But that hadn’t happened, and at last, after two weeks of thinking of little else but this job, and waiting for her ribs to heal and bruises to disappear, she was here. Further along the platform, near the way out, she could see a tall man wearing a voluminous checked coat, a thick muffler and a tweed cap. He looked expectant, as if waiting for someone, and she hoped it was her.
‘Mrs Brook?’ he asked as she came near to him. ‘I’m Andrews. Miss May asked me to collect you. Welcome to Dorchester. Now let’s get going before we get stuck in the snow.’
He grabbed her bag, but as they went out of the station Mabel noticed he had a bad limp; she wondered if he’d been wounded in France.
‘Sorry, this is going to be a cold and bumpy ride,’ Andrews said, helping her up into a small carriage, very like the hansom cabs she’d seen in Bristol, pulled by two piebald horses. ‘The horses don’t mind snow, but I’m not so keen.’
Andrews arranged a blanket across her lap, then hopped up in front, and with a flick of the reins, they were off down the snow-covered road.
It was dusk as they drove away from the station, but before long darkness fell, and they appeared to be going away from the town. The only light came from small oil lights either side of the carriage, and through the falling snow all Mabel could see were ghostly-looking trees, with no further houses or lights.
There was a little window in front so passengers could see where they were going, and she slid it back so she could speak to Andrews. ‘Is Miss May’s house very isolated?’ she asked a little nervously. It rarely snowed on the Devon coast, so she wasn’t used to it, and although it had snowed while she was in Bristol it never became a scary white-out like this – and besides, there were lights, trams and houses.
‘It’s a bit off the beaten track, but you’ll enjoy the pretty walks by the river, and you can ride a bicycle to explore further afield,’ he said, yelling back and half turning in his seat. ‘But you may have to resign yourself to being snowed in for the first few days. This lot looks like it’s here to stay.’
‘Do you live in Miss May’s house?’ Mabel asked. It crossed her mind he might be her lover, along with being her driver, as he was rather handsome in a bony sort of way; even his limp gave him a sort of dashing charm, and her new employer sounded unconventional.
‘Oh no, I live in the town with my wife and two small sons,’ he said. ‘I’m not Miss May’s exclusive driver. I drive lots of different people about. Though I have to say, you are the youngest person to be in my carriage this year.’
Mabel laughed. ‘The year is only two weeks old.’
‘Yes, but if you ask me in December, I’ll probably tell you the same thing. Most of my clients are old. Miss May isn’t, of course, and she happens to be my favourite as she makes me laugh.’
‘I hope she likes me,’ Mabel confided. ‘I’m really nervous.’
‘Well, I can tell you there is nothing to be nervous about. She’s looking forward to getting a bit of help, and she’s a lovely lady. I’m delighted for her that you are young. The last housekeeper she had was old and very grumpy. I think Miss May was a bit scared of her. I know I was!’
Mabel laughed. ‘This snow is a bit frightening. But I have every faith in you getting me there in one piece.’ She wanted to add she hoped it wasn’t much further, as she was frozen to the marrow, but she didn’t want him to think she was a moaner.
He turned to the right quite suddenly, on to a narrow tree-lined lane where the snow looked even thicker.
‘Not far now,’ Andrews said. ‘You’ll see lights up ahead soon, she always keeps it lit up like a lighthouse.’
As the lights appeared, Mabel was able to see the house; it looked very pretty, with pointed eaves and the roof thick with snow. The house was surrounded by tall conifers, and they too were laden with snow.
‘You can’t see now, because of the snow, but the river is just here in front of the cottage. I’ll just take you to the door and then go, or I might get stuck in a drift,’ Andrews said as he drove in through a gateway. ‘Duke and Bertie might like the snow but even horses have their limitations. I expect I shall see you again soon. And I wish you every happiness here.’
The door was opened by a pretty, slender woman with shiny, dark brown hair, and rather prominent, large dark eyes.
‘Welcome, Mabel, and come on in out of the cold,’ she said with a wide smile, waving to Andrews as he turned the carriage around.
The house felt very warm and it smelled of something spicy.
‘Thank you, it’s good to be here, Miss May,’ Mabel said.
‘You must be frozen stiff. Now forget the “Miss May”, I want you to call me Clara, we’ll leave the “issa” out of it. So glad the train got you here, I was half expecting a telephone call to say snow had wiped out the service. I’m sure your train was probably the last for a few days.’
‘I’ve heard most trains leaving Southampton are packed with wounded soldiers,’ Mabel said. ‘I wonder how the snow will affect them?’
‘They’ll get through somehow – it’s the passenger trains they stop first. We have many German prisoners of war coming here to Dorchester. There is a big camp here. At the last count over four thousand men. But you must be cold, hungry and dying for a cup of tea,’ Clara said. ‘I’ve got supper ready in the kitchen. Let me have your coat and hat first.’
The first thing that struck Mabel was the oil lamps. After having electricity at Harley Place, she’d imagined anyone able to employ a servant would have electricity. But at least Miss May wasn’t mean with the oil lamps; in the hall alone there were three alight, and the house had been a blaze of light as they approached.
The lack of electricity didn’t spoil anything. Mabel thought her new employer and her house were delightful. Clara wore a red wool dress with a red-and-white striped cardigan over it. She was also wearing red slippers. Mabel had lived in black for so long now that she felt quite envious of the bright colour, but then the cottage was full of colour too. The hall was papered in a fantastic print of multicoloured butterflies; the rug over a wooden floor was a chequered design, picking up the reds and greens in the wallpaper.
The kitchen leading off the hall was large, with French windows going on to the garden at the back, and a myriad of brightly coloured plates, jugs and other ornaments adorned a huge dresser.
Even the central table, which had been laid with supper for two, had a big cobalt-blue china elephant sitting in the middle, with four candles around it. And the kitchen was well heated, thanks to a cooking range that looked even more modern than the one at Harley Place.
‘Let me draw the curtains to keep out that chilly view,’ Clara said. She pulled heavy red curtains, trimmed all round with yellow and blue braid, across the window.
‘What a lovely, welcoming home,’ Mabel said. ‘So much colour!’
Clara grinned impishly. ‘I can’t be doing with sombre, sensible colours. I’m not sure I’ve actually become an adult.’
‘I expect that is why you are a children’s book illustrator, then,’ Mabel replied. All at once she felt she could finally breathe out, forget the worries she’d had that she wouldn’t be able to cope here. Just looking around, she knew she was going to love looking after this house, and its owner.
‘The weather is too bad to take you down to the little cottage tonight, so if you don’t mind, you can stay here. It might be for a few days,’ Clara said.
‘That won’t be a hardship,’ Mabel said with a heartfelt smile. ‘It is so lovely here.’
‘If you think that, then we’ll get along famously.’ Clara beamed. ‘Now sit down, I’ve made soup, and there’s sandwiches too. I’m a terrible cook, so don’t expect too much of the soup.’
The soup was French onion, and despite what Clara had said, it was good, as were the ham sandwiches, and some fruit cake. Over supper they talked. Mabel told Clara a shortened version of what had happened since she’d been made to leave Harley Place, and talked rather more unwillingly ab
out her husband being killed in France.
‘There is going to be a whole generation of widows and spinsters,’ Clara said sadly. ‘So many young men dead and injured. And for what? I ask myself. Over in the POW camp the prisoners are mainly just boys too. What is wrong with the world that we send out our finest young men to be killed and maimed? What cause could be that important?’
‘There is talk that it is nearly over now, and we are winning,’ Mabel said.
‘There will be no winners.’ Clara shook her head. ‘Not when children will never know their fathers, when women have lost their husbands and sweethearts, and mothers have lost their sons. Germans, French and English, it’s the same for all of us. Women will have to shape up now and make sure they get the vote to create a fairer society. Maybe one day we’ll even get women in the government to influence those who see war as an answer.’
‘You sound like a Suffragette,’ Mabel said.
‘I am – or rather, I was – the war put much of that on a back burner. Women have been doing traditional male jobs since war broke out, and they’ve proved themselves more than capable. I’m ashamed I haven’t done my share. I do go over to the POW camp once a week and teach art, but that’s hardly helping the war effort – in fact, some would say I was collaborating with the enemy.’
‘Surely not!’ Mabel was shocked at that.
‘Only a handful of simpletons would fail to see that a country that treats its prisoners with respect and compassion is a strong country. But happily, people round here are mostly tolerant of the POWs. Many of them help on the local farms and look after public gardens, so they are keeping things going while our men are in France. I have no doubt we’ll see gangs of them out tomorrow clearing the snow off the roads. I have a man helping in the garden too. In the summer he came often, but now only occasionally – mostly to chop wood for me.’
After supper, Mabel washed up while Clara dried, and then she showed Mabel round the rest of the house. The sitting room was lovely – all soft pinks and greens, with thick carpet and a piano. Clara said she loved to play and, in fact, had wanted to be a concert pianist. ‘I wasn’t good enough, sadly,’ she laughed. ‘So I painted instead.’
There were several of her large paintings on the walls; all landscapes, and exceptionally beautiful. Then she took Mabel to show her the studio where she worked. That was upstairs at the back of the house, and very cold, as it had a huge window and no fire lit. There was no easel as Mabel had expected; Clara said she did her illustration work at the big table. She showed her some pen-and-ink sketches of a pig in women’s clothes.
Mabel laughed when she saw that the pig pretended to be human, but that she was always being found out, however much she disguised herself. ‘I’m liking this book already,’ she said.
‘I wish I could do bigger pictures for it in colour, but the publishers just want these little sketches,’ Clara said wistfully.
Finally, she showed Mabel to a small room at the front. ‘This is where you’ll be staying until the snow clears a bit. Now, do you think you’re going to like it here?’
‘I know I am,’ Mabel said.
‘Well, you’ll find I can be a bit of a recluse when I’m working. I shut myself away for lengthy periods. But you mustn’t think you’ve offended me in some way. You just get on with whatever you think needs doing.’
It was just after ten when Mabel got to bed. The pretty blue and white room and the comfortable double bed with a thick eiderdown made her feel cared for. Her last thoughts before she fell asleep were of Nora. She wished it hadn’t ended so badly, and she was resolved that in future she would be less quick to judge people who weren’t quite in line with what she thought was right.
Mabel was up the next morning just as the first rays of daylight appeared in the sky. She thought it must be after seven o’clock, though she had no clock or watch to check. She reminded herself she must ask Clara if she could borrow one.
After having a quick wash and getting dressed, she crept down to the kitchen. The range was still alight, but it needed riddling to bring it to life, and more coal. When she’d finished, she put the kettle on.
Pulling back the thick curtains, she gasped involuntarily. The snow was halfway up the French windows, and the garden looked so beautiful under its blanket of snow that her eyes welled up unexpectedly.
There were humps and bumps everywhere – buried shrubs, she supposed – and the trees were bent down with the weight of snow on their branches. She could see animal tracks in the snow; a fox, or maybe a badger, had come right up to the house. She longed to go out there herself and make fresh footprints. But she had work to do.
When she pulled back the curtains in the sitting room, which looked out to the front, she got an even better surprise. Willow Cottage was less than a hundred yards from the River Frome. That too looked beautiful; the bushes and trees on both sides were laden with snow, and she could see Dorchester straight ahead, across the river, rising beyond the fields.
By the time Clara came down, at almost nine, Mabel had cleared the fire in the sitting room and laid and lit a fresh one. She’d swept the carpet in there, dusted, and plumped up the cushions on the sofas and armchairs. She’d also laid the table in the kitchen for breakfast, looked in the pantry and decided she could make a beef stew later with what she’d found there.
‘Well, well, well, you’ve been busy, and I never heard a peep,’ Clara said. Wrapped in a dusky-pink dressing gown that looked several sizes too big for her, she went over to the range to check on it.
‘You’ve seen to it. How clever you are,’ she said, looking delighted. ‘The last help I had here was hopeless. Not only was she a tartar, she was always letting the stove go out. It heats the water and some radiators, so that was infuriating.’
Mabel poured her a cup of tea. ‘I grew up with the oldest, nastiest old stove you can imagine,’ she said. ‘You had to learn how to coax it into life, to nurture it. Or it would sulk, and you couldn’t even boil an egg on it. Speaking of which, what do you like for breakfast?’
If Mabel could have designed her ideal job and the place to do it in, she would have chosen to be housekeeper here at Willow Cottage, with Clara as her mistress.
There was plenty to do; the whole house looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly for some months. In the little scullery was a huge basket of clothes and bed linen waiting to be ironed, and the kitchen cupboards were very mucky. But all of that made Mabel glad that she could take pride in making everywhere lovely.
While she was cleaning Clara’s studio and lighting a fire there, her mistress began playing her piano downstairs and singing. Mabel thought she must be one of the most talented women in England; her voice was like an angel’s.
Clara exclaimed in delight when she went up to her studio later and found the fire lit and everything clean and tidy.
‘You are a treasure,’ she yelled down the stairs.
Mabel found herself smiling as she prepared the beef stew and put it in the range to cook. She made a fruit cake too, which could cook at the same temperature.
About three in the afternoon, Clara came downstairs.
‘I thought we could put our coats and boots on and have a little walk, over to your cottage, so you can inspect it. Then perhaps see how much farther we can go in the snow,’ she said. ‘I need to get out in the fresh air, and I’m sure you do.’
Mabel happily agreed. She did want to go out; she’d looked at the pristine snow in the garden and wanted so much to run about in it like a child. She didn’t feel able to reveal that yet, for fear of sounding silly. But she borrowed a spare pair of wellington boots, thick socks and a woolly hat, and grinned happily at her new mistress.
‘The cottage will be like an ice house. It’s some time since anyone lived in it,’ Clara said as they began to trudge across the garden towards the woods. ‘In a day or two I’ll get Carsten to light the stove in there and we’ll keep it going each day until you are ready to move over there.’
‘Not exactly. He’s the German prisoner of war, from the camp I told you about. He does gardening, odd jobs, anything really.’
‘A German?’ Mabel had a picture in her head like the cartoons she’d seen, of a man with a shiny, spiked helmet. ‘Isn’t that a bit scary for you?’
Clara laughed. ‘Not at all. He’s young, very gentlemanly and pleasant – and he speaks English, which is a bonus. Back in the autumn he made a first-class job of putting the garden to bed for the winter. I showed him which plants needed cutting back and which ones to leave, and he did that and more.’
Mabel could no longer resist stamping about in the snow, feeling it crunch beneath her wellingtons. And to her astonishment Clara followed her lead and did it too, laughing like an excited child.
‘We’ve messed it all up now!’ Mabel laughed as she surveyed the area they’d trampled.
‘There’s plenty more in the woods and down by the cottage,’ Clara replied, picking up a handful of snow, rolling it into a ball and throwing it at Mabel. ‘Gotcha!’
Mabel retaliated and hit Clara directly in the chest. They threw a few more snowballs each, shrieking with laughter, before Clara put her hands in the air and yelled, ‘No more!’
Suddenly they became aware of a man watching them. He was tall and slender, wearing a long blue-grey coat and a light-grey woolly hat, pulled down over his ears.
‘It’s Carsten,’ Clara exclaimed.
‘I am sorry to intrude,’ he said in halting English, and doffed his hat. ‘I came to see if snow was trouble for you.’
Mabel felt a bit embarrassed she hadn’t instantly realized his coat and hat were army issue, but then she’d never seen a German before. He was remarkably handsome too, with bright blue eyes, blond hair and high cheekbones. He looked a similar age to her.
‘We like the snow, Carsten. It makes children of us,’ Clara said. ‘This is Mabel, my new housekeeper. We’re on our way to look at the cottage. I was going to ask you to light the stove and keep it going for a few days. I think it will be damp in there.’
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