I stood up straighter. ‘Charlotte, go upstairs,’ I said.
The tender little scene disbanded and Charlotte, with her fingers on the doorknob and a last, lingering look at Eliza, like a lover off to sea, left the room. Eliza got to her feet, and brought her eyes to me. They burned with want, and I saw for the first time how badly she needed the work. We stood looking at one another, as hoofs clattered on the street below, and carriage wheels trundled. I wondered if Agnes had properly bolted the door after admitting them, and tried to resist the urge to go down and check.
‘When are you able to begin?’ I asked.
She had been holding her body very tensely; now her shoulders sank, and her face cleared. She clasped her hands in front of her, as if she did not know what to do with them. ‘As soon as you would like, madam.’
‘I shall need to order a bed for Charlotte’s chamber – we’ve no room with the servants, so that’s where you will sleep. Your wage will be two shillings and sixpence a week. Would a week today suit you?’
‘Yes, madam. Very well. Very well, thank you.’
Once they had left and I’d locked and bolted the door myself and checked the others, I went to find Charlotte. She was sitting at the window in her bedroom, looking down at Devonshire Street. Her tortoise was on her lap, moving its ancient head towards a sprig of parsley she was holding. Her room was square, and smaller than mine, with striped wallpaper and a narrow rosewood bed pushed against the wall. A dresser sat beneath one window and a stuffed footstool beneath the other, which Charlotte knelt on to look outside. Toys and games covered almost every surface: wooden horses, baby dolls, spinning tops. I ought to stop buying them for her, as she would soon grow out of playing. But what then? What did a girl of ten, twelve, fourteen do, if not gallop horses in a carpet race? She could speak French, though she would not go to France. Her pretty gowns would be seen by no one, her curls admired only by Agnes and Maria.
‘Do you like Eliza?’ I spoke from the doorway.
She had not heard me come in and jumped, whipping around as though caught in some private act. Her cap had skewed again, and her white dress was creased as well as dusty. She appeared not to have heard me, so I asked her again, and her face lit from within, and she smiled and nodded with great enthusiasm. Her teeth were her first still, like a row of little pearls.
‘Would you like it if she was your nursemaid?’
‘What’s a nursemaid?’
‘Somebody who cares for children. She will live in the house with us, and sleep here in your bedroom.’
‘Where will I sleep?’
‘In here with her. We will find her a bed and put it here. You must tidy away your toys, though, or there won’t be room for her things.’
She looked pleased, and gazed happily at the space Eliza’s bed would occupy opposite hers. What she said next surprised me.
‘I know her.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘I know her. Eliza.’
‘Yes, you saw her at church.’
‘I met her.’
I stared at her. ‘At church?’
She looked down and began picking at the hem of her dress. ‘I like her,’ she said.
From the floor below came the jingling sound of Agnes on the stairs, and with a jolting clarity I realised it was three o’clock, and I would be late for tea with my parents. I had not read the newspaper; I had not even looked at my map book to follow Ambrosia’s journey north. Immediately I fell into a panic. Organisation was needed – routine. But the way of things would last only another week, and then a new structure would begin. If I thought about it at length I would change my mind altogether, so I left Charlotte’s room and closed the door gently behind me, and a moment later her soft voice came from within, interrupting my thoughts. Pressing my hands to the panels, I rested an ear to the wood and listened.
‘Hello, Charlotte, I am pleased to meet you,’ came her little voice. I frowned, and listened harder. ‘My name is Eliza, and I am here to take care of you. I will love you, and cherish you, and play with you all day long, and at night-time, too.’
I closed my eyes and thought of Ambrosia. For seven years I’d been my parents’ only child, and if I tried hard enough I could still conjure the memory of being the singular object of their affections. I had basked in their love like a cat in a sunny spot, and wanted for nothing. A brother came in-between us, departing as swiftly and noiselessly as he had arrived, and leaving Mother tearful for some time. But then Ambrosia came and stayed, scowling and mewling in my mother’s arms. I had been alarmed, and for a time felt woefully discarded. But then she grew and began to look like a person, and became a warm body in my bed. She prodded me with chubby fingers, fascinated by my hair and nose and teeth, and followed me around like a little lap dog. She began to speak, and called me ‘Assander’, with a little lisp. I was precious to her, and she to me, and to our parents’ delight we adored each other. I felt pity when I thought of how Charlotte would never know what it was to have a sibling, a companion.
Her chatter came again: ‘Eliza, do you take sugar in your tea?’
I kept my forehead on the door, and two floors below the long-case clock in the hallway chimed once, twice, three times. We had only just met Eliza, and already the cogs of the household were shifting. The day was off its axis, and I was late for tea.
CHAPTER 10
‘Is that all you have?’ I asked, and of course it was. Eliza had arrived with only a canvas sack, and even that was only half-filled, giving it the appearance of a bagged cat ready for drowning. She had already made one mistake, calling at the front door and not the cellar steps, and Agnes had dithered on the doorstep before hurrying her inside. I watched from the staircase, and Agnes near jumped out of her skin when I spoke from the gloom. I had been on my way up from the kitchen, where I’d exchanged cross words with Maria over the new butcher’s order. The slow-witted cook had uttered the same sentence repeatedly, asking if we needed more tripe, liver, gammon, and eventually I lost my patience altogether.
The hallway was dark, and I could not see Eliza’s face as Agnes shuffled away. She clutched her bag to her stomach, and I saw only the pale glow of her bonnet, and the outline of her drab cloak.
‘Do not call at that door again,’ was all I said, before going on up the stairs. Agnes had been instructed to show her where she would sleep and put her things, but I was not halfway up before Charlotte came bounding down. I blocked her way with my skirts.
‘That is not how ladies descend a staircase. That is not even how children descend. That is how dogs descend. Are you a dog?’
She froze, her indoor cap askew. I sighed and straightened her, and she submitted placidly. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek, and her fingertips were black.
‘Have you been feeding your toys coal again? Oh, you are wilfully disobedient! Coals belong in the scuttle – how many times must I tell you? Eliza’s first task shall be washing you properly. She has not even set her things down and you are already creating work for her.’
Charlotte’s large brown eyes were solemn. She was wearing her best dress – a stiff little gown of rose pink and white, with delicate ivory tassels down the stomacher and on the sleeves. She had fixed a silk ribbon at her neck and put on her best gold slippers. She saw me notice this, and her eyebrows drew closer together in defiance. Her breath came hot through her angry little nose, and her nostrils flared. I lifted a finger as though to touch the white ribbon around her neck, but let it fall. I should have said: ‘What a pretty effort you have made for Eliza.’ I should have said: ‘You look beautiful.’ But what I said was: ‘Blue would look better next time.’
As the words fell from my lips I heard them thud dully at Charlotte’s feet, cruel and misguided. Eliza stood silently behind us. I knew that I did not know how to speak to my daughter, and now so did she. I knew that I did not know how to love my daughter, and so would she. You know why that is, came that spiteful voice in my mind, the one that sometimes used my lips
as an instrument.
Charlotte was staring unhappily at the floor, smarting from my words, and Eliza was standing damp and timid in the hall as Agnes awaited instruction. Suddenly I could not face them, any of them, and I picked up my skirts and continued my climb, bypassing the parlour altogether and going to my room. On the dresser between the windows the crystal decanter glowed dimly. It had been filled, and I let out a sigh of relief. I locked the door and removed first my slippers, then my jacket and stays, setting them on the chair and standing upright with my hands on my hips. I leaned left and right, and stretched upwards and forwards, and breathed in and out. I scratched an itch on my back, and unpinned my hair. The curtains I drew halfway so that the room was soft and darkened. From the bureau in the alcove next to the fireplace I took out my special box, brushing off imagined dust with my palm. It was ebony wood, with little oriental figures inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold-leaf bamboo. I traced the lid with one hand and poured from the crystal decanter with the other, taking the box and the glass, and going to sit on the floor at the foot of my bed, putting them both on the carpet in front of me. I crossed my legs and tucked my skirts beneath them, put my hands over my eyes and breathed.
One by one, like picking grapes from a stalk, I took out the contents and arranged them on the floor. The order I had perfected over time. First came Mother’s ring, and the pearl-drop earrings she’d worn on her wedding day. Next came Father’s military badges, three of them, which I breathed on and polished with my thumb and placed in a proud triangle. They were followed by Daniel’s miniature, which I’d wrapped in a handkerchief. I peeled back the silk as a lover might to reveal his face. In the likeness, painted on smooth ivory, Daniel was captured sideways, looking as though someone to his left had called his name. He wore a grey wig and a red jacket, and his gaze was winsome, and playful, and proud, just as it had been when I’d met him in the empty kitchen of my aunt’s house at night-time, hiding from a party. I found myself smiling, and remembering.
‘I did not see you,’ he had said, finding me heating milk at the fire. ‘You are quiet as a mouse.’
The servants were all off enjoying themselves, too, and I had gone downstairs in my stockings, hoping not to be seen. I ignored him, and wrapped my shawl more tightly around me, watching the pan grow warm.
‘Are you a guest?’ he had tried again. ‘I have not noticed you.’
‘No, I am a niece,’ I’d said, without turning around.
‘Ah, the niece. I have heard about you.’ His voice was much closer, and I did not like the knowledge in it. ‘Your Aunt Cassandra says you do not attend her parties, and sit in the attic rooms sewing a cloth of dreams. Is that true?’
Was he teasing me? I looked at him for the first time, and saw that he was handsome, in a dandyish sort of way. He was younger than me, by a few years, and shone with boastful youth. I turned away again. He asked me for a tinderbox to light his tobacco pipe, and drily I told him there was a fire before us, and he might save himself the effort of starting another one, and he laughed, and found a splint in a jar on the mantelpiece. He lit his pipe and breathed deeply in, as though he had been waiting for the moment all night. I stood stiffly, watching my pan, as he smoked beside me and asked me my name.
‘Alexandra.’
‘Ah, yes, your aunt said. I met your sister Ambrosia – isn’t she a Catherine wheel? Who is your father?’
I was silent, and after a moment said: ‘Patrick Weston-Hallett.’
‘Why do I know that name, Weston-Hallett?’ he said thoughtfully. Then, a moment later, with a change in tone and the flat note of recognition: ‘Oh. My apologies.’
His sympathy seemed genuine, and it disarmed me. I looked at him again, and his light eyes saw me, and who I was. He told me his name was Daniel Callard, and asked me to sit with him in the empty kitchen while he finished his pipe, saying he hated parties, but I knew it was untrue. He was twenty-four years old, and had recently finished an apprenticeship with a porcelain merchant in London. He was in the early stages of setting up his own business buying and selling whalebone, but he needed an investor. A benefactor, he said, making the word sound exotic and foreign. He told me how they caught the whales and brought them to London and gutted them at a dock at Rotherhithe, where the merchants would pick over the carcasses, lighting on a rib here, a bit of skull there. How their blubber was used to make oil for lamps, their bone for women’s stays.
‘You women are more familiar with it than men,’ he told me. ‘You touch whalebone every time you dress.’
I had blushed then. That night I had left my bedroom for a cup of milk, and gone back to it in love. But I was twenty-nine years old. I had lived with my aunt all my adult life, and never been to school, or Europe, or even Cheltenham, which was the nearest town. My world had shrunk to the size of a nut. And then Daniel came to one of Aunt Cassandra’s parties, and cracked it open.
I’d gone to sleep that night with a head full of whales, and ships, and crashing waves, and Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.
The next day he came again to see me at Aunt Cassandra’s damp, draughty house ahead of his return to London, and I told him he could have my money for his business if he married me. As a girl, I’d watched how Father dealt with his contemporaries when they came to our house, and made Daniel a proposal: we could live in the Bloomsbury house, and I would set him up in trade. He had listened in disbelief, and by the time the teapot grew cold he had kissed me on the mouth.
Aunt Cassandra almost expired with shock when I told her I was to marry a man I’d met in her kitchen the night before. I knew she had resigned herself to never being rid of me, especially as Ambrosia had married George the year before, well and truly sealing the dust that coated my prospects. Cassandra had tried, bringing a parade of bachelors through the doors at Knowesley Park, and to her frustration I’d turned down them all. I had my parents’ money and did not want a husband. I had not thought to marry or change my circumstances at all, and was too old, besides. That was until Daniel Callard walked into the kitchen looking for a light, and it turned out I was it.
We married on a freezing day in January a month after meeting, and turned out the tenants at Devonshire Street. The wedding had been the first time I’d left the house in five years, and the curate had placed a chair before the pulpit, thinking me a cripple. I’d dreaded getting into the carriage, and shook the whole way to London, but Daniel had locked his fingers tightly in mine. I’d looked at our bright gold wedding rings, and felt as though they were someone else’s hands.
I took out his ring now and slipped it onto my widest finger. Somehow, even now, it was never cold, as though he had just removed it. There were a few more things in the ebony box: the first tooth Ambrosia lost, and a bouquet of our hair – mine, Ambrosia’s, Mother’s and Father’s – tied in a ribbon. There was the mourning brooch I commissioned after Daniel’s death, studded with seed pearls, of a woman strewn against a plinth as willows wept above her. And last of all there was the tag, with the number 627, and two pieces of scrimshaw, carved with initials, which put together made a heart.
Later that afternoon, I went to the kitchen to ask Agnes and Maria if Eliza should eat with me in the dining room or with them in the kitchen. The pair of them stared blankly at me and I sighed.
‘What is usual for our type of household?’ I asked.
‘Nowhere I worked ever had a nursemaid,’ was Agnes’s reply. Somewhere in her late forties, she had worked in service since the age of ten.
‘Mine neither,’ said Maria. ‘Mr and Mrs Nesbitt was old when I began working for them, and their children had grown up and left.’
‘If she sleeps with Charlotte, would they eat together as well? If only I’d asked Doctor Mead.’
Maria stood at the blackened range, stirring a pot of apple sauce. ‘I think that would be proper, if she ate with you,’ she said decidedly. Probably the two of them had already discussed it. I understood: they, too, had their own way of life here, and after several years
did not wish to change the order of things. They were wary. Well, so was I. The air thickened while they waited. I did not wish to displease them and lose them to another household. One new servant was tolerable; three would be unbearable.
‘She will dine with us, then,’ I said, more convincingly than I felt. I checked the door out of habit and went upstairs to Charlotte’s bedroom.
Eliza and Charlotte were sitting on the floor with their legs tucked under them and Charlotte’s dolls spread before them. A second bed had been placed against the left-hand wall, made up with fresh white linen. It must have taken Eliza all of a minute to unpack her bag, which was nowhere in sight. I suddenly had the thought that the one person in the house who knew where she should dine was Eliza herself, but I would not ask her. She peered up at me, expectant, almost childlike herself. I knew almost nothing about her yet she would come to know plenty about me. It was a common enough exchange, though a queer one – people understood very little about their servants, yet servants knew their masters intimately, in almost every way. Mine observed many things about me, but not everything. Like sunlight on a yard, there were some parts always in shadow.
‘Eliza,’ I said. ‘You will dine with Charlotte and me every evening at five o’clock.’
She nodded. ‘Thank you, madam.’
I wondered if there was anything else I should say: that I hoped she liked the room, that laundry day was Monday. Impatience was simmering off Charlotte like steam from a pan – I had interrupted them. I let myself out, closing the door behind me. I was not wanted in the kitchen, and now I had no place here. Then I realised something: that for a long time we had been two pairs – Agnes and Maria, and Charlotte and me. Now there were two new pairs, and I was alone. The child and her nursemaid, the maid and the cook, and me. The mother. The widow. The mistress. For one person I had many hats, yet rarely felt like wearing any of them. Why had I suddenly no notion of how to be at peace in my own home? I remembered Ambrosia and my map book, and set upon examining her route in the parlour.
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