Justine Elyot Read online

  ‘He denies it was him, but everyone knows it was. Susie didn’t even have a sweetheart. And I’ve seen her with the baby – got his eyes, she has, and his dark hair.’

  Dark hair. The man driving the car.

  ‘Well, I’m no fool and no flash Harry is going to seduce me,’ said Edie briskly. She allowed room for a little pause, removing her skirt in the silence, before changing the subject. ‘What do you think of Lady Deverell? She’s new to the house, isn’t she?’

  ‘Not so new. Been here a year now.’

  ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘My ma always says if you can’t speak well of someone, don’t speak of them at all.’

  Edie laughed uncomfortably, her face flushing hot.

  ‘She’s awfully glamorous, though, isn’t she?’ she said, putting the black dress on. It was a little tight under the bust but, apart from that, a snug fit. ‘I saw her on the stage in London, in one of Mr Bernard Shaw’s plays. She was quite magnetic.’

  Jenny sat down on the side of one of the beds.

  ‘London,’ she said, as if intoning a magic spell. ‘I’d so love to visit the theatre one day. I mean, I’ve seen the Kingsreach Players, everyone has, but the proper theatre. All red and gold, with balconies and plaster cherubs. That’d be smashing.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you will one day,’ said Edie, trying to steer the conversation back to her preferred subject. ‘But Ruby Redford won’t be treading the boards.’

  ‘Hush, you’re not to call her that! It’s Your Ladyship and Lady Deverell now. She hates anyone mentioning her past. She’s a bit sensitive about it. Well, more than a bit. You’re best off forgetting it, if you’ve seen her on stage. Not that you’ll get to speak to her much. She don’t have much to say to the servants.’

  ‘Really? I thought she might be a good mistress to have – since she’s closer to, to our class than most of the gentry.’

  ‘The opposite. Everyone says the first Lady Deverell was a real smasher, kind and sweet. She gave extra half-holidays when the weather was nice sometimes, and she always asked after your family. This one don’t even acknowledge you. Like I say, she’s funny about her past. She thinks talking to us like we’re people shows her up, I reckon. But we all know that that’s the mark of a someone who ain’t a real lady. But I mustn’t talk like this.’

  A flicker of fear had crossed Jenny’s pale face.

  ‘Not when I don’t know you. You won’t repeat any of this, will you? Do you promise? Not to a soul?’

  ‘Of course not. What has passed between us is in strict confidence. You may be sure I will observe it.’

  ‘Gaw, you London girls talk proper, don’t you?’ Jenny’s momentary anxiety had turned to a curious admiration.

  ‘Oh, not really, I studied my mistress and her daughters at my last place and tried to imitate them. It’s a habit. I expect I shall grow out of it here.’

  Jenny stood again, seeing that Edie had tied her apron and pinned on her cap.

  ‘Well, might be for the best,’ she said. ‘You’ll get teased for it downstairs. Come on. I’m to help you find your feet today. What would you like to see first?’

  ‘Well, I hardly know. Should we do a wing at a time?’

  ‘Good idea. Let’s start with the West Wing.’

  They sallied forth, black-and-white neatness in duplicate, to the servants’ staircase.

  ‘The West Wing’s used for visitors and children. We spend less time on it, especially since there aren’t any Deverell children just at the moment. The ground-floor rooms aren’t used at all.’

  The West Wing was indeed, though splendid, a little neglected; its carpets threadbare and its wainscots dusty in places. The unused downstairs apartments were empty of furniture – huge, high-ceilinged bunkers with ornate plaster mouldings and pictures behind dust sheets.

  Edie found it quite sinister and was glad to cross the courtyard to the East Wing, which contained the family rooms.

  On the upper floor, the younger son and daughter of the house kept their suites.

  ‘This is Sir Thomas’s rooms,’ said Jenny, briefly opening a door into a neat and unusually plain chamber. ‘We needn’t go in.’

  ‘Who is Sir Thomas?’

  ‘Lord, you really don’t know nothing, do you? He’s the younger son. He joined the Army and did very well for himself at first, but after getting shot in the war, he wanted out. Lord Deverell had to buy him out, even though he was injured. Walks with a limp now, always will.’

  ‘Does he have another occupation now?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ Jenny shook her head. ‘He can’t settle. They say Lord Deverell’s at his wits’ end with him.’

  ‘What is he like?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know him, really. He keeps himself to himself. Spends a lot of time at the races, or out with the dogs.’

  They reached the next door.

  ‘Whose rooms are these?’

  ‘Lady Mary’s, but I wouldn’t be opening them if I didn’t know she’d gone out. She gets wild if anyone disturbs her in her room.’

  Jenny opened them with a furtive, mysterious air then stepped a little way into the light, airy chamber. Everything seemed to sparkle in there. Edie thought, with a sickening pang, of her room at home in London. She had the same cut-glass scent bottle on her dresser. The silver-backed hairbrush looked familiar too, even if Edie’s was not monogrammed like Lady Mary’s. Fresh cut flowers stood on the bedside table and the chest of drawers, and a tangle of stockings and scarves were strewn all over the bed.

  ‘I suppose she was trying to decide what to wear tonight,’ said Jenny with a laugh. ‘She’s fearful fussy. Ask Louise, her maid. She leads her a merry dance, she does.’

  ‘A hard taskmistress?’

  Jenny whispered, ‘A spoiled little madam,’ and then put a hand to her mouth, giggling guiltily.

  ‘What is happening tonight?’

  ‘Didn’t Mrs Munn say? A big dinner, some visitors from London. I don’t know who they are but I think they’re supposed to be important.’

  Another surge of panic rose through Edie’s stomach.

  ‘Will I have to serve them?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, not your first day.’

  She exhaled gratefully.

  ‘I wonder if Lady Mary will announce an engagement soon,’ Jenny prattled on. ‘They say she’s got ever so many admirers in London. But, like I said, she’s fussy.’

  ‘Neither of the sons are married?’

  Jenny sighed. ‘No, and it don’t look likely neither. One’s a womaniser and the other’s a recluse. Come on, shall we go downstairs?’

  The windows were bigger on the floor below and the fittings notably more elaborate.

  ‘Sir Charles’s rooms,’ whispered Jenny, her hand on an antique gold door handle.

  ‘Should we?’ Edie was suddenly nervous. ‘What if he’s in there?’

  ‘He went to town,’ she said. ‘With Lady Mary. Come on.’

  ‘There could be a woman in there.’

  Jenny let out a peal of merry laughter. ‘You ain’t met him yet and you’ve got the measure of him already. Come on.’

  She opened the door.

  No woman was hidden behind it. The rooms were magnificent, crimson and gold, but the style was decidedly masculine and his valet had not yet cleared away his shaving things from the basin in the little bathroom. Edie felt possessed by a sense of the man who used these rooms; the scent of his cologne, mixed with a faint aroma of smoke, crept into her and took up residence in the corners of her consciousness. A dressing gown hung carelessly on a bedpost and his slippers were in the middle of the floor.

  ‘Who is his valet?’ Edie wondered aloud. ‘Should he not have tidied these things?’ She was proud of herself for remembering that aristocratic men all had valets. Although the social circles she moved in at home were mixed, they rarely involved lords and ladies.

  ‘He is between valets at the moment,’ said Jenny. ‘His last one resigned a few
days ago. He is sharing with Sir Thomas until they can hire a replacement.’

  ‘Why did the last one resign?’

  Jenny pinched her lips and shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But Edie thought that Jenny was concealing some further knowledge.

  Moving towards the other side of the room, Edie saw a book on Sir Charles’s bedside table and was consumed with curiosity to know what kind of thing this man enjoyed reading.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, picking it up. ‘The Moon and Sixpence. I have read this.’

  ‘Put that down,’ exclaimed Jenny, rushing over. ‘Don’t touch a thing.’

  ‘We shouldn’t be in here, should we?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Come on.’

  She dragged Edie out by her elbow, but Edie was already wondering to what extent Sir Charles might identify with the book’s hero, his namesake, a man who abandons his established life to pursue an impossible dream.

  ‘His Lordship,’ she said, flapping her hand at another door without opening it, following up a moment later with ‘Her Ladyship’.

  ‘Oh, can we not go in?’

  ‘Her Ladyship is in. No, we cannot.’

  ‘I would so like to see her rooms.’

  ‘Well, you can’t. So there. Come on, let’s go to the ground floor. Like reading, do you?’

  She opened a smaller door at the end of the corridor. It led on to a large gallery, looking down into a treasure trove of bookcases.

  ‘Oh, a library! Oh, this is huge. How wonderful.’

  It occurred to Edie that perhaps she should not be displaying such raptures in her role as a housemaid. But surely housemaids might like to look at a book or two now and again?

  ‘Do a lot of reading, do you?’ asked Jenny, leading her down the steps to the main room. ‘You can’t have been very busy in your last place.’

  ‘Oh, I was, but I read on my days off, you know.’

  ‘Must have been nice for your family.’

  ‘They didn’t mind.’

  Edie barely registered Jenny’s disparaging tone, too engrossed in the endless spines of gold-embossed leather that lay behind the glass doors of each cabinet.

  ‘At least they had the shelves turned into cupboards,’ said Jenny with a sniff. ‘I hated dusting all those perishing things. Lord Deverell thought we were going to ruin them just by touching them so he locks them away now.’

  ‘He is a keen scholar?’

  ‘No, not really. I suppose they’re worth a few bob, that’s all.’

  Edie shook her head. The idea of valuing books for their monetary worth was quite beyond her. At home, in her room, her books lay in piles, higgledy-piggledy, with dog-eared pages and dusty jackets, but they were the landscape of her life, to be kept round about her, not shut away in cages.

  She was reluctant to leave this wonderland, but they had to move on regardless, to a breakfast room in modern pinks and pale greens, then a comfortable sitting room and a brace of cold gilt state rooms, until they were at the central part of the house.

  The splendour of these rooms left even Edie open-mouthed – as huge as the British Museum galleries and several times more ornate. She craned her neck up at pricelessly painted ceilings and then let her eye move downwards to works of Tudor and Stuart art, interspersed with gold leaf twining all over everything. The impression was sometimes sumptuous, sometimes intimidating. It was nothing like a home. How did people conduct their daily business in rooms like these? Reception rooms opened on to more reception rooms; then there were morning, drawing, breakfast and dining rooms, each with a different colour scheme and each groaning with antiques that would need careful dusting and cleaning, over and over again.

  Seeing everything with a maid’s eye, Edie came to resent all the magnificence, much as her artistic senses were impressed. But really, who needed all this?

  Out of the wings, Edie and Jenny now ran across several of their colleagues, all working hard to get the grandest rooms of the house into a fit condition to receive guests. Flowers were being arranged, feather dusters wielded and, in the dining room, a French polisher attended to a scratch on the table.

  ‘They’ll cover it with a cloth,’ whispered Jenny, whisking Edie past. ‘But Tilly Gresham got in terrible trouble for it all the same.’

  A tall, thin, fastidious-looking man in a dark suit and white gloves appeared to be directing the carrying up- and down-stairs of a number of ornamental urns.

  ‘Jenny,’ he said. ‘Is this the new girl?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Stanhope, Edie Prior.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss Prior.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Edie, unsure whether or not to curtsey. She decided against it.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you have work to do,’ said Stanhope after an awkward pause. ‘On such a day as this. And if not, I’ll be asking Mrs Munn why not.’

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ muttered Jenny, leading them to the back stairs. ‘He gets himself a bit worked up when there’s a big do. He’s the butler, if you didn’t know.’

  They descended to the depths of the house once more, where Jenny collected a trug of cleaning materials before showing Edie to the room where Mrs Munn had ordered them to work.

  They passed along endless yards of corridor, under the baleful eyes of the Deverell ancestry, up and down the back stairs and through that busy, bustling series of reception rooms before arriving at the well-named Green Drawing Room.

  It was very green, and very golden, and very velvety and very cold – in style rather than temperature. Everything in it was heavy and sharp-cornered. When Edie considered her family drawing room in Bloomsbury, with its cheerful patterns and fringed shawls all over the place, it could not have been more remote.

  ‘Do people come in here to relax?’ she asked, looking over a two-hundred-year-old spinet in the corner of the room.

  ‘People hardly come in here at all,’ said Jenny vaguely, sorting through rags and polishes. ‘It’s not much used. Here, I’ll wax the wooden furniture and you can polish the mirror there.’

  Edie accepted a rag and a tub of metal polish and made a start on the heavy ormolu-framed square mirror that stood over an unused fireplace.

  They worked silently and diligently until Edie was drawn to the window by the sound of a car drawing up in the drive. She would not have admitted it to herself, but she was hoping for a glimpse of Ted.

  The car was not the one she had ridden in earlier, though. It was that same sleek, cream-coloured monster that had twice passed her on the road.

  The rain had abated and its driver got out on to wet gravel, looking up at the house windows as he did so. Edie took a swift step back, her heart pounding. Why did she not want to be seen? Because this must be Charles, the rake of the Deverell’s, and she had no wish to draw his attention to her.

  He was pristine in a pinstriped blazer over light-coloured waistcoat, shirt and trousers. His dark hair was immaculately cut and he was clean-shaven. He didn’t wear a hat, and Edie approved of this, for she had no taste for the current fashion for straw boaters on men.

  His eye was soon drawn away from the house, and he went to the passenger side to open it for a young woman.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Edie, and Jenny came to look over her shoulder.

  ‘Lady Mary. Oh, don’t look. Sir Charles will see you.’

  ‘She is fearfully lovely.’

  ‘Yes. Come away.’

  But a creeping fascination had overcome Edie, who noted that Mary was exceptionally fashionable and glamorous in a calf-length beige skirt, a lace-collared blouse and a loose belted jacket. Her hat was low on her brow over dark, shiny bobbed hair and she wore three long strands of pearls.

  Jenny tried to tug her away but to no avail. Edie watched Charles take Mary’s arm to help her up the steps, then – disaster! He looked directly at her window. Her throat tightened and she tried to move away but she felt held there by the keen penetration of his gaze. It only lasted a moment, before Lady M
ary slapped him on the elbow, as if in reproof, and he turned back to her, laughing.

  But a moment was enough. Edie had been noticed, and now she felt like a marked woman.

  Chapter Two

  Her stomach in knots, she returned reluctantly to her mirror. The surround was devilishly full of sharp points and curlicues and polishing it was a more arduous task than she had imagined.

  ‘Lady Mary, the spoiled beauty. Shouldn’t she be in London for the season?’ she asked, resuming her labours.

  ‘So many questions,’ said Jenny briskly, putting the polish back in the trug. ‘Oh, lor’. Oh, dear me, no.’

  Edie looked around, putting her materials down on the mantelpiece as a stricken-faced Jenny drew nearer.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You don’t never use polish on the ormolu. Didn’t you know that? It damages it. You can only dust that down.’

  ‘Oh, I had no idea,’ said Edie, her hands flying to cover her mouth.

  Josie McCullen had never mentioned ormolu. Only silver and plain brass. Oh, there were so many gaps in her domestic education. She would be making huge mistakes all the livelong day.

  Jenny sighed. ‘It’s probably all right,’ she said. ‘But that polish strips the gilt away. The most you can do is dab it with meths and a soft cloth, and then only when you can see some corrosion. Let me look a bit closer. Oh. Oh, dear.’

  A tiny scrap of one of the curlicues had dulled, a tarnished patch amidst the bright gilt.

  ‘We’ll have to tell Mrs Munn,’ Jenny decided. ‘She’ll know how to fix it.’

  Mrs Munn did know how to fix it – or, at least, she knew a restorer who did – but she still pursed her lips and tapped her fingers against the mantel in the servants’ dining hall when the maids made their confession.

  ‘It’ll have to come out of your wages,’ she told Edie. ‘I can’t imagine how you could be so careless. What kind of place have you come from, where they had no ormolu in the house?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ repeated Edie, feeling like a spot of grease on the floor at Mrs Munn’s feet. ‘I only had charge of the silver and brass at Mrs Winchester’s.’