But now she knew. She had always feared her father for his loudness and roughness but had thought it was no more than that. Now, however, there was something else pushing at her memory, somewhere deep inside her, a place she had locked up and never visited again; Dorcas’s words about the way her father had used her mother and Mrs Leander were shaking the padlocks she had set on her secret place. It was the dream she had so often, the memory dream in which she sat under the table in Mamma’s boudoir and listened to Papa shouting, until he came and found her under the cloth. In the past when the dream came at night that moment had been followed by blackness and her waking, but now the blackness was thinning and there were shadowy movements in it, and she didn’t want to see those movements or even think about them, she didn’t, she didn’t, she –
She took a long shaky breath and said carefully, ‘So. You need five pounds.’
Dorcas sat up sharply and gazed at her. Her face was flushed and that gave her back some of her old beauty, and in the late afternoon light her bedraggled hair and clothes softened and looked better, almost seductive. It could have been the old Dorcas who looked hopefully at Tilly, but it was the new Tilly who looked back, waiting. She was holding on to herself very tightly, for fear she would weep; ‘yet why should I weep?’ she asked herself in the secret recesses of her mind. ‘Why should I, when it is Dorcas who is in trouble, not I?’
The control held, to her deep gratitude, and went on holding as Dorcas scrambled off the bed and came to crouch at Tilly’s feet to hold on to both her hands and look up at her pleadingly.
‘Say you will help me, dearest Tilly. Say you can give me the money I need. I can’t say when I will give it back but one day I will, I swear it. Just get me out of this tangle now, I beg you, so that I may be married to Walter and start our new life, and as soon as I am able to repay you, I will, truly I will – only I beg you –’
‘I can give you no cash,’ Tilly said calmly and pulled on the string of her reticule, which was attached to the waist of her gown. ‘But I think you may raise what you need with these. I can’t say if they’re worth five pounds of course, but – well, if not, we must think again.’
With remarkably steady fingers Tilly pulled the reticule strings open and turned it over on to her brown taffeta lap to spill a little shower of silver and colour; the set of twelve enamelled silver teaspoons her mother had once told Tilly were her favourite wedding present. She had collected them from the dining-room on her way upstairs.
‘They came all the way from St Petersburg in Russia and are worth a great deal of money,’ her Mamma had said turning them lovingly in her hand. ‘My Uncle Patterson gave them to me and told me they were worth much money and would be a useful standby for me. But I would not sell them for the world. They will be yours one day when you are a bride –’ And Mamma had bent and kissed small Tilly, let her touch them and stroke the jewelled colours, the red and green and blue and purple and yellow that adorned each of the handles and the backs of the bowls. The inner parts of the bowls were yellowed with tarnish now, though Tilly remembered them being sparkling silver, but that didn’t matter. It did not affect their value, and she held them out to Dorcas in both hands.
‘If you take them to a jeweller well away from Brompton – in town perhaps – you should be able to get a good price for them,’ she said in a steady voice. ‘Mamma will never know they have gone. And she told me they would be mine one day. So I have but taken them a little sooner.’
Dorcas looked down at the spoons with calculating eyes and then took one and turned it over to peer at the reverse of the bowl, and after a moment got to her feet and carried it to the window where the failing light was strongest. After a while she came back and nodded and took the rest of the spoons from Tilly’s hands.
‘Thank you, Tilly. It’s a help – I’ll go now into town and see what I can get for them – and if it’s not enough then perhaps you will find me something else. There are always your Ma’s pearls – the ones you wore on your wedding day –’
‘No!’ Tilly flared and reached for the spoons, suddenly regretting her action, but Dorcas had already tucked them into the hidden pocket in the skirt of her merino gown and they were not to be seen, let alone touched. ‘No – those are – I will never sell them. But there is some other silver that is never used as far as I can tell.’
Dorcas was standing by the door now, pulling her gown straight and running her fingers through her matted hair as she set her untidy cap straight on it. She was all business now, practical, cool and not at all the sodden frightened heap she had been, and Tilly sat and stared at her and confused feelings were again tangled inside her. The pity had gone, for there was nothing pitiable about Dorcas now, and so had the concern, for once again Dorcas seemed in full control of herself. As for the triumph – that had a hollow ring, now Tilly thought about it, and she felt flat and a little sick as she watched Dorcas rearrange her appearance.
‘I need to slip out quietly,’ Dorcas said. ‘Lend me a cloak, dearest Tilly –’ and without waiting for an answer she was across the room digging into Tilly’s big press, and was pulling out one of her dark stuff cloaks, one with a wide hood inside which she could easily hide her head and face as well.
She came back to Tilly and again crouched at her feet, staring up at the still white face above her. ‘I’m truly grateful, Tilly. You mustn’t think, because I have ceased weeping, that I have ceased fearing and feeling. You always were much too beguiled by surface appearances – I can imagine you now thinking I am ungrateful, for I am in such haste to be gone, but I am not. You will see – I will always stand your friend. As you have mine. Believe me.’ She reached up and kissed Tilly’s cheek and hugged her briefly, and then went, closing the door behind her so softly that no one could have known anyone had left the room at all.
Chapter Four
TILLY’S FIRST THOUGHT when she woke after a restless, dream-haunted night, was the spoons. She lay with her eyes still closed against the early spring sunshine that poured in through her window and saw them against the orange glow there behind her lids, vivid in their rich colours, with the delicate ribbed traces that highlighted the perfect enamel work of the handles and the backs of the bowls, and regretted their loss as keenly as she had ever regretted anything. Even, she remembered suddenly, as much as the loss of her doll Charlotte. When she had been eleven, Mrs Leander had pronounced her to be an insanitary rag and thrown her on the kitchen fire. Why had she done it? Why, oh why had she parted with her Mamma’s precious spoons, her own precious spoons come to that, for weren’t they her promised inheritance?
The anger lifted in her and she snapped open her eyes and sat up sharply with her arms round her bent knees and her eyes fixed unseeingly on the dead grate of her fireplace where last night’s ashes lay cold and cheerless. Why on earth had she done it? what had possessed her to give so special a possession to Dorcas, of all people?
She shivered involuntarily as she tried to answer her own question; realized how cold she was now that her arms were outside the bedclothes and frowned. Her bedside clock announced that it was past eight o’clock; the housemaid should have come long ago to light her fire so that she could dress in decent comfort. It was all due to Mrs Leander’s laziness that the girls who worked under her neglected their duties so sorely and Tilly, luxuriating in the anger which had started with the spoons and now encompassed cold arms and a dread of having to expose the rest of her shrinking body to the cold air of her distinctly uninviting bedroom, reached across and seized her bell pull and tugged hard.
She couldn’t hear it pealing far below in the kitchen, of course, but she could imagine the third bell from the left in the second row on the board above the back door dancing and jangling on the end of the complicated series of loops and ropes that connected it to her bedroom. She could imagine Mrs Leander looking up at it from her favourite place beside the fire in her little sitting room, from which she had an excellent view of the whole of the kitchen, and ignoring i
t; and that made her angrier than ever and she tugged even harder and went on tugging until she was sure the bell below stairs was dancing in an ecstasy of constant movement. She should not ignore her. She could not!
She was still tugging in rage when the door opened and Eliza the housemaid peered in, her face flushed and dirt-smeared, and her cap askew. Eliza stood there gaping at her and Tilly, who hardly ever raised her voice, opened her mouth and let out a shriek of fury with all the strength she had in her. It felt wonderful.
The girl gawped at her and her face crumpled and that added fuel to the flames for Tilly. She was not used to having people stare at her with fear-twisted faces and brimming eyes, and she was amazed at how much she liked it, and she shouted more loudly than ever as the girl stood and shook her head, openly crying now.
The tide of fury ebbed away as fast as it had risen and Tilly stopped and looked at the girl who gulped and looked fearfully back at her, and suddenly felt a wave of shame.
‘Oh, Eliza, I did not mean to be so – well, I am very cold! You cannot blame me for being angry when it is so late and there are no fires set and lit yet. Where have you been? Why is my fire not yet dealt with?’
‘Oh, Missus, I’m sorry, Missus, really I am, only I couldn’t, what with the kitchen to get done and Mrs Cashman not fit to – I mean – well, I had to do the kitchen fire first for the breakfasts, and it wouldn’t draw not for no one, and it’s been such a battle, though it’s going now, Missus, and I’ll be about your fire right away, that I will.’
‘Mrs Cashman?’ Tilly frowned. She hardly knew the woman, for she had been employed as cook only a month ago; for some reason which Tilly did not fully understand no cook remained in the house for very long. One after another they came and went, and Mrs Leander would mutter to Austen Kingsley about them and demand more money for a better one, and he would roar back and refuse, and yet another cook would appear and the dinners were never any better. Mrs Cashman was just the latest in a long line of such women and it was not surprising to Tilly that there were kitchen troubles again.
‘She had a – um – she had a bad night, Missus.’ The housemaid looked over her shoulder as though expecting someone to pounce on her from behind. There’s only me stirrin’ and the master’ll be shouting for his fire and tea soon and – oh, Missus, I’m that sorry and I’ll be about it right away, that I will.’
She was a country girl, still with the soft roundness such girls brought with them from their homes in Sussex and Surrey and Kent when they came into service with families in London, but there was the beginnings of the familiar city pallor about her and Tilly was filled with compunction. She wasn’t much more than a child – thirteen or fourteen, perhaps, no more – and small for her years at that, and Tilly said, ‘Oh, it’s all right, Eliza. Go and see to my Papa’s fire and tea first, and then see to Mr Quentin’s. Once they are settled you may come back to me. I shall manage well enough. But tell Mrs Leander when you go down to –’ She stopped, not sure what to say to the housekeeper, wishing she had the courage to send a very waspish message indeed, and as she paused Eliza said quickly, ‘Oh, but she’s not – I mean –’
‘She’s not what?’ Tilly demanded. She had braved the cold and swung her legs out of bed, and was sitting with her toes curling against the chill, and as the girl swallowed and muttered, anger stirred in Tilly again. ‘Well? What?’
‘Oh, Missus, please not to tell her I was behind, like!’ The girl’s face was once more crumpled in a mask of terror. ‘I got that tired I couldn’t wake up this morning and that’s why I’m all at sixes and sevens, and the only good thing is she’s not up yet so she don’t know and if she finds out she’ll tan me again and I don’t think I –’
‘Not up yet?’ Tilly looked at her clock. Half past eight and the housekeeper not yet out of her bed? ‘What’s going on down there? And Mrs Cashman, you say –’
‘They was both the same last night,’ Eliza said. ‘They had their suppers and a lot of porter and –’ She reddened. ‘Well, it’s not for me to say, Missus.’
‘A lot of –’ Tilly nodded. ‘I see. Drunk, you say?’
‘Oh, no, Missus, I never said nothing – oh, Missus, please not to tell her I said nothing. She’ll have the skin off my back again, and I couldn’t bear it, and my Ma says I’m not to come running home again or she’ll just send me back like she did last time.’
Tilly was no longer aware of being cold. She was staring at the girl in amazement. ‘What do you mean, running – you went home from here? When? Why? What happened?’
‘Oh, please, Missus, I won’t do it again, only don’t tell her, please don’t tell her. She’ll –’
‘I won’t,’ Tilly promised. ‘Just explain, will you, what this is all about.’
‘Mrs Leander, Missus. She beat me for being stupid like and I went home to my Ma and she said I had to come back because of the money she’d paid over, Missus, and –’
‘What money? You mean your wages?’ The girl looked miserable and once more on the verge of tears.
‘It was this ’rangement they made, my Ma and Mrs Leander, Missus. Mrs Leander promised to teach me to be a proper cook and then a housekeeper and my Ma pays her the money, Missus, and –’
Tilly shook her head, mystified. ‘Your mother gave money? Why?’
‘My apprentice money, Missus. To teach me, like Mrs Leander says. For five pun’ she’ll teach me to be a lady cook and housekeeper what’ll get positions in dukes’ palaces and all that, and my Ma finds the five pun’ and it ain’t easy, Missus, that I can tell you, for a widder woman, and I’ve three little sisters at ‘ome to come after me but like Ma says, once I’m apprenticed and taught right, I can teach them and we can all get into good positions with the real gentry, and off I go and that happy to do it. And then it all –’ Her eyes filled again. ‘It ain’t what I expected, Missus, and there’s the truth of it. And when I tried to tell my Ma she says I’m just being lazy and won’t hear me and says she’s got to have value for her money and sends me back. So don’t tell Mrs Leander, Missus, please not to tell for she’ll –’
Tilly was sitting very still now, staring at her and trying to get her head clear. It wasn’t easy.
‘It’s all right, Eliza,’ she said after a long pause. ‘Go about your business. See to the gentlemen. I shall be well enough. And do stop crying. I shall cause you no mischief at all, be sure of that.’
The girl looked at her like a scared kitten and then bolted and Tilly sat and thought a while longer and then very purposefully got out of bed and set about getting dressed. The water in her jug, cold as it was, would do well enough for washing. She would add no further burden to Eliza’s already overladen shoulders by asking for hot. But she would have to do something about Mrs Leander, that was for certain. Not only was the woman a shameless abuser of her mistress’s household and no better than a bawd, she was robbing everyone in all directions; Tilly’s Papa and by extension, Tilly told herself, me too. She was robbing that child Eliza and her simple-minded mother.
‘And there’s my spoons!’ she thought illogically, and again rage rose in her like a tide and she welcomed it, for it gave her strength and sharpened her wits. She knew exactly what she was going to do, and do it she would. Today.
By the time she got herself downstairs the household seemed to be in some sort of order. Her father was in the breakfast room shouting about coffee and Mrs Leander was in there dealing with it. Tilly went into the breakfast room herself, summoning all the dignity she could and looked at the older woman sharply; she was a little pale and perhaps a touch puffy about the eyes, but otherwise looked much as she usually did. She nodded frostily at Tilly as she went out, leaving her to serve herself with coffee and to find a piece of toast that was not too badly burned. It would appear that Mrs Cashman was also in circulation at last; for there was bacon that was burned and poached eggs, though they were leathery, while the cold dishes – the ham, the ox tongue and the collared beef – on the sideboard looked
decidedly tired and quite ungarnished, as though they had been hurried there directly from the larder and not even set on clean plates. Once again Tilly let anger rise in her and she relished it.
Her father ignored her, sitting hunched over his coffee and his large plate of ill-cut ham as he peered at the Morning Post. It was not a journal he particularly enjoyed. Tilly had long suspected, but it was necessary for any gentleman in business to know of its contents, so read it he did, and she knew better than to interrupt him while he did so.
She sat herself quietly opposite with her toast and coffee – which was, she decided, definitely muddy. Her father looked red about the eyes, as he usually did, and more jowly perhaps than he had this time last year, but much himself in other ways. The things that Dorcas had said about him yesterday afternoon came unbidden into her mind, and she immediately dropped her gaze and tried to think of other things. Think about the spoons, she admonished herself; think about Dorcas and your spoons.
The door opened again and Frank came in and she looked up almost eagerly. Perhaps today he would be in a better humour. Last night he had come late to bed, stamping about in his dressing-room and choosing to sleep in there rather than come to their bed. Not an unusual act for him, of course; he rarely spent more nights in the week in bed with her than he spent on the dressing-room truckle bed. But he had been noisier than usual and she suspected he had been drinking too much again. His behaviour this morning made that seem even more likely, for he was sulky and irritable and threw her a withering glance and only grunted when she said, ‘Good morning,’ as brightly as she could.
Her father ignored him as he went to the sideboard and looked under the silver covers and grunted his disapproval of what he saw before loading his plate and coming back to the table.
London Lodgings Page 5