Slipper

by Hester Velmans

  Lucinda shuddered. She suddenly had a vision of this mysterious father as he might well turn out to be in real life: a red-faced, blue-bearded, strong-smelling creature like her Uncle Edmund. Sir Edmund had also had a lovechild—more than one, in fact. Everybody knew that. Was it not likely that her father would be like him? Finding him could mean even greater trouble…

  “Never mind, Thomas,” she said. “Please forget that I ever mentioned it.”

  But Thomas did not let the matter drop. He was glad of the opportunity to do something for his beloved Bessie. Thomas was ashamed that he had not tried harder to keep Bessie by his side. Should he not have taken a chance and followed her to Dorset, trusting in God or Fortune to provide him with a way of making a living? Would that not have been the devoted, the dashing, the daring thing to do? No, anything he could do to be of assistance to Bess would make him feel a lot better.

  Thomas had aged noticeably in the time Lucinda and Bessie had been gone. His tight curls were grey now, especially above the temples, and his forehead had grown higher and shinier where the hairline had receded. The crease in his cheek had become a groove and was flanked by many other creases, most of them vertical and all of them permanent. His shoulders had narrowed, his arms had sinewed, and if you’d had a measuring tape with you and cared to use it, you’d have found that his hands hung a few notches lower by his sides than before.

  But if the years had dulled his looks, they had not dampened his character. His eyes still radiated a quizzical openness that spelled trust, and his grin was even more impish, ingratiating and childlike than before. For Thomas had found that a manly swagger and stern expression only landed you in trouble, whereas boyish charm, laid on with an expert hand, opened doors, mended quarrels, and deflected criticism in the most ingenious way. Even Arabella, in all her viperish spite, was disarmed by that frank innocence and genuine bewilderment, so that Thomas was the only one of the household staff who was routinely let off with a mild reproach instead of a screaming tirade.

  The first person Thomas approached in his new role of sleuth was Mistress Spudding, head cook at Wriggin, and incorrigible gossip.

  “Missus S.,” he said, springing to her aid as she tried to tip a large cauldron filled with broth, “—here, dear, let me help you, that’s much too heavy for you—Missus S., do you remember that girl—what’s her name—Lady Olivia’s personal maid, you know, who ran off when her mistress was sent away?”

  “Josie. Josie Davenport, was her name. Ah, she was a piece of work, I remember her! One day, I catch her wearing paint. On the lips! And a patch, too. Mind you, this was when patches was not as common as you see ’em nowadays. I say to her, ‘Well, mum,’ I says, ‘what do I see, is that paint? And where do you think you’re going, all tarted up like that?’” Mistress Spudding dipped her ladle into the broth and thrust it into Thomas’ face for a taste; at his approving “Mmmm!” she continued in the same wheezing breath. “‘Do you think Our Lord meant us to bepaint and besmirch His Image,’ I says, ‘I mean that form which He created in His Own Likeness?’ ‘Out,’ she says. ‘Out?’ I says, ‘looking like a harlot? Off you go to the scullery, my girl,’ I says, ‘and scrub that paint off your face before you go mucking up the good name of Wriggin Hall—’” (here Mrs. Spudding wiped her own glistening face smartly on her bespattered apron) “— but I can’t tell you if it did any good. And then she left, running after poor Lady Olivia, and her disgraced and all. I shouldn’t be surprised if she’d taken to bad ways…”

  “Yes, Josie Davenport,” said Thomas dreamily, “that was her name.”

  “What’s come over you, thinking about her?” asked Mistress Spudding, suddenly suspicious. “I tell you Thomas, that wench was no good. No good at-all. You oughter be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Me? Oh no, never a fear,” Thomas said brightly. “You know your poor Thomas better than that, now, Missus! No, I was just wondering what happened to her, is all. But don’t let me keep you, dear, there’s supper to be fixed, I’ll just run upstairs and fetch Master’s tray…”

  There was one good thing about living among the servants, Lucinda decided, and that was that they called a spade a spade. No beating about the bush for them: none of the vagueness and euphemisms that had kept Lucinda and her cousins in the dark about life’s major mysteries. Lucinda had always been a quick study. Now she was picking up the meanings of words she had never heard before, and was able to piece together a good deal of information normally hidden from females of her class.

  And so she learned that her grandfather, far from suffering from the gout, as she had been led to believe, was actually stricken with the pox. She gathered, too, that one caught the pox by doing wicked things, things that were too shameful to mention, things of which God did not approve.

  This knowledge led her to consider in a new light her grandfather’s erstwhile understandable refusal to acknowledge her existence.

  “Thomas,” she said, as they sat side by side, he polishing plate, she scouring copper pots, “if Grandfather has the pox, then he must have been awfully wicked, mustn’t he?”

  Thomas smirked and looked around at the others. “His lordship has never been what you might call a pillar of virtue.”

  “Tell me, please. What did he do?”

  “Please, ma’am. I don’t think this is a fit subject for a lady…”

  “I am not a lady!” Lucinda exclaimed. “Can’t you get that through your head? I am no better off than any of us down here. Worse off, actually. Look at me! Am I a lady? Am I?”

  “No, no,” Thomas placated. “Don’t take on so, please, Miss Lucinda. All right, all right, I’ll tell you. He—he had a thing, you see, for young boys, your grandfather.”

  “Young boys? What did he want with young boys?”

  Thomas immediately regretted having responded so freely.

  “Well ma’am, some men—so I’m told—” He looked around apologetically. He hoped none of the others would assume he was speaking from personal experience. “…They have their pleasure, you know, lying with their own sex…”

  “I see,” said Lucinda, although she didn’t quite see. At Belweather Manor, in the nursery, all the girls had shared one bed and all the boys another. Lying with your own sex was what you were supposed to do. But she was willing to let up a little on poor Thomas, whose brow was now glistening with sweat. “So is that—is that how you contract the pox?”

  “No, no, ma’am. ’Tis a life of wickedness, so they say, leads to the pox. Whoring, debauchery, the like.”

  “Whoring.” Lucinda sighed. There were so many new concepts to grasp. “Is that—young boys?”

  A titter went around the kitchen. Thomas was growing more and more uncomfortable.

  “No. Whoring, now, that’s when a man does it with a woman, for instance, who isn’t his wife. The whore—she does it for profit. Do you see now?”

  “I see,” said Lucinda, and bowed her head over the pot she was scrubbing. She mulled over this new information.

  “Thomas,” she finally whispered fiercely, “how can a man, like Grandfather, who does whoring and debauchery and such, who has the pox, how can he be so ashamed of me? Whatever my mother did, it can’t have been more wicked than that, can it?”

  Thomas pursed his lips noncommittally. “Ah, but that’s different, ma’am,” he said.

  “Different? How? Tell me!”

  “Well, because—it’s different, that’s all. Your mother was a lady, and ladies are expected to…”

  “I know,” Lucinda interrupted impatiently. “Ladies must protect their Virtue. Can the men just do as they please, then?”

  Take her Uncle Edmund, she thought to herself. He was just as bad as her grandfather. Everyone knew he chased every petticoat in sight. And then what did he do? He accused her of being a wicked girl, and used that as an excuse to ruin her! (Actually, Lucinda wasn’t sure if her “ruin” was what Thomas was talking about: she suspected there was more to this debauchery, this whoring, this ly
ing with, than a stolen kiss, or seeing an uncle’s naked part, as she had done.)

  “Well,” she said, tossing her head back and rolling her shoulders to loosen them, “that’s men for you, isn’t it? That’s men for you.” It was an expression she had heard many times from Bessie.

  Thomas swallowed. He could not for the life of him understand why suddenly he felt so sad.

  14

  THE SLEUTHS

  A few months into this new life, Lucinda felt as if she had never known any other. The daily drudgery, performed for the most part in silence, was now second nature to her: her body functioned in automatic response to the demands made upon it, and pushed itself to its physical limit. Meantime her mind was far away.

  Never had she spent so much time in that imaginary realm where anything was possible, and where she was the most enviable, the most important, the most beautiful and the most beloved damsel in all the world. Where everyone sang her praises, where ladies fainted with envy when they beheld her, where men fought deadly duels over her, and where Henry Beaupree was the hero who swept her off her feet and saved her from fate after terrifying fate. And kissed her, kept kissing her. Gently, softly, tenderly; and sometimes, too, passionately, roughly, uncontrollably. If you were to creep up on our poor Lucinda sweeping out a sooty fireplace so that she did not hear your approach, and you noticed through the grime on her face that her eyelids were momentarily closed, her mouth drawn into puckish grin, you would be right in assuming that at that very moment, just such a kiss was being rehearsed.

  Oh, Henry, she sighed to herself. Where was he? Why had he not come to rescue her from her aunt’s evil clutches? But she would catch herself and quickly take it back, deciding that no, it was better if he did not see her in this posture, her unwashed hair falling stringily in her face, her face gleaming with sweat, her unbecoming clothes reeking of the same. Better that he not find out about the shameful episode for which she was being punished, better wait until it had all blown over, as Bessie had suggested it would. Better that he continue to think of her as a poised, fresh, untouched maiden. A beautiful young lady. For that was what she was!

  But it was hard to retain that image of herself in the face of such odds. There were no looking glasses in the house; Arabella did not enjoy being reminded of her own disappointing appearance, and the first thing she’d done upon her mother’s death had been to order all the mirrors taken down. It had proved not only a valuable lesson for the servants (on the Folly of Vanity) but a lucrative one as well. Selling the looking glasses had brought a nice little sum into Arabella’s secret coffers, for Wriggin Hall had had many splendid mirrors in Lady Hempstead’s day.

  As time went by, Lucinda barely remembered what she looked like, and she did not like, nor did she identify with, what she saw when she caught a glimpse of herself in the wavery window-glass—a bowed, common, wispy-looking creature in drab, threadbare clothes. Meanwhile, as the novelty of her presence wore off, the other servants began paying less attention to her too. And so she became, in her own perception as well as theirs, just another faceless drudge.

  Thomas, however, had not given up on the quest for her father. He was determined to find out more about the circumstances of Lucinda’s birth by hunting down Josie Davenport, but none of his peers at Wriggin had heard from Josie since she left.

  “Hmmm, yes now, let me see,” said Mr. Tucker, the steward, when Thomas screwed up the courage to ask him. Tucker’s florid color had deepened somewhat at the sound of the girl’s name: he had had quite a crush on her at the time. Josie had been a sassy young wench, and very popular with the stable hands. But she had turned Tucker down rather cruelly. All he’d done was to offer her a ride to church, in front of him on his nag, one Sunday! As if he’d had any unlawful intentions!

  “If I remember right,” he told Thomas wistfully, “she came to me the day after they sent poor Lady Olivia away, and said she was leaving, because she was afraid she’d be put into Lady Arabella’s service, and she couldn’t bear to work for her. Said she didn’t care about references. And that was that. She left without her wages, and without a word to milady, God rest her soul.”

  “Do you know where she went?” asked Thomas.

  “No. But I think she was friendly with one of the cottagers’ wives. What do you want with her?”

  “Actually,” confided Thomas, “I am trying to trace our Lucinda’s father—her real father, I mean. Doing it as a favor for Bess.”

  “Ah yes, Bessie,” smiled Tucker. “How fares our Bessie?”

  “Well enough,” said Thomas. “Well enough. And she has asked me to do this for Miss Lucinda. You know how fond she is of the child.”

  “Poor little wench,” sighed Tucker. “But it isn’t surprising, what happened to her, is it? Her reaching an age, and well, being such a little peach, and no one to protect her. Her uncle—those fine sirs, if you ask me, there’s not a one among them as has any morals at all. Not a one.”

  “And they call themselves our betters,” said Thomas, then looked around in alarm, in case any of the aforementioned betters were within earshot.

  “The rake who fathered Miss Lucinda, eh? Now there’s another one for you,” Tucker continued. “I hope he rots in hell, for what he did to poor Lady Olivia. There was an angel for you. And Miss Lucinda her spitting image, if you ask me.”

  “Help me find her father, Tucker. It’s the least we can do,” said Thomas.

  Tucker coughed, suddenly aware of the excessive familiarity with which the footman was addressing him. Thomas Boothby was a servant born-and-bred; he, Will Tucker, the youngest son of a clergyman, had gone into service because he had not the stomach for soldiering, the only other course open to him. “Good,” he said haughtily, turning away. “If you discover anything, I trust you will let me know.”

  On his next afternoon off, three weeks later, Thomas began making the rounds of the cottagers.

  Mrs. Pennyroyal, who with her husband tilled the hayfields on the northern edge of the estate, remembered Josie.

  “Josie? There’s one we didn’t see much of once she got her job up at t’ big house. Too good for the likes of us, all-a-sudden. Fanny Bryar was her cousin. Why don’t you ask her? She lives up at t’ cobble, the little hut on t’other side of the lake.”

  Fanny Bryar lived by herself. When, years ago, she had proven unable to produce children, her husband had left her for a more fertile woman. She had a mat of prematurely white hair poking out of her kerchief, a deeply grooved, sun-browned face, and gnarled, stubby hands. She got by in the winter by gathering firewood and bartering it for food. In the summer, Mr. Lockjaw, the head gardener, employed her in the kitchen garden.

  “She’s my cousin, is Josie Davenport,” she told Thomas. “Our fathers was brothers. When she was sixteen, she come here, looking for employment. Mr. Lockjaw got her a position up at t’ house. She come and visit me when she could. She was plenty of laughs, that girl. She brang me leavings—bones and suchlike—from t’ kitchen.” She sighed wistfully.

  “But what I’d like to find out,” pursued Thomas, “is what happened to her after she left. Is she still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fanny. “Her people is from Simmins-Hollow. They’d be t’ ones as I’d ask.”

  And so Thomas took his leave, though not without a promise to procure some leavings from the kitchen for Fanny.

  Simmins-Hollow was less than a day’s ride from Wriggin Hall, but for Thomas it might as well have been the Indies. For rest and recreation, Thomas was granted one free afternoon a month; he had never been away, not in the thirty-odd years he had lived there. How was he to pursue the search?

  He wrote to Bessie of his predicament.

  “Bless me,” said Bessie, when Kitty, Lady Clarissa’s chambermaid, had finished reading Thomas’s letter to her. How clever of him! Thomas’s quest put her own apathy to shame.

  It wasn’t long before Bessie came up with a scheme of her own. If she told Lady Clarissa that she had heard
of a woman in Hampshire who was growing a new kind of plant with rejuvenating properties, she was fairly certain that her lady would authorize a trip—nay, fund it, even.

  Clarissa took the bait.

  “What does it do, then?” she asked excitedly. “Does it erase wrinkles, or lighten the complexion? Is it something to swallow, or does one rub it into the skin?”

  “I don’t rightly know, milady,” said Bessie. “But I shall find it out. The stagecoach stops at Stilmouth, so I have been told, and I can go on foot from there.”

  “Very well,” said Clarissa, counting out some coins. “But you must be back by the Lord’s Day.”

  Bessie accepted the coins reverently. Outwardly, she was calm and composed. Inwardly, she was dancing a jig.

  Two days later, Bessie found herself regretting her adventurous impulse as she slowly picked her way along the track between Stilmouth and Simmins-Hollow, avoiding, as best she could, the puddles, the horse dung and scattered rocks. Her legs ached, and her best petticoat was covered in mud. She toddled up to a stile along the side of the road, and carefully set herself down on one of the rails.

  “Oh my Lord,” she sighed to herself, “Lordy-Lord,” and peered down the road. She had been walking for close to two hours, and was growing rather discouraged, for at the end of every stretch of road, instead of the promise of a village around the next bend, another interminable hedgerow came into view. Bessie was not used to so much exercise. Nor was she built for it, her upper body being proportionally too heavy for her short legs and little feet, giving her a side-to-side waddle that was ultimately very tiring.

  Just as she was considering turning back, she heard footsteps and the grinding of wheels.

  “Hoy!” It was a young lad pulling an empty cart down the road. He stopped when he noticed her sitting there all forlorn.