All I Want Is You (3 page)

Though if Mrs Burdett overheard she would speak to them sharply. As Mr Maldon had implied, she did, despite her brusqueness, take care of me in her way. I found out years later that she and her brother had been raised in an orphanage, and that perhaps gave her some sympathy for me. But apart from Mrs Burdett, all the upper servants – Mr Peters the butler, the Duke’s long-serving valet Mr Harris and the Duchess’s personal maid Miss Stanforth – took no notice of me at all.

After my first week there I wrote to Mr Maldon. In the servants’ hall after our supper we sometimes had a little free time before the evening chores started, so one night I sat at the table with my pen in my hand, but I didn’t know what to say. In the end I wrote,
Dear Mr Maldon, I am working at Belfield Hall now in the kitchen. I am very grateful to you because I know I owe my position here to you, though I am a little confused because Mrs Burdett says it was a Mr Isherwood who recommended me. I trust this finds you well. Yours sincerely, Sophie Davis.
I paused, with a lump in my throat. I scrubbed out
Davis
and put
Smith –
I was Sophie Smith now.

Carefully I copied his address –
Wilton Crescent –
from the sheet of paper he’d written it on, and I tried to imagine him in London, a city that sounded like a far-off magical place to me. Would he even remember our meeting? I posted it on my next afternoon off and to my surprise the following week I got a reply. The post was always handed out by Mr Peters the butler at breakfast, and I think I blushed bright red.

‘Our little Sophie’s got an admirer,’ sneered Betsey, one of the maids whom I didn’t like.

I opened it with fumbling fingers. His writing was beautiful and even, in black ink.

Dear Sophie, Mr Isherwood is a bank manager in Oxford, and a friend of mine; I asked him to write to Mrs Burdett. Are they feeding you well? Is Peters still a tyrant, and do the Duchess’s cats still drive everyone to distraction? Tell me more next time. Yours, etc, Mr Maldon.

I folded the letter in some consternation. He knew the Hall, though Mrs Burdett had not even recognised his name! He knew Mr Peters the butler, and he knew that the Duchess’s dozen or so cats – which were truly a law unto themselves – annoyed the staff exceedingly with the hairs they left everywhere.

I wrote back to him that very evening, telling him how Cook had chased two of the Duchess’s cats out of her kitchen with a broom only yesterday – they’d licked the cream off a trifle and she was furious. I wrote,
Please tell me about London.

In his next letter he described some of the fine shops, and also told me about the cavalry that rode up and down Horse Guards Parade. I wrote eagerly back, and for many months his replies to my letters came regularly. I kept them all. I still have them.

Of course the war was darkening everyone’s world by then. So many men were being lost in the fighting, and in the autumn of 1916 Will joined up too, my good and dear friend Will, who had been working on the home farm since leaving school. He came to tell me he was off to France and talked eagerly of being in the army, but I think he was also hoping I’d beg him to stay. Lord Charlwood was still in France; he was a captain,
aide-de-camp to a general, they said, and covering himself with glory. The Duchess loved to talk of her war-hero son, but it was muttered often in the servants’ hall that his was a safe job, well away from German guns and gas.

Sometimes I heard the servants talking of London: of the fashions, and the wonderful parties the rich people still gave in spite of the war. I listened to every word. There was a footman called Robert, who hadn’t joined the army because he had a weak chest – asthma, he said. Sometimes Robert would sweet-talk Mrs Burdett into letting him carry an old gramophone she owned into the servants’ hall, and he would wind it up so we could listen to her records of Caruso and Nellie Melba while we ate our supper. The music filled me with pleasure, but Robert would croon the songs in a mocking sort of way once Mrs Burdett and the rest of the upper servants had retired, as they usually did, to her private sitting room.

Of course, apart from the servants’ mealtimes, the male and female staff were meant to be kept strictly apart, but the footmen were a topic of constant gossip amongst the maids and I quickly realised that Robert was a particular object of admiration. One night in our dormitory the other maids started to tease me when they noticed I was listening. ‘Little Miss Holier-Than-Thou,’ they taunted. ‘Don’t you sometimes look at Robert and think what a nice-looking fellow he is, eh? Oh, wait till you’re old enough.’

They often talked like that, though not in Cook or Mrs Burdett’s hearing, and they loved to bait the new
kitchen boy, Dan, who was even younger and shyer than I was. He bumped into Betsey once by mistake and she accused him, as a joke, of trying to feel her up. ‘Now, our Dan!’ she cried. ‘I’m after a man’s prick, not a boy’s that’s no bigger than my finger.’ He blushed furiously while they all laughed and, because I didn’t join in, Betsey whispered something about me to the others that made them laugh even more. Robert, the arrogant footman, persecuted me in different ways. He would wait till I’d just cleaned the kitchen floor and then he would spill something – coal-dust, or scraps saved for the pigs. He would give his mocking smile and say to me, ‘Oh dear, Sophie. You’ve not made a very good job of that floor, have you?’

My face flaming, I would get on my knees and start again.

On one bleak mid-January day I realised that Mrs Burdett’s efforts to keep my identity secret had been in vain. There was often whispering in the servants’ hall about Lord Charlwood’s reputation; he was a
philanderer
, they said. I always tried desperately not to think of him and my mother in the garden, but on that particular day, as I was clearing away the pots after our lunch, all the servants started talking about Lord Charlwood again, just loudly enough for me to hear.

‘It’s true,’ Betsey was saying in a raised whisper while pointing at me. ‘Little Miss Holier-Than-Thou over there – yes, her mother was one of his lordship’s favourites for a month or two. Used to work in the laundry. Florrie Davis was her name, and in Coronation year
Florrie came running whenever he so much as smiled. His lordship’s Coronation Special, Florrie was.’ They all laughed loudly.

I dropped a plate, Mrs Burdett roundly told me off, and after that the maids got on with their work, though Robert came to help me pick up the broken pieces. At first I thought he was being kind, but as he bent close he whispered, ‘Never could say no to a man, your ma. Thanks to some old boyfriend of hers, you were on the way before she even met your so-called dad, Phil Davis. But then, by golly, she married poor Phil quick as she could, then told everyone once you were born – him too, poor fool – that you were an early arrival.’

To be told in such a way that I wasn’t the child of the man who’d raised me was cruel indeed. I remembered what those men in Oxford had said –
She caught poor Phil Davis right and proper –
then I thought with pain of my father leaving us so suddenly. Yet I faced up to Robert. I knew by then it was the only way.

‘Well, aren’t you a know-all?’ I replied calmly. ‘You think I didn’t know?’ I got on with my work, but I was crying inside, for my mother and for the man I’d thought was my father.

I dreamed of getting away, and of course I wrote to Mr Maldon. I didn’t tell him about the other servants’ cruelty over my mother, but instead I told him of the jobs I’d learned to do, and how Mrs Burdett was very pleased with me. I told him too about Robert sometimes borrowing Mrs Burdett’s gramophone, and also how one of the Duchess’s cats had brought a live mouse
into the kitchen, which had Cook shrieking and climbing onto a chair while Mr Peters tried to shoo it out.

But he only wrote back once more, to tell me that he’d be away for a while.
I want you to still write to me though, Sophie
, he said.
I want you to still think of me, and to think well of me.

These words of his mystified and upset me. How could I not think well of him, when he’d been so very kind to me? I kept his letters tucked inside one of my mother’s precious books, and I still wrote every week to his address in London. I missed getting his letters badly, but I took comfort in the thought of him getting mine.

I wondered often why he’d been in Oxford that day last spring when my mother had died, and why he seemed to know the Hall so well. But I had a feeling that if I tried to find out too much, all my memories of him would vanish, just as the figures in a dream will fade away to nothing if you try too hard to remember them.

Life at the Hall went on, and my only friend was a new maid called Nell, who had been raised in the workhouse and was just a few months older than me. None of the menservants noticed either of us except to torment us, since Nell was slightly lame from birth and I still looked scarcely more than a child in my black servant’s gown. As for the Duke and Duchess – well, we might as well not have existed. One of the first things I’d been told was that if – by some dire accident – I should spot any member of the family or their guests approaching down a corridor, I was to turn to the wall and stand very still
until they’d gone past, so they didn’t have to see my face even, let alone speak to me.

Sometimes there were grand house parties, and we might catch glimpses of the Duke and Duchess and their finely dressed guests as they went to and fro. The Duchess was gaunt and sharp-nosed, and for these house parties she loved to create vast flower arrangements, which were the bane of the servants’ lives since they were always dropping leaves and getting in our way. The Duke was a little jollier, though to me he did not resemble his son Lord Charlwood in the least, but was short and stout, with red, puffy cheeks. In his younger days he’d apparently enjoyed riding to hounds, but now he confined himself to hosting shooting parties and playing billiards with his friends in the library.

Over the Christmas of 1917, the Duke arranged for a jazz band to be hired for one night for his guests, and we servants crept as close as we could to the half-open doors of the great hall to watch the young ones performing some modern steps, which were called the ragtime and the tango, Robert told us. I loved it all, and later when I was alone I practised by myself; but I couldn’t remember much of it, so I danced in my own way, as I’d danced in the gardens as a child that summer afternoon so long ago.

I thought of my Mr Maldon, always.

In the spring came the shocking news that Lord Charlwood had been killed. He was supposed to be safe behind the lines with his general, but he wasn’t; a stray German shell had landed on him.

‘Must have blown the bugger to bits,’ breathed Robert almost reverentially. ‘Just think, all over the shop he’d be, him and all his medals…’

‘Robert,’ cried Mrs Burdett, ‘you keep your mouth shut for once! Oh, my goodness, it’ll be mourning everywhere, black draperies to be put up, and there’ll be dozens of house guests for poor Lord Charlwood’s funeral…’

‘Some funeral,’ muttered Robert slyly to us all after she’d gone. ‘How are they going to find enough of his lordship’s body to fill a coffin?’

I said nothing, but I wrote to Mr Maldon to tell him about Lord Charlwood’s death, and how the Hall was plunged into mourning. Every week I walked to the village on my half-day off to put wild flowers on my mother’s grave, then to post my letter to him.

And I still hoped that some day he would reply.

The old Duke was stricken by the loss of his only son. The Duchess, never known for the sweetness of her temper, went around with a face that would turn milk sour. Who was the new heir? That was something that everyone except Nell and me seemed to know, and we were indeed swiftly told by the other servants that the Duke had a much younger brother, who’d died eight years ago, leaving a widow and just one child – a nine-year-old boy known as Lord Edwin.

Lord Edwin came to the funeral with his mother, who seemed a quiet mouse of a woman; Lord Edwin was plump and frightened-looking, I remember, and all dressed up in a stiff knickerbocker suit of black velvet.
The Duchess, the servants muttered, was absolutely desperate to keep her husband alive for as long as possible so she wouldn’t have to make way for this child.

‘Otherwise,’ Robert told us at the servants’ supper, ‘I reckon she’d poison the old Duke herself to be rid of him.’ Cook heard him, and warned she’d report him to Mr Peters next time he spoke like that. I was realising by then that this wasn’t the only rumour about the Duchess – they said, for example, that there was a locked room leading from her private parlour, which no one but her elderly maid Miss Stanforth was supposed to enter; no one but Miss Stanforth was supposed to clean. But Betsey told us that she’d once peeped inside the forbidden room, and there were lilies all around in vases; white lilies, for death, Betsey whispered.

Lord Charlwood’s coffin was brought home from France with great pomp to rest for five days in the Hall’s marble chapel. All the reception rooms of the Hall were swathed in black draperies, and the bell of the village church tolled from dawn till dusk. We servants had to file past the coffin and I thought of my mother as I made my curtsey. I thought of her grassy grave in the village churchyard, with the birds singing in the leafy trees overhead, and I knew I would far rather have her place in the earth when I died, than be put in the family mausoleum like Lord Charlwood.

That summer, because so many young men had gone off to the war, the garden and grounds were allowed to run wild where they weren’t visible from the house, and we maids had to do much of the work that the men had
once done, carrying the coals all around the house in heavy buckets and trimming and filling the oil lamps. We were especially busy with the approach of the funeral, because so many house guests would be staying. The day before the funeral itself, there was a great fuss because Lord Charlwood’s young widow was arriving. ‘About time too,’ said Cook sourly.

Nell and I were cleaning the dining room on our own. It was as gloomy in there as in the rest of the house because the mirrors were covered and the blinds were drawn and I longed to be out in the sunshine. We were meant to be brushing the carpets, but Nell had peeped out of the window because she’d heard a motorcar arriving.