“Have another crumpet?” she offered Kezia. “They really are delicious. This conversation is appalling. We have all been unpardonably rude and placed ourselves in positions from which we have no way of retreating with any dignity at all.”
They stared at her as if she had spoken in tongues.
She took a deep breath. “The only way would be to pretend none of it happened and start again. Tell me, Miss Moynihan, if you had a considerable sum of money, and the time to indulge yourself, where would you most like to travel, and why?”
She heard Emily gulp.
Kezia hesitated.
The fire sank with a shower of sparks. In a minute or two Emily would have to ring for the footman to come and stoke it up again.
“Egypt,” Kezia replied at last. “I should like to sail up the Nile and visit the Great Pyramids and the temples at Luxor and Karnak. Where would you like to go, Mrs. Pitt?”
“Venice,” Charlotte said without thinking. “Or …” She had been going to say “Rome,” and then bit her tongue. “Or Florence,” she said instead. She could feel hysteria rising in her. “Yes, Florence would be marvelous.”
Emily relaxed and rang the bell for the footman.
Gracie had a very busy afternoon. She found Gwen continuously helpful, but it was Doll, Eudora Greville’s maid, who taught her how to make silk stockings look flesh colored by adding, to the washing a little rose-pink and thin soap, then rubbing them with a clean flannel and mangling them nearly dry. The result was excellent.
“Thank you very much,” she said enthusiastically.
Doll smiled. “Oh, there’s a few tricks as are worth knowing. Got plenty of blue paper, have you? Or blue cloth will do as well.”
“No. What for?”
“Always put white clothes away in a box or drawer lined with blue. That way they won’t go all yellow. Nothing looks worse than whites as ’ave gone yellow. Come to that, I s’pose you know how to care for pearls?” She saw from Gracie’s face that she didn’t. “It’s easy when you know how, but make a mistake an’ you could ruin ’em—or worse, lose ’em altogether. Like in vinegar!” She gave a wry little laugh. “You boil bran in water, then strain it, add a little tartar and alum, hot as you can stand. Then rub the pearls in your ’ands till they’re white again. Then rinse ’em in lukewarm water and set ’em on white paper and leave ’em in a dark drawer to cool off. Works a treat.”
Gracie was very impressed. A few days at Ashworth Hall, paying attention, and she was going to be on the way to becoming a real lady’s maid. And she could read and write as well.
“Thank you,” she said again, lifting her chin a little higher. “That’s very gracious of you.”
Doll smiled, and something of the guardedness in her relaxed.
Gracie would like to have stayed and talked longer with her, learned more, but in displaying her own lack of experience she was inviting speculation as to why Charlotte should have such an ignorant maid.
“I’ll make a note o’ that, for if any of our pearls should get dull or lose their color,” she said with aplomb. Then she excused herself and returned upstairs.
However, she very quickly became bored, as there was nothing for her to do, so she decided to explore the rest of the servants’ parts of the hall. In the laundry wing, she found the maids relaxing and giggling together after a hard morning’s toil with steamy sheets and towels. One of the housemaids was ironing. The others, she was told, were carrying coals up to the dressing rooms to light the fires in time for changing for dinner.
She saw Tellman walking across the yard back from the stable, looking grim. She felt sorry for him. He was out of his depth. He probably had not the least idea how to do his job; all the well-trained valets of the other gentlemen would be bound to notice it. She really ought to offer him a little help. At the moment he looked like a spoilt child about to throw a tantrum. She had found with Charlotte’s children, once they were out of the three-year-old frustration tempers, such incidents usually occurred because they felt somehow overlooked or unimportant.
“Beginning to find your way around, Mr. Tellman?” she said cheerfully. “I never bin in such a big place before, an’ I don’t even ’ave ter bother wi’ outside.”
“Well I do,” he said tartly, looking sour. “If we do get any trouble it won’t be blacking boots an’ carrying coals they’ll be thanking me for!”
“You shouldn’t be carrying coals,” she said quickly. “You’re an upper servant, not a lower one. In fact, you are one of the top ten, so don’t let anyone take advantage of you.”
His face twisted with disgust. “One of the top ten! Don’t be ridiculous. If you spend your time waiting on other folk and taking orders, you’re a servant, and that’s all there is to it.”
“It most certainly is not!” she said indignantly. “That’s like saying if you’re a policeman it’s all the same whether you’re a senior detective wi’ knowledge and cleverness or a rozzer wot walks the beat carryin’ a lantern an’ don’t know a robber from a priest less someone shouts ‘Stop thief!’ ”
“But you’re at other people’s beck and call,” he said.
“An’ you in’t?”
He started to deny it, then met her blunt, candid gaze and changed his mind.
“An’ if yer don’t know wot ter do, I’ll find out for yer,” she said generously. “You don’t want ter look like yer don’t know yer job. I’ll show yer ’ow ter brush a gentleman’s coat proper, an’ ’ow ter take orff spots. Do yer know Ow ter get grease orff?”
“No,” he said grudgingly.
“An ’ot iron an’ thick brown paper, but not too ’ot. Lay it on a piece o’ white paper first, an if it don’t scorch, it’s a’ right. If that don’t ’move it all, a little bit o’ clean cloth an’ spirit o’ wine. If’n yer get stuck, come an’ ask me. Don’t let ’em see as yer don’ know. I’ll find out for yer.”
She could see from his face that he resented it profoundly, yet he could appreciate the point of her argument.
“Thank you,” he said between his teeth, then turned and walked into the house without looking back.
She shook her head and went on with her explorations.
She was in the stillroom when she saw Finn Hennessey again, his dark head and slender shoulders unmistakable. He stood with a grace unlike anyone else’s.
He turned the moment he heard her step, and his face lit up with pleasure when he saw her.
“Hello, Gracie Phipps. Looking for someone?”
“No, just discoverin’ the ’ouse, so I know where ter find things,” she replied, delighted to have encountered him, and yet now tongue-tied for something sensible to say.
“Very wise,” he agreed. “So am I. Funny isn’t it, how we work so hard for days preparing to come, and when we’re here, at least today, there’s almost nothing to do until dinner.”
“Well, at Orne I ’ave children ter care for as well,” she said, then realized that categorized her as a maid of all work, and wished she had kept silence.
“Do you like that?” he asked with interest.
“Oh yeah. They’re pretty much obedient, an’ ever so bright.”
“And healthy?”
“Yeah,” she said with surprise. She saw the shadow in his face. “Isn’t children ’ealthy where you come from?”
“Where I come from?” he repeated. “The village my mother lived in, and her mother before her, is a ruin now. It was abandoned after the famine. There used to be close to a hundred people there, men, women and children. Now it looks like the tombs of a departed race crumbling back into the earth.”
She was genuinely shocked. “That’s terrible. Yer ma married an’ moved then? Din’ she ’ave no brothers wot stayed there?”
“She had three. Two of them were evicted when the land was sold and the new landlords put it to grazing. The third, the youngest, was hanged by the British because they thought he was a Fenian.”