by Anne Groß
Seizing his moment, Richard leaned over Elise’s shoulder. “Like this,” he whispered as he took her hands into his while his mother fussed at Mrs. Postlewaite about the wastefulness of too strong tea. Elise looked up in surprise as he embraced her from behind and briefly caught Mary’s angry glare. A long, single apple peel emerged from her hand, guided by Richard. Once the peel broke, he pocketed an apple from the basket and snuck out of the kitchen.
While Elise was grateful for the five-second lesson, she couldn’t help but feel irritated by Richard’s disappearing act, knowing it would mean Mrs. Ferrington’s attention would eventually turn back to her. She busied herself with the apple, satisfied with how the paring knife felt more secure in her hand. Then she realized there had been a pause in the older women’s conversation. When she looked up, she saw them watching her while Mary banged pots in the fireplace. They smiled. Elise looked back down, feeling uncomfortable.
“Well, she seems to be doing fine with that apple now, but you’re right, Mary should be in the kitchen more. Elise will go to the pump for water in the morning and afternoon from now on instead of Mary. And I see no reason why she can’t start the fires, empty the pots, and sweep out the dining room too. She seems perfectly healthy now, don’t you think?”
“She seems a little frail, Ma’am.”
Mary piped up from her corner, “She’s wearing her chemise over her stays, and has forgotten her petticoat. I’ll not be washing her stays every week just because she’s too daft to dress properly.”
Elise looked down at her gown. The stack of clothing that had been left for her had been confusing. The stockings were obvious, as was the apron. Was the enormous bra with the tiny quarter cups and all the uncomfortable under-wires supposed to go over the slip? That was stupid, thought Elise. There seemed to be an extra skirt too, which she realized must have been the forgotten petticoat. Elise had also left a pair of knee length shorts draped over the chair in her bedroom. She didn’t see the use in them since they were crotchless but she now realized there would be an uproar if it was discovered she wasn’t wearing the oversized undies.
“Mary, please try to be kind,” Mrs. Ferrington chastised. “Elise will dress properly tomorrow, I’m sure. You’ll be glad enough to have her when you’re not set to fetching water and tossing out the night-soil.”
That seemed to perk Mary up quite a bit, but sounded ominous to Elise. She hoped night-soil wasn’t what she thought it was.
“Where’s Thomas?” Mrs. Ferrington asked. “I know the odds were against him last night, but I hope he managed to earn my congratulations?”
“Aye, he won again last night. He’s already come and gone, Ma’am,” Mrs. Postlethwaite replied.
“Oh that’s wonderful,” Mrs. Ferrington chirped. “I don’t approve of gambling, but I’ll always put a little down on our Thomas.” She was practically rubbing her palms together, Elise noted.
Mrs. Postlethwaite’s lips pinched into a thin line and Elise saw Mary glance anxiously at the two older women. “He’ll likely be back in the afternoon. You can congratulate him then if you’re here.” Mrs. Postlethwaite said. “Have you not finished with those apples yet, Elise? I’ll need them soon.” She’d returned to whipping the eggs. Talk of Thomas had caused the eggs to move well beyond the point of being frothy.
Three naked apples sat in front of Elise in a line. She picked up the pace with the fourth in her hands. “I’m almost done,” she replied.
“Which fine ladies will you be calling on today, Mrs. Ferrington?” Mary asked.
“Mary, would you please come away from that fire and help Elise with those onions,” Mrs. Postlethwaite snapped. Elise smiled to herself and slowed her work on the fourth apple to a glacial pace. If she timed it right, the onions would fall off her list of things to do.
Mary’s question caused Mrs. Ferrington to suddenly remember she was late. She called out final directions for the evening meal as she bustled her way through the dining hall door. Mary came and stood next to Elise and took up an onion to start chopping. When Elise tried to discretely move down the table and away from the fumes, Mary followed, staying close enough for them both to suffer. “Mrs. P doesn’t like it when Mr. MacEwan fights,” she hissed at Elise when the stout cook had stuck her head in the larder. “She thinks Mrs. Ferrington encourages him for her own gain. The Ferringtons raised him, you know, so Mrs. P. blames them.”
“Does Thomas fight a lot?” Elise whispered back, taking three steps to the left and wiping her eyes. Her apple was nearly peeled.
“Oh, all the time. He usually wins too.” Mary scraped the onions down the table with the blade of her knife and followed Elise’s retreat, resolutely staying close.
There was something about Thomas that was at odds with boxing, she thought, unlike Mary who seemed to enjoy picking fights. She took a half step to the left and realized she’d reached the corner of the table as the last red peel fell from her apple. Elise pulled an edge of her apron up to press against her watery eyes. When she pulled the apron away to squint angrily at Mary, she was handed the second onion and given a sly, teary smile in response. “Onions won’t be the worst of it.”
“What’s night soil?” Elise asked suspiciously.
“You really are a queen, aren’t you?”
Elise sighed. It was going to be a long day.
BURDENSOME STRAYS
“Good morning Mr. Tilsdale,” Elise said as cheerfully as she could, but it came out only slightly more friendly than a grumble. She was descending the steps from the third floor, where she had groggily stumbled out of her bedroom only moments before. The lanky old man emerged from the gloom of the passage on the second floor and stopped at the staircase landing to let her pass.
It was another day, and thus another trudge through life in a place she didn’t want to be. The day before had indeed been a trial. She had been forced to endure it with Mary most of the afternoon until dinner when the customers started coming through the door. No one paid any attention to her when customers were waiting to spend money. Thomas was strangely absent, and with no one watching the bar, she was able to get a beer from Johnny and slip away to her room for much needed rest. She didn’t mind skipping her dinner of the Missus’s famed stuffed ham.
The meager light that leaked through the tiny bedroom window had enraged her when she had opened her eyes. She wanted to rip the weak sun from the sky and punish it in her fist. In Tucson the sun was everything. It vibrated the cicadas’ song; it reflected metallic off hummingbirds’ feathers and sent the sweet smell of baking sage into every crevice of the dusty town. Here, the sun crept fearfully through the window and into Elise’s bedroom, apologetic, mincing. It could be morning or noon or late evening, it didn’t matter, the light was always the same: ineffectual.
It would have been easy enough for Mary to wake her, but making things easy didn’t seem to be Mary’s style. Also contributing to Elise’s foul mood was the distinct swampy smell that her dress was beginning to take on. When she’d asked about a change of clothes the previous day she’d, once again, been called a Queen—as if having two dresses was a luxury. It was clear to Elise that if she didn’t get up before Mary in the mornings, there wouldn’t be any water left in the ewer for a sponge bath. It didn’t occur to her to go down to the kitchen for her own water, and reusing the water in the basin was out of the question. What’s more, she still didn’t have any shoes.
Her red polished toenails had made quite a splash, as did the size of her feet—a respectable eight-and-a-half. “I’ll not spend my money to have a pair of shoes made for those,” Mrs. Ferrington had said. “You’ll have to wait for a suitable used pair.”
“The only other woman I know as got feet like frying pans is Mrs. Williams,” Mary had laughed. “I can ask her if she’d part with one of her old pairs. I hope you’re not too proud to wear an old woman’s shoes?”
And to top it off, Elise was sure she wouldn’t be offered any coffee that morning, and would be lucky
to get tea.
Mr. Tilsdale touched his forehead where the brim of his hat would have been had he been wearing it on his head instead of carrying it in his hand. “Morning Miss,” he said with a smile. Elise smelled halitosis and damp wool. The scent moved back into the tenant’s passageway where it waited to seep slowly outdoors through the walls, one molecule at a time.
There were five tenant rooms on the second floor and four of them were rented. Mary had described the tenants as single men of humble professions and small incomes. Her eyes had sparkled when she had pointed to the one empty room. “It could be anyone as takes that room,” she had said. “We’re due for a handsome one. We’ve had nothing but louts and old farts lately.”
As Elise attempted to swing widely around Mr. Tilsdale—undoubtedly one of Mary’s old farts—he grabbed her arm. “Aren’t you Mr. MacEwan’s little lunatic? I believe we haven’t been properly introduced.”
“I say, by George, I believe you’re right, Old Chap.” Elise snapped back with an exaggerated accent. Later that day she would be discovering what he had to eat in the last 24 hours and carry it in a bucket all the way downstairs, past the kitchen and into the cellar. She would, she thought to herself, become very familiar with all the tenants’ digestive hygiene. She pulled her arm out of his grip and continued down the stairs.
The previous afternoon Mrs. Ferrington had presented Mary with a grand promotion to be the cook’s assistant, but Mary remained wary. While the barmaid was delighted to forego the job of dumping dumps out of the pots and into the household septic tank, she wasn’t thrilled by the potential competition of having Elise take over the chambermaid duties. Mary’s anxiety only abated when Elise showed very little interest or enthusiasm for learning the job.
The sound of Mr. Tilsdale’s footsteps following her unnerved Elise—there was something in the way he said “lunatic” that made her skin crawl. She could feel the man’s eyes on the bare skin of the back of her neck and wished she hadn’t swept her hair up with borrowed hairpins. Mary said he was a Barrister’s clerk when she’d taken Elise into his room for training. She could tell he’d been at the Quiet Woman for quite some time by the amount of things he’d accumulated—a pocket watch with its back pried open for repairs, a small sewing basket that held socks that needed mending, saved slivers of shaving soap, and a large grease stain on the mattress. With Mary supervising, she had swept his room and made his bed tucking the sheets with tight hospital corners. Elise considered hooking all the tenants up to urinary catheter bags as she’d poured his chamber pot into the bucket Mary had given her to take to each room.
At the bottom of the stairs, Elise said good day as she opened the door into the pub and Mr. Tilsdale left to go to work. The dining hall was empty with the exception of the shivering old man in the wing chair. Elise wondered if he’d gone home the night before.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Postlethwaite was chopping turnips with a loud banging against the table. Instinctually, Elise glanced at the stack of linens on the shelf behind her for makeshift bandages. Thomas was sitting on the low stool in the corner near the fire. His bottom lip had almost returned to normal and would have looked nice had his pipe not been dangling from it. Everything about him seemed wilted. His eyelids drooped over his bloodshot eyes. His hair, normally thick and unruly, fell lank to his chin. His chest was sunken and even his taut stomach seemed to fold over his thighs. He pulled his pipe out of his mouth and yawned. Elise’s eyes widened in appreciation as he stretched to his full length, transformed for mere seconds before slumping back into his former position. “Where were you last night?” she asked.
“What business is it of yours?” came a sharp reply from Mrs. Postlethwaite. The cook looked up to scowl at Elise while her knife kept cubing vegetables. “Mr. MacEwan was attending to other matters of importance. He was attending to matters,” she reiterated, “and you’d do best to remember that and thank him in the mornings and not talk to him like an old wife.”
Elise didn’t know what to say to that and stared at Mrs. Postlethwaite with her mouth open. She was saved when Thomas started to choke and cough after an ill-timed deep inhale of tobacco smoke. She turned to look at him and could swear he was trying not to laugh. “Serves you right.” Mrs. Postlethwaite shouted at him. “Just look at that blooming eye,” she said, jabbing her knife in the air to point at Thomas’s face. A small cut high on his cheekbone was scabbed over and slightly discolored by a bruise. The eye itself seemed fine.
“How can I look at my own eye?” Thomas replied around his pipe after he recovered.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting a side of beef to put on it.”
“If you’ve got a side of beef, it’ll go in my belly, not on my eye.”
“Well, there’ll be no beef for you.” Mrs. Postlethwaite’s knife came down decisively on a hunk of turnip with a deadly kerchunk.
Thomas bent to take a glowing twig from the hearth to relight his pipe, completely unfazed by the threatening cook. Grey tendrils of smoke swirled gently over his head as he sucked rhythmically on the stem, and the smell of it made all Elise’s pores open like nicotine landing docks. She sidled up as close to him as she could reasonably get without giving her addiction away to inhale his second-hand smoke.
“Have you ever seen such a laggard?” Mrs. Postlethwaite asked, her attention and her knife suddenly swinging in Elise’s direction.
Thomas puffed his pipe in response and closed his eyes with apparent exhaustion.
“Standing about, doing nothing for nobody, listening to things that she’s no cause to listen to. So glad you could join us this morning, your Highness. Have you even put the water on yet?” Mrs. Postlethwaite scraped the turnips into a pile with the edge of her blade and then started chopping onions. Without waiting for a reply she continued, “Look at her, wandering down here, pretty as you please, well after everyone else was up and about? Mary’s got all the fires going and the hall swept already.”
“I don’t have the strength to beat her this morning, Mrs. P. It’ll have to wait until this afternoon,” Thomas replied with his strange, scarred smile. He pulled himself straight again and the fabric of his sleeves stretched tight over the muscles in his arms.
Grabbing the kettle from off the shelf, Elise hastily filled it with water from the barrel and set it over the fire as she’d seen Mary do the day before. When she turned back to the kitchen table, Thomas was again slumped on the stool with his pipe in his hand. He was digging in the bowl with the unlit end of his twig.
“Don’t tease the lass like that Thomas,” Mrs. Postlethwaite laughed. “Look at her! The Queen’s going to wet her bloomers.”
“Damned thing won’t draw,” he mumbled grumpily at his pipe.
“Have you let the cats in yet, your Highness?” Mrs. Postlethwaite demanded. Being told what she hadn’t yet done in irate tones instead of told ahead of time what she was expected to do seemed to Elise like the most inefficient way to learn her job. She opened the back door to the courtyard and the scrawny shadows slinked in, meowing and circling her ankles. “There’s a pitcher of milk on the thrawl. You can give them some.” Elise looked at the cook blankly. “On the thrawl. The thrawl!” Mrs. Postlethwaite shook her knife at the larder door. “What are you waiting for? You’d think I was speaking French, the way she stares.”
Following the pointing knife, Elise held her breath and opened the door. The smell that came from the basement staircase located in the back of the larder emanated like waves of heat over Arizona asphalt. She located the pitcher of milk on a cold stone shelf and left quickly, pulling the door shut against all vapors. She took the milk to the table and poured a small amount out into a bowl under the watchful eye of Mrs. Postlethwaite who guided her to add a bit more with a nod of her head.
“Only four cats?” Thomas asked, after Elise placed the bowl on the warm hearth. “Where’s the fifth?”
Mrs. Postlethwaite finally set down her knife to stick her head out into the yard. “Kitty kitty kitty,”
she called loudly and uninvitingly. When the fifth didn’t come running she turned back to the table and sighed. “The Missus won’t be happy.”
“I think it’s the black one that’s gone missing, poor bugger.” Thomas leaned over to pet one of the cats and it turned to hiss at him.
“They’re all the same to me. Cats shouldn’t be in kitchens anyway, filthy things.”
Elise wished she could point out that the cats washed their paws more often than anyone else in the kitchen, but wisely kept her mouth shut.
“There she is,” Mary called out loudly, glaring at Elise as she banged into the kitchen swinging two buckets full of water. Everyone jumped and looked around at the floor, thinking she was referring to the fifth cat. “And what have you been doing all morning?” Mary demanded, pointing a finger at Elise.
“The blackie’s gone,” said Mrs. Postlethwaite to Mary with her hands on her hips and her lips thinned into a straight line.
“Blackie?”
“Yes. Have you seen it?”
“No. That is, I don’t think so. What does it look like?” Surprised by Mrs. Postlethwaite’s accusatory ambush, Mary retreated from her initial attack.
The cook frowned. “It’s all black is what it looks like.”
“Oh yes, of course,” Mary replied, not understanding.
“The black cat.” Elise finally clarified.
“I knew that,” Mary snapped. “The cat the Missus calls Magdalene? No, I’ve not seen it. Did anyone look in the cesspit?”
“Oh god, Mary. Why would that be the first thing you think of?” Thomas asked. He blew vigorously through the stem of his pipe and ash flew out of the bowl.
“Cats is always falling into cesspits. The night-men would tell you that.”
“I’m not in the habit of talking to night-men,” Thomas said.
“Neither am I,” Mary replied quickly, blushing. Thomas raised a brow and continued scraping out his pipe.