Lady of Spirit

by Edith Layton

  Thoughts of the perfidious Alfie piqued the horseman even further, for the boy had promised to try to flush Miss Dawkins from her hiding place for him today but then had vanished himself. The earl had left instructions at the Manor that the lad be driven home when he turned up at last, but now he narrowed his eyes as he caught sight of one lone little figure trudging through the meadow ahead, with bent but undeniably brilliantly golden head glowing in the morning light. The earl nudged his horse to overtake the truant.

  “Good morning, Master Johnson,” he called, slowing the horse to a walk to match the boy’s when he came abreast of him. “How very pleasant to see you. And yet, how odd that I did not when I was at the Manor this morning.”

  Alfie didn’t lift his head, and it wasn’t like him to remain in silence as long as he then did as he continued to walk along, for with all his sauciness, he was never presumptuous, and never forgot that the earl was a gentleman, and he only a boy.

  “’Ow nice,” Alfie finally said when he and the horse had walked on side by side in silence for a few minutes, “’ow honored I am that the great lord, the master, ’is ’igh lordship ’imself, deigns to walk wiv me, and even talk wiv me, who is just a scurvy peasant.”

  “Been hitting your history books, eh?” the earl remarked pleasantly, “but ‘scurvy churl’ is, I believe, the phrase you were seeking. It’s in that green picture book, the one Comfort’s been lately torturing you with, isn’t it? It used to be mine,” he added, “or one very similar. Depressing how history never changes.”

  “No, it don’t,” Alfie agreed, nodding as he stared down at his boots as they trod down the clover, and then volunteered nothing further.

  “It’s a long walk,” the earl remarked presently, “since, thank God, we’ve a lot of acres between us and the Ludlows’. Care for a leg up?”

  Knowing how much the earl enjoyed his daily ride, Alfie had argued against taking the curricle out for such a short trip just because he was coming along. And he’d flatly refused to take the horse that he’d been learning to ride to the Old Manor, preferring to share the earl’s mount, saying it was because he wasn’t sure enough of himself alone on the beast as yet. But since the boy had taken to the horse’s back as though he’d been riding since he could toddle, the earl thought it more likely that he wanted to be truly expert when he finally showed Miss Dawkins his new skill. The need to cut a dash in front of a fair lady being so much a part of the male condition at any age, the earl had quite understood. But he didn’t understand when the boy shook his head and replied repressively.

  “No, thank you kindly, my lord, I’d rather walk. Wouldn’t want my inferior self cluttering up your saddle, would I?”

  “What the devil’s got into you?” the earl asked, with some justifiable annoyance. “I ought to be vexed with you, my friend, for running out on me, forgetting your errand, and leaving me alone with Miss Sophrina, Miss Charlotte, and their wonderful parents.”

  “You didn’t seem in need o’ me, my lord,” Alfie said, throwing a bitter look over his shoulder to the earl, “and ’oo could blame you? If I was being called ‘dashing’ and ‘charming’ and ‘so amusing’ and what-all, plus being begged to come to breakfast, nuncheon, and dinner, ‘anytime,’” he said mockingly, adding in perfect duplication of Miss Charlotte’s breathy little voice, “‘since it’s so exciting, really, too thrilling, having the Hall open once more, and with such a charming new earl in it too,’ I wouldn’t be looking for no other company, not me.”

  “Where were you, wretch?” The earl laughed. “Behind a curtain?”

  “No,” Alfie said seriously, “in the wall.”

  “What?” was all the gentleman could muster in reply. “Talk sense, lad.”

  “I am,” Alfie said sorrowfully, “but I wisht to Gawd I wasn’t.”

  The earl slid down from the saddle, and taking the reins in his hand, paced along with Alfie, who’d never stopped in his forward march, as though once he’d set his feet in motion, they carried him along independent of his body.

  “The place,” Alfie said thoughtfully, beginning to speak up as soon as he heard the earl fall into step beside him, and as it was important to him to communicate, abandoning his duplicitous use of slum argot and speaking as clearly as he was able to do whenever he deemed it prudent, “is filled with hidden passages. Now, Miss Victoria explained that lots of the gentry don’t like for their guests to see their servants, and don’t care for the sight of their help themselves, for that matter. So, she says, in some great houses, the help has to turn their faces to the wall and freeze tight if they see anyone coming. Then everyone pretends they aren’t there, so it’s all right, ’cause it’s like they aren’t. Have you ever seen such, my lord?” he asked, turning a troubled face to the gentleman.

  “Once. Yes,” the earl answered slowly, and just as seriously as he’d been asked. “When I first came into the title and was invited to a duke’s residence outside of London. I thought I was seeing things.” He smiled now. “Imagine what it feels like to enter a room on your way to the gentlemen’s convenience and to see out of the corner of your eye some poor little female, clad all in black, not two feet from you, standing staring at the wall with her head down, just as you said, as though frozen in place. For a moment I thought she might be an apparition. Fortunately, I had a friend with me. So when I turned round and began to stare to convince myself that what I saw hadn’t been brought on by all the port I’d been drinking, he quietly explained the matter and so saved me from embarrassing the poor creature further.”

  “Ah,” Alfie said softly, “so if it’s all the crack, why don’t you have us do that at the Hall, your lordship?”

  “I shall not hit you,” the earl replied tightly, “since I don’t like striking someone smaller than myself. Remind me, then, to clout you a sound one for that when you grow up. If I allow you to grow up. Why, you miserable little wretch,” he shouted, losing his temper and stopping in his tracks to confront his small companion, “how dare you think I need such trappings to convince myself of my excellence? Or that I would befriend anyone who did?”

  “I didn’t, not really, I was only checking,” the boy apologized at once, and then, as they both began to move on again, he sighed and said helplessly, “but, sir, I had to be sure. You see, the Ludlows think like that, or at least, blame where it belongs, their granddads did. ’Cause the house is built full of passages, they’re alongside every room, then go round and round the house, upstairs and down, long tunnels lit with little torches and wall lamps, all so that the servants can creep around the place and never bother the gentry. So when servants hear someone coming, if they can’t get past them fast enough, they have to creep into the walls and go back that way, or else stand and wait in the wall until the coast is clear.

  “I was in the wall of the gold room,” Alfie said sadly, “with Miss Victoria all the time you were with the squire and his family, ’cause I followed her, not knowing where she was nipping off to when she heard you coming.”

  “I didn’t know she detested me that much,” the earl said quietly at length, shaking his head, “that she’d flee into the very walls at my approach.”

  “She don’t,” Alfie said. “She had to, or lose her post. That’s the rules at the Old Manor.”

  “But she’s a governess, not a lower servant,” the gentleman protested.

  “She’s nothing but a servant to them,” Alfie replied savagely, “but since she didn’t want to get her dress all filthy, she didn’t crawl all the way up the stairs to her room through the walls, like she could have done.”

  “How could she bear it?” the earl wondered aloud, his dark face wearing a black scowl. ”Oh, she done very well,” Alfie reported, “for she didn’t say nothing until everyone was gone. She just stood there all the while you was taking tea and compliments, with her eyes closed, even in the dark. But I almost drowned. Mind, she don’t sniff, nor snivel like our Sally does, but it’s even more ’orrible, ’cause she stands real qu
iet, and all the tears just keep falling like it was raining inside the walls.

  “Imagine,” Alfie said again, a long while later, after they’d walked on a distance in silence, “I went through the whole house that way afterward. Can you believe, sir, that they even got a tunnel behind the squire’s bedroom wall? Now, how could you sleep knowing someone might be creeping about behind your pillow all night?” he wondered.

  The earl was diverted from his own dark thoughts for a moment by the notion that there were a great many other things one might not be able to accomplish in one’s bed with the thought of such a possible unseen audience in attendance, but all he said dryly, was, “I imagine it would be most inhibiting.”

  But then by Alfie’s sidewise crafty smile he knew the precocious fellow had gotten there long before him, and he was glad of the opportunity to laugh aloud.

  “Here, lad,” he said then, as though the laughter itself had finally decided him, as lightly as though he’d rid himself of a burden, and so, he thought, he had, even if it meant taking on another one, “it’s clear we’ve got to get Miss Dawkins to come back to us. By hook or by crook. Although the Hall is said to be haunted, I would think she’d be happier there than where she is right now. For I believe that invisible servants are far worse than visible spirits, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely, my lord,” Alfie crowed, turning a vivacious face to his companion. “And now, if I may make so bold, do you think we might put that nag of yours through his paces? ’Cause if we all walk home together as equals, before you know it he’ll be putting on airs.”

  “An excellent idea,” the earl said, swinging up into the saddle again and bending to give a hand to the boy. “Kindness to servants is one thing. But I will not allow my horse to get above himself.”

  “Very proper,” Alfie agreed, settling himself on the saddle before the gentleman, and then he said no more, for they rode home so fast the wind quite took his breath away.

  9

  Miss Dawkins received two letters all in a day, which in itself was enough to make that day a memorable one for her. One came by post, and though it had come a long way, she realized to her sorrow that, as with all the others she’d gotten since she’d come to the Manor, it had been read and reassembled before it had ever been given to her. The servants at the Old Manor had no more rights or privileges than their counterparts did when the place had originally been built. But then, Victoria thought resignedly, they hadn’t been called “servants” then; “serfs” was more likely to have been their designation.

  She’d been attempting to teach this, as well as some other points of history, to her younger charge, but at about ten minutes into the lesson, when she was just dipping into some simplified feudal history, Miss Sophrina developed the most exquisite headache from the strain of staring at the picture book she’d been shown. After warning her tutor that Mama would be outraged if she should develop squint lines from gaping at such fustian, she’d waved her away entirely, declaring that she would take to her bed immediately to prevent any such outrage to her beauty.

  As Miss Charlotte had made it clear that she did not require a companion in the morning, those hours being devoted to sleep and relaxation, Miss Dawkins had set about her other chores. It would have been pleasant, she’d thought, to have a word with one of the other servants she passed as she made her way down past the kitchens to get some new threads and needles from the housekeeper’s stores, though when she received her letter from the woman along with the sewing supplies, it chased all thoughts of conviviality from her mind. But then too, it hardly would have mattered if she’d cared for a conversation or not. Although there were nine other indoor servants at the Old Manor, the truth of it was that there wasn’t one she could have chatted with. Precisely because these were no longer the days of feudal servitude that she’d tried to teach Miss Sophrina about, the sort of person who, although born free, nevertheless opted to work at the Manor, was perforce the sort of person Victoria had little in common with.

  The butler and the housekeeper held themselves too high to speak civilly to any other but each other and their employers, Cook ignored everyone and was happy so long as she got her due respect and five round meals a day, and all the other unfortunates worked like drones, bypassing any possibility of unity with their fellows because they were terrified of giving offense and so losing their positions.

  And, as Victoria soon discovered, if one were constantly fearful of uttering a word out of place, then one could never place a word right. It might even have been that some of the others had been forced to their employment through a similar run of bad luck such as she’d experienced, but there was no way of discovering if that were true, since they all worked in silence. Tentative smiles and hesitant whispers were the most she ever received from any of them. Perhaps if she’d shared a bed with the other females, as the maidservants did, sleeping three to a mattress in their rooms under the eaves, she’d have heard their midnight fears and confessions. But as a governess-companion, she had her own small attic room in the nursery wing and it was as remote from other human habitation for her as was any mountain peak.

  So she accepted the fact that her mail was preread, just as she’d had to accept Alfie’s news of Mrs. Haverford’s past visits, realizing that they’d been kept from her, in the same deadened spirit with which she’d accepted every indignity of servitude she’d been treated to since she’d come to this place, because she had absolutely no choice in the matter at all. If she didn’t work at the Old Manor, she honestly didn’t know where she would be.

  She made her way quickly from the housekeeper’s quarters after she’d been given her letter. For now that she also had her work to hand, she could slip off somewhere for a few moments to read it. Mrs. Finch had handed it to her with the hint of some vast pleasure in her eyes, and Victoria hoped that it signaled some good news that the housekeeper had discovered the letter contained for her. Victoria had never stopped believing in human compassion. And the missive was from her brother. It might be, she fancied, that it held news of his fortune finally made, and the housekeeper in her own peculiar fashion was pleased that at least one poor wretch could now escape from this place.

  It was rising to a clear warm July day, so Victoria, who never had enough of the fresh clean air she’d discovered in the country, went out through the servants’ door to the kitchen garden and took a garden seat to read her letter and breathe in the sweet summer’s morning. But she stopped breathing entirely at the very first words she read, for they sloped off to the side of the page themselves in their excitement, and they spoke, amid hasty blots, of “great good news that could not wait.”

  She paused, she breathed in again, and laid her letter down in her lap, for, like all beings who are unaccustomed to much gratification, she wanted the pleasure of drawing out the pleasure as long as she could. Then, when she couldn’t wait another second, she dried her palms on her skirts and picked up the paper in fingers shaking so visibly that she had to lay the letter right down again upon her lap to see it right, and only then did she read on. And then she crumpled the letter between her two hands and would have thrown it to the ground if she hadn’t recalled herself at the last, remembering that she would want to refer to the letter again and again to convince herself that it was true, to torment herself with the proof that it was true, in all her long mornings to come. For, “…you would love her,” he wrote, and “seeing her, hearing her, you would understand at once why I could not wait upon matters,” and “Had I not offered, she’d have gone to another, I know,” he’d written, and “Had we not wed at once, I’d have lost her forever,” he explained. And then, “With a family coming soon now, I know you and Mother will understand that I can no longer send very much to you, and with my future here with Amy, I doubt I can ever return to you. In time, when I’ve made my fortune, it might be that I could send for you one at a time. But first there’s our new home I must pay for, and the baby coming with all its needs, and Amy cannot go in rags, it wo
uld not look well for me, so I know you both will understand that…”

  Ah, but she did, she thought, smoothing out the letter and folding it neatly so that she wouldn’t need to read further now. He’d been without Mama and herself for all of a year, and he’d forsaken all he’d promised them, because he, poor lad, had never been able to do for himself, and so could scarcely be expected to do for others; it had been their own folly to presume that age would bring him what had not been born in his bones. So now, Victoria thought, remembering Mrs. Finch’s barely disguised smile, and knowing it for what it was at last, they could tell her to take up permanent residence within the very walls here instead of only crawling into them for an hour as she’d been forced to do the other day, and she’d have little option but to comply. Now she was truly alone, for once hope has been killed, the will either bends to the pressure or breaks entirely.

  So when Alfie gained audience with her in the late afternoon, he was surprised to see her more pale and quiet and bereft of laughter and animation than she’d ever been, even when he’d feared that she lay dying.

  “Sickening again?” he asked as they strolled down the gravel path in front of the Manor as they always did in clement weather, for from the first, even though she was always given leave to visit with Alfie when he came, he’d always taken care to have conversation with her far from any watchful eyes or listening ears. ”No, no, dear,” she replied quietly, so quietly that he frowned as he stared up at her averted head, “it’s only that I’m just a little weary today.”