The Servant

by Maggie Richell-Davies

  I look up at this man, who I realise matters to me, and know I cannot deceive him. He is the only person apart from Peg to have shown me real kindness since I left the Buttermere house. If I lied to him, he would rightly despise me for it, and I could not bear that.

  ‘I have a farmhouse full of nothing but memories.’ He pauses, the hat still for a moment. ‘I have been thinking about this for months. You need a home, and a future, while I am without a wife. So why not be my helpmeet. My love?’

  I shudder at that word. Thomas is a kind man and I more than like him. But I could not bear to be in his bed and have his hands on me.

  ‘You are a bright and compassionate girl, Hannah. Life with me would provide opportunities for your talents. You could help me develop my dairy. Teach the children in my village to read and write. And in return, I promise to cherish you.’

  ‘It is not possible, Thomas.’

  ‘Please don’t answer now. Take as much time as you need to think about it. You could bring Peg with you.’ A ghost of a smile touches his lips. ‘Make a lady’s maid out of her, in lace mittens with ribbons in her cap.’

  In the next street, a knife grinder is shouting and ringing his bell.

  ‘I do not need time.’

  He lets out a gusting sigh. ‘I have lost the ones I loved before, but without you I fear staying a sad man forever. How can I learn to smile again, if the best thing in my life will not have me?’

  ‘You must not say such things.’ Despite what Peg says, this is the last thing I want. ‘I would only bring you trouble.’

  ‘I am in trouble already. Whenever you are near, my stomach swoops as if I were on the high seas.’

  There is need in his eyes and I know I must stop him. He will hate himself later when he remembers such foolish words.

  ‘Gentlemen tend to bolt their food,’ I say. ‘But fennel seeds are good for the stomach. Betty could pound some to put in your tea. Or a strong dose of rhubarb might help.’

  ‘Perhaps that is what it is.’

  He is disappointed. Hurt even. It is in his eyes.

  ‘I am sorry. But I could never be your wife.’

  ‘I am sure you like me. And I would not rush you. You could take as much time as you needed to find tender feelings for me. A year. More even.’

  ‘No, Thomas.’

  ‘But what am I to do with myself, if you will not have me? I have been lonely for a woman’s voice. Not just any woman’s voice, Hannah. Yours.’

  ‘You must persevere.’

  ‘Do you not think I have tried?’

  I start to shiver. Under my folded arms the thing lodged inside moves, like a fish trapped in a bowl of water. Reminding me of its hated presence. I need to get indoors and think of more ways to earn money, but first I must destroy this hope infecting Thomas. Release him to live his life and forget me. It is the only kindness I can give him.

  ‘There is someone I have met,’ I say, hesitantly. ‘Jack is an apprentice in the Twyford bookshop.’

  Thomas steps back as if I have trodden on his foot. He replaces his hat, glances up at the bruised sky.

  ‘Well, forget what I have just said. It was utter foolishness.’ He holds up his hands as if before a highwayman. ‘I should not keep you out in this cold. We will not speak of this again, for it must not spoil our friendship.’ He manages a stilted smile. ‘I still think you need a husband. To give you a better and more fulfilling life. If it cannot be me, then I hope the young man at the bookshop might suit. It sounds as if he would.’

  He settles his hat more firmly on his head and clucks at Hercules to move on, while I take myself inside, feeling as if I have strangled something precious.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  How many minutes she has been watching I cannot guess, but her blow slams me against the wall.

  The mistress has slid noiselessly into the kitchen as I am struggling to ease stays tightened until I can scarcely breathe. She has finally noticed the bulge under my apron.

  ‘Look at that belly!’ Her nostrils flare as if I stink. ‘You have been whoring. With Jack Twyford.’

  Her face is like a fist.

  Shock makes me forget myself.

  ‘That is untrue! This was your husband’s doing.’

  ‘Liar!’ She strikes again. For a scrawny woman she has the punch of a coal heaver. ‘Repeat that and I will have you in Newgate. For slander.’

  ‘He attacked me. When I thought myself safe under your roof.’

  ‘Shut your foul mouth!’

  Her eyes are dark with fury and I almost believe she thinks him innocent. We stare at one another, spitting cats in an alley. The wind is moaning in the chimney and the kitchen fire dying, its heart turning to ash. It is finished, done with. Like me.

  I grind my teeth, desperate with accusations, but afraid of what this wicked woman might do to me.

  ‘I will not have you shaming my house. Get yourself gone. Before I fetch my husband’s whip and flog that bastard out of you.’ She kicks over a stool. ‘Go on! And take nothing does not belong to you.’

  I am incensed at her hypocrisy. In her youth, she sold herself to all comers. Afterwards, she was a kept woman and has now sunk to the filthiest of trades.

  ‘If people knew…’

  From under her skirts a slender knife flashes out and I freeze.

  ‘Knew what?’ The blade is a hair’s breadth from my eye.

  With no spit in my mouth I force my lips to form words. The tension in the house these last days has made me jittery. What would they do if they suspected I was responsible for that letter?

  ‘That he…likes women.’

  The blade is withdrawn, though not before stinging my cheek like a furious wasp. ‘Spread such lies about your master and you will find that worthless throat of yours cut. Ear to ear.’

  Then she backs off and storms upstairs, perhaps to find the whip. But, seconds later, I hear shouting and realise it is the master’s turn. I hope she kills him.

  Peg warned me.

  ‘The minute she finds out, get away quick. Before the old bitch throws every last thread that you own into the fire. For spite.’

  I must not risk that, so my preparations are long made, with my possessions always ready in my bag. The filched documents stitched into the lining. My lavender bags folded inside my spare shift.

  As I scramble to the garret, I pass the master, stomping around in his book room.

  ‘God damn you to Hell!’ he roars at me.

  I ignore him and hurry to the top of the house. The place has gone quiet, but the mistress will be lurking somewhere like a repulsive spider. My heart thumps as I seize my bag and remember I must collect my spare stockings from the line in the scullery. I will need everything I own to help me survive.

  Peg is out, fetching the tobacco Master Chalke favours for his clay pipe of an evening and pastries for the couple to eat before bedtime. I will wait at the corner, for I need her to guide me to my hiding place.

  On my return from the scullery with the damp stockings, I grab the cheese Thomas brought yesterday and the remains of this morning’s loaf. It is unlikely to be missed and I cannot know when I will get more.

  Outside, the sky is heavy with the threat of snow and as I slam the great door behind me hail spits on my head as if the weather, too, is incensed with me.

  I have left through the front door, refusing to creep away out of the servants’ entrance. I do not expect ever to return to this evil place and that, at least, pleases me.

  I huddle under the bare branches of a tree, to wait for Peg. I would have gone on the errands myself, but the mistress seems to enjoy seeing the old woman limping along the road with her bad leg.

  When Peg sees me with my carpet bag she limps over.

  ‘They know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She cut you,’ her hand moves to my face.

  ‘A scratch. I would not care if she had paid my wages.’

  The package Peg carries smells of hot cooked
apple. There was a time I would willingly have baked such things for the Chalkes, but for many weeks I have only done what I must. Peg opens the paper wrapping and hawks disgustingly over its contents. After the briefest hesitation, I do the same. Then she folds the paper back over the food and grunts.

  ‘I must take this inside. Then I will come back and show you where you needs to go.’

  She will stay in the house, so at least one of us will be fed and she can let me know if anything happens about my letter.

  In the icy wind it seems an age before she returns, placing her hand on my elbow as we walk, to guide me.

  ‘It is a wretched place, Hannah. But you are strong. You will manage. And at least they had my old room available. I went to check, just yesterday.’

  I am not strong. Inside, I am a whimpering infant, desperate to hide from bogeymen under her mother’s petticoats.

  ‘Of course I will manage,’ I say.’

  Peg takes my hand as if I am her child and we leave that hateful house behind us. We do not speak again, and I refuse to look back.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The sky is pewter rubbed with harsh sand as we trudge from wide streets, with gleaming front doors and clean windows, to where destitute families huddle in doorways.

  Wheels and hooves spatter evil-smelling slush. Barefoot children and threadbare crones stretch out hands for coin or bread. Women clutching sickly infants slump on the steps of illicit Geneva shops, uncaring about freezing to death. Half-starved men slouch against walls, desperate for money to buy oblivion, and we cross the street to avoid a need so great they might try to rob women as poor as we are.

  This London is beyond my imagining. Dilapidated houses lean across squalid streets, ready to collapse into one another. It is snowing properly now, dredging down like sifted flour, turning rooftops white and softening the edges of ruined buildings. Masking the piles of waste.

  We reach a stinking network of courtyards, washing frozen into ragged shapes on sagging ropes, and stop before a derelict house. Wooden planks are nailed over most of the windows.

  ‘Is this it?’ My voice is barely audible.

  ‘I said as how it was a dump.’ Peg pushes at a warped door that refuses to open fully. Inside, the stench is like a buffet in the face and I bite the edge of my shawl to stop my stomach heaving.

  Mortified at needing refuge in a place like this, I try to shrink into myself. Perhaps one of London’s forgotten old rivers runs beneath the building, for damp mottles the walls as if they have a scabrous disease.

  Yet people live here. Too many for decency. If I have been sliding down, this is the pit at the bottom. We step up to a battered door in the hall and Peg taps nervously on it.

  The man who finally answers has a woman clinging to him whose bodice gapes indecently. Both stink of ale and Peg’s diffident query is answered with a grunt and an exchange of coins for a key on a greasy string. Then the door slams shut again.

  We gather up our skirts and Peg leads me down broken steps. People have used this hallway as a place to piss and I draw my shawl over my nose. At the end of an underground passage my feet sink into something moist and foul. The cesspit of the house next door must be leaching through the foundations of the wall.

  ‘The good thing about this place, apart from it being cheap, is this.’ Peg brandishes the key.

  She unlocks the door and I see my future home is one of several partitions under what was once a grand staircase. It is the size of the scullery at the Chalke house, but makes that humble room seem a palace.

  ‘The woman in the next room has a fire,’ Peg says. ‘Sleep close to that wall and there is warmth through the bricks. For free.’

  A tiny window, high up, provides murky light and there is a heap of straw on the floor for a bed. There is nothing else but three pegs hammered into the wall and a stinking wooden bucket, brimming with the previous tenant’s waste. The only thing to save me creeping out into the yard at night to do my business. Not a stick of furniture, not a stone to form a fireplace, not a rag for a curtain. All I have for comfort is the home-made quilt folded into Thomas’s old rush basket and what I carry in my carpet bag.

  The chill is like a tomb. I do not want Peg to abandon me here and clutch her arm.

  ‘I must get back,’ she says, smoothing my hand with hers. ‘But I will come back tomorrow. Meantime, don’t go wandering about after dark. It’s a bad neighbourhood.’ She prizes my fingers from her arm. ‘But you are a strong girl, Hannah. You will manage.’

  I feel anything but strong. I would sink down and weep, if the floor were not so filthy. I thought I knew about want. Now my ignorance chastens me.

  ‘Best sleep in your boots,’ adds Peg, as she turns to leave. I look a question. ‘You don’t want your toes bitten.’

  I swallow down horror. Rats. How can I stay in such a place? But she is right. I will manage. Like prisoners in dungeons in olden times, I will make marks on the wall to count out the days of my captivity. I have been with child for six months and one week. That means eleven weeks remain before I am free of my burden. Though days and nights in a place like this will feel like years.

  ‘Peg...’ I bite down a sob.

  ‘At least it is not the street. And you should be safe here,’ she says touching my arm.

  I take a breath and try to sound as if I could become accustomed to this squalor. ‘You are right.’ And at least I am away from the Chalkes.

  After she leaves and I am alone, I can at last weep. I sink down on the straw as if on an island in a hostile sea.

  How can I sleep one night here? Never mind more than eleven weeks?

  Images from the past flood back. The warm and clean Buttermere kitchen, so vivid in my mind that it makes my heart want to bleed. Listening to mother’s tales of my grandparents coming across the sea from France, having abandoned everything they had worked for. Her admonition that even if you cannot live as a lady, you should never stop behaving like one.

  Then I jump, for I have been bitten. The straw is alive with vermin.

  Chapter Fifty

  There is no need to knock on the landlord’s door, since it is open and inside he is crouched down, rattling the bars of his fire with a poker. At least that slut has disappeared.

  The man is thickset, red-faced, and wearing a filthy waistcoat over a tattered shirt. Even from two yards away, he reeks of onions and stale beer.

  ‘Is there a broom I could borrow?’ I say. ‘My room is heaving with fleas.’

  His eyebrows arch as if I had said I wanted a coach and four to convey me to the court at St. James’s.

  ‘Brooms cost good money. If I lends them to everybody as wants them, they would be worn to a stump in no time.’

  I am tempted to ask which of his miserable tenants has ever swept a floor in this pigsty, but must not offend him. ‘I only want it for half an hour.’

  ‘As I said. Things cost money.’

  I finger the coppers in my pocket. ‘How much for ten minutes?’

  ‘A halfpenny.’

  ‘I am not asking to buy it. And I need fresh straw. Should that not be included in my rent?’

  He hesitates, perhaps calculating what I can afford, then grunts. ‘You can have some for a penny. But the broom will still cost a halfpenny.’

  ‘Even just to borrow?’

  ‘As I said, you will wear it out, and I have a living to make.’ He leers and fingers the buttons of his breeches. ‘Unless you’re offering payment in kind.’

  I have to remind myself that not all men will be loathsome, though the majority seem that way. ‘Keep your broom. I will just take the straw.’

  I thrust out my penny and he shrugs. ‘I was thinking to do you a favour, so no need to get on your high horse.’ Dirty fingers grasp the coin. ‘Fat Nellie, in the room next to yours, has a broom that she might lend you. It is not as if she ever uses it.’

  He bends back to riddling his coals, addressing me over his shoulder. ‘The straw is in the abandoned stab
le across the yard. Take as much as you can carry in your arms, in two journeys. No more.’

  I turn away. I would have slept on the bare brickwork, if necessary, with my rag quilt to give a suggestion of comfort. Anything rather than that flea-infested straw.

  I return to my cellar and start ferrying soiled bedding to the common midden outside with my hands, shuddering at the insects that jump at being disturbed. Then my eye discovers a piece of wood, half-hidden in the slush near the door, and I find I can use it as a shovel to make my task easier. After I have finished clearing the straw, it can be a cover for the night soil bucket.

  I refuse to waste money borrowing the wretched man’s broom, for there are eleven hungry weeks to get through and necessities to buy. Perhaps it might be worth asking my neighbour about hers, after I am rid of the mucky straw. Eyes have been watching me since my arrival. I have felt them through the crack of the adjacent door.

  As I get to the bottom of the steps on my final journey there is a thickset woman in the hallway, a stubby clay pipe between her teeth and a squalling child tucked under one arm. She is wearing a man’s greatcoat, secured around the waist with string. She gives me the barest nod as she labours up the stairs to throw a bucket of swill into the street, somehow retaining a grip on the infant, but I am grateful at least she acknowledges me. She looks as if she might let me borrow that broom.

  When she returns, I follow and stand in the doorway of her room. She must be a childminder, for there are infants everywhere, most bare-arsed so they can do their business on the floor and save the washing of clouts. In consequence, it squelches underfoot and a stench tells me what will be in the dark corners, where a small figure is currently squatting. Babies and toddlers sleep in baskets on the floor or huddled on the bed like puppies.

  I have heard that many childminders scrape their existence by watching the infants of others. Her room is a disgrace, yet there is warmth from her fire and something simmering in the pot above it smells surprisingly enticing.