by Heide Goody
“We’ve been expecting you,” said the butler with the cheek scar.
“Have you?”
“For some time,” said Cheeky. “May I suggest that you took a wrong turn at Bovey Leys and should have stayed on the B road a mile longer, miss.”
“Um. I’ve come to see my father.”
“Naturally, miss.”
“He’s still here, is he?”
“If you will allow me to show you to your room.”
“I wasn’t planning on staying…”
“You’re expected at dinner with Mr Dainty in thirty minutes.”
“Right,” she said, perplexed.
Your father will be present, naturally.”
“Naturally,” said Ella.
Cheeky ushered her inside.
“My bag,” she said.
“Will be brought up,” he said smoothly.
He accompanied her up a grand wooden staircase, which featured huge carved beasts standing on each post: griffins, dragons and other heraldic-looking things. They continued along several panelled corridors. They passed portraits, animal heads and small tables holding old vases. Similar sets of objects repeated over and over again. Eventually they came to her room. There was a fire in the grate, a large sheepskin rug, a four-poster bed and enough floor space to accommodate a light aircraft. Ella put her hand to one of the scagliola pillars beside the fireplace. She might be an eco-builder but she knew her classical interior design. This was either one of the finest Georgian bedrooms she had ever seen or it was a criminally perfect recreation of one.
“And you were expecting me?” she said.
“Dinner will be served at nine sharp,” said Cheeky. “I’m sure you will want to freshen up.”
“My bag,” said Ella but the door was closed and the butler was gone.
Ella saw that there was a sheer satin dress laid out on top of the bedspread for her. For her. She rolled her eyes.
“Christ,” she growled. “Why does everyone want to dress me? Do I look like Malibu Barbie?”
She could choose between her current heavy ball gown with multiple petticoats and full whalebone corsetry or the homely attire of a working-class girl who opted for the ever-practical option of using all available fabric on a full swishing skirt leaving only tiny scraps (and some artfully threaded string) to cover her breasts.
“I’m supposed to get my tits out for Mr Dainty, huh?” said Ella. “Well bugger that.”
There was a brief scuffling sound in the darkest corner of the room. Ella grabbed a poker from the fireplace and went over to check for dwarfs, bluebirds or other intruders.
“I will smite the living billy-o out any magical git thinking of offering me fashion advice,” she warned the room at large.
But she was only talking to herself. There was a Regency table on which stood, oddly, a round painted teapot and a rococo mantel clock. Ella peered into the teapot, checking for tea pixies or whatever but there was nothing.
“Right. Clothes,” muttered Ella. Another table was covered in a large white tablecloth, so she removed that and checked its size. It would do.
She climbed out of her ball gown, fought her way out of it like a Houdini wannabe, shook the tablecloth open and held it to her back, like a giant bath towel. She pulled it round her body under her arms. Then came the clever bit. She kept hold of the corners but swapped hands, crossing the tablecloth across her front, then tied the corners at the back of her head and formed a halterneck.
She admired her tablecloth dress in the full-length mirror and grinned as she adjusted it. It wasn’t bad. It was certainly more modest than either alternative on offer. She’d watched Lily and Petunia trying to make sarong dresses often enough that she knew the routine. There was a time when they had a promotional video, running on a loop in the garden centre, that showed a dextrous woman demonstrating the many ways that one could wear the sarongs that were on sale. Ella never could decide what was more tiresome, seeing the same video a hundred times a day, or having to witness Lily and Petunia wrapping themselves up like mummies in their attempts to imitate it.
A few minutes before nine o’clock, there was a knock at the door. It was Cheeky the butler. He looked at her improvised dress but said nothing.
“Dinner?” she prompted. “With my dad?”
“This way, miss,” he said and she followed him out of the room.
The scale of the dining table made her gasp in shock and quickly check her surroundings to be sure that she was still a full-sized human.
“Good evening,” came a voice from the distance. Ella looked to her right and could just about make out the end of the table, where a huge figure sat.
“Do make yourself comfortable,” directed the figure.
Ella saw that the only available chair was in front of her, in the middle of the table. She looked left, to the other end of the table, and saw someone hunched in a chair. Was that her father? She walked towards him. A discreet cough behind her made her turn and she saw Cheeky indicate the vacant chair with a meaningful nod.
Ella gave him her most pleasant ‘fuck you’ smile and continued to the end of the table.
Her heart both leapt and sank at the sight of her father. Gavin Hannaford, the fifty-something bon viveur she knew, casually incompetent dad and weekend alcoholic, had been replaced with a tired red-faced little man. The look on his face was that of a rabbit caught in the headlights, a rabbit that had just seen its own daughter behind the wheel.
“Dad,” she said, reaching out for him.
He half rose, stopped and then, frozen, clutched her outstretched hand.
“Oh, Ella love, what are you doing here?”
“I came to find you. I have so much to tell you.”
“You can’t be here!” he hissed, giving her hand a squeeze.
“But I just arrived.”
“You have to go.”
“Why?” she asked.
“They’re about to serve the soup.”
“What the…”
A servant stepped towards her. “We are about to serve the soup, miss,” he said. He had the same exotic accent as Cheeky and had a hook for a hand.
“Manners are very important to Mr Dainty,” said her dad.
Ella considered the hook-handed man and her situation. She decided to ignore the possibility that all of the household staff were battle-scarred henchmen and instead chose to believe that Mr Dainty made a special effort to employ individuals who had suffered life-altering injuries. ‘Help for Heroes’ sounded better than ‘hired henchmen’.
It took a full thirty seconds to walk back to her seat. The table could easily have seated a couple of hundred people. She saw more servants carrying food — there was one with a metal plate screwed to his forehead, another with an eyepatch — and realised that the table was so long that it required a series of different doors to service different parts of the table.
As she sat down, a bowl of soup was placed before her.
Ella wondered what level of etiquette this situation demanded. She didn’t want to start eating before her dining companions, particularly if her dad lived in fear of Dainty’s manners, but she could hardly see them, let alone tell whether they were wielding cutlery. Perhaps there would be some sort of verbal cue. She waited.
“Excellent soup!” boomed the figure to her right.
Ella’s soup was whisked away. She reached after it with a spoon but it was gone.
A main course was set before her, delicate slices of something that might have been turkey. Ella’s picked up her cutlery, determined not to miss out on this course.
“Miss Hannaford,” boomed Mr Dainty. “I wonder if you would be kind enough to pass me the salt?”
Ella looked and sure enough, the salt was set before her, and ludicrously, there was none by Mr Dainty. She got up from her chair and carried it to him, which took longer than seemed reasonable. The man was tucking fiercely into his meal, stuffing folds of meat into his mouth. Ella set the salt down on the table, but
before she could move away his hand came down on top of hers, so she was pinned in place.
She looked at him properly as he smiled at her. He was just a man, she thought, surprised. And then she followed that thought with, what did you think he would be? He was a man of perfectly normal size and yet there was a strange ‘hugeness’ about him, as though she was viewing him through a magnifying lens. There was a roundness about him, that couldn’t decide if it was muscle or fat and, though he was clean-shaven, there was a nascent bristliness about him as though he could probably command an imperious moustache or patrician beard to spring forth at will. He oozed importance, significance and power.
It was the way that he held himself, she decided, as if he was the only thing in the room that might be worth looking at.
“Interesting dress,” he observed. He had the same unplaceable, middle-European accent as the other men. “But your figure deserves better, you should know this.”
“Should I?”
“I am an expert on the dressing of women, Ella Hannaford. There are whorehouses in my home country that have doubled their margins since they took my advice. This is good, hah?”
Ella couldn’t believe that she was supposed to respond to this, but Dainty looked at her expectantly.
“Is that your business then?” she asked eventually.
“What, fashion or whorehouses?”
“Yes,” she said.
“No, I do not mix business and pleasure.” Dainty laughed loudly as though he had made the greatest joke ever and released Ella’s arm. His face morphed from convivial host to a threat-laden scowl.
“My business interests are many, but I build my empire by being extremely well-informed. I miss nothing, do you hear what I am saying?”
Ella nodded.
“You are like your father,” Dainty continued.
“Am I?”
“He has also taken liberties with my possessions, and I want them back.”
Ella stared down the table to the shadow that was her dad.
“Possessions? What possessions?” she said.
“Antiques. Valuable antiques have gone missing since your father started his cataloguing work.”
“That’s not my dad’s fault.”
Mr Dainty patted his lips with a napkin.
“I can see how he thinks that perhaps I have so many things that he might decide to take items for himself.”
“What items?”
“It is what we call opportunism, yes? You would know about this also, I think?”
“Sorry?”
“My tablecloth, Miss Hannaford. I would like it back please.”
“Oh that! I wasn’t planning to keep it. I was only borrowing it.”
“Only borrowing it,” he echoed. “Ha! You hear that, Gavin?” he called out, grinning widely. “Only borrowing it! You should have tried that one!” He looked at Ella. “I would like it back now, please.”
Ella stared at him. “The tablecloth?”
“Yes, the tablecloth.”
“Are you a bully, Mr Dainty?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I have been called many things. I think that perhaps some people who find themselves in a difficult situation will call me that and worse. In both business and life, it is important to remain impervious to insults from the desperate.”
“I am not desperate Mr Dainty, but I don’t have my own clothes, so I will wear your tablecloth until I find an alternative. I do not intend to steal from you, any more than my father does, so I’d be grateful if you’d let us both leave now.”
He roared with laughter and slapped the table.
“Hey, the little girl has a backbone! This is something I did not expect! You may keep the tablecloth. Consider it my gift to you. Your father must remain here though, he has much work still to do, and there is the matter of my missing antiques.”
Ella couldn’t imagine leaving her poor, defeated dad one day longer with this dreadful man.
“You know,” she said, “I am also an expert in antiques.”
“A woman expert?” said Mr Dainty. “There are only two areas of expertise in which women excel.”
“I can easily pick up my father’s work,” she continued. “It’s even possible that with a fresh pair of eyes I can locate the misplaced items.”
“You will find my Wedgwood teapot?”
“I’ll get straight onto it.”
Mr Dainty gave her a long appraising look, as though she were some prize beast he was thinking of buying.
“You must realise,” said Mr Dainty, “that I have the means to make you both…” He waggled his fingers, heavy with rings. “Disappear?”
“Okay,” she said.
“I tolerate your presence as long as you are useful or interesting to me.”
“Good, that’s settled then,” she said. “Dad, you might as well get going when you’ve finished your —”
Ella turned to see that servants were carrying all of the plates away from the table and that, at the far end of the table, servants lifting her dad from his chair.
“Dad!”
She ran down to the other end of the table and only caught up with them as Hook and Cheeky physically escorted her dad from the room.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“You’re going home,” she said.
“But my work…”
“I will finish it.”
“What?”
He resisted then as Hook and Cheeky, each with an arm under his, carried him out the front door and down to a waiting car.
“I have to tell you something,” she said, but it was hard to do so when the two manhandling manservants would not slow. “It’s about the wedding.”
“Is Myra angry with me?”
“No. Well, yes, probably. The thing is, mum —”
“Aww,” he smiled. “That’s nice.”
“What?”
A chauffeur opened the rear door.
“I had hoped that my two girls would get on. That, one day, you would think of Myra as not your mum but a sort of new kind-of-mum-type person.”
“No,” said Ella and then had to pause as the servants, swiftly, politely but firmly inserted Gavin Hannaford into the rear seat. “I’m talking about mum.”
The door was shut.
“Jesus!” she spat. “I’ve trying to have a conversation here.”
But the servants said nothing and the chauffeur got in the car and, as Cheeky gently prevented her grabbing the door handle, the car pulled away into the night.
Ella snatched her arm out of Cheeky’s grip.
“I didn’t even get to properly say goodbye.”
Cheeky gestured for her to return to the house. “I will escort you to your room.”
“But I’ve not even eaten yet.”
“I will have something sent up.”
“Forget it!” she snapped and stomped inside.
In her room, she wedged a velvet chair (which would have been classified as a throne in a normal domestic setting) under the door handle, checked the windows were locked and climbed in the bed, which turned out to be very comfortable. She folded the tablecloth securely beneath her pillow so it couldn’t disappear in the night.
On the cusp of sleep, she heard a faint scratching sound somewhere in the room. She couldn’t have said why but she thought it sounded like scampering china.
Ella woke refreshed.
A table by the window had been set out with a monstrous breakfast of meat, eggs, cheeses and bread. Her bag rested on an ottoman at the foot of her bed. The tablecloth had gone from beneath her pillow. The chair was no longer by the door but in its original place in the corner.
“Creepy fuckers,” she said matter-of-factly before getting up and demolishing the breakfast.
She then dressed. The contents of her bag hadn’t been magically transformed into impractical feminine attire and she relished the pleasure of being able to wear jeans and a t-shirt once more.
Cheeky was waiting in the cor
ridor outside.
“Good morning, miss.”
“Let’s see about that, shall we?” she replied.
“You will no doubt wish to make a start.”
“Start?”
Cheeky led her down to the first floor and a room that might have once served as a study but which was currently occupied by boxes, piles of forms and loose notes and shelves of ornamental knick-knacks and oddments, some wrapped in crepe paper. There were also (artfully hidden and not so artfully hidden) a number of wine bottles dotted around the room.
“My dad’s work, huh?”
“I shall send lunch up at one,” Cheeky told her.
“I’m not expected to sit at table with the lord of the manor?” she said.
“Mr Dainty is attending to business today. He will send for you if he needs you.”
“Oh, will he?” said Ella but Cheeky was already walking away.
Ella settled in for the morning, sifting through the paperwork that her father had left behind. She had worked alongside him often enough to know the bare bones of the business (even if her assertion that she was an antiques expert was far from true). Her dad’s catalogue work seemed thorough and organised, but there were piles of other things that defied categorisation.
“We’ll work it out,” she told herself.
She was on her own in this crumbling Gormenghast, and she had to survive long enough to form a plan and get out of here.
“One,” she said. “Finish dad’s work so I can get out of here. Or escape. Run away.”
She looked out the window, across the lawns and onto the scrubby gorse bushes that stretched off into the distance. Escaping — with the sea on one side, wilderness on the other and a bunch of dangerous looking serving staff on the prowl — might prove difficult.
She returned to her dad’s notes. The next item looked like a poem, with lots of crossings-out and alterations.
There’s no-one quite like Myra, she makes my life so sweet
When she puts on her kinky boots it makes me feel complete