Untitled (5 page)

   "Them's for you," Elsie says over her shoulder. "And keep it quiet on the stairs—Mr. Cartwright don't like being woken up too early." She jerks her head to the doorway and the stairwell beyond, and Jane understands: Mr. Cartwright sleeps in the room under the stairs. Maybe she's already woken him and will find out how bad his temper can be.

   With the box set on a chair, Jane lifts the lid: blacking and blacking brushes, emery paper, a dry leather. "What do I do about sweeping the carpets?" she says. "Is there a back garden where I can get grass?"

   Elsie swings her head towards her. She lets out a snort of laughter. "Garden? A garden? Not likely." She bends back to the fire.

   "Then what should I use to keep down the dust?"

   Elsie's cheeks fill out as she blows on the flames dancing through the kindling. "Tea leaves, like everyone else. Didn't you rinse out the used ones from yesterday before you went to bed?" She sighs, then lifts her chin towards the scullery. "Jar of them in there."

   As she steps away from the stove, Jane catches a movement at her feet, something small and quick scurrying across the stone floor. Beetles. Small ones like dark fingernails, fat ones as long as her fingers. She stamps at them and doesn't care if she crushes them or not as long as they are scared into running off. In their confusion they turn this way and that. One runs onto her boot and she kicks wildly, but who knows if it has been sent flying? In the dark it is impossible to tell. She shakes her skirts hard, for all the good it does—no beetle drops out, and now she cannot rid herself of the idea of it clinging amongst the folds.

   "Don't have beetles where you come from?" Elsie asks.

   "All over the floor like this? No."

   "Had them every place I've worked." She lets out a sharp laugh. "It doesn't mean nothing and the light gets rid of the bleeding things." She sniffs. "The thing is, they creep all over you in the night if you sleep down here. You learn quick to keep your mouth closed."

   Jane's disgust shows—the thought of it, quick legs and feelers reaching into her mouth, touching her tongue, testing the damp warmth as a place to hide.

   Elsie lets out another laugh. She pulls her skirts around her and crouches at the fire again. Tenderly, she blows on the flames. "Come on, now, come on, my chicks," she says, and feeds them some small pieces of tinder.

   In the scullery Jane finds tea leaves in a jar by the sink. The water she uses to rinse them is cold enough to sting her hands, but she keeps going, handful after handful, squeezing them out as hard as she can. Of course they're wet and stick together—what use will they be on the carpets? Maybe, she thinks, she'll have to manage without. Maybe the dust won't be that bad.

   Elsie has her hands held out to the fire. She calls over, "You'd better get a move on. Lizzie was never this late getting started."

   Lizzie. Until this moment Jane hasn't given much thought to the fact that she has taken over this situation from another girl—but of course she has, just as the young girl from the orphanage came to take over from her at the Saunderses'. She's only the most recent of a succession of maids whose bodies have made a hollow running down the center of the hard, narrow mattress upstairs, whose hands have rubbed dirt into the wooden handle of the housemaid's box as they lugged it from room to room. "And where did Lizzie start?"

   Elsie breathes hard into the fire. Jane watches the way her cheeks billow out, the shine of the light on her eyes. She's just about to ask her again when Elsie turns around. "With the dining room, seeing as the family'll be needing it for breakfast."

   Jane lifts the box. She should get going, up to the empty rooms upstairs to clean grates and lay new fires. She hesitates, though. She asks, "Is this a hard place?"

   "Hard? They're all hard." There's a twist to Elsie's mouth. "Isn't a mistress in the whole bleeding city who doesn't think she's paying you too much, never mind how hard you work. And there's not one of them'll let you work your way up. Can't bear it, can they? Can't bear the idea of paying you a bit more than before."

   "Is that why Lizzie left? To better herself ?"

   Elsie sits back on her heels. Into the half-moon of light around her creep the shiny bodies of beetles. "This place didn't use to be so bad. But that's all changed for now. Lizzie found that out."

   From somewhere close by comes the groan of hinges. Jane glances towards the doorway, but she doesn't step away, not yet. Instead she asks, "So she left?" She hopes she doesn't sound too eager to know. This is not her business—that's what Mrs. Saunders would have said.

   Elsie lets herself down on a chair and gives a grin that shows teeth all tilted this way and that. "Oh yeah," she says. "We've got two mistresses here. One of them never minded us as long as we did our work. But this new one—she says we're all wrong." She shakes her head. "Oh Lord yes, we need to be put right. Lizzie found that out. Mrs. Robert said she had a follower, and next thing we knew Lizzie had packed her box and was gone. Didn't even have time to eat the dinner set out for her."

   "That doesn't sound fair."

   "Fair? Isn't a matter of fair. Them upstairs do what they want. And as for the likes of us, we're not supposed to even look at a man. But
they
do, don't they? How else do they get themselves husbands? Have you thought about that?" She lets out a hoot of a laugh. She rocks herself forward, her grimy hands gripping her arms. "They get to have their fun, don't they? Making themselves pretty for the men, all those dresses and ribbons, and going to dances, and stealing kisses whenever they can like they—"

   "You're forgetting yourself," Jane says quietly, and she feels like Mrs. Saunders. It's exactly the sort of thing she used to say, all prim and proper, the meaning skewed, since what did it mean except that you'd forgotten to pretend to be someone you weren't?

   In the doorway stands Mrs. Johnson, a candle in her hand. "I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, Elsie. And you, Jane, you can't be standing around gossiping when there's upstairs to be getting on with. Get yourself up there or you'll still be at it when Mr. and Mrs. Robert come down."

   And so a morning of sweeping and blacking and starting fires begins, a morning that seems to go on forever. By the time Sarah fetches her down for breakfast the sky has lightened to a sullen grey and a miserable rain is falling. Already the bottom of her apron is filthy from when she stumbled in the coal cellar, and her hands are so black that she has to wash them three times before she can sit down to eat. Bread and butter, sugared tea. She is hungry, but her stomach is so tight she can barely eat. Instead the bread slips around her mouth, and the tea when she drinks it leaves a scorched trail down to her stomach. Across the table Sarah is watching her. "Drink it up," she says. "You've earned it." Then she gives a funny laugh, and Jane realizes how she means it: she's worked hard, all right, but tea and sugar are part of their wages. Not the good tea the family drinks—no, the sort of tea that leaves dust at the bottom of the cup.

   There's a knock at the door and Elsie pulls it open. It's the baker's boy with a basket on his arm. "All right, Mrs. J.?" he calls. "Got your bread and buns, nice and fresh." He stares at Jane from under his cap. "Got new help, have you then?"

   Mrs. Johnson swats at him with her cloth. "Any business of yours, is it?" she snaps. Elsie goes to carry the bread to the pantry, but Mrs Johnson clucks her tongue at her. "Put it on the table where I can see it. Haven't had a chance to write it down. You're going to mess up my accounts, you are."

   Even after Elsie has pushed the door closed a coldness lingers in small currents that curl around the room, making Jane shiver, swaying the laundry above her head. Mrs. Johnson glances up at the clock, then lifts the lid on a pan. Soon the air is thick and warm again and filled with the smell of hot kippers. "Get a move on," she tells Sarah. "They'll be down before long. It'll be your hard luck if you're not finished."

   Mr. Cartwright opens the door and glances in. "Let's be having you," he says.

   And so Sarah stands, adjusts her cap, smoothes her apron. Then the silver domes that have added a touch of brightness to the room are gone, and Jane is left staring at the dull gleam of copper pans hanging from the racks along the walls.

   At the stove Mrs. Johnson bangs her spoon against the edge of a pot. "You've got the bedrooms to do, love," she tells Jane.
Love
. Yet coming out of Mrs. Johnson's mouth it is a hard word, empty as a husk. "Up the stairs to the first floor. Quick now."

   From outside Jane hears the rattle of a carriage and the cries of a costermonger, though what he is selling she can't make out. The world outside is large as the sea, and that at least is something she is familiar with: the English Channel that can turn grey as stone, that can heave and crash and blur into the clouds or settle into a sharp line against the sky. As she brushes crumbs off her apron she remembers the smell of it, that mix of fish, brine, and wet sand. Her eyes prickle and her throat tightens. Stupid, she tells herself, to feel sad about leaving Teignton. She forces herself to remember the way Mrs. Saunders would call her up to her sitting room to read to her from a book called
The Servants' Friend,
would read from it as though she were in a pulpit, instructions on keeping oneself clean, and scorning pomps and vanities because they were the road to ruin. Jane would sit there, sewing and listening, glancing at the bottom of Mrs. Saunders's silk dress, the full skirt of it that must have taken yards and yards to make, at the slim waist she had thanks to a corset, at the lace she wore around her neck, at her hair coiled up all fancy on top of her head. It was all she could do not to jump out of her chair and throw the socks she was darning into Mrs. Saunders's face.

   Even the memory of such humiliation is not enough to stop her tears now. She gets up quickly and rushes out of the kitchen before Mrs. Johnson sees her lips trembling—if nothing else, the orphanage taught her not to show weakness, because others will use it against you, whether they mean to or not.

   Out of the kitchen and into the stairwell she hurries, straight into a woman carrying a tray. A spoon clatters onto the tiles, and she reaches for it. This woman is not Sarah, not Mrs. Johnson or Elsie. It's a large-nosed woman in a dark dress. Jane places the spoon back on the tray, says, "Excuse me, ma'am, I'm so sorry."

   The woman laughs, not all held-in like Mrs. Saunders but like a crow. "
'Ma'am'?
" she says. "
'Ma'am'?
That's a fine one." She goes cawing into the kitchen. "Oh, Mrs. Johnson," she calls, "did you hear that? I must be looking my best today, that's for sure."

   Jane doesn't wait to hear what follows. She lifts her skirts and runs up the stairs, tears cold against her face here where the air is chilly. Of course that wasn't the mistress—carrying a tray downstairs, and at this time of the morning—what was she thinking? She retrieves the box from where she left it on the landing and carries it upstairs, though it bumps, bumps, bumps against her knee and the weight of it pulls at her sore ribs. Up through the dim light she goes—for who uses this staircase except the servants?—out into the brighter light of the first floor, where she emerges, blinking. The door of one room has been left ajar. She pushes it open: a bedroom. She carries her box over to the fireplace, then ties on her rough apron over her cotton one to catch the worst of the filth. At least it is warm in here, though the fire looks sickly in the light coming through the windows. Sarah must have lit it early this morning to take the chill off the room—it's not for the likes of the family to have to get dressed in the cold.

   She flings open the windows to let in the air. She should get started on the bed, but instead here she stands, in a cold breeze peppery with the smoke of coal fires, her hands tucked under her arms as she looks out at the city. The rooftops have turned silver in the rain, and when she leans forward she can see down to the street. With both hands she holds onto the window frame to watch the gleaming tops of carriages sliding behind horses, and the dark circles of umbrellas floating beside them like strange, burnt flowers. Between them, in hats and coats and shawls, carrying baskets, holding children by the hand, move the figures of shabby people. People like her. The ones who work for a living. She has to correct herself—Reverend Saunders, Mrs. Saunders reminded her more than once, worked too. Though from what Jane saw when she brought coal or tea into his study, he spent a lot of time in an armchair by the fire with a book open on his knees. However, that didn't stop him from complaining when he sat down to dinner that he was weary to his bones.

   The city is all black carriages, black hats, black umbrellas, black coats, grey sky, grey horses and, on the other side of the street, tall pale walls with dark windows. At one doorstep a maid is on her knees scrubbing, at this time in the morning—people all about who can see her ankles, and the shape of her behind as she crouches. Thank goodness, Jane tells herself, that she doesn't have to scrub the doorstep here. That must be Elsie's job. Despite the sick feeling in her stomach at being so far from everything she knows, she realizes that she has bettered herself, that at least here there is someone below her in the household to whom the very worst jobs go.

   The windowsill is down by her knees, and she leans her weight on it. Her eyes follow the rooftops that roll away into the near distance like waves, spires showing amongst them like the masts of ships, before it all disappears into a pale obscurity of fog that even the rain has not washed away. So this is London. And one day soon— when she has her half day off—she will go out into its streets, and she will not be afraid, not in the daylight.

   For now she sighs and turns away to the bed. On one pillow a woman's nightgown is lying limp, and on the carpet on the other side, a man's has been dropped to the floor, as though he just pulled it over his head and let it fall. She drapes them both on chairs by the window to air, then tidies the dressing table. Pots of face cream left open, a hand mirror dirty with fingerprints, a brush tangled with hair. The woman she ran into downstairs cannot be this woman's lady's maid, not when there is so much left to be done.