Blackberry and Wild Rose Page 5

  * * *

  Once, when she came in and saw me using vinegar on Madam’s washstand, she rushed at me as if I was about to set a torch to it. “What are you doing?” she exclaimed, grabbing the cloth from me.

  “Cleaning, of course.”

  “She’ll not thank you when she puts her face in the wash bowl and it smells like a scrubbed-out slop bucket! Didn’t you think of how it would stink?”

  I had not. I had been told to wash down the kitchen with vinegar and castile soap and had thought to do the same in Madam’s bedroom. Moll tipped her head on one side, eyeing me silently while the sharp tang of vinegar stung our nostrils.

  “I cannot fathom,” she said softly, “how a maid-of-all-work would do such a thing. Did the last house you worked in stink top to bottom of vinegar?”

  “You are the maid-of-all-work, not me,” I said, taking the bottle of vinegar from the washstand and trying to get past her.

  She stepped in front of me and blocked the door. “But you said you was a housemaid before you came here?”

  “Yes, and a housemaid is above the maid-of-all-work, so please stand aside as I have work to do.”

  “Why don’t you know you shouldn’t use vinegar in the mistress’ bedroom, then?”

  “Because the maid-of-all-work did it!” I thrust the bottle into her hand and pushed past her to the door.

  * * *

  I lasted a couple of weeks before I went to Madam. I knocked, but perhaps she didn’t hear as when I opened the door she was sitting on her embroidered stool with her skirts up around her thighs, trying to tie a garter round her stocking. She started when she saw me and dropped the ribbon on the floor. She must have expected me to excuse myself and walk straight out again, but instead I closed the door behind me and approached her.

  “Here, let me,” I said, kneeling beside her and picking up the garter.

  “Thank you,” she said, sounding uncertain. I ran my hand up her stockinged calf, smoothing the wrinkles where the stocking had begun to sag back down her leg. They were a fetching green, matching the silk of her dress. I tied the pink garter round the stocking, just above her knee, then reached for the other stocking lying on her dressing table. She seemed tense at first, flinching when I touched the stocking to her toes and almost shrinking from me as I rolled the sheer material further up her leg. But she seemed to relax into my touch and did not demur when I fixed the other garter. When I had finished, I smoothed her skirts down, although it seemed a shame to hide such prettiness. I had thought her rather odd-looking when I first saw her, with her unusual complexion and features too strong to be dainty, but now I had come to know her, I found her quite beautiful.

  “You were right, madam,” I said.

  “About what?” She was almost blushing. I suppose she wondered what I might be about to say.

  “You really don’t need another scullery maid. Little Moll does such an excellent job keeping the house clean, there is no need for anyone else.”

  She nodded slowly. “Are you leaving us so soon?” If I had not known better, I might have thought she sounded a little disappointed. Or perhaps she was just wondering how I would be able to repay my debt before I left.

  I turned away from her and busied myself picking up a shift lying discarded on the floor. She watched me intently as I folded it and placed it on the bed. Then I said, “The house is well looked after, but you, madam, are not.”

  She was taken aback, as if she had no idea what I was referring to. I smiled to reassure her. “A lady’s maid, madam. You need a lady’s maid.”

  She laughed. “Are you suggesting yourself?”

  “And why not, madam?” I returned to her side and sank to my knees. “How could I better repay you than by that?”

  In that moment, I felt truly grateful to her, as if I actually wanted a life serving her every need. I surprised even myself with what I did next. I clasped the hand resting in her lap and brought it up to my lips. I felt the chill of her wedding ring press across my skin as I kissed her hand. She tolerated it for an instant, then snatched it away, busying herself with a wisp of hair come loose from under her cap.

  Esther

  I spoke but my husband barely looked up. He continued to spoon the soup into his mouth, as diligent and single-minded in that task as he was with everything else. A drop ran down his chin and disappeared into the beginnings of his beard. He sat back and swiped a cloth across his face.

  “What did you say?”

  I straightened in my chair, responding to Elias’ attention.

  “I was talking about the girl staying with us, Miss Kemp. I thought I might keep her on to help me. As a lady’s maid, perhaps.”

  Elias picked up his wine glass and eyed me over the rim. My own husband, yet his thoughts were as inscrutable to me as the columns of figures with which he filled his ledgers. We were a modest household, given my husband’s wealth. We did not need another housemaid—servants for whom there was no need would have been an intolerable extravagance for any Huguenot household—but the more I thought on it, the more Sara Kemp seemed to be right. I did have use for a lady’s maid. And if that would mean a new life for someone else—a way for Sara to repay her debt—then I was made doubly happy by the thought.

  “Do you agree then, husband?” I said, my voice cautious. I had not wanted too detailed a conversation about Sara, so I had mentioned her over supper when his head would be full of that day’s business and preoccupied with the tasks of the next.

  Elias finished his wine. “Who is this woman?” he asked.

  “Well,” I began brightly, “Miss Kemp used to work in a tavern—”

  “A tavern?” Elias’ words cut through my own. “Have we not had enough of women who used to work in taverns?”

  I swallowed hard and ignored his reference to my mother.

  “She was a cook,” I continued. “Well, a kitchen maid, really, but she is skilled in the kitchen and has been a great help to Monsieur Finet, I believe.”

  He looked down at his plate. “I thought the pie tasted better than usual. I think she should stay in the kitchen.”

  “But we do not need a kitchen maid and she has worked in a household as well. I need help with my toilette and my wardrobe, bathing and dressing.”

  “What’s she going to do? Cover you with egg wash and stick pastry on you?”

  “Do not mock me, husband.”

  “My point, Mrs. Thorel,” he said, tilting the wine jug toward him and peering into it, “is that she is not qualified for the job.” He let go of the empty jug and turned his gaze back on me.

  He was right. Sara did not fit into our household and trying to put her there was like hiding a cow among the sheep, but I could not give up so easily.

  “She has need of help and sanctuary,” I said. “You of all people should understand that.”

  He fell silent, his reply, if there was one, stoppered by the history of his own people.

  When we had finished the meal, Moll brought in a gooseberry tart. Its sticky sweetness seemed to mellow him as then he said, “The girl—Kemp—she can stay, if you like. These domestic matters are for you to decide.”

  * * *

  Sophia Courtauld. I saw her sometimes, gliding across Spital Square with her basket of good deeds swinging from her arm. The woman my husband would have married, if he hadn’t married me. The one chosen for him by his family. A good Huguenot wife for the Thorel heir. Elias Thorel had slipped into the same house and profession as his father as though they were a pair of perfectly fitting shoes. And he was about to take the wife who would have joined the Courtaulds to the Thorels when he looked out from his workshop one day to see an English girl passing.

  I was his one rebellion, the single way in which he pushed against the expectations of his community, and they punished him for it. In small ways they made him an outsider. He no longer h
ad first choice of the best patterns or the new malachite shades from the dyer, and for a time the best Huguenot journeymen weavers filled their looms with silk from other masters. Even then, I don’t think he ever questioned whether I was worth it. He was able to reestablish himself in Spitalfields simply by the force of his own talent and acumen, helped by the more pragmatic attitude of the English suppliers and weavers.

  I was not a poor match: I was the daughter of a well-known surgeon. We lived in Spital Square in a house worthy of any master weaver, and my father often attended court to purge and blister the nobility. Then a girl died, the daughter of a duke or earl, and suddenly all the bloodletting and evacuations that had earned my father his fortune made him a quack or worse. He was not told to go: they forced him out with whispers and tittle-tattle. Rumors started, first about my father, then about my mother. Elias had married me knowing full well that my mother had been a singer, but it was only then that it came out she had started her career singing ballads from chapbooks in taverns. After they left a lawyer moved into their house in Spital Square and I have seen neither my mother nor my father since.

  Sophia Courtauld became Sophia Marchant and not three years later, little feet pattered after her when she walked across the square. I wonder what Elias thinks when he looks at her.

  8

  Sara

  It is the job of a lady’s maid to make her mistress as fair as her God-given assets will allow. My own mistress had a bewildering array of daubs and ointments on her dressing table. It was she who was the respectable one, but the vials of paints, creams, and patches she owned could have come straight from a harlot’s toilette. Indeed, their house seemed full of contradictions. They were supposed to be Calvinists, Puritans almost, yet their home was full of wealth. It scattered the mantel with silver trinkets and lined the walls with wood paneling from floor to ceiling, painted tasteful shades of gray and palest ocher. I asked her once whether such a comfortable life sat well with the austerity of the master’s religion. She replied that wealth earned with a good heart through honest toil was always godly. I was glad to hear that, if only for the sake of the girls at Mrs. Swann’s.

  One morning, when I came into her room, she pulled the cloth cap from her head and sat at her dressing table, waiting. The sight of her hair uncoiled down her back was a silent summons, so I placed the clean linens I was carrying in the cupboard and stood behind her. She had become particularly concerned about her appearance of late, even while at home, and I watched her reflection in the mirror as she drew her teeth over her lips to redden them. Mrs. Swann would have called Madam an unusual beauty and put her in front of the widest clientele possible, in the hope that at least some would find charm in her angular limbs and the freckled imperfection of her pale skin. Fortunately, once the powder was on, no man would know the difference.

  “That’s enough, Sara!” she exclaimed, among genteel little coughs as I dusted over her face.

  “But you can still see them, madam,” I said.

  “See what?” She sounded hurt.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, putting the lid back on the powder and picking up the tortoiseshell brush. I busied myself untwisting the rope of hair. It was the color of autumn, shades of red and amber turning to gold where the light caught it, and for a moment I was engrossed with brushing it out so that it fanned across her shoulders. When I looked up she was studying me intently in the looking glass. “Madam?”

  She smiled at me benignly. “You must be feeling so happy, Sara.”

  I looked down at her hair, finding a little knot and pulling at it. “Yes, madam,” I said.

  “And I am so happy to have helped you,” she said, praising her own reflection in the mirror. “To think that I have saved a woman like you from having to do what you did at Mrs. Swann’s, well …” She fell into a reverie, the beatific smile still on her face.

  I plucked at the knot. A woman like me? What had I become under the patronage of Mrs. Thorel? Even as a lady’s maid, I still rose at dawn and emptied her chamber pot. I bathed and dressed her and looked after her clothes and wigs. For this I was promised a crown a week and given a room at the top of the house, which she made me share with Moll. It was two yards wide and three yards long. In it there was a bed and a washstand. Only one floor below, her bed was stuffed with feathers, while mine was stuffed with straw. She drew linen up to her chin at night while I lay under a rough coverlet. Only the water we splashed on our faces was the same. This was the life she had given me, and she expected me to be grateful. So it is, when you exist only to serve another. It is an enviable transition from whore to lady’s maid, but both are a life of forced intimacy serving the needs of others.

  “Tsk.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  Her eyes were wide and surprised in the glass as they flicked up to mine. I must have been tugging at that knot too hard, imagining the bronze finery of her hair turning withered like autumn leaves and falling to the floor. I left the tangle and went back to brushing, stroking the hair from her face so that she could see herself more easily. And she took full advantage of that, staring at her image as if pride were not a deadly sin. I had not realized what vanity lay behind that godly exterior. How gratifying it must have been for her to glance up from studying her own delicate features and see me standing behind her. As if her face was the picture, and mine the dull, sturdy frame.

  “Madam, may I remind you that I have not been paid my wages these past few weeks?”

  “Your wages?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A crown a week, you said.”

  Madam flushed somewhere under all that powder. “A crown a month, Sara, not a week.”

  I let go of her hair as if it had turned to snakes in my hand. Five shillings a month! It would take me years to pay her back the money I owed. I turned away from the mirror so that she would not see the helplessness in my face. The room seemed to close in on me. How could she have misled me with dreams of bettering myself, then pay me a crown a month? I was as trapped in Spital Square as I ever had been at the Wig and Feathers.

  Madam twisted in her chair to see what I was doing. I stepped over to the washstand and tipped a little water from the jug onto my hands as if to clean them.

  “I need to teach you the value of honest hard work, Sara,” she said to my back, as I shook the water from my fingers. “That is the best thing I can give you—better than money.”

  I forced myself to walk back to her, drying my hands on my skirts as I did so. She settled herself back round to face the mirror and I lifted the lid of the glass pot on her dressing table and ran my finger round the inside. I rubbed the pomade round my palms to soften it, then raked my greased fingers through her hair. She leaned her head back slightly and half closed her eyes. As I worked, the smell of the lavender became stronger and she breathed deeply as if she welcomed the heady scent and the steady rub of my hands. Once I had pulled and teased her hair on top of her head, I had any number of silver pots to choose from to powder over the pomade. So I patted and preened her, covering the person she really was under a thin layer of dust.

  * * *

  That night I climbed into bed with Moll. Her feet were blocks of ice against my calves and as she shifted to get comfortable, sharp elbows dug into my sides. I jabbed her back. She had barely spoken to me since I had become Madam’s lady’s maid and risen above her in the household. So we played out our little spats there, in that tiny bed, with digs and pinches as we jostled for space.

  The only other person I had ever slept with was my mother. We would curl up together in her little bed and she would sing me to sleep while she stroked my hair. I had not seen her since the day she had thrust a bag into my hands, containing little more than a loaf of bread, a farthing’s worth of cheese and The Art of Cookery, the only thing my father had left us. My mother had used the knowledge in it to persuade the Quakers to find her a job as a c
ook instead of a scullery maid. I read it while she cooked so I would know why she pressed the onions with studs of cloves and sweetened her cakes with rosewater and sherry. That day—the day she told me to leave—is preserved in my mind, like pickles in a jar. She gave me the pound she had saved and wrote out the name and address of her cousin, who lived in Spitalfields. It was to be my introduction to London, but it had gotten no further than the top of Mrs. Swann’s bodice.

  In the early days, I used to cry every night, wondering why she had sent me away, what I could possibly have done wrong for her not to want me anymore, but after a few months at Mrs. Swann’s it became hard to know what I was crying about. I knew my mother loved me, so there must have been a reason she had sent me into all of this. I just couldn’t work out what it was.

  I must have dozed off. When I awoke, I looked for the gray silhouette of Moll sleeping beside me and listened for the gentle rasp of her breath, but when I patted the bed next to me, I found she was gone.

  Esther

  I tried to persuade myself that my husband was a good man. That he had given up the approval of his community to have me as a wife and I had rewarded him with whispered gossip at church. And with each month that went by without a child, I sensed his simmering disappointment. He began to turn away from me when I spoke to him. He barely looked up as I entered a room and left without bidding me goodbye. I accepted that he was always somewhere else, even when I was in the same room as him. It was in those moments of isolation that I turned to my painting.

  It was my sanctuary. When I painted, I had something to cherish and nurture, in the way that other women might have turned their thwarted affections on a lapdog. Or a child. I captured the swell and bloom of those flowers even as my own belly lay flat and empty. And if my husband’s attention was invariably on the artistry of what he created, rather than me, then it was not my place to complain. After all, even a wife cannot compete with the beauty of silk.