Manor of Secrets (16 page)

“Now that’s where you’re wrong,” Janie said. “When word gets out that Lawrence seduced the daughter of The Manor, he will be barred from every decent house in England. He will be blacklisted.”

“We’ll make it, as long as we’re together.” But doubt had started to creep into Charlotte’s mind.

“Will you?” Janie asked quietly. “When my father died and my mother went back into service, I lived in a two-room cottage with my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, and seven cousins. My uncle worked the farm. My two older cousins were lookerers — shepherds on the Romney Marsh. And the rest of us just starved.”

“Don’t be overdramatic, Janie,” Charlotte sneered.

“One meal a day, Charlotte. Sometimes just a potato. Or cabbage soup. Is that what you want? And if you think you can handle it, is that what you want for him? Do you love him enough to make him starve for you?”

Did she?

“We wouldn’t …”

“You might,” Janie said quietly, and Charlotte saw tears in her eyes. “Is it really worth the risk?”

“But you are the risk taker, Janie. You’re the one who tried the Indian chili first. You leapt headfirst off of the ha-ha.”

“I broke my collarbone,” Janie said with a dry laugh. “And when it gets cold and damp, I can still feel it, because it didn’t set right. I couldn’t stop working, Charlotte, or I would lose my place. I would do everything to prevent my ever going back to the life I once lived.

“Which is why I
thought
about kissing Lawrence,” she went on, and Charlotte could see she told the truth. “But I never would. Life isn’t a romantic novel, and it’s certainly not poetry. Only stories have the happily-ever-after.”

Janie’s face hardened until it looked like she was wearing a mask.

“I’m not your friend, Charlotte. I am your maid. Your
servant
. And I will not be privy to your secrets.”

“Then go back to your kitchen,” Charlotte snapped.

Charlotte felt the room go still around her. Janie didn’t even breathe. But she dropped her hands and left the room, shutting the door silently behind her.

G
uilt sat heavily on Janie’s chest, slowing her down and cramping her fingers. All through the morning, it threatened to consume her. Through the boiling kettle and the too-sticky porridge, through the burned scones and bitter coffee and complaints. Only the sharp chiming of the bells roused her from her stupor.

Upstairs and downstairs were divided. By rules and bells and baize-covered doors. Maybe what she’d said was true — maybe she and Charlotte couldn’t be friends. But that didn’t mean she didn’t care.

Lawrence could lose his job for kissing Charlotte. But Charlotte could lose her social standing. Her reputation. The very life she led.

Janie couldn’t let that happen.

When she saw Lawrence enter the butler’s pantry alone, she slipped in after him.

“What do you think you’re playing at?” Janie hissed. “With Lady Charlotte?”

Lawrence wouldn’t look at her. He tried to get around her, but she didn’t move.

“Nothing, Janie.” Lawrence offered her one of his disarming smiles, and she wanted to slap it off his face.

“Charlotte doesn’t think it’s nothing.”

“Lady
Charlotte was just —”

“Just what, Lawrence? Just in your way? Just trying to
kiss
you?”

The smile disappeared, and his eyes glittered. “You certainly don’t beat around the bush, Janie.”

“I see no reason to! You’re ruining her.”

A ghost of the smile returned. “Calm down.”

Lawrence’s condescending tone made Janie livid. “If anyone else had seen that. Lady Diane. Miss Caldwell. Lord Broadhurst. All of Charlotte’s chances would be bankrupted. She’d never marry.”

Lawrence raised an eyebrow. “Marriage to the aristocracy isn’t the ultimate goal.”

“It is for them!” Janie flung her hand up to indicate the upper floors of The Manor. “It’s all they’ve got, Lawrence. If
she doesn’t marry, what does she have left? She’s not strong and she’s not brave, and she couldn’t survive in the outside world.”

The guilt returned like a kick in the chest because Janie wasn’t telling the truth. Charlotte ate that chili without sputtering or spewing. Charlotte wrote her life into her stories, making it different from what it was. She did have a hidden strength. She did have something more. Something not visible in the pale skin and innocent hazel eyes.

“She’s rich,” Lawrence said. “She’ll be fine.”

“What about you?” Janie said, grasping. “You’re jeopardizing your position here. Your whole career.”

That got his attention. For the first time, he looked a little less than confident. So Janie pushed her advantage.

“You think there’s no blacklist for servants? We all know who
not
to work for. We have our own network —
Oh, don’t work for Lord Doolally because he never pays wages —
and Lord D suddenly has no staff. You think it doesn’t work the other way?”

“You don’t know everything,” Lawrence said. He deftly stepped to the side to get around her, but Janie followed him. Dogging him.

“I know everything there is to know about this manor and the people who live in it,” Janie said.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Janie.” Lawrence stopped and
finally looked at her, his mouth straightening into a firm line. “There’s more to people than what you see on the surface.”

Janie remembered what she had thought of Charlotte just a few days before. Spoiled. Cosseted. Ready to do whatever was expected.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said quietly.

“Things are changing, Janie. It’s inevitable.” Lawrence offered one last smile. She no longer found it charming. “Don’t get left behind.”

After he left, Janie leaned against the wall beneath the bells. She wondered if the world could change enough for two people to kiss without dire consequences. A world where a lady could be a writer or a king could marry a commoner. Where stepping out of place wouldn’t get you knocked down.

By midmorning, the basement was full of dust and guns and leather trunks crammed with enough dresses to change four or five times a day. And servants. Party guests required maids and valets and coachmen.

All the talk was of the ball. The
servants’
ball.

“Are we all invited?” Lord Buckden’s valet asked, leaning against the kitchen doorjamb. His thick Highland brogue made him difficult to understand. But at least he was talking
to her. Unlike The Manor staff. Tess had left the first batch of bread to burn. And Mollie had taken to leaving pots caked with food in the middle of Janie’s work area.

“I believe so,” Janie said, mixing fat into flour for the pie dough. “We’ve never had a servants’ ball before.”

The way everyone was acting toward her, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go.

Janie surveyed the mess in the kitchen and sighed.

“Only a few more hours, sweeting,” Mrs. Seward said, bustling in past the now-retreating valet. “The servants will have their supper early, and we can clean up before the ball. I’ll have Mollie help.”

“You think I’m trying to get out of my work now, too?” Janie snapped.

“I just thought you might be tired.” Mrs. Seward went to the other side of the table, where a piece of beef waited to be filleted.

“Who cares if I’m tired?” Janie said. “You’re tired. Mollie’s tired. The housemaids are tired. I’m not trying to get out of anything, and I’m certainly not saying I’m better than anyone else.”

“Has someone been implying this?”

The kitchen — and its staff — was Mrs. Seward’s domain. But when the last kitchen maid got caught with the chauffeur,
it was Mrs. Griffiths who did the sacking. Janie’s mother would have given the girl another chance. And Mrs. Griffiths knew it. Which was why the housekeeper had taken Janie into her sitting room alone.

And why Janie couldn’t get her mother involved.

“I can handle it.”

“You can’t be in two places at once,” her mother said. “The entire place is overrun with the shooting party and the ball, and there you are traipsing upstairs to do hair as if you were a little girl with her dolls.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.” Janie felt her throat begin to close and turned away, swiping ineffectually at the flour Tess had spilled across the floor. “I know where I belong. In this kitchen.”

“Maybe you do,” Mrs. Seward said, her thin, sharp knife moving deftly, swiftly, but never touching her fingers. “Like I do. Just maybe not
this
kitchen.”

Janie’s throat felt too thick to reply. Her mother was planning to leave. Janie looked around. At the scarred table. The brick floor, worn smooth around the stove where someone almost always stood — and always had — stirring and frying and cooking. At the gleaming copper pots hanging from their pegs. At the still-dirty ones under the sink. At the flour still on the floor.

She’d always assumed she belonged here. She could feel it in her bones. But did she deserve better? Is that what her mother was talking about?

The servants’ entrance thumped open, and footsteps clattered on the brick floor of the kitchen corridor.

It sounded like a herd of wild animals coming into the house.

Janie looked up and met her mother’s eye. Mrs. Seward covered the beef with a plate and came around the table to kiss her on the forehead.

“You belong wherever your heart is,” she said, and stepped into the hall and was swallowed up by the chaos.

Janie turned out the dough for the pies, filling each one with meat and gravy. The noise from the corridor rose to near-deafening proportions as the new staff called out questions about locked cases and where to unpack and if there was any shoe black available. Janie couldn’t imagine being in the middle of it without her mother. Without her support. Without that kiss on her forehead.

She was decorating the tops of each pie with leaves of pastry when Tess stomped into the kitchen and slammed an ice-cream churn in front of her on the floor.

“I don’t have time for this,” Tess said, her face red, her expression indignant.

Janie went back to the pastry leaves. “It’s too hot for ices.”

“Not according to Lady Diane. If there’s ice in the ice-house, ice cream can be made!”

Tess walked out, her back straight with arrogance. Janie looked down at the can of cream, at the condensation that gathered on the metal lid. The chunks of ice in the bucket were melting rapidly.

“Blast.”

Janie put the pies in the oven and took the ice-cream churn to the larder, where at least it was marginally cooler. Both for the ice cream and herself.

She faced the wood block where the pheasants were plucked. And the rack where the strings of birds would hang up over it. Thank goodness the shooting hadn’t begun, or Mollie would be in here with her, plucking the birds. She took a deep breath to suppress the tears before they overwhelmed her. She knelt on the floor to crank the ice cream.

She didn’t turn when she heard footsteps behind her.

“Janie,” Harry said, coming into the room and looking into the wooden cupboards. “I’m to take some eggs to Mr. Foyle; he’s supposed to make some kind of cocktail that Lord Buckden has asked for. Something ridiculous he drinks at his club that’s made with raw eggs, syrup, and brandy. Do you know where they — Janie? Are you all right?”

Janie refused to look at him.

“The eggs are over there in the corner,” she said. “They got moved to make room for the birds.”

Harry squatted down next to where she struggled to turn the arm of the ice-cream churn.

“Let me do that.”

“You have your own job to do.”

Janie pushed again at the churn, and it barely moved.

“Cocktail hour isn’t until six,” Harry said, putting his hand on hers. “Here, you sit on the churn and I’ll turn the handle.”

Janie turned her back to him to sit on the top of the churn. She gathered up her skirts around her and buried her face in them. She felt the churn move a little and widened her stance to keep it from sliding across the floor. The metal can of ice cream creaked and began to spin slowly and sporadically.

“Isn’t this almost done?” Harry panted.