Plain Jane

by Beaton, M. C.

  Rainbird sighed. What was their life sinking to when even such as little Lizzie turned thief?

  Slow, heavy steps on the stairs heralded the arrival of the housekeeper, Mrs Middleton, a tired anxious lady of uncertain years with a face like a frightened rabbit. She opened her huge reticule and triumphantly placed a large, moth-eaten-looking cabbage on the table.

  ‘How much?’ asked Rainbird.

  ‘Nothing,’ beamed Mrs Middleton.

  ‘You bin stealin’ as well?’ asked Dave.

  ‘Get back up that chimney and mind your manners,’ said Rainbird severely. ‘Now, Mrs Middleton, what happened?’

  ‘It was a porter at Covent Garden,’ smiled Mrs Middleton, taking off her enormous bonnet, which looked like a coal scuttle. ‘He dropped it and I picked it up and went after him. “Here, my good man,” I said. “Oo d’ye think yer callin’ goodman?” he says. “You can take that there cabbidge and . . .”’ Mrs Middleton turned pink. ‘I did not understand the rest of what he said, but he looked so violent that I said, “Thank you”, and put the cabbage in my reticule. What did Dave mean about stealing as well?’

  Joseph opened his mouth and then shut it again as Rainbird glared at him.

  ‘Hurry up and finish those chimneys,’ called Rainbird to Dave. ‘Angus MacGregor has gone into the country for firewood so mayhap we’ll have some heat this evening.’

  ‘There’s soot everywhere!’ screamed Mrs Middleton. ‘Alice, why are you hugging that useless maid? Lizzie, start scrubbing out this hall and when you’ve finished, get to work in the kitchen.’

  ‘Here’s MacGregor,’ tittered Joseph, ‘sounding like the whole of Prince Charles’s rabble retreating from Derby.’

  They all trooped into the kitchen where the Highland cook was just swinging a large sack down from his shoulder.

  ‘Snowing hard,’ he grunted.

  ‘Blood!’ screamed dark-haired Jenny. ‘There’s blood dripping from that sack!’

  ‘What have you got there?’ demanded Rainbird.

  ‘A deer,’ said the cook cheerfully. ‘A wee bit cratur. Venison tonight.’

  ‘You’ve been poaching on some lord’s estate,’ accused Rainbird.

  ‘No,’ said the red-haired cook laconically, jerking open the string that held the sack. ‘It’s a young ’un. I got it in the Green Park.’

  ‘The King’s deer,’ whispered Rainbird. ‘You great fool. They’ll hang us all.’

  ‘It was there for the asking,’ said the unrepentant cook. ‘I was that low in spirits for ah hud a great bag of firewood and I put it down to rest on the long road back and some blackguard stole it and ran off into the fog.’ Rainbird had carried in one tallow candle when he had heard Angus MacGregor’s arrival. In its dim circle of golden light, the faces of the servants were as white as paper. ‘Don’t look sae feart,’ went on the cook crossly. ‘I was coming through the park and there was this little deer with a broke leg and next to death wi’ the cold. I took out ma knife and slit its throat. I had a spare sack wi’ me so I hefted it up and ran here.’

  He cocked his head to one side and they all stiffened as the heavy tread of marching feet sounded up in Clarges Street outside.

  ‘And dripping blood all the way,’ said Rainbird, panic-stricken. ‘You’ve brought the whole militia down on us. The volunteers drill in the parks every day . . .’

  ‘Tie it on my back,’ said Dave. ‘Quick!’

  ‘Why . . . ?’ began Rainbird.

  ‘Tie it on,’ screamed Dave. Heavy steps began to descend outside. While Angus MacGregor quickly lashed the deer onto the pot boy’s back, while Alice and Jenny frantically scrubbed at the blood stains on the floor, there came a loud, imperative knock at the door.

  ‘Open in the King’s name!’ called a harsh voice.

  Dave scrambled into the empty kitchen grate with the deer on his back. He seized the first of the iron rungs that had been placed inside the chimney for the sweep’s climbing boys. ‘Push me up,’ he hissed to MacGregor.

  Mrs Middleton had often bemoaned the old-fashioned open range with its wide chimney, but now she thanked God feverishly for Jonas Palmer’s parsimony.

  Rainbird opened the door. A tall captain with snow glistening on his scarlet regimentals pushed his way into the kitchen. With him came a sergeant, a trooper, and a Bow Street Runner.

  ‘Stay outside, the rest of you, until you are called,’ shouted the captain over his shoulder.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ asked Rainbird.

  ‘Where is your master?’ demanded the captain.

  ‘My master,’ said Rainbird, ‘is the Duke of Pelham. He is at Oxford University. In the meantime, I am in charge here.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Mr John Rainbird.’

  The captain jerked his head, and his sergeant held up a lanthorn next to the butler’s face. The captain studied the butler from head to foot. Rainbird was wearing the livery bought for him by the previous tenant – black tail coat, white waistcoat, black silk knee breeches, white stockings, and buckled shoes.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said the captain, a reluctant tinge of respect creeping into his voice. ‘Some female reports she’s seen a man kill a deer in the Green Park. Sure enough, there was blood on the snow. We followed the trail o’ blood and it led right here. So we’re going to search this house from attic to cellar.’

  ‘Fustian,’ snorted Rainbird. ‘I am not a thief, sirrah.’

  ‘Mayhap. But one o’ you is. How do you explain that trail o’ blood?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Rainbird, very stiffly on his stiffs.

  There came a faint curse from inside the chimney.

  ‘Who’s there?’ called the captain sharply.

  ‘It’s only the climbing boy,’ said MacGregor.

  ‘Scotch, hey?’ said the captain suspiciously. The Scots unless they were of the upper class were still regarded with distrust and suspicion and often spat on in the street. Were they not savage foreigners who descended on the south in hordes and took jobs away from decent Englishmen? He glanced downward at MacGregor’s shoes, his eyes narrowing at the traces of mud and melting snow.

  ‘I’ll just take a look up that chimney,’ he said.

  ‘Help!’ came a wail from the scullery. ‘Oh . . . I am dying.’

  ‘It’s Lizzie!’ cried Rainbird. He made a move to the scullery door, but, as he did so, the door swung open and Lizzie staggered over the threshold. Bright blood spurted from a vein in her wrist and her eyes were wild with fear.

  ‘Gad’s ’Oonds!’ cried the officer.

  Rainbird snatched out his handkerchief, seized a wooden spoon, and twisted a tourniquet around the top of Lizzie’s arm. ‘What happened, girl?’ he demanded, forgetting their peril in this new fright.

  ‘I was in the Green Park,’ whispered Lizzie through white lips, ‘and I slipped and fell in the snow and cut my wrist on a broken wine bottle.’

  ‘We will get her to St George’s Hospital,’ said Alice, coming forward into the light. ‘You will help us, Captain.’ She said it as a statement, not as a request. The captain looked at the golden wings of Alice’s hair shining under her crisp cap, at the slow rise and fall of her beautiful bosom, at the creamy skin of her face, and the wide cerulean blue of her eyes.

  The deer was forgotten. Orders were barked out. A hackney carriage was brought to the door outside. Rainbird picked Lizzie’s frail body up in his arms, cursing softly under his breath as he carried her up the stairs.

  Joseph followed, digging his hand in the pocket of his livery. He brought out a lace and cambric handkerchief and looked at it longingly. It was his dearest treasure. Then he leant over Lizzie where she lay back in a corner of the hackney and held out the handkerchief. ‘For you, Lizzie,’ he said in a low voice. He leaned forward and kissed her thin, white cheek.

  Now Lizzie had harboured a secret love for the tall footman since the first day she had started work at Number 67. ‘Thank you, Mr Joseph,’ she whispered, taking
the handkerchief and putting it in her bosom.

  The captain was to say long afterwards that he had never seen such a brave servant girl. She had smiled dreamily while a surgeon at St George’s had stitched her wound. So transfigured by happiness did she look that an old lady at the hospital fell to her knees in awe, thinking Lizzie was a dying girl on the threshold of heaven.

  The snow was falling thick and fast as they put Lizzie to bed in one of the best bedrooms upstairs. Palmer would not venture out on such a night, and Lizzie, who had cut her own wrist to save them all, must have only the best.

  Then a terrified Dave, who had not the faintest idea of what had been going on, had to be rescued from the chimney. He was sobbing with fatigue, having hung onto the rungs with the weight of the carcase on his back for some two hours.

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Angus,’ said Rainbird severely to the cook. ‘Two children nigh dead over your folly.’

  ‘Aye, weel, you’ll sing a different tune when ye’ve all got a bit of roast venison inside,’ said the unrepentant cook, untying the deer from Dave’s back.

  ‘Lizzie saved us all,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘God bless her.’

  Rainbird sighed wearily as the snow whispered at the area windows, which were set high up in the wall. ‘It is so cold,’ he said. ‘We have nothing to make a fire, Angus. Do you expect us to eat that animal raw?’

  ‘I cannae dae everything,’ said the cook sulkily.

  ‘They had coal delivered next door today,’ said Dave, recovering from all his shocks with his usual resilience. ‘Sacks and sacks o’ it, straight dahn the coal ’ole in big shiny lumps.’

  Rainbird’s eyes sharpened. ‘Lizzie must have heat,’ he said. ‘We must have heat.’ He sat for a few moments in brooding silence. He looked round at the servants who, with the exception of Lizzie, were all sitting about, made listless by the intense cold.

  ‘No one must ever steal anything again,’ he said, ‘but there is no harm in borrowing. Now, as we were returning from the hospital you must have noticed that Lord Charteris next door was leaving for the country with all his staff. That means the house is empty.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Joseph, looking at the butler curiously. ‘Luke told me t’other day they was all leaving.’ Luke was the Charterises’ first footman.

  ‘Down in our cellar,’ said Rainbird dreamily, ‘there is a pick and a shovel.’ He stood up, a slow grin curling his mobile mouth. ‘Strip off, Joseph, my boy. Tonight, we mine for coal!’

  ‘Me ’ands,’ wailed Joseph, reverting to that Cockney whine of his that was normally covered by a thin layer of affected gentility.

  ‘Wear gloves, you Jessamy,’ said Rainbird. ‘To work!’

  Lizzie in the bedroom upstairs drifted in and out of sleep. At one point she tried to struggle out of bed because there were great hammerings and thumps reverberating through the house, and she thought the militia had come back. But she was too exhausted to make much of an effort and soon fell back into an uneasy doze.

  She awoke sometime during the evening. A fire was crackling on the hearth, throwing a dancing rosy glow up to the ceiling. Warmth crept through her body, and she wondered dreamily where they had found the coal. Then, all at once, Joseph was bending over her, stripped to the waist and black with coal dust.

  ‘You still got my kerchief, Lizzie?’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes, Joseph,’ said Lizzie mistily. ‘I’ll never part with it.’

  Joseph’s face fell. ‘Mr Joseph to you, minx,’ he grumbled, slouching away.

  He joined the rest of the black and weary servants in the hall.

  ‘What’s this?’ he cried. ‘Only bread and water?’

  ‘You’ll get something later,’ said MacGregor. ‘I’m going to fry the liver. But the beast’s got to be hung.’

  Rainbird looked down the table at the weary, dejected faces.

  ‘Be of good cheer,’ he said. ‘I do not think the Good Lord above meant us to starve in Mayfair. Somewhere, right at this moment, someone is planning to take this house. I know it. I feel it.’

  But the wry twist at his mouth and the weary sadness in his eyes gave the lie to his optimism.

  TWO

  It’s all very well to be handsome and tall,

  Which certainly makes you look well at a ball:

  It’s all very well to be clever and witty,

  But if you are poor, why it’s only a pity.

  ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, SPECTATOR AB EXTRA

  In a small village twelve miles outside Brighton lived a small, plain girl who did not know yet that she was to stay at Number 67 Clarges Street and change the fortunes of the staff. She was only eighteen years of age and had not yet put her hair up. Her name was Jane Hart, daughter of a retired sea captain.

  At the very moment that Dave was frantically climbing up the chimney with the deer, as brave little Lizzie was slashing her wrist in the scullery, Jane Hart was sitting at the window of her bedroom, a romance lying on her lap, and gazing unseeingly out at the white mist rolling over the Sussex downs.

  Her sister, Euphemia, often laughingly referred to her as Plain Jane. For Jane was as brown-skinned as her sister was fair, as small as Euphemia was tall, and as shy as her sister was bold. Although Jane naturally did not like to be called plain, she had to admit that no young lady she had ever met was as beautiful as Euphemia, and, therefore, it was understandable that anyone would pale before such beauty.

  Euphemia was nineteen and a fashionable goddess. Her hair was naturally curly and of a rich brown. Her pale skin was without blemish and her large brown eyes, liquid and full. She had a small straight nose and a tiny mouth, the upper lip being larger than the lower.

  Jane had tough, coarse, gypsy hair that frizzed in damp weather. Her thin face was golden-brown, her mouth was large and generous, and, alas, her nose was decidedly snub.

  Her large eyes were hazel and fringed with sooty lashes. Her uncle, Mr Hardwicke, had once praised the beauty of Jane’s eyes, but Mrs Hart, Jane’s mother, had sniffed and said Jane’s bad skin-colouring ruined any possibility of beauty.

  Mrs Hart, who had once been a great beauty, had disappointed her parents by marrying a sea captain. Jane had often heard her father described as being dashing and handsome in his youth, but the captain was now a sullen, morose, lantern-jawed man, nagged by his wife. It was hard to think he had ever been young.

  Mrs Hart had a great deal of money of her own. She had nagged her husband until he had reluctantly resigned his command right after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and settled into bitter retirement.

  The family, considering the amount of Mrs Hart’s wealth, could have lived in more comfortable circumstances. But Mrs Hart was penny-pinching to a fault and so they were confined to a damp barracks of a mansion in an undistinguished village with few diversions. Practically their only caller was Lady Doyle, relict of an Irish peer, who claimed to know every society figure of note in London. Mrs Hart considered Lady Doyle good ton.

  Mrs Hart’s parsimony did not run to Euphemia’s dowry, which was large. No dowry had even been discussed when it came to Jane, and sometimes Jane dismally thought spinsterhood lay in front of her for, without money, there was little hope of marriage.

  Lady Doyle was at that moment belowstairs being entertained to tea. Jane sighed. Her mother could not understand anyone disliking so grand a personage as Lady Doyle and would already be resenting Jane’s absence.

  Jane stood up, gathering up the long skirts of her gown – a hand-me-down from Euphemia – and reluctantly made her way downstairs. On the half-landing was a long thin window. As Jane looked up at it she could see large feathery flakes of snow beginning to fall. Lady Doyle would no doubt cut short her visit so that she might travel to her home at the other end of the village, Upper Patchett, before the weather grew worse.

  A murmur of voices from the drawing room filtered out through the panels of the thick oak door. Jane pushed open the door and walked in. Her father was sitting at one
side of the fire, moodily cracking his knuckles and staring into the flames. On the other side, with a fire screen on a long pole raised to shield her face, was Lady Doyle.

  She had a long, drooping, curved face, rather like the reflection of a face in a spoon. She still wore old-fashioned panniered skirts and powdered hair. Only one small rebellious tendril showed that her hair was powdered, for the rest was covered by a starched frilled cap, with a broad-brimmed beaver hat on top of that. Her large teeth were very white and strong, but broken in places, making them look like a new castle’s ramparts that have been recently shelled. The firelight flickered on the gold embroidery of her velvet gown and sparkled on the heavy rings on her long bony fingers.

  Mrs Hart turned as Jane entered the room and threw her daughter a quick disapproving frown. Jane’s mother’s beauty hung about her like a pale ghost. There was something in the grace of her movements and the pout of her lips that showed she had once been a diamond of the first water. But too much use of blanc with a lead base had pitted her skin and disappointment had soured her expression. Although she would not admit it, her mouth had once been as generous as Jane’s, but years of primming it up to reduce it to a fashionable size had left her with the odd appearance of always being on the point of whistling, and she had a thin network of wrinkles radiating out from her lips.

  Euphemia glanced at her little sister with indifference. Then she returned to practising her Attitude, which was of Dreaming Beauty. This involved turning her eyes up to the ceiling while resting the tip of her forefinger on her cheek.

  Jane sat down quietly in a corner and folded her hands meekly in her lap. With any luck, she might escape Lady Doyle’s malicious attention. But Lady Doyle’s next words fell like a heavy stone into the silence that had fallen when Jane had entered the room.

  ‘I see there’s a town house to rent in Clarges Street for the Season. A prodigious low rent. I was thinking, it’s such a shame a beauty like Euphemia who could marry a duke should waste her looks upon the country air.’