Justine Elyot

by Secretsand Lords

  He kissed her, catching her nose before she turned her face away.

  ‘I hope so. I’ve had enough of it now. I’m not getting any younger. Bed-hopping in big houses was fun for a while and quite a wonderful antidote to the three years I spent behind barbed wire in Belgium, but perhaps it’s time to give it up.’

  She caught her breath. ‘The war,’ she said but he interrupted, putting a finger over her lips.

  ‘Hush, let’s not,’ he said, then he released her, sat up and lit a cigarette. ‘Want one?’ he offered, waving the packet at her, but she shook her head.

  The giant spectre of recent history had raised its head and neither of them could quite shake it off.

  Edie cast around her mind for a change of subject.

  ‘Who seduced whom?’ she asked. ‘You or … Lady Deverell?’

  She had thought of saying ‘my mother’ but the words had sounded so freakish on her lips that she retracted them.

  ‘Oh, must we?’

  ‘So many forbidden topics.’

  ‘Look, it doesn’t reflect well on me, all right? I did it for my own reasons, which were selfish and vapid and spiteful. Though I still think she’s a disastrous wife for my father and he should get rid of her. But I don’t want to be telling you what a bastard I am. Not now. Not after we’ve …’

  He put out his cigarette half-smoked and caressed her cheek, looking half-heartbroken.

  In his post-coital rumple, baggy-eyed and off duty, he looked more lovable than Edie had ever seen him – a man of sad regrets and dreams and hopes. This was a man she could like, she realised. Oh, why was he doing this to her? Why did he have to make her like him, as well as all the rest?

  ‘I want to make it all better,’ he whispered. ‘For you.’

  ‘For me?’ Her heart thundered. ‘I’m just … you’ve had what you wanted from me, haven’t you? I’m just the maid.’

  ‘No,’ he said, sounding dreadfully hurt. ‘You’ve misunderstood me. You think I just wanted a quick fumble and then I’d let you go? Christ, Edie, did it mean so little to you? Have I had no effect on you at all?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want,’ she said, suddenly on the verge of tears. ‘I don’t know what you can want.’

  ‘I want you,’ he said passionately, drawing her to him so that their foreheads touched. ‘That’s all. Just you. I want to get into you, to that core of defensive repulsion I keep seeing, and break through it. I want to make you love me.’

  ‘But what if I did, Charles? What could ever come of it?’

  He kissed her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Something. But I do know that I’m not letting you go. I can’t let you go.’

  ‘What if I want you to?’ she asked, every instinct she possessed screaming against the idea.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she faltered. ‘I just don’t see how …’

  ‘Don’t try to be reasonable about it. It’s passion. It’s beyond reason. We can only let it take us where it will.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe in all that.’

  He drew apart from her as if stung, squeezing his eyes shut and pinching gently at her cheeks.

  ‘I will make you believe in it,’ he said in a low, intent voice, bringing his face back to hers, then his lips.

  She felt the force of his determination in the kiss he gave her then, felt the uselessness of resisting him. The ache between her legs was insistent, a constant reminder of how he had her now, he had her virginity for all time.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he whispered, having laid her back down in his arms, ‘to try and keep a sensible head on your shoulders. But the more you deny the way I make you feel, the more I’m going to pursue you. I just thought you should be forewarned.’

  ‘I feel like I’ve accidentally sold my soul to the devil.’

  ‘So you should.’

  ‘We ought to get up. Won’t people notice that we’re both missing?’

  ‘People? There’s only Tom here.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Charles, the staff are people too!’

  ‘Oh, the staff, yes, yes. One forgets.’

  ‘I am a person. And that poor girl you impregnated and then abandoned is a person.’

  ‘I think we’ve discussed that, haven’t we? And established that I did not abandon her.’ His voice was cold now and he had picked up the unfinished cigarette and relit it.

  ‘You claim to support her and the child, but you made that claim during the course of an attempt to seduce me.’ She tried to maintain a brittle, bright tone, but inside she screamed at herself to stop trying to spoil everything between them. ‘It could be empty words. Everybody says one shouldn’t trust you.’

  He puffed, silently and moodily, at the cigarette until it was finished, then stubbed it out swiftly and got out of bed.

  Edie reached half-heartedly after him, but he had stalked into the dressing room and emerged a few minutes later with a basin of water and a flannel.

  ‘Stay,’ he said gruffly, motioning her to lie back.

  He put the flannel in the water, squeezed it out, then applied it to Edie’s blood-smeared thighs, wiping off the marks with gentle care. Once they were gone, he rubbed between them, cleaning her lower lips and pubic hair. It smarted a little when the water dripped on her vagina, but she had no wish to stop him and she stared at the ceiling, feeling by turns grateful, angry at herself, resentful and guilty. But a greater emotion bound all those others together, all about him and how she wanted – badly wanted, despite herself – to be kind to him in return.

  ‘There,’ he said, his face unreadable. ‘No trace of it. It might never have happened.’

  What an idea.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t promise to do the same for the sheet,’ he said, frowning. ‘There’ll be talk at the laundry. Luckily the linen is sent out and done in Kingsreach, but the maids’ll notice.’

  ‘They’ll know it was me,’ said Edie. ‘They’ll know.’

  ‘How can they know?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘I’ll take it off and put it in the fire, if you want. Or get rid of it some other way. I’ll say I burned a hole in it with my cigarette. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Of course I would. Anyway, get up and get dressed. I’m taking you to meet someone.’

  ‘Oh?’

  But he had returned already to the dressing room and came out only to gather his clothes from the floor and start putting them on.

  ‘Much as I’d rather stay in bed with you for the rest of the day,’ he said, pulling on his trousers.

  Edie watched with regret as he covered the body that had so recently been on top of her, making love to her. He seemed once more quite distant, disconnected.

  ‘Would you?’ she said, longing now for the return of his earlier gentleness.

  ‘Of course. All day, all night, all week, if possible. Get up then. You’d better go up and get changed into your own clothes. I don’t want to take a uniformed maid out with me. That’d start the tongues wagging all right.’

  She put one leg over the side of the bed.

  ‘Charles,’ she said, and her hesitancy made him look sidelong at her while he buttoned his collar.

  ‘You’re terribly pale, my love,’ he said, pausing to give her his full attention. ‘You have stopped bleeding, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I expect so.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, but he waited for her to speak again.

  ‘I just … it wasn’t too painful, you know … in fact … well, I did … like it. Just thought I should say.’

  January became June, and his face glowed with a smile she could almost call soppy. He crouched at the bedside, his tie hanging around his shoulders, and took hold of her fingers.

  ‘If you liked that, then wait until tonight,’ he said.

  She clenched between her thighs, ruefully aware of the twinge of pain as she did so. Did he really mean
to try it again so soon?

  He caught her apprehension and laughed, kissing her brow.

  ‘You’re an innocent,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. There are plenty of other things we can do.’

  ‘Are there?’

  ‘Plenty. Come on. Get your things on and get back to your room. I’ll meet you halfway up the drive in the motor in an hour.’

  He pulled her to her feet, patted her bottom and continued dealing with his tie.

  She scrambled into her uniform as quickly as she could, despite feeling as if she had been kicked between her legs by a horse, and made for the door.

  He caught her en route and made her stop for a long, deep kiss.

  ‘I liked it too,’ he whispered, opening the door for her and checking that the passage was clear. ‘I’ll see you in an hour. Don’t be late.’

  Yes, she felt different as she walked along the corridor. But that was just the residual pain. One could hardly forget about it when one had such a constant reminder. When it faded, would she be back to her old self again? Or would she always feel the absence of what she’d had before, what she’d given to him?

  She pushed open her door, her whirring thoughts fixed on where she might be going, and who might notice or gossip about their joint absence, so firmly that she didn’t realise at first that she was not alone in the room.

  It wasn’t until she pulled off her mob cap and looked in the mirror at her disordered hair that she saw another woman, also uniformed, behind her.

  She spun around.

  ‘How dare you? This is my private room.’

  ‘You don’t need it no more, I think. You have another bed to sleep in.’

  Sylvie bared her teeth in a catlike little smile.

  ‘Wait till I tell Her Ladyship,’ she gloated.

  Chapter Eight

  Edie could not quite shake off the idea that she might be hallucinating.

  ‘But you … you went to London,’ she said.

  ‘In the end, I decide to stay,’ said Sylvie coolly, taking an unoffered seat at the dressing-table. ‘Because a little bird tells me – a little Jenny wren – that my position may be available again sooner than I think.’

  ‘Jenny? What on earth could she tell you? She barely knows me.’

  ‘She does not need to know you. She knows Sir Charles well enough. When he has an eye on a maid, she soon disgraces herself. It is a fact of life at Deverell Hall.’

  ‘There was one maid,’ said Edie. ‘One. He looks after the child, financially.’

  Sylvie laughed. ‘And all the girls before the war as well. You are the last in a long, long line. Not a very distinguished one, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m not in any line,’ retorted Edie, her blood up, ready to defend herself. ‘I’m not some sighing little idiot, thinking I can bag myself a lord. You’re quite, quite wrong about me.’

  ‘Oh?’ Sylvie’s composure was maddening. ‘But I’m not wrong about you coming here straight from his bed, am I?’

  Edie could not lie so blatantly.

  ‘It’s none of your blasted business what I do and with whom,’ she said.

  ‘So he has had you,’ said Sylvie. ‘It’s quite obvious anyway – I can smell him on you. And your face – that pathetic rapture, that glow. You make me sick.’

  Edie’s legs were trembling again; she had to sit down on the bed. She winced as her tender nether parts made contact with the mattress.

  ‘Now you have given him what he wants,’ Sylvie continued, her voice low with malice, ‘I say it will last perhaps a month. Until he is bored of you, or you fall pregnant.’

  ‘That won’t happen,’ said Edie, helplessly adrift.

  ‘No, you’re right, because it will end before then. It will end tomorrow, when Lady Deverell packs you off home without a character.’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll do that,’ said Edie, suddenly struck by a pathway out of this odious predicament.

  ‘No?’ Sylvie laughed.

  ‘No. Because then there would be nothing to stop me telling Lord Deverell about her affair with Charles.’

  Sylvie screwed up her face scornfully. ‘As if he would believe you.’

  ‘Perhaps he wouldn’t. But do you know that for certain?’

  ‘Listen, I hate that woman with all my heart, but I did not say a word to Lord Deverell because I know I will be blamed and disbelieved and I will lose my character for ever. No good house will take on, what do you call it, a tattle-tale. Discretion is the better part of service, non?’

  ‘I’ll do it, if you breathe a word of this. I promise you.’

  ‘Then you will never work again.’

  Edie smiled, a twitchy nervous thing.

  I don’t have to, she told herself, meaning it. Not that she dreamed of really telling Lord Deverell a word of it. But somehow she had to get this devil off her back.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said, as calmly as she could. ‘I don’t care about working again.’

  Sylvie looked thunderstruck.

  ‘You are joking,’ she said uncertainly. ‘We all have to make a living in this world.’

  ‘I don’t need this job,’ said Edie.

  ‘No, because I suppose you can make better money on your back,’ snarled Sylvie, back in full venom again.

  ‘But listen. I’ll make a bargain with you, if you want.’

  ‘A bargain?’ Sylvie was working hard to temper her rage, but her eyes glittered with fury.

  ‘I will be the worst lady’s maid that ever was. I’m not far off it anyway. I will suggest to Her Ladyship that she take you back.’

  ‘What? And you will go back downstairs, to the parlourmaids?’

  ‘If that is her wish.’

  ‘You are lying.’

  ‘No, no, I promise you, I am not lying. I am a clumsy oaf when it comes to dressing hair. I can’t sew. I fumble with buttons. She will tire of the novelty soon, Sylvie, I am sure of it. And what’s more –’ she lowered her voice ‘– this is between us, yes? She has quarrelled with Charles. They are no longer friends.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Yes. Look, can you give me a week? I’ll do everything I can to make her sack me. A week is all I ask. Please.’

  ‘Well … I suppose so. It will be less unpleasant than the other way.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we can achieve this without any unpleasantness at all. You will be back in your old place and I will have no qualms at all about going back downstairs. And neither Lord nor Lady Deverell need know any more about what goes on behind their backs. Will you shake hands with me and seal the compact?’

  Edie rose unsteadily and held out her hand.

  Sylvie, dubious at first, took it.

  ‘One week,’ she said. ‘No more.’

  ‘No more,’ agreed Edie.

  ‘Take a bath,’ suggested Sylvie before leaving the room. ‘You stink of that man.’

  Edie could not call down for bath water, though – especially at this time of the morning – so she gave herself a thorough sponge wash instead, before dressing in her own clothes and trying hard not to feel so wobbly and weak.

  * * *

  ‘There’s a problem,’ she said, climbing gingerly into Charles’s car.

  He raised his eyebrows, gloved hands on the wheel, and waited for her to elaborate.

  ‘Did you know Sylvie hadn’t left? She’s been lurking in the kitchens, biding her time, waiting for us to have an affair. And now we are …’

  ‘She knows?’

  Edie nodded, her lips pinched.

  ‘Ghastly little creature that she is,’ muttered Charles. ‘Like a burr, clinging where she’s not wanted.’

  ‘She threatened to tell Lady Deverell.’

  ‘Of course she did. Don’t worry. I’ll see to her.’

  ‘No, Charles. Leave her be.’

  His look was puzzled, then he craned his neck to peer over his shoulder as if he feared Sylvie might be hanging on to the rear bumper.

  ‘You want her to tell y
our … my … her … about us?’

  ‘No, but I made her an offer. I said I’d try to get myself sacked for incompetence, so she could have her place back.’

  ‘You said what? Edie, you don’t owe that stupid bitch anything.’

  ‘I feel I do, actually. It wasn’t fair that she lost her place because Lady Deverell was jealous and suspicious of us. It was never part of my plan that I should displace other people. Better people. People who didn’t deserve it.’

  He breathed deeply. ‘You’re a lot better than I am,’ he said. ‘I don’t take prisoners.’ He repeated the words in a whisper, making Edie shiver for a reason she couldn’t quite comprehend.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she told him. ‘I’ll go back below stairs.’

  ‘I won’t be able to get at you so easily down there,’ he objected. ‘I want you close.’

  ‘There’ll be chances. Or perhaps …’

  Perhaps I’ll tell my mother everything and then leave. Go back to London, start everything new and fresh. Get away from you and this horrible pull on me you have.

  ‘Perhaps what? Perhaps you’ll let me set you up in some nice little cottage in Kingsreach? Say you will, go on.’

  ‘No, that’s not an option, not even for a moment, Charles.’

  ‘You’re breaking my heart.’

  ‘You haven’t got one to break.’

  They sat in silence for a moment before Charles made a determined yank at the gears.

  ‘Right then. Full steam ahead for the young Deverell,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ve brought her some sweets. She won’t like you otherwise.’

  ‘Your daughter?’

  ‘Charlotte, yes. She knows what she wants. Chip off the old block.’

  They drove to the outskirts of Kingsreach, to a slightly ramshackle riverside environ made up of low brick cottages and higgledy-piggledy enclosures of land. Chickens everywhere, and goats and dogs. And children, lots of children in torn pinafores and raggedy shirts, climbing the trees in search of spoiled fruit.

  Edie had never seen habitations like these, probably as poor as the London slums but not as dirty, and the children less stunted and haggard than those she had seen in the city streets.

  ‘It doesn’t look much,’ he said apologetically, parking his car well away from the cottages, but still finding it overrun with curious children as they walked up the lane. ‘But she owns it outright – cottage and land – so if she ever wants to sell up and move away, she can. I’ve heard a rumour the council are planning to build model dwellings down here, so they might make her an offer.’