The Crooked Branch (15 page)

“Mrs. Spring would insist that you stay.” There was a new voice now, interrupting, as Alice Spring herself emerged into the garden.

She was stunning in a bold blue gown that she gathered up in one hand so it wouldn’t drape into Ginny’s vomit as she passed. As Alice Spring stepped between them, the two women both straightened their posture, and Ginny tried not to gape at the clean display of splendor. The price of that dress would’ve fed her family until the next harvest. That one gown could have saved them from hunger. Ginny had never seen anything so fine up close. It was embroidered along every seam with a delicate vine of violets. The color was vivid, saturated.

Alice Spring was beautiful, a linear and austere kind of beauty that might have been ordinary in London, but was almost exotic here in the west of Ireland. Her jaw, her nose, even her eyelashes, were impeccably straight. The stem of her neck was a perfect perpendicular to the angle of her shoulders. Her waist didn’t nip in, to the hourglass most women aspired to, and neither did it bulge outward, the way that happens after the accommodation of growing babies. Her figure was flat and smooth, like the simple lines of Springhill House. Even her hair hung in thick golden ropes that didn’t curve or tangle in the breeze. The feminine shapes of Ireland framed her; behind her, out beyond that lowest garden wall, the rowdy land swooped and bulged with raucous colors. The sunless Irish sky was bloated and churning above her. In the foreground, Alice Spring was precise, immaculate.

She stood with her back to the others now, and cocked one hand up to shield her eyes while she surveyed her sprawling parklands. Her waist and her rib cage were tidy inside her corset, and the bustle tumbled out theatrically behind her. Roisin looked flabbergasted, her mouth standing open. She was speechless.

“Did I hear you’re with child?” Alice Spring said brightly, twirling around to face Ginny.

Mrs. Spring had the strangest smile on her face. Ginny had heard stories of Alice Spring’s eccentricities ever since her arrival from London four summers ago—everyone for three parishes around had heard those stories. But hearing rumors was an entirely different business from staring them in the face. Ginny tried to stand away from the wall, but found she still needed the extra bit of support. She leaned back.

“Yes, mum,” she said. “But it won’t interfere with my ability to work.”

Ginny tried to ignore the absurdity of the scene. She tried to pretend that the three of them weren’t standing around a puddle of her vomit discussing her employment prospects.

“Of course it will, you silly girl,” Mrs. Spring responded. “But that’s to be expected, in your condition. We can work around it. I’m terribly fond of babies.”

Ginny nodded, but wasn’t sure how to respond. The housekeeper was still standing with her mouth open. Mrs. Spring strode out a few paces, then turned back again.

“Are you from this parish?” she asked.

“A neighboring one, Knockbooley,” Ginny answered. “This side of Westport.”

“And have you family? Aside from your absentee husband?”

Again, Ginny wasn’t sure how to reply. Her parents and Raymond’s were dead, and she was in the unusual position of having no siblings. Raymond’s only living brother was in New York. But did she mean children? Ginny hardly dared to breathe. Alice Spring was watching her like a chicken hawk. Ginny nodded again, almost imperceptibly.

“Visiting them will be out of the question,” Mrs. Spring said, and Ginny tried not to grimace. “We’re quite isolated here. I don’t like to mix with the outside. Fever! The fever is everywhere,” she whispered, clutching Ginny’s arm queerly for a moment.

Ginny looked down at the woman’s fine gloves gripping her sleeve. The sour smell of vomit clung in the air.

“Yes, mum,” Ginny stammered.

“Roisin will show you around. She’ll instruct you in your duties,” Mrs. Spring said, and then, turning to Roisin, added, “Close your mouth, you’re like a lighthouse.”

The housekeeper snapped her mouth shut.

“I think I’ll go for a promenade, get some fresh air,” Mrs. Spring said then, clasping her hands behind her back, allowing her blue skirts to billow beneath her like a sea.

Ginny held her breath. For the first time in weeks, she felt a faint thrill of hope, a reprieve. She might save her children. She still couldn’t believe what was happening, the strangeness of it. She was afraid she would awaken from this, to find her babies moaning of hunger. Or worse, to find them not moaning at all.

“Thank you, mum,” she said, bowing her head. “Thank you. I’ll work. You’ll be so glad of me.”

Mrs. Spring waved her off with one hand. “You can start by cleaning up that mess.” She gestured to the stink at their feet. “Roisin will get you cleaned up. And Roisin?”

“Yes, Mrs. Spring?”

Mrs. Spring gestured to Ginny’s red petticoat. “Get her something more appropriate to wear.”

•   •   •

First, Ginny scrubbed the sick off the flagstones, and then doused them with a pail of fresh water. The shabby afternoon sun was fading into a drippy mist, but the breeze was still clean enough to scour away the bad smell quick. Ginny was feeling a bit wobbly and worried, and entirely stunned by her luck. But she was determined to get straight to work, before Mrs. Spring could come to her senses and change her mind. She still had to figure out how she could get food to her children, fast.

Roisin gave her a jug of clean water and a towel, and then took her up three flights of stairs to a small attic room, with a bare mattress and a three-legged table where the stub of a candle remained. There were no windows in the little room, and the gables sloped down low overhead.

“You’ll sleep here, nights,” Roisin said, stepping inside so the sound of her brogues rapped loudly against the gappy floorboards. “But never worry that it’s a bit bare; you won’t spend much time here besides.”

Ginny gave a measured nod, careful not to betray the awful swell of tears she felt, looking at that lone, bare mattress. She tried not to think of the cozy little bed she shared with the girls at home, now that Raymond was gone. The sunny patch of clean straw for Michael in the same room, where they all slept together. There was a warm reassurance in all that shared breath in the nighttime. She couldn’t imagine how she would sleep here, alone, without the whispered dreams of her children all around her. Sometimes Maggie giggled in her sleep, even since the hunger, even now, when she never laughed in her waking life. Ginny took a deep breath and held it for a moment. The trick, she would learn, was to relieve her mind of the burdens of adjustment, and convince her body to take over that work instead.

“Get yourself washed,” Roisin was saying. She opened the glass trap on her lantern, and lifted the little candle stub from the table to light it. There was a black skirt and fresh white shirtwaist folded neatly at the end of the mattress. Roisin pointed to it. “Get dressed and come down to the kitchen, after. You can help me get the tea on.”

“Will I be able to find it?” Ginny asked. “The kitchen?”

“Back to the dining room—you know the door I came through?”

Ginny nodded.

“In that door and down the steps, in the basement.”

“Right.”

When the housekeeper closed the door behind her, Ginny sat down for a moment on the mattress. The flame from the candle threw close-dancing shadows overhead.

“I have to get food to them,” she whispered to herself, her face screwed up with anxiety. “Straightaway. Tonight.”

Thank God they had that small bit of food today, to keep them ticking over. Thank God that girl Anne had passed by the cottage and stopped. Ginny knelt for a moment, gave a few further prayers of thanks, and asked God to watch over her children and keep them safe. Then she stood, careful not to bump her head on the gables above, and unbuttoned her worn shirtwaist. The skin of her belly was stretched taut, and the bump was fairly pronounced when she was undressed. But not the size it should be.

Outside she could hear the wind scraping itself over the roof of Springhill House, and she reached a hand up to touch the cold wood overhead. She hoped her babies were warm enough at home, in the cottage. “Don’t worry, Maire,” she said. “Just hold it together.”

•   •   •

The kitchen at Springhill House was enormous, by far the biggest room Ginny had ever seen, outside of the parish church. Copper pots and ladles lined the walls, and still more hung from racks that were strung to the ceiling. Wooden storage bins stood along the walls, and atop these were countless little clay pots and small glass bottles with oils and dried herbs in them. There was a deep larder at the far end of the room, and two massive fireplaces along another wall that shared a chimney. One of the hearths was raised up off the floor, at waist level, so that you could cook in it without having to kneel down on the stone floor. The other was the ordinary kind, down low to the ground, but there was a great spit affixed above that hearth, and the girl who had answered the door earlier stood there now, turning a large leg of mutton on the spit. The chimneys were well vented, but the scent of roasting meat filled the hot, dark room. There were no windows, as the room was in the lowest level of Springhill House.

Roisin stood at a long, central worktable, kneading some dough in a trough, and she looked up at Ginny when she came in.

“You met Katie, before,” she said, gesturing at the girl beside the hearth.

“I did, at the door, but not properly. How’re ya, Katie.”

The girl kept turning the spit, and gazed back at Ginny without a word.

“She’s our scullery girl, a great helper. She’s been with us this five months, nearly.”

Roisin smiled at the meek, dark-haired girl, but Katie only turned her big, mournful eyes toward the mutton.

“Misses her family something awful,” Roisin whispered. “Her mother was my only sister. Passed away last autumn, and Katie came here to me. Her brothers and sisters all got shipped out to various places. She’s been a great addition to our little number. Haven’t you, Katie?”

The girl still didn’t answer, and Ginny tried not to scratch at her neck, but the uniform was terrible itchy.

“It’s just the starch, dear, you’ll get used to it.” Roisin glanced up again. “There are knives in the drawer just there, in the larger press. You may get started on those carrots.” She nodded at a large bunch of thick orange roots.

Ginny found a knife, and lifted up one of the carrots by its leafy stem. Roisin was watching her, still kneading the dough.

“Give it a quick scrub, use that bucket there”—she pointed with her chin—“and then just peel it, the same as you would a potato.”

“Right, so,” Ginny said. She had never seen a carrot before.

The three women cooked for the better part of two hours, and while they did, Ginny asked Roisin about the daily operation of the house. Although the estate had a substantial acreage and numerous outdoor staff, the house itself was rather on the small side, despite its flawless Georgian facade and pristine walled gardens. Ginny learned that, apart from herself and her two kitchen mates, it was only Murdoch and Mrs. Spring who were resident in the house. “A tidy little number,” was what Roisin called it. Ginny thought it odd. She had never heard of an estate with such a small house staff, and she wondered whether that would mean less work for their limited number, or more. Not that it mattered in the least. While she scrubbed and chopped, she moved her lips again, thanking God for her strange turn of excellent luck.

The feast that was laid on when they finished cooking would have served a village. Ginny thought of her hungry neighbors in Knockbooley, her skinny children at home. The amount of food in Springhill was perverse.

“Are the meals always this grand?” she asked Roisin, as they prepared the plates to be carried up to the dining room. They used little clay domes to keep the food warm.

“Only the evening meal,” Roisin said. “Breakfast is usually fairly simple, just toast, maybe a boiled egg, unless there’s guests. And Mrs. Spring likes to keep the supper in the daytime fairly light. A bit backwards if you ask me. But then who asked me?”

She was so pleasant, Roisin—so easygoing and lighthearted that you could nearly forget about the horrors going on outside the gates of Springhill House. You could nearly forget about that man who’d passed by the cottage in Knockbooley just this morning with his starved baby wrapped up in a sack for the graveyard. It was a sort of madness inside these walls, a determined forgetfulness. The length of the worktable was covered with food: boiled carrots with butter, roast mutton, fresh bread, and a mushroom soup with barley and fennel. Ginny wanted to scoff at the extravagance of it, but she couldn’t gauge Roisin yet, what her loyalties might be to Mrs. Spring. She couldn’t risk offense.

“It’s some feast,” she said instead, trying to sound admiring. “What about the staff?”

Roisin was loading the prepared plates onto a tray. Katie added a basket with the steaming bread wrapped up in a cloth.

“Well, as I said, it’s really only us in the house,” Roisin explained. “We usually serve Murdoch and Mrs. Spring together. They ordinarily dine together because Mrs. Spring doesn’t have anyone else for company, God bless her. And then it’s only the three of us, after. And the jarvie. The odd time he joins us for the evening meal instead of eating with those ruffians in the stables.”

“Jarvie?”

“Mrs. Spring’s driver,” Katie piped up. It was the first time she’d spoken, and a blush came to her cheek straightaway. He must be handsome, this jarvie.

“But what about the grounds staff?” Ginny asked.

“The head gardener’s wife cooks for the outdoor staff, there are so many of them,” Roisin explained. “She even has her own scullery girl, because there’s a whole army of gardeners and stable hands. I couldn’t even keep count of their number. But they eat much simpler than this, more like the tenant farmers. Just potatoes and eggs, mostly. Of course this year it’s different, with the praties gone. They’re having to make up the difference with grains and vegetables out of the house gardens. Mrs. Spring has spent a small fortune feeding them already, since the potato crop failed. I tell you, Murdoch is none too happy about it.”