A Pearl for My Mistress
‘It’s … very impressive, my lady,’ she said at last.
‘It certainly is.’ Lady Lucy grinned again, and Hester felt as if she had seen through her clumsy politeness clearly, as if the truth was written on Hester’s cheeks. Surprisingly, this was not a discomforting feeling; her mistress’s smile held no maliciousness.
Or, perhaps, it was all merely a fruit of Hester’s overanxious imagination.
She ran through her next duties as quickly and efficiently as possible. While Lady Lucy dedicated her full attention to the breakfast tray, Hester picked up the clothes she had worn on the previous evening and set about preparing her morning bath. With soothing timeliness, it was ready just in time as the lady finished her tea. So far, Lady Lucy looked friendly; however, making her mistress wait was the last thing Hester wanted to do on her first day.
Lady Lucy climbed out of bed vigorously, as if the duvet had held her captive. She wore a long, thick nightgown, which could have belonged to her Victorian grandmother (and, in all probability, it did). Hester wondered if it truly saved her during the cold Northern nights; after all, even now she could feel the chilly draughts seeping into the room through a thousand unseen cracks.
The lady’s skin was still breathing with the warm languor of the bath, while Hester fastened the hooks of her blue morning dress. An ardent blush still bloomed on her cheeks.
Lady Lucy probably blushed very easily, Hester reflected. After all, her skin was so fair; her veins could have been painted in vivid blue upon the ivory surface of her wrists. Her fingers were so thin that Hester found herself catching her breath in fear.
What if she had an accident? They would be so easy, so painfully easy to break …
Some ladies, Hester had heard, enjoyed the daily ritual of having their hair brushed and arranged. However, her new mistress clearly wasn’t counted among them. She frowned into the mirror, turned her head in discontent, and drummed her fingers on the table tirelessly, as if performing some unnerving melody.
‘Have you arrived from far away?’ she finally asked, clearly aiming to fill some time.
‘No, my lady.’
The name of her hometown was unlikely to tell Lady Lucy anything; however, she made a courteous nod of recognition upon hearing it.
‘To be honest, I imagined you to have come from some distant clime,’ she noted. ‘You have such lovely olive skin, after all. Most local girls look as if they’ve spent their youth and childhood in Château d’If.’
‘Well, some of my ancestors might have come from those distant climes,’ Hester replied, her tone tinted by pleasure at the compliment. ‘There is even one family story … Although, strictly speaking, it’s more of a family legend.’
She stopped, as if her speech had been cut away with a knife.
You are not bantering with your friends now. She isn’t interested in your family legends. Or stories, for that matter.
She must remember; she must mould herself into this new role.
‘Do tell!’ Lady Lucy’s blue eyes, lucid and unnervingly clear, now shone with curiosity. She looked at Hester, unaware of her painful thoughts. ‘I love legends.’
As she moved her hands, Hester couldn’t help but notice a scar cutting across the lady’s right palm. It resembled an ugly stitch, made by an indifferent apprentice upon transparent white satin.
‘Well …’ Hester lowered her eyes, continuing to brush her mistress’s fine hair. The strands flew between her fingers, like water. ‘It says that my family actually came here from Spain many centuries ago, fleeing the wrath of Queen Isabella. They were Moors, I mean. From Granada,’ she hurried to explain, belatedly. ‘Isabella captured it …’
‘I am familiar with the events of the Reconquista, thank you.’ Lady Lucy’s voice grew harsher for a second, before melting into genteel neutrality once again. ‘It is quite fascinating. Do you believe it, Blake?’
Hester paused. Was she supposed to tell the truth or to play along with her lady’s evident wanderlust?
Of course, she must nod and agree; it would have been obvious for any servant, Mrs Mullet wouldn’t even think …
‘To be honest, my lady, I don’t. I am not sure how these things work; but, I think, if my ancestors came here in the fifteenth century and married the locals ever since, there wouldn’t be any traces left by now. Not even the olive skin.’
It was still only a half-truth. Hester didn’t trust the exact facts of the story, of course; she wasn’t that fanciful, whatever her mother might say. However, the lure and enigma of the legend never failed to capture her imagination. Ever since she had heard it for the first time, she was entranced by these visions of the sun-soaked lands. She closed her eyes, daydreaming in the warmer afternoons, and saw the bright shawls of dark-eyed beauties, the orange trees blooming in March.
Hester was still unsure about this latter image, though. She suspected it to be at least an embellishment. How could anything bloom in March, let alone oranges?
Her hometown was a practical place, built around shipyards and factories. Lady Lucy’s Victorian grandmother must have seen it rising. It was sturdy; it was sensible; it was part of the backbone of the industrial empire. It wasn’t a gloomy place, either; there were teashops, and Saturday dances, and even a park. But no oranges or lemons bloomed there in March. Or in any other months, for that matter.
‘Still, it’s a splendid story,’ Lady Lucy concluded, as if answering her thoughts. ‘And, as I’ve said, I love legends. Speaking of which, we have quite a good selection in the library. Have you already been there?’
‘I can use the library?’ Hester blinked.
‘Of course you can.’ The young woman turned and stared at her, slightly frowning. ‘All upper servants can. Didn’t Mrs Mullet tell you?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ Hester confessed.
She said it as quietly as she could, as if trying to drown the evidence that it was her first time in service, and she only knew the barest of rules.
‘Well, then I am telling you. You can read however much you want there.’
A weight seemed to lift from Hester’s shoulders. She had already imagined the trouble of carving out time for trips to the nearest town’s library; or, even worse, the nightmare of living without any new books at all.
‘Thank you, my lady,’ was all she could say. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘You are welcome. Now …’ Lady Lucy touched her newly arranged curls ‘… I think that’s quite sufficient. I wouldn’t dare keep you here for too long; I imagine you have plenty of duties to attend to.’ Her tone and smile were as courteous as they could be; however, from her eyes’ expression, she could just as well have been a military officer saying Dismissed. ‘As do I.’
***
Lucy was a child of winter.
She was born in the crispy frost of January, in the deafening silence of snow-covered countryside.
She was born in the early years of the war, which later passed into the realm of legends. On the Continent, emperors fought with kings, and the fields were soaked with blood. Here, the lights went out, and the country stood in the hushed silence of terror.
Lucy was the first child of a young, sweet, impossibly proper couple – as proper as they came in those turbulent days. She was really supposed to be a boy: a sunny heir, the first of more to come, the harbinger of hope. There would have been joyful celebrations; there would have been tables laid out for tenants. Maids in pristine aprons would have patiently queued to receive a golden sovereign each from their benevolent master.
As it was, there were only veiled consolations.
‘Don’t worry,’ the well-wishers must have said. ‘It will all turn out properly next time.’
No one recounted such words to Lucy, of course, but it was easy enough to imagine them. They appeared in her mind so readily, as if they were lines in an already written novel, just waiting to be called to light. Ordering life in the format of a novel made it so much easier for her to understand.
Lucy was also, at least, supposed to be cheerful and hearty, never bothering anyone with fevers or complaints. She was supposed to be stout and perfectly healthy, a lover of horses and hunting, her cheeks bright as apples. Instead, she turned out to be weak and pale, rarely getting through spring without a flu. Later, she learnt to apologize for it.
And the next time never came. Little Lucy didn’t, of course, know the word ‘miscarriage’ – she was shielded from this improper knowledge as she was from many others. But, as she grew and found out, the strange, unnamed tragedies of her childhood suddenly blossomed with blood and meaning.
She was, in other words, a walking spectre of happiness that never came. She was a living reminder of a failure. She was the failure incarnate.
There was a way to atone for being a failure, and that was to become perfection.
After all, diamonds could be cut and polished. Why not people?
The polishing came in many ways. There were books she wasn’t supposed to read (at least, if she didn’t want them to end up in the fireplace). There was a list of people she could correspond with (all related and female), provided, of course, that her letters were dutifully submitted for inspection. There were things she was never supposed to ask about.
There was a catch, though: namely, that Lucy wasn’t a diamond, and thus didn’t patiently sit on a pillow and wait for the tools to cut her. She learnt to evade the questions and hide the books, to invent codes for letters, to guess the moods, to coax the smiles she wanted and sometimes the permissions she needed. She learnt to navigate the labyrinth of traps (which was hard, as their positions changed every time) and to tread on eggshells.
This latter skill was vital for every inhabitant of the house, from Her Ladyship to her housemaid. After all, her father’s rages were the stuff of legends. They were always called that: rages, with a tint of awe. Never tantrums or, God forbid, hysterics. These words were reserved for Lucy herself, for the times she raised her voice.
She learnt a lot of things, and she went through life with the apologetic air of someone who wasn’t really supposed to exist.
At least, so it was until the last year. Until Lucy learnt with growing surprise that, perhaps, there was someone who might actually be very grateful for her existence.
Very grateful indeed.
Chapter Two
Hebden Hall wasn’t a house, or even an estate; it was a world of its own, and it took time for its map to imprint on Hester’s mind.
There were whole clusters of rooms with unclear purpose: lamp rooms and hamper rooms and flower-arranging rooms. There were clusters of rooms long since shut, and in her more fanciful moments Hester liked to pause by these doors and listen, imagining the cries of a madwoman or the footsteps of a ghost.
But these were, of course, just silly fantasies. The key was turned on all these endless chambers, Snowflake parlours, and Lilac bedrooms, for more practical reasons: the house would have become totally unmanageable otherwise. With the skeleton staff that was left, taking care of it all was beyond possible.
The world of servants, the world downstairs, was a separate universe in its own right. Its sheer size whispered to Hester the stories of the past grandeur, of the disciplined army that must have once dwelled there.
This quiet spirit of forlornness didn’t spare even the servants’ hall, the heart of all things. Among the rows of bells that hung there, most had been deadly quiet for over a decade, intended for long-since dismissed servants. In its cavernous space, Abigail the red-haired housemaid looked painfully small as she sat there in the evenings, mending the towels with a coarse flaxen thread. Her movements were mechanical, but her eyes were alive; she hummed to herself the latest jazz melody, if she couldn’t put the actual record on.
Or, at least, Hester supposed it was the latest. She wouldn’t be surprised if by the time a fresh hit reached the world of Hebden Hall, in London shops it was already moved to the classics department.
Her anxiety waned a little as the time passed. Gradually, her days were drained of the sense of apprehension and filled instead with a sense of routine.
Then, Hester finally decided to clarify a silly little question, which had been disturbing her mind since that first day. It was embarrassing, really – to see a girl for several weeks and doubt whether you knew her real name. She couldn’t bear asking such a question in the hollow space of the servants’ hall; she’d have to wait until they were alone.
Thankfully, such an opportunity presented itself every day.
It was seven in the morning, and the sky was still veiled in a murky haze. Hester gulped down her tea as fast as she could, balancing the tray on her knees. The housemaid, meanwhile, was laying out and kindling the fire. Her face was pallid, and her eyes rimmed with red; the strands of ginger hair, straying from beyond her lace bonnet, seemed to be the only splash of colour in the world.
Hester hesitated for a moment; then she carefully put her cup away.
The tea would do for now. Her real breakfast would be later, after the masters had already been safely served theirs.
She wasn’t sure how to approach the subject.
‘I know it sounds rather silly …’
‘Aye?’ Abby turned her head. Her eyes, Hester noticed, were dim blue.
‘I was just wondering … well … is your name really Abigail?’
‘Of course!’ The girl laughed. ‘What else could it be?’
‘I don’t know. Mary? Rose?’ Hester never felt more stupid in her life. It wasn’t the girl’s fault, after all, that she had such a housemaid-ish name.
‘Oh! My sister’s Rose.’
‘Really? It must be nice to have a sister.’ Hester was relieved to find at least some kind of point of rapprochement. She was eager to ask any question now, just to bury her embarrassment. ‘Does she live somewhere around here?’
‘No, no. She stayed in the Highlands.’
Abigail’s accent left little room for doubt.
‘The Highlands? Must be a lovely place.’
‘Nae, not really.’ The first flame had already been woken up by Abby’s sure hands, and the faint glow turned her hair into threads of fire. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have to march down here to find a decent job.’
Hester blinked. ‘What do you mean, march?’
‘I mean march like the soldiers march.’ Abby looked a little amused by this strange misapprehension. ‘Actually, I took me Da’s army backpack with me,’ she added, ‘so I really felt a wee bit like a soldier.’
‘You came here all the way from the Highlands on foot?’
‘It wasn’t so bad,’ the redhead assured her. ‘The big problem was to find somewhere to spend th’night. I was lucky sometimes: people let me in the sheds. But usually I had to stay in a workhouse. I had to toil all the next day as a payment – a lot o’ time lost.’
‘I think they’re called institutions now,’ Hester said automatically. ‘Not workhouses.’
Abigail shrugged.
‘A workhouse’s a workhouse. I’m lucky they took me in here; I thought the housekeeper would turn me away at once. But it turned out they just wanted a housemaid who wouldn’t ask for too much. They didnae have much choice either. I saw it after,’ she added. ‘There’s no queue to serve in this house; that much I can tell.’
‘But you like it here?’
‘They feed me very well.’ It was so strange, to hear this forced purity, devoid of dialect. Mrs Mullet must have worked hard to bring this girl up to standards. ‘Always real butter. Never tasted margarine here. My brother’s jealous.’ Abby bit her lip so as not to giggle. ‘He had to go further south, down to Manchester. Works in a factory now. It was better here afore, though,’ she noted. ‘I worked with another girl back then. She left after the New Year, and they still didnae find anyone else. No queue, just like I said.’
‘It must have been easier to work together.’
That was a bit of an understatement. Having scaled the enormous realm of Hebden Hall over these weeks, Hester failed to imagine how one could housemaid keep even a part of it in order.
‘Oh, it’s not just that.’ With an effort, Abigail stood up. ‘We had so much fun. We used to practise all the new dance steps, when no one saw, and …’ She looked at Hester with a slight suspicion, as if unsure whether to trust her with a grave secret. ‘Promise you won’t tell the Crow. She’ll have my guts for garters.’
It wasn’t hard to guess whom she meant by that soubriquet.
‘I’m deaf and mute.’
‘Well, it happened when we were still in town. It was so late, and we had to clean up after a party. So, we cleaned it …’ Abby made a dramatic pause. ‘Especially the cocktails guests didnae finish. We polished them right off.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I know, I know! We felt so wild. But we’d never drunk anything like that before, so …’
‘What, even at Saturday dances? I mean … There’re Saturday dances in your hometown, aren’t there?’ Hester had never been to the Scottish Highlands, so she wasn’t entirely sure. Who knows how it was in that windswept wilderness?
‘Of course there’re!’ Abby sounded offended. ‘Every week, in the church hall or the baths. I’ve tried the Green Goddess during the break, but it was nothing like this.’
‘Oh, you’re bold! I’ve always wanted to try it, but could never bring myself up to it. I thought it was only for the most daring girls.’
‘You didnae miss much,’ Abigail assured her.
‘One minute!’ Hester remembered. ‘You said you were in town then? In London, that is?’
‘Aye. We all went there last summer, for Lady Lucy’s coming out.’
‘And how was it?’ Hester asked, her heartbeat firing up. ‘The city? How was it?’
‘It was stoating!’ The redhead exclaimed. ‘The house is much smaller, so I didnae have to clean so much. And on Sunday I could even go to the pictures.’
***
‘I wish all my readers good fortune; I hope my advice will help them in this dreariest of winter months!’
The typewriter clicked, and the last of the digits bloomed on the page in vivid fresh ink. Lady Lucy Fitzmartin leaned back in the heavy library chair and stretched her fingers. Her head hurt slightly; it was hard to decide whether it was due to the lack of fresh air or the excess of banality.
I swear to heaven, if I have to write the words ‘charming’ and ‘elegant’ one more time, the heads will roll.
Of course, it was all for naught – empty threats to the universe. That was what they were expecting her to write about: frocks and garden parties, weddings and tips on entertaining. Some Society gossip as well, of course. The heiress of such-and-such abandoned, at last, her Eton crop and began to grow her hair – congratulations! Lady Diana Mitford demonstrated a highly inventive way of wearing a tiara (on her neck, no less). A daring young gentleman came to a costume party in nothing but Zulu war paint and had to be turned away.
That was what they wanted her to write.
More importantly, that was what they were prepared to pay for her to write.
Lucy was certainly in no position to complain; at least, for now.
It was only now she saw, looking back at the last summer, just how haphazard was the start of her career, how fortunate. An encounter at a dinner party, a mentioned need for contributors to the fledgling Sunday Express, an ardent (too ardent to be ladylike) agreement from her.
A trial contract for three articles was signed during the same week.
She was not a fool, of course. She understood that this haste had nothing to do with Lord Beaverbrook’s belief in her talents, but everything to do with his desire to feature a titled name in his young newspaper. ‘Written by Lady Lucy E. Fitzmartin’: doesn’t it sound solid and respectable?
Never did Lucy feel herself in a greater grip of thrill and horror than in those weeks. The fact that someone deemed her writing interesting enough to print it (indeed, to pay for it) was unbelievable all by itself. For hours and days on end, Lucy refused to part with her notebook, writing and crossing out line after line, polishing the drafts until they shone. Despite all these measures, they all seemed to her unbearably silly, silly, silly.
But the Sunday Express was apparently pleased enough, and three articles soon turned into ten.
Lucy’s hands trembled as she signed above the dotted line.
It felt so strange. She always used to regard her penchant for writing as an embarrassing tumour rather than a useful asset. After all, she was neither deaf nor blind; she heard the sneer in people’s voices as they talked about silly and shameless women, who wrote romances, and horrid intellectual girls, who wrote anything else. She was used to scribbling when and where no one could see her, hiding the notebooks as soon as she heard the menacing footsteps.
Lucy was secretly relieved that her hasty handwriting was practically unintelligible: this way no one would be able to read her drafts, even if they unearthed them somehow.
Listening carefully, noticing small details, reimagining her life as a series of flowery sentences to make it seem more exciting – it was something she was always simply doing; recasting it as a serious profession seemed laughable. Holding her the first cheque (an actual cheque for a solid sum, intended for her, featuring her name on it – it seemed surreal), Lucy only thought about pin money, about petty pleasures and beautiful bookshops. But, as the time passed and the sums increased, her thoughts changed accordingly. Slowly but surely, she started imagining other things.
What else could money buy?
A household of her own. A name of her own. A life of her own.
Could it be possible?
The success depended just as much on the power of her title as it did on the actual quality of her writing. Again, she was not a fool. She doubted that regular journalists, however talented, were paid hundreds of pounds for ten articles.
Of course, any real influence her title ever held had drained away decades before she was born. The only inheritance it brought her was a swarm of illusions: illusions of elegance and sophistication for some, illusions of might and tradition for others.
However, in this day and age, even illusions could have their power, if wielded carefully.
Lucy used to picture the future very differently.
Only a year ago, she believed – indeed, she knew – that the only way out for her lay in marriage. That’s why she waited for her first Season with such impatience, such ardour. She believed – indeed, she was sure – that it would be enough for her to come out officially, to appear at a few debutante balls, and she would immediately catch the attention of some eligible young man. That was the whole point of the Season, after all.
She wasn’t particularly sure what this man should look like (although he must love books, otherwise life with him would be unbearable). But there was one vital, iron-wrought condition – he would marry her as soon as possible and take her away from this house.
These were all childish dreams, as she discovered soon enough.
Meeting someone suitable and interested enough to propose, despite her uncertain dowry, during her first Season was improbable all by itself. However, even if this fairy-tale-like encounter did occur, her family would never permit such a hasty union to take place. Several Seasons were an accepted norm, an approved time for seeking the most promising match. Early marriages reeked of scandal.
And if there was something the Fitzmartins strived to avoid at all cost, it was scandal.
Lucy knew it all too well.
Several Seasons – that meant several years. Several more years beneath this roof, several more years among these people. Several more years of degrading, sickening dependency used as a lead on her neck – a lead they could pull any second.