‘Are you Nellie? The landlord said you might lend me a broom.’
‘Did he, now?’ I notice she wisely wears pattens indoors, to raise herself above what is underfoot. The hair escaping her cap is streaked with grey, but dark patches on the bosom of her gown suggest she is breast feeding.
‘I have no money to pay for it,’ I say, ready for a rebuff.
‘Borrow it and welcome,’ says Nellie. ‘That room of yours is running with vermin. It would be a mercy to have fewer of them hopping along to bite me.’ Behind her back I hear a baby whimper. How many can there be, squashed into her cramped space? ‘But be sure to bring it back when you are done.’
There is the trace of a smile on her lips as she hands me a worn-out besom and the kind gesture fills me with hope. It gives me a spurt of energy to improve the awful place where I am condemned to live. The smell I cannot remove, but I sweep down to the brick floor, choking as I displace inches of dust and dirt. Now there is nowhere but my heap of straw for rats or mice to hide and the clouds of fleas the broom disturbed must surely be lessened.
I have forced open the tiny window to let in fresh air, but must soon close it again before it begins to freeze. With neither heating nor proper bedding, I will be sleeping cold. The fresh straw from the landlord will help, but there is not enough of it and I long for even a single blanket to add to my rag quilt. I lay the flat of my hand against the wall. Peg was right about there being warmth from the bricks of Nellie’s fireplace.
At least I have a neighbour with a scrap of fellow-feeling, though I did not dare say much to her when I returned her besom. She must guess I carry a bastard under my petticoats and presumably decided to ignore it, though she might easily change her mind and refuse to have anything more to do with me.
I told her my name was Anne. The landlord had not asked and clearly does not care as long as I can pay him. Close up, Nellie’s curdled smell made me want to gag, but it is a comfort to know who lives on the other side of the wall when I feel so desolate.
Life is not fair. But whoever said it would be? This is my lot and I must make the best of it. I realise now what a blessing my early childhood was, even if it did not last beyond my tenth year. To have so much love and the beginning of an education. It gave me something to build on.
I think of the Chalkes and their hypocrisy. Without my mother’s urging me to always keep learning, and that Dictionary in the Buttermere library, I would never even have known what that word meant. I have also been taught how to do accounts by Mrs Lamb, as well as kitchen skills. One day these things must help me, for I refuse to be like Peg, forever scrubbing and sweeping. Forever hungry and in rags.
I must somehow survive, hidden here, and hope to pick up some kind of life after the child is born. Hope, too, that Peg will bring me news of the Chalkes being brought to justice and possibly of some kind of reprieve for little Suzy. Of whether she escaped the clutches of that dreadful uncle.
Chapter Fifty-One
I gave up counting the flea bites this morning. My legs and body are aflame with bumps I cannot stop scratching, but I tell myself they are just one more thing to be endured. At least I wasn’t troubled by rats, though I heard scrabbling in the night and lay rigid with fear in the dark. I have never been completely without the means to make light before and am grateful for the layer of snow that has fallen, since it reflects a pale gleam into my dungeon.
I barely slept, from the terrible cold, from the scurrying of creatures under the floorboards, and the all-pervading noise: children crying, men’s angry voices, women shrill with drink, boots stomping up and down the stairs. I feared somebody might break in, despite the lock on my door. Not to rob me, for I have so little, but to put hands on me. The biting things that found their way into my clean straw, into my hair and my clothing, were almost a welcome distraction.
This cellar is even worse than I feared it would be, but Peg used to sleep here and survived. At least it is cleaner than it was. Then there is the landlord, Doggett, who is not someone you would buy a second-hand chair from, for fear it would collapse under you. I grip the key, on its string around my neck, and pray he does not have a duplicate.
I think about my letter and wonder whether Chalke’s brother has managed to hush everything up. Whether things continue as before. My flesh prickles with fear at the thought that they might suspect me and try to track me down. And I think about little Suzy and wonder where she might be.
Meanwhile, I must do what I can to make this new existence tolerable. There are things to buy. After that, perhaps I can turn my lavender bags into money to help me through the bitter winter.
Chapter Fifty-Two
In the afternoon I trudge to the second-hand stalls to sell my hairbrush, my spare flannel petticoat and my carpet bag to pay for necessities. A bowl to wash in, a jug for water. A spoon. A knife. A dish and a tin mug. I also need an old blanket, for the cold in that cellar is frightening and my rag quilt offers insufficient warmth. With my swollen belly I am beginning to move like a farmyard goose, though pregnant women are commonplace and nobody gives me a second glance.
I lay out my possessions and the trader surveys each carefully. Turning them over, holding them close under his eye, frowning. His expression is dismissive. He is clearly a shrewd man, who will guess my plight and seek to take advantage of it. Why else would I be offering him these things? I know this, but have no alternative.
He offers under a shilling for the first two items, though the brush once belonged to Mistress Buttermere and the petticoat is in good condition, but lingers over the bag, unable to hide an avaricious gleam in his eye.
‘It has been mended,’ he says, squinting inside.
‘Invisibly mended,’ I stress, knowing the superiority of my needlework. ‘The stitches barely show. Anyone can see it belonged to a lady of quality.’
‘Nicked from some house where you was working, was it?’ He does not sound judgemental, only interested in what he must give for it.
‘Of course not! It was a gift.’
‘So you say.’ He grunts and runs a finger over the silk lining. ‘I expect I could sell it, given time. It would be useful for someone wanting to travel. I am prepared to give you five shillings. No questions asked.’
‘I want more than that. It will have been costly. And it was not stolen.’
‘Seven and six.’ His eye runs over me again. ‘That is a generous offer, girl.’
‘A guinea.’
He rolls eyes heavenwards, then he thrusts the bag back at me and returns to re-arranging the things on his stall.
I need money to keep a roof over my head until February, when the child will come and I will at last be free. Meanwhile, work will likely be impossible to find, but the rent will be due every week and the landlord will come banging on my door for it.
I grasp the bag by its pigskin handles. It is worth a great deal more than what is being offered. There are other stalls nearby, though the customers looking for bargains are poor folk, unlikely to buy fine bags.
‘It is worth at least a guinea,’ I say, making myself sound firm. I can always come back with it, tomorrow. He will still be here. ‘I will just take what you are offering for the brush and petticoat. Others will be interested in a bag that clearly belonged to a member of the gentry.’
‘Fifteen shillings.’ He sounds disgruntled at being bested by a slip of a girl. ‘Take it. You will not get more. Not around here.’
I hesitate, then nod. I need to get back to my cellar, for my bladder is bursting. ‘I’ll take it. But you rob me.’
He counts the money into my hand, glancing at the livid flea bites on my wrist. ‘That gown of yours,’ he says. ‘I could give a fair price for it. It is hard-wearing fabric, and well-made. And you are going to burst out of it soon enough.’
For a moment I do not understand. Does he think I will sell the clothes off my back and walk away half-naked?
‘It is the only one I have.’ I give him a sour look. ‘I do not inte
nd parading around in my shift.’
‘There are others here you could exchange it for.’ He gestures behind him. ‘On the trestle table yonder. You could do a trade and walk away with the difference. In coin.’
‘Not today,’ I shudder at the thought of dragging another woman’s unwashed gown over my head. Of wearing her dirt and smells pressed against my skin. At least the sweat saturating my clothes is my own.
He nods, but I see he expects to see me again.
I will need to look respectable when I am ready to search for decent work again and wish I had not cut down my other gown for Peg after the bodice of her own was badly ripped for some transgression. Yet my priority for now is to keep that miserable roof over my head and put food in my belly. When my money runs out, which it probably will, I might be glad to raise a coin or two by trading my gown. It is well-sewn, by my own hand, and someone will be glad to buy it. I must take care to trade it before it loses its value by becoming ragged. And this man and his stall will still be here.
Soon I will take my lavender bags, door-to-door, to some of the better houses. Anything to increase my meagre store of coins. If people like them, perhaps I could buy fabric and make more. But to do that I would surely need a table and scissors, as well as more fabric and lavender. If only I had some spare money, I believe I could make life better for myself.
Returning to my cellar from the second-hand stall, I approach Nellie’s open door again and peer inside. Dim light shows her eating her dinner on a rickety table, with a gin bottle and a spoon by her hand. A pot simmers on the fire, probably a permanent fixture into which she throws whatever scraps she can scrounge. All I have eaten today is that last heel of bread I snatched from the Chalke kitchen and some of Thomas’s wonderful cheese. Thinking of him makes me wince. What would he think, to see me now? What will he think when he hears I have been dismissed, and why?
Nellie looks up and noticing my hungry gaze grasps the ladle and measures an inch into a none-too-clean bowl. She hands it to me and I do not care and scald my mouth spooning it down. It is potato and onion, with shreds of what might be rabbit, and tastes surprisingly good.
‘You are a kind woman, Nellie.’
Every surface is jammed with babies and infants, most in soporific sleep. She leans over to the bed and spoons clear liquid into a fractious mouth that makes the infant splutter. It is clearly true childminders use gin and water to keep their charges from being a nuisance. Perhaps that explains the relative quiet in the room.
‘Do you know of any work?’ I put down the empty bowl. ‘I am not proud. I will put my hand to anything honest.’
She studies me. Breasts like swollen udders leaking dark patches through her gown. ‘What can you do?’
‘Sew. Cook. Scrub.’ Best not say I can read and write.
I am aware that needlework, like most home work for women, pays only starvation wages and that my room is unfit for making more lavender bags, even if I could scrape together money for what I would need. But that might change if only I can earn something. Cooks work in households or inns, where a character is required. Casual cleaning jobs are easier to find, but women with growing bellies scrub less efficiently than those without them, so why employ them?
Nellie tamps down the bowl of her pipe and frowns thoughtfully.
‘You could maybe plait straw for bonnets. It is hard on the fingers, and the pay is bad, but it would bring in something. Though the light is poor in that room.’ She sucks on her pipe till the tobacco flares, a coil of smoke rising.
‘I could sit on the floor under the window.’
‘Aye. You could.’
She eyes my shape. ‘Sweetheart let you down? Men can be bastards, can’t they?’ The baby starts grizzling again and she scoops it up and rocks it, roughly but not unkindly. ‘I suppose you know you could call the law down on the rogue responsible? To make an honest woman of you?’ She grunts. ‘Though it probably takes an angry father behind you to make that happen.’
‘And who would want to be tied for ever to such a rat?’ I shake my head. ‘The man, in my case, has a wife living.’
She eyes me. ‘I bet it were a gentleman. They consider maidservants like sweetmeats. To be fingered and devoured.’
‘The man I worked for came after me.’ I make a noise of disgust. ‘In the dead of night.’
Nellie gives a gusty sigh. ‘Wish I had a guinea for every time I have heard that tale. A poor man can be whipped for stealing turnips for his starving family and a poor woman transported for lifting a silk kerchief. But toffs with money can tumble an innocent girl, ruin her by getting her in the family way, and saunter away laughing.’
The gin seems to have done its work and she settles the quietened baby back on the bed and moves a basket from a rickety chair onto the floor. Another baby is sleeping soundly inside it. ‘Nothing much women can do about it, except stick together. Here, you can borrow this chair, to sit on. The floors in these cellars are mortal cold, Annie. You don’t want the rheumatics.’
She dusts it off with the skirt of her gown. ‘I will ask about straw plaiting for you. And find out if the skinflint on the top floor might pay something to have his shirts mended. They have more holes than a colander. He’s only a clerk, but he has coin in his pockets.’ She sniffs. ‘Or he might bring something from the warehouse where he works. A packet of tea sweepings, maybe. You could trade that for bread in the market.’
‘You are very kind.’
‘Like I said, Annie. We must stick together. My man went off with a tavern wench half his age, leaving me with five little ones and another on the way.’ Her chins wobble with a snort of laughter. ‘But I find I am better off looking after other women’s babies instead of sprouting my own every year. My daughters are in service in good households now, and remember their old mother when they gets paid. I have no complaints.’
She ladles more soup into my bowl. ‘You are pretty, Annie, but better still, you are bright. No reason why you should not do all right for yourself.’
I pray she is right. I intend to try.
I sold my lavender bags with surprising ease the next day. They were admired, for I had embroidered tiny butterflies on them with scraps of silk from the bottom of the mending basket Mistress Chalke probably did not even know were there. They earned me over a guinea, which I added to the coins in the glass jar hidden under my bed straw. I could buy more food with it, but my priority must be settling the rent, week in, week out. Going hungry, I can probably bear. Sleeping in the street, I could not.
Chapter Fifty-Three
If I cannot find a place soon, I will have to lift my skirt to squat and make water in the open street. Up some side alley, in the gutter, like the beggar women.
There is a tumbledown inn on the corner with a sour-faced woman sweeping the yard cobbles. A necessary house is at the side of some ramshackle stables.
‘May I use your privy, Mistress? Please?’
Desperation is in my voice, my face, my rigidly held body. She gives me a quick sideways glance, pauses a second at my shape, then nods me towards the rough plank door. I only just make it. These last days I want to go all the time and trudging the streets only makes it worse. Men are spared this, as so much else, since even a great lord will piss freely against any wall –
at the side of a church even, if nature calls – and none will think twice about it.
When I come out again, breathing through my mouth rather than my nose, and holding my skirts tight against my body to avoid touching anything, I bob the woman a curtsy by way of thanks. The place was only a befouled wooden seat over a stinking pit, but it was not the public way.
‘I went like the parish pump with my last one,’ she says, with a shrug. ‘They say ’tis how they lie in your innards.’
Through an open door I can see a shambles of crocks in what must be the inn’s scullery.
‘I am looking for work,’ I say, hope glimmering. ‘Cleaning, scrubbing. Or I can cook. I will do anything you need, and d
o it well. I am a hard worker, and honest. For just a few coppers.’ I stop gabbling and we both hear my stomach growl and know I am in no position to bargain. I have not eaten since yesterday and that was only a heel of bread so rock-hard, I feared for my teeth. I lower my expectations. ‘Or I will put your scullery to rights for a bowl of broth.’
She peers at me and frowns. My dress grows shabbier by the day, but is too good for a vagrant. Then her eyes reach my left hand and narrow with contempt. Perhaps Peg was right. I should have used a few of my precious coins to buy a pinchbeck ring.
‘Honest?’ Her nostrils flare. ‘With that great belly, but no wedding band to excuse it?’ She makes a motion in my direction with her besom as if to sweep me from the yard. ‘Do some more whoring, if you are hungry. Our pots are too good for the likes of you.’
I turn to skulk away, my cheeks flushing at the unfairness. Not long ago, this woman would at least have treated me with respect. Now she regards me like dog mess on her shoe.
‘I am going,’ I say, striving for dignity. ‘But your scorn should be for the church-going gentleman who forced himself on me. In the dead of night. When I believed myself safe under his roof.’ I am tempted to spit my disgust at her feet, but remember mother’s attempts to make a lady of me and merely look my defiance. ‘Were he here now, you would bow and scrape to him. Though he is no better than a beast.’
I shrug my shawl around my shoulders because the wind is keen, and regret letting my mouth run off. It does no good and will likely bring more trouble on my head. As I turn to leave, I try to make amends. After all, the woman helped me when I had a need. ‘But thank you, Mistress. For letting me use your privy.’
‘Wait.’ She stands, head tilted as she studies me. ‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen.’
The Servant Page 19