Justine Elyot (5 page)

‘Perfectly, Mrs Munn,’ said Edie, feeling like a recalcitrant schoolgirl. No Latin prose had ever been as challenging as the mysteries of cleaning and serving, though.

* * *

‘Ted likes you,’ said Jenny, kneeling down beside Edie to sweep the first of a great many fireplaces free of ashes.

‘Oh, he’s a ladies’ man, though, isn’t he? I bet he’s like that with all the girls.’

‘Not all of them,’ Jenny insisted. ‘A lot of the girls are after him, though. He does wear that uniform well.’ She let out a tiny sigh.

‘Oh, Jenny, do you …?’ She left the question delicately poised.

‘It’s a silly daydream, that’s all it is. Plain little Jenny Wrens don’t land fellows like that. I’ll live and die in this place, I don’t doubt.’

‘Oh, don’t say that.’ But Edie knew Jenny was right. Men were scarce these days and those who remained were keenly sought after.

‘I suppose Ted fought in the war?’

‘Yes, he was an infantryman. Fought in the trenches, he did. He won’t never talk about it though. Says he’d rather forget all about it.’

‘And what about … the Deverell sons?’ Edie’s heart stepped up its pace at the mere mention of the name. Damn Charles Deverell and his insidious ways. ‘Did they go to the Front?’

‘Yes, both of them. I’ve told you, haven’t I, about poor Sir Thomas and his shrapnel wound. Very unlucky. Mind you, I suppose he’s still alive, at least.’

Edie wanted to ask after Charles, but she did not trust herself to speak his name without putting in some nuance of tone that might give her away. Jenny already suspected her of a pash on him. Was she right? No, she could not be right. The man was a perfect stranger, and not a very nice one at that.

Instead, they chatted about inconsequential things while grates were black-leaded and floors swept.

They were working in the morning room, Edie on her knees, making heavy work of polishing the fender, when their joint rendition of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ was silenced by the entrance of a family member.

‘No, do continue,’ Charles said, sinking into a chair and unfolding a newspaper. ‘A little music while I read would be rather congenial, as it happens.’

Edie’s fingers clenched around the cloth, her arm too stiff to move for a moment or two. She did not dare move, knowing that every inch of her skin from the tips of her ears downwards was burning bright. She willed Jenny to ignore her.

‘How’s our new girl?’ he asked softly. ‘Getting into the swing of things?’

Edie made no reply, and Charles did not pursue the conversation. For a deeply uncomfortable half-hour there was no sound but the rustling of newspaper and the scrubbing of iron. She was mortifyingly aware of her bottom sticking out in its tight black skirt, swaying from side to side as she worked. She felt sure that Charles Deverell was watching it. Her skin prickled, an itch at the back of her neck. And something else too – a damp heat between her thighs that she wished would go away.

A masculine cough, the click of a lighter, then the smell of cigarette smoke wafting over her. He wanted her to be aware of him. With rising excitement she wondered, what would happen if Jenny was not in the room?

Would he come over to her, crouch down beside her, tell her he knew that she thought of him, put his hand on her spine and rub it up and down, moving ever lower until he reached her bottom …

This was not a profitable line of speculation. She shut it down and forced herself to concentrate on conferring a high shine upon the poker and the shovel instead.

The only person to come and crouch beside her was Jenny.

‘Next room,’ she whispered. ‘Grate’s looking lovely, too, that’s a nice job you’ve done.’

Only because she had displaced all her thoughts about Charles into hard work, Edie realised. The next task might not absorb her so thoroughly.

She picked up her trug and tried to walk primly out of the room without looking at the indolent Lord in his chair of state, but at the last minute she flicked him a sideways glance and saw that he was watching her.

She lifted her chin higher and stared ahead.

‘Dinner at eight again? I’ll look forward to it,’ he drawled as she hurried through the door.

‘What was all that? Why are you flirting with him?’ hissed Jenny, once they had attained the freedom of the corridor.

‘Flirting with him! I’m doing no such thing. I didn’t even look at him, didn’t even answer his question.’

‘To him, that’s flirting. The more you run, the harder he chases. The worst thing you can do is ignore him.’

‘But that makes no sense. Are you saying that I should, should … make sheep’s eyes at him and then he’ll lose interest and pursue some other poor girl? Perhaps I should offer myself to him. Is that what I should do?’

Her agitation seemed to quell Jenny’s suspicions, but she did not sound entirely convinced when she said, ‘I’m sorry. You weren’t flirting, I know that. But I’d make sure I was never alone in a room with him if I was you.’

He ruins girls. He could ruin me.

Carrie, the indisposed housemaid, was better and so Edie was not called upon to serve the family at dinner that night.

Instead she sat in the kitchen with the cook, the scullery maids and various low-level male staff, drifting in and out of their conversation while she stitched at a rent she had made in her sleeve.

‘You’re accident-prone, you, aren’t yer?’ remarked Mrs Fingall, tiring of some talk about how Lady Mary had reacted to a mail delivery that morning.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Edie. ‘I’m fearfully clumsy. Have been from a child.’

‘Perhaps service ain’t for you,’ suggested the cook. ‘All that precious china up there. Clumsy people ought to keep away from it. Gawd, ain’t you never sewed before? You’re making a hash of that too. Here, let me.’

She sat beside Edie and took over the operation, her sausage fingers surprisingly deft with the needle.

‘Little bird tells me,’ she said in a low voice once the youngsters had started joshing each other about sweethearts, ‘that one or two fellas round here is sweet on you.’

‘Oh, no,’ protested Edie, wanting to get up and run away, but trapped by the thread that Mrs Fingall held taut.

‘I’m sure you’ve been warned about our Sir Charlie,’ she carried on. ‘So I won’t repeat what’s already been said. But Ted’s a lovely lad. A real prize. Do you think you could look kindly on him?’

Put on the spot, Edie could not pluck one single word from the air.

She swallowed and shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again.

‘Oh, I am not here for … for that kind of thing,’ she whispered.

‘Of course not. And quite right too. Just, you know, if you ever was so inclined … you could do a lot worse.’ She winked.

A bell rang and Edie glanced up at the complicated system of pulleys and levers that hung on the far wall.

‘Sir Thomas for you, Giles,’ Mrs Fingall called out.

The footman leapt up from the table and dashed away.

‘I’d get to my bed if I were you, dear,’ said Mrs Fingall, cutting the thread with her teeth and tying a final knot. ‘They’ll be finished at dinner soon and they won’t need you for anything more.’

‘Yes, I think I will,’ said Edie, eager for some solitude.

Alone in the attic, she looked out of the window and thought about how far she was from home, in more senses than the strictly geographic. She had never realised how easy her life was, nor how free she had been compared to most women. And not just the servants either. Lady Mary was discontented, straining against the yoke of her father’s expectations for her. Most women lived in prison. She had heard it said but had never understood it as fully as she did now.

She sat on the bed, pulled her knees up to her chin and thought of Sir Charles. It was different for him. He could do as he liked and nobody called him to account. It made her angry, made her want to seek him out and slap his face.

But, of course, that was impossible.

What about Lady Deverell? Was she the most imprisoned of all, forced to play a role for the rest of her life, even though she had fled the stage? If only she could ask her. If only things could be simple.

The thunder of feet on the back stairs drove her to undress quickly and slip into bed, where she feigned sleep before she could be questioned on anything further.

‘Sir Charles wants her,’ she heard Jenny say.

‘Do you think she’ll fall for him?’

‘They all do, don’t they?’

A sigh.

‘If only he’d fall back,’ said Verity. ‘But he never does.’

‘Surely Lord Deverell’d kick him out if he got another girl in the family way.’

‘Maybe. Remember how it was when they found out about Susie?’

There was a collective shudder.

‘You could hear the shouting right across the lawns.’

They fell silent then and Edie waited, curled up on her side, until each body creaked into its bed and the candle was snuffed.

As the girls drifted into sleep, Edie thought back to Mrs Fingall’s words at the trestle table. Could she think of looking kindly on Ted?

Ted.

It would not do to be mooning over a chauffeur. He was lovely, of course, but no doubt he was the same with all the girls. He was a natural flirt, that was all.

Besides, there was to be none of this lovey-dovey frippery for Edie Crossland. She had not spent the last seven years wedded to the Women’s Suffrage movement to be swept off her feet by a fellow in a peaked cap who dropped his aitches. It was inconceivable.

No, he was a helpful friend, and that was as much as he could be. Love was the silly trap into which so many good women fell. It was not going to catch her.

And why was sleep staying so stubbornly away tonight? An hour ago, as she toiled up the back staircase, she had been fantasising about her old bed with its pile of pillows and patchwork throw. Every limb ached, her feet were blistered and her eyelids were gritty with the day’s exertion, and yet her mind would not let her be.

It persisted in going back over the emotions of the last forty-eight hours, so that she swirled in a vortex of fear, exhilaration, curiosity, humiliation, attraction.

The narrow bed was less than comfortable, and the air of the high-up room was thick and humid. She needed to clear her head.

Slippers and dressing gown on, she stole out of the stifling dormitory and down the uncarpeted back stairs, as quietly as she could. At first, she had no notion of where she might wander, but it soon occurred to her that she could find Lady Deverell’s room and stand, albeit divided by the door, in the close presence of that fascinating woman.

She had had the opportunity to drink her in at yesterday’s dinner, but today had brought disappointingly few glimpses of the red-haired beauty. She had watched her cross the lawn in her riding habit, head low and stride determined. How much better, though, to perhaps see her, through a keyhole, in repose. The mask she wore every day would be stripped away and she would see the woman behind it, unadorned and unshielded.

Edie slunk on silent feet along the confusing maze of corridors she had negotiated earlier in the day, trying to remember which had led where.

A wrong turn took her to the library, and she was at once thrilled and soothed by its familiar bookish smell, naturally drawn to the shelves where she squinted to make out the gold lettering on the spines. But the night was too cloudy and the light from the arched stained glass windows too dim as a consequence.

There would be no reading in here tonight.

She found at length the right staircase and the corresponding corridor and walked along it swiftly, taking no notice of portraits and busts that might otherwise interest her, until she was in the wing that housed Lady Deverell’s private rooms.

Did she sleep with Lord Deverell? He had a private bedroom and dressing room at the far end of the same corridor. She knew this was a usual arrangement in the grandest of the old family houses, but it struck her as strange. Did they make appointments for love? Or were the separate rooms a mere formality, an age-old habit they did not possess the modernist urge to break?

Here was her door.

And, oh.

What were these noises coming from behind that door? Surely Lord Deverell was in London? He must have returned straight after the gathering, Ted driving him through the night back to his wife’s side. He must be in the grip of passion.

Edie put her hands to her furiously heating cheeks, guilt-ridden at her snooping now. She should not be here. She should go back to bed immediately.

And yet she found she could not come away from the luxurious moans and sighs that poured through the keyhole.

The act of love. That thing she despised and feared, and yet was fascinated by. She had read Freud and found it terrifying, throwing the book aside in repulsion. No man would make her want to do such a thing.

But what
was
such a thing? She had never seen it, and reading about things was not always the same, loth as she was to admit the treacherous fact.

Lord Deverell, she knew, was a man nearing his sixties, while his new wife was barely forty. Did she desire him, truly? Surely everybody knew it was a transaction – his wealth and status for her fleshly charms and charismatic glamour.

But
love
?

Perhaps it was. And, if so, what did love look like? She bent to the keyhole, all the while in a kind of horrified trance, her body driving her towards actions of which, in the light of day, she would strongly disapprove.

At first, she saw that the room was in dim light, the gasoliers on the wall turned down low. The huge four-poster bed could be seen only from an angle that hid the heads of the occupants, but she could see the lower portion, and two pairs of feet protruding from the covers. The larger pair lay between the smaller, and the sheets and counterpane rose up from them into an arch – an arch that moved, quite vigorously and in a rhythmic pattern that matched the low grunts emitting from the unseen upper half.

If this was love, it seemed awfully brutal, thought Edie with dismay, and really little more than animalistic. The creak-creak-creak of the bed springs masked some words being spoken, but then a female voice grew louder and higher, and they became distinct.