All I Want Is You (7 page)

I rather thought that Mr Peters would. He stepped forward, adjusting his metal-rimmed spectacles, and started to explain, but in the end Lady Beatrice interrupted him and declared that she’d drive to town herself to fetch the Duke’s physician. Then her eyes fell on me. ‘You. Sophie, isn’t that your name? Come with me – Margaret tells me you’re the only one around here who has any sense.’

So I went with her, and though I was concerned for Nell, my mind was whirling. I knew that Margaret must have told Lady Beatrice about Nell, and I wondered suddenly if Margaret had told her mistress about the kisses and caresses the two of us had shared. My heart thudded, my cheeks burned.

I kept glancing all the time at Lady Beatrice as she drove. I noticed everything about her – I couldn’t help it. Her short dress and matching coat – oh, in cream and coral silk, so lovely, her fine stockings and her shoes with their little heels. The way she drove her motorcar with such confidence.

I wanted to be like her.
Not like Margaret, not a servant, but like her. She was humming as we careered down a narrow country lane – ‘Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody’
–
but she was frowning, and I could tell she was furious about Nell. My pulse was racing.

I think somehow I knew that my life was going to change very soon.

Doctor Blakey came back to the Hall in his car and he called an ambulance to take poor Nell to the Oxford hospital. After Nell had gone I went to find Eddie, who was out in the courtyard polishing the Duke’s Rolls-Royce and whistling.

‘You are scum,’ I told him. I was so angry. ‘Scum, to abandon poor Nell, and to speak to her so cruelly.’

Eddie cocked his head insolently. ‘Could be me, could be one of quite a few others. She put it about a bit, did our Nellie.’ He started whistling again and turned back to the shiny motorcar.

‘She loved you,’ I insisted. ‘You know she loved you.’

He came close, smelling of sweat and car polish. ‘Well, Miss High-and-Mighty. You’re really turnin’ out to be quite sweet-lookin’, ain’t you? But they say you’re too stuck up to be interested in any courting. You kept poor Will Baxter dangling, then went cold on him. Know what you need? What you need is a bit of
this
inside you…’

Before I realised what he was talking about, he’d grabbed my hand and put it on his crotch. With shock flooding through me I realised he was aroused; he wanted me, or thought he did. I kicked hard at his shin.

He cried out in rage. ‘By God,’ he growled. ‘By God, you bitch. You really
do
need a lesson, like the others say.’

He grabbed me and hauled me against him while his mouth clung greedily to my lips, but I kneed him, I caught him where it really hurt, as I’d heard the other maids describing. Then I ran inside, shaking with helpless fury.

Two nights later, Mrs Burdett called me in to her private sitting room. She needed, she said, to warn me that the other servants were complaining about me. Why, she wouldn’t say; but I guessed that on top of the whispers that I’d been cruel to Will, Eddie was spreading his lies. What grieved me above all was that Mrs Burdett, who had always been kind to me, had now turned against me.

Mr Peters happened to be passing as I left the housekeeper’s room, and he eyed me askance through his metal-rimmed spectacles. ‘Sophie, there you are. Lady Beatrice has asked if you’ll take a tea-tray up to her private sitting room.’

Why me? Why not Margaret?
My mind in a whirl, I took the tray up and went in;
oh my
, I remembered that room well, the settee where Margaret and I…

Lady Beatrice told me to sit down on that very settee, while she strode around in her long blue evening gown, impatient and agitated. ‘I’m going to be staying for a while,’ she told me. ‘There’s a great deal going on here at the moment, Sophie, and I
need
to be here.’

Though she was their son’s widow, she had never shown much sign of affection to the Duke and Duchess,
so I wondered what had caused her change of heart, but of course it wasn’t my place to ask.

‘The thing is this,’ she went on. ‘I need a second maid while I’m here, in addition to Margaret, and I’d very much like a girl who’s utterly familiar with the household, yet on whom I can rely. I want you to work for me, Sophie, for the next few weeks at least. Would you be interested?’

I think I probably stammered my reply, I was so overwhelmed. ‘I-I don’t know, my lady. I would have to ask Mrs Burdett—’

‘I’ll do that,’ she interrupted. ‘And I’ll make sure she agrees.’ She gazed at me thoughtfully from top to toe, then lit a cigarette; she smoked it using a long ivory holder. ‘Margaret will still be my chief maid, of course,’ she went on, ‘but I need someone who is good at sewing and at caring for different fabrics. You like clothes, don’t you, Sophie? You like
my
clothes?’

I wondered if she had noticed me watching her and taking in everything she wore, every detail. All I could do was nod, but she smiled, looking as satisfied as one of the Duchess’s cats with a bowl of cream. ‘I thought you did,’ she said softly. ‘So you’ll agree to the job?’

I felt both fear and excitement, mingled with relief that Margaret must have said nothing about the time I’d spent with her here, in Lady Beatrice’s rooms. ‘I would be honoured, my lady.’

‘Then start looking at my clothes, why don’t you?’ She glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. ‘We have an hour before dinner. Pick your favourites. Try something on.’

What?
‘I-I beg your pardon, my lady?’

‘Choose a gown. And try it on,’ she repeated impatiently.

I still remember that gown I picked out from her wardrobe. She’d worn it to dinner the previous night – it was of pink crepe de Chine and she told me it was made by Jeanne Paquin, a famous Paris designer. It must have cost hundreds of pounds and I thought it was heavenly.

She poured us both drinks from a silver tray; she must have had quite a lot already, but she appeared icy calm. She made me taste mine – it was gin and tonic, like the drink Margaret had given me, and as I felt the unaccustomed alcohol racing through my blood, I was suddenly enthralled by what was happening to me. By the possibilities that were opening out in front of me.

I had to take my maid’s gown off while she watched, and I hesitated, looking down at my old chemise and corset – they were far too bulky for the exquisite gown. I felt her eyes skimming my figure, and her fingers with their scarlet-painted nails were suddenly resting lightly on my arm.

‘Take those ugly undergarments off,’ she said. ‘You’re about my size, thinner if anything.’ She was already searching in a drawer. ‘Wear these instead.’

She handed me an unboned, feather-light brassiere with matching lace-edged knickers in cream silk. Oh, how often I’d gazed at pictures of similar exquisite, delicate garments in the magazines that sometimes found their way to the servants’ hall! I put them on, my heart fluttering with excitement, and she helped me. The
brassiere and knickers were gossamer-soft against my skin, and I thought – or did I imagine it? – that I felt her fingers caressing my ribcage. I was about to carefully pick up the Jeanne Paquin gown when she stopped me.

‘
No.
Put these on, Sophie!’ She was thrusting a pair of cream kid gloves at me, and I blushed as I eased them over my rough, chapped hands, but she patted my shoulder. ‘It’s not your fault that they give you such demeaning work. Now. Let me see.’ She was looking around again. ‘Here, you’ll need these too.’

She handed me a pair of beautiful silk stockings, quite new, and some lacy garters; then it was time for the gown. I felt transformed. She lit herself another cigarette then stepped back and surveyed me thoughtfully. ‘Turn round,’ she commanded. ‘Yes. You need your hair to be shorter, and you need some make-up too. Then you’ll be quite lovely. Some day you must come to London with me…’

London?
London?

‘But for now,’ she went on, ‘I’m staying here. You see, I want to find out what plans are being concocted for Lord Ashley.’

Some warning kicked inside me. ‘Who is Lord Ashley?’ I asked.

‘He’s the heir, Sophie.’ She drew closer. ‘The new heir to the title and all the Belfield estates, now that the sickly little nephew is dead. And they hate him. The Duke and Duchess simply hate him.’

The son of the English lord and the Frenchwoman.
I nodded. ‘I’ve heard, but I didn’t know his name.’

‘And I know what you’ll have heard – that he’s not
worthy of the title.’ She smiled almost dreamily. ‘He sets them a problem and I’ve come here, Sophie, to find out just what they intend to do about it. About –
him.
’

She drew on her cigarette in its long ivory holder. She put on a record, and started slowly to dance by herself. The song was called ‘Jazz Baby, Be Mine’
–
I remembered it from the night they danced on the lawn. She was moving in time to it with her eyes shut, and was singing under her breath – she was more than a little drunk, I realised.

And so was I. I was sitting on the settee, watching her; I was wearing the beautiful French gown she’d helped me into, and the silk undergarments and stockings, and my insides shivered with forbidden excitement.

She’s got everything I want for myself
, I realised. She had knowledge and sophistication; she had money and independence – everything I could have desired in my wildest dreams. And she was talking about this Lord Ashley, the hated heir, as if he were part of her plans.

‘Lord Ashley,’ I repeated. ‘Why should Lord Ashley matter to you, my lady?’ As far as I could gather, her own income was secure; she came from an immensely wealthy family, which was why Lord Charlwood had married her. We all knew that was the way of things.

She sat beside me, and I remember her perfume was heavy and alluring. ‘Sweet little Sophie. Why should Lord Ashley matter to me, you ask? Because, quite simply, I’m going to marry him.’

Shock jolted through me. ‘But surely. Don’t you—’

She interrupted. ‘I know what you’re thinking.
Shouldn’t I still be grieving for my decent, ever-so-British husband? Really, he wasn’t over-bright, you know. And, to be honest, he wasn’t awfully good in the bedroom department.’

I blushed, and she laughed. ‘Oh, child, some men are worth bedding and some aren’t. Shall we say they can…
vary
in their attributes? Charlwood would have made a perfect old-style duke, I’d have provided him with the obligatory heir or two, but then, my God, I’d have escaped back to London, leaving him to his hunting, fishing and shooting.’

She put her arm round my shoulders, pulling me closer on the small settee. ‘But – Ash,’ she went on dreamily. ‘I want him all right.’

My mouth was dry.
Ash
. ‘You’ve met him, my lady?’

‘Oh, I met him briefly a few years ago, in London.’ Her lip curled as if at some private joke, and her smooth palm was suddenly cool and silky on my poor work-chapped hands. I clenched my fingers; she unfurled them and frowned. ‘Such pretty hands,’ she muttered. ‘Such pretty hands.’

I was silent, but I remember that my heart was pounding, and the pink dress suddenly felt too tight and too hot.

Then she said, as if breaking a spell, ‘Well. You’d better put on your hideous maid’s outfit again, little Sophie. And remember, I trust you not to breathe a single word about what I say to you, what I tell you. Do you understand?’

And so I became Lady Beatrice’s maid.

Margaret took me under her wing, her dark eyes gleaming whenever she looked at me, the scar on her cheek always giving her narrow face a slightly sinister appearance. ‘You and I, Sophie,’ she said softly, ‘we’re to share a bedroom.’

I felt a quick spasm of fear that must have shown, because she laughed a little then showed me the room. It led off my lady’s private quarters, and in it were two narrow iron beds, a dressing table and a shared wardrobe. That first night I hardly slept, but to my relief Margaret didn’t try to touch me again. It was as if she’d forgotten that we were intimate, but I could never forget – I jumped if her hand so much as brushed mine. Yet my blood surged with excitement, because I saw in all this my chance to leave the Hall at last.
London,
Lady Beatrice had said.
Some day you must come to London with me, Sophie.

Sometimes I saw Lady Beatrice watching me, when I was sewing in her sitting room or helping Margaret to adjust one of her beautiful gowns. I kept my eyes down, I spoke only when spoken to, but was aware of her, always. And I absorbed every detail of those exquisite garments; the styles and the adornments she chose.

Skirts were getting shorter every season for the fashionable; Lady Beatrice wore hers with the most exquisite silk stockings and, instead of heavy corsets, she dressed herself in the kind of undergarments she’d let me try on: soft chemises and brassieres made of silk or satin in shades of cream and light caramel. I adored her clothes. I believed that even I could be beautiful in such garments.

She said nothing more of Lord Ashley to me. Meanwhile other guests arrived and left, as was the way
in these grand houses; and in the early autumn the Duke hosted an important meeting, to which politicians from London and even New York came.

Mr Peters, in his haughty way, told the staff it was something to do with the huge war debt that Britain owed to the American government.

‘Why not meet in London?’ asked Betsey.

‘Because,’ said Mr Peters importantly, ‘these people realise that they will get far more privacy here at the Hall than they ever would in London.’

Indeed the guests had their privacy, and they were also entertained on a sumptuous scale. Every day there were outings, every night there were vast banquets of twenty courses or more, and I gathered from Margaret that Lady Beatrice was in great demand because of her beauty and her sharp wit. She was friendly with a pale-haired, pale-eyed man called Lord Sydhurst, whom the footmen detested because he was so extremely arrogant. ‘Lord Sydhurst,’ pronounced Robert, ‘likes to talk of his important work in the war. Which means, of course, that he sat on his backside in some government office in London and gave lots of orders.’