’s main streets where she vanished amidst the houses and shops.
I tried to dismiss the thought of her. I continued to dust as a bead of sweat dripped off the tip of my nose and splattered on a side table. I damned the heat, but it was not just the summer sunshine which had made me perspire. For the rest of the day, I could not shake the sick ball which tumbled in my stomach whenever I recalled the image of the girl on the green.
I didn’t see her again until the next day.
I had spent that morning with Miss Grey, sorting though some papers and preparing the menu for Cook. Miss Grey liked to think of herse
lf as someone with purpose. She enjoyed long mornings surrounded by papers of her accounts, though they never told her anything new. She had a private bookkeeper, whom I had never had the pleasure of meeting, and occasionally he sent records her way so she could frown over how much Cook had spent on partridges or fresh fish, or how much lace cost nowadays, or how she would soon have to be darning her own stockings. I tried not to remind her that I already darned her stockings.
Miss Grey was a miser, you see. She was also a hypochondriac, though I hadn’t known that when I applied for the role as her companion several months previously. She had indeed seemed the epitome of ill health when I had visited one bleak November day, the rain blowing inland in horizontal sheets from the English Channel. She had been sitting in her drawing room, the fire stacked high, the flames grasping at her skirts. She had pressed a handkerchief to her reddened nose for the entire meeting whilst I had poured tea and cooed over her and nodded in sympathy as she described just how ill she was. And I had believed her, for her lungs really did rasp whenever she took a breath, and her hand really did shake when she brought her teacup to her lips. So I had accepted the position as her companion, a paid friend, thinking she must have been somewhere near death.
A mild case of the influenza, her grave illness turned out to be. The snivels dried up within a week of my arrival, and though she held her face over bowls of steaming water until spring came, her lungs had cleared of their sickness before Christmas.
Now the summer was here, she was forever in fear of the typhus or cholera. She ordered me to eat a little of her food before she ate it herself and to keep the windows closed if the wind blew in such a direction as to bring the hot, foul smells of the town our way. She would insist on taking the carriage out into the countryside most days; it was the only place where she felt she could breathe properly.
But in the mornings, we stayed inside surrounded by dusty papers, filling endless minutes with endless drivel, until she handed me the much-deliberated menu, which was usually the same food she had ordered the day before, and I escaped to the basement.
Cook was a large woman with an unhappy countenance that I believed would have soured the milk had she looked at it for too long. She sweated even in the winter and constantly wiped her forehead on her apron so that the yellowed tip of it often had to be bleached. She didn’t like me at first because of the way I turned my nose up at the food she cooked, for after all, I was sure some of her sweat must have fallen into it. But after I had caught her helping herself to the larder’s contents and had consciously turned my head, she came to grudgingly accept me. We usually grunted at each other and said goodnight when she left after dinner to go back to her family in the town. Miss Grey didn’t like servants in the house, so she said. She thought them dirty and that their dirt would permeate into the upper quarters of the house, especially at night, and weaken her. It was also rather handy that she didn’t like too many staff, for her accounts couldn’t take it, so I discovered, again, too late.
Miss Grey lived off an allowance, once given to her by her father, now by her brother. Meagre was not the word. Whilst Mr Grey languished in his London mansion, his sister had to make do with one cook and one companion, and I acted more as a lady’s maid and housekeeper than as one of my station should have been accustomed to living.
And so it was, the following day, after I had emptied her pot, after I had brought her breakfast crockery down to wash, after I had wet the fly papers in the scullery and had hung them in the kitchens, that I saw from the window a white skirt. The kitchens being in the basement, I could only see the very bottom of Luella’s dress and her worn, black boots. I thought her feet must have been very hot, for I myself was sticky; the wind had disappeared that day and the air was close. I collected the piles of flies’ bodies from the kitchen floor in some old newspaper, took them outside and threw them in the hedgerow beside the house, then tiptoed up the side passage and came out in front of the kitchen window.
She stood above me, looking down on me, silent. I climbed the short flight of steps and came level with her. Both of us were in the shade of a laburnum tree whose golden flowers had been shed a few weeks ago, and now the sun only dappled through its leaves. The green in front of the house was quiet at that time – midday, too hot for ladies in petticoats and corsets. The air was lazy all about us as we stared at each other, wondering who would speak first.
Now that I was there with her, I didn’t know what to say. Up close, I could make out the smattering of freckles over her skin, and the longer I looked, the more I thought I recognised her features – the pointedness of the tip of her nose, the prominent bow in her upper lip, the faint crease between her brows. I was about to remember something, then she spoke and the familiarity of her vanished.
‘Bonnie Hearn?’ she said. Her voice seemed to startle her; it was loud in the stillness of the day. She cleared her throat and her hand rose to her chest. It was then that I noticed the chain about her neck, though whatever was on the end of it was hidden underneath her bodice. She wound the chain around her finger once, then dropped her hand as if it had pinched her and waited for my response.
‘Who are you?’ I said.
She met my gaze, and there was a hardness in her face. She seemed determined, suddenly, and though her voice was quieter when she spoke again, her words were clear.
‘Meet me in the tea room on Giles Street tomorrow at three.’
Her accent was pronounced, familiar, the sound of this part of the country. I tried again to think where I might have seen her before, but she remained a mystery. Even so, it was obvious she knew me.
‘I can’t. I am afraid I am busy –’
‘I know Miss Grey likes to sleep then, and I know how you fills your time when she does so.’
If I’d been anyone else, or if she hadn’t been so young and such a small country girl, I would have blushed. Instead I smiled, almost laughed. What a preposterous predicament!
‘All right,’ I said, for now my curiosity was piqued. It could have been a lucky guess; she might not have known what I really did when Miss Grey slept, but if she did, I wondered how long she had been watching me. The amusement I had been feeling quickly vanished.
She nodded once, then turned. Her boots clicked on the pavement and echoed as she walked away from me, the vision of her simmering under the heat of the sun.
I had never been to the tea room on Giles Street before. Like most of Stowmouth’s buildings, this one was rather crooked, and the top of my hat caught on the door frame as I entered. It had a smell to it: stale tea and sweet cakes left out in the heat. Dozy flies wavered in the air above middle-class ladies’ heads, and I wondered why they hadn’t hung themselves some fly papers as I made my way to a small table in the corner of the cramped room, my skirts banging against the closely packed tables. After squeezing into a chair, which faced the door so that I could see Luella clearly when she arrived, and after dragging my feet off the sticky floor and placing them on the table legs, I smiled and nodded at the women about me. I ordered tea for two.
I had arrived at the tea room promptly, of course, and waited happily for the first five minutes, filling the time by watching the steam pouring out of the teapot spout. Yet as time lengthened, I became agitated. A couple of the women finished their tea and left, nodding at me as they went, and the others who remained looked at me and gossiped to each other; no doubt, I was the latest topic of conversation.
I removed my lace gloves and poured the tea which was, by that point, half cold and as dark as molasses. I sipped the drink and winced at the strength of it, then put the cup into its saucer gently and smiled at the women. They blushed to know I had caught them gawping.
Five and twenty minutes had passed, and I was fastening on my gloves and readying myself to depart, chastising my own foolishness, when the tea room door squeaked open and Luella entered. She was too short to hit her head on the door frame, but she stopped just inside the room and stared about her. Perhaps the afte
rnoon sun had made her blind and her eyes needed to adjust to the dimness. Perhaps she was not quite in her right mind. Either way, she was caught off guard for a few moments, and I was able to study her quickly and collect myself. I patted down my skirt, eased off my gloves and laid them on my lap, and arranged my face so that the frown had disappeared by the time she looked at me.
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