Home for Christmas (17 page)

Quartermaster had warned her to watch her tongue. She was there to be of service to the family, not to gossip about them. ‘The atmosphere will improve once this is all past,’ he said.

His tone was confident, but Agnes had seen the worried look he’d exchanged with her mother.

The hearse pulled up outside the main door of Heathlands pulled by four black horses. Feathered plumes bobbed between their ears and black velvet cloth covered their flanks. The day was cold and their breath steamed in the cold air. A horse-drawn hearse, not a motor car, would convey the remains of Sir Avis Ravening to his final resting place.

Agnes thought he would have preferred a motor car. Rumour had it that his wife, now his widow, was responsible for the ostentatious show of mourning, the ornately carved vehicle with its etched glass and jet black japanning that gleamed like satin even on a dull day like today.

The older members of the family would travel to the church in the car, younger members and staff walking behind the hearse.

In the kitchen, Agnes watched her mother fussing nervously over the funeral luncheon. Sarah Stacey was pale faced and bleary eyed above the stiff blackness of her collar. Her hat was already on her head, bobbing around like a stuffed bird as she went about her duties. Between overseeing the kitchen and checking that the dining room sideboards were suitably groaning with food, she checked Agnes.

‘Oh, dear, oh dear. Why do you never look ladylike in a dress?’

Agnes rolled her eyes upwards and sighed. ‘I’m not made that way.’

‘Of course you are. You can look really pretty when you try.’

Agnes pouted. She didn’t want to try. Anyway, what was the point of looking pretty at a funeral? Sir Avis wasn’t there to see her and nobody else would care.

Her mother was embroiled in the battle of getting Agnes’s collar to lie flat when she spotted the locket and recalled that it had been a present from Sir Avis. He’d given it her for her seventh birthday.

‘Nothing that glitters,’ she said, her fingers already searching for the catch. ‘It’s not seemly.’

‘Sir Avis gave it me for my birthday. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me wearing it to his funeral,’ Agnes said tartly.

Sarah Stacey was about to insist, but changed her mind. If people saw the lovely locket with the Ravening coat of arms, they would know it meant something, especially if they heard that Sir Avis had given it to Agnes. A seed planted in those minds in which gossip had not yet taken hold. The locket would confirm that Agnes was indeed his daughter.

‘Why not indeed? It’s Sir Avis’s funeral and the locket was a present from him. That’s what we will tell those who notice it.’

As she turned away she muttered, ‘Let them see. Let them all see and know.’

Agnes felt a sense of foreboding. There had always been comments whispered behind cupped hands, always smug asides that hinted at the status of her birth, that the ‘husband’ her mother spoke about was a made-up person, someone unreal.

The kitchen was empty, but even so Sarah Stacey seemed to fill it with her buzzing around, with her need to be occupied so she wouldn’t break down, so her grief wouldn’t show.

Agnes felt her mother’s anguish and it saddened her.

Lighten her spirits. Make her think of something else. Make her retaliate about something less important.

‘I suppose I have to wear that dreadful hat. The black straw one with the elastic under the chin?’ she said, sounding as though the hat was some kind of torture device – which it was in a way.

She knew she had to wear the itchy, wide-brimmed hat, but she wanted to get back to mundane things, to have her mother back in the routine of complaining about Agnes’s unfeminine foibles.

The ploy might have worked if it hadn’t been for what happened next.

‘You know very well that you have to …’

The kitchen door swung open, instantly extinguishing weak squares of sunlight falling from the panes of the adjacent window.

A dark-eyed woman, her hair frosty white and fashionably coiffed, stood in the doorway. She was clad in a black dress scattered with jet beads that sparkled when she moved. The collar of her blouse was high and stiff, black like the collar on Sarah’s blouse. Rigid like the one worn by Queen Mary.

The hawk-faced Rudolfo Credenza stood at her shoulder, half a head taller. His eyes and brows were as dark as those of the woman and so was his hair.

All thoughts of hats and lockets flew from Agnes’s mind. She followed her mother’s lead, nodding at them and wishing them good morning.

‘You look quite lovely,’ she said to the woman, then bit her lip. It wasn’t what she’d been planning to say, but too late, it was out.

Never mind. It was still far superior to a plain old hello or good morning. All women liked being flattered didn’t they?

The woman’s eyes, black as the jet beads glinting on her dress, glowered in her direction before fixing on her mother.

Reading pure venom in that look, Agnes instinctively felt duty bound to protect her mother no matter what. If she’d been made of milder stuff, she might have shuddered or hid behind her mother. She did neither. She wanted to know who this woman was and what she’d read in that dreadful look.

‘Pack your things,
Mrs
Stacey. I want you and your child off the premises by noon,’ said the woman, her voice as cold as the wintry day.

Sarah Stacey swayed and reached for the edge of the table in order to keep herself upright. ‘But I have the food to deal with …’

The face and voice of the woman in black remained frosty. ‘Other members of the kitchen staff can deal with that. I want you out of here. Now!’

‘But the funeral … Surely you wouldn’t begrudge me paying my last respects?’ Sarah Stacey held one hand over her breast as though she were suddenly having trouble drawing breath.

‘Under the circumstances, I begrudge it very much! I want you gone from here. And take your brat with you.’

Her foreign accent, a mixture of Spanish and American English, served to make her tone even sharper.

Agnes’s mother shook her head in disbelief. ‘He wouldn’t have liked this. It isn’t right and you’ve no right … I will see Master Robert … He wouldn’t treat me like this.’

The woman in black stepped forward, her face flushed, her eyes fiery with hate. They faced each other, both scowling, each harbouring great resentment towards the other.

The woman in black tossed her head. Her nostrils flared widely, just like those of her brother.

‘Heathlands and the town house have passed to me. They will be mine as long as I live. They will pass to Master Robert on my death. In the meantime, I will do with them as I please; that includes dismissing and hiring what staff I please. You do not please me, Mrs Stacey. Go. Go now. And take your bastard child with you!’

‘How very informative,’ Agnes piped up suddenly. ‘You have just confirmed what I’d started to suspect, what clearly everyone around me has always known, that I was born out of wedlock and that Sir Avis was my father. I thank you for that! However, I will not have you speaking to my mother like that. It is totally uncalled for.’

The dark, furious eyes stared unblinking, the corners of the woman’s mouth twitching as she sought to regain the higher ground. Frightening as her presence was, Agnes did not flinch.

The twitching lips finally spoke. ‘Get out of my house, the pair of you. Get out now before I send for the constable and accuse you of stealing the silver. I’m sure you have stolen things over the years. My husband would not have noticed. He was a fool. Nothing but a fool who had this insane belief that everyone was equal. Well, I know they are not. A servant is a servant. A slut is a slut. Now get out!’

Mother and daughter moved closer today, an act defining their solidarity.

‘I am not a slut,’ muttered Sarah, gritting her teeth so hard they hurt.

‘And you are a harpy,’ yelled Agnes.

Lady Julieta’s eyebrows rose almost an inch. ‘Harpy? What is this harpy?’

Agnes took great delight in explaining. ‘A mythical creature with the face of a woman and the claws of a monster. And leather wings and a beak to tear a man’s heart out.’

Round eyed and blustering for breath, Lady Julieta exploded. ‘Get them out of here. And oversee their packing. I want everything accounted for. They will take nothing that isn’t theirs.’

With their luggage loaded on to the back of a cart, they headed for the railway station. Sarah’s request for a lift to the station was denied. Sarah was in no doubt that Lady Julieta was exacting revenge in any way she could, her treatment meant to put Sarah firmly back in the lower orders where she belonged.

Agnes and her mother trudged tiredly beside the cart, eyes downcast, their black-gloved hands clasped tightly in front of them.

Agnes sensed her mother’s tears, though there was no sound of sobbing, and no wailing that she didn’t know what would happen next.

She reached out and squeezed her mother’s arm.

‘We will survive. I can work. You will see how I can work.’

‘She won’t give us references. Can you believe that? That old bitch would sooner see us starve.’ Sarah felt she was choking with despair.

‘But Robert will. I have his address. He’ll give us a reference.’

She heard her mother blow her nose. There was quiet for a time as Sarah Stacey digested what she had said.

Finally, after mulling it over, she managed to speak.

‘It’s worth a try. Of course it might mean we end up in different households…’

‘That isn’t what I was thinking. I thought we could both live with Gran in Myrtle Street. And I wasn’t thinking of being a kitchen or parlour maid. I want to drive a car.’

Her mother shrugged herself down into her shoulders and said that Agnes would never get a job driving. ‘You’re a woman, Agnes. You will only get women’s work, looking after a household, laying tables, cleaning silver …’

Agnes was fierce in her response. ‘No. I will not do that. I will get a job driving, you just see if I don’t. Sir Avis said I could do it.’

Sarah covered her eyes with splayed fingers, rocking backwards and forwards as though that would console her. ‘He shouldn’t have told you all those things …’

Agnes sighed and transferred the bag she was carrying from one hand to the other. Her mother would grieve for some time, wishing she’d done things differently perhaps, even to wishing she’d married a respectable man who worked hard for a living and didn’t inflict modern ideas on his children.

‘Know your place,’ she’d often said to Agnes.

Agnes knew what it meant, and it bridled her sorely. The world of servants and masters was close to disappearing; Sir Avis had told her that. Her mother couldn’t see it. Much as Sarah had loved him, she had never really understood that Sir Avis had had foresight.

It was different for Agnes. They had talked together, just the two of them in the conservatory. He had been the biggest influence on her life and she would always remember him.

‘They all think our world of privilege and possessions, the British Empire and all that, will go on forever,’ he’d said to her. ‘They all think that women will never get the vote or own property in their own right or do all the things that men do. But it will all happen, my darling girl. So never be afraid of change, Agnes. Your life will be full of changes.’

Still thinking her own thoughts, Agnes fell behind a little as the cart swung between high, unclipped hedges, the road narrowest here before widening again.

The crispness of the morning air pinched at her cheeks as she regarded her mother’s rigid back, as tight as a corset holding everything in.

She’s gone through a lot for me, Agnes thought to herself. She never gave up on me, nor on Sir Avis. We were both dependent on her. Now she’s dependent on me. I have to get a job. I will get a job, but one of my choosing.

The road widened. Agnes caught up and slid her hand into that of her mother’s. ‘It’ll be all right, Mam. You see if it isn’t.’

Sarah Stacey swiped at her eyes.

‘Yes. Of course, it will. Everything will be fine.’

Eric Miller watched as Kate Mallory pulled off each garter and then her stockings. A true actress, who knew her audience well, she did it slowly, meticulously, bending this way then that, allowing him delicious views that even married men seldom had of their wives.

Soon she was dressed in nothing but stays and drawers; he helped her off with both before leading her to the bed. His bed.

‘And now,’ she said, her voice husky with promise as she lay full stretch beside him.

He had initially felt guilty at having another woman in the bed he’d once slept in with Emily and had suggested using the guest room.

‘Your servants will know,’ she said to him. ‘Do you want them to know?’

Of course he didn’t.

‘We’ll be careful,’ she said to him. ‘We’ll leave no evidence and I’ll be gone before dawn. Your servants will come back from their day off completely unaware that your … paramour …’ she said, clicking her tongue between her teeth, ‘was ever here.’

The arrangement was working out wonderfully well, thought Eric as he drew Kate into his arms. They only went to bed at his house on the servants’ day off and when Lydia was on duty at the hospital.

Kate had reawakened something in him that he’d thought was dead. Yes, she was an actress and his colleagues in the medical profession would no doubt condemn him as immoral to consort with her. They would suggest he give her up before society was scandalised and no longer sought his services.

Kate caught him grinning as he stroked her naked back, his chin resting on the top of her head.

‘What’s so amusing?’ she asked.

‘I was just considering how an old lady once said that she greatly appreciated my skills in the bedroom. She was actually referring to my bedside manner.’

Kate snuggled up to him, her lips brushing his chest, her eyes bright with desire.

‘I rather think she had it right in the first place. Your skills in bed are very good indeed!’

Sister Gerda leaned over the woman lying there so white and so still.

‘She collapsed on the steps outside. She also left a trail of blood behind her. I have detailed a porter to mop it up.’