Death at Daisy's Folly (28 page)

With abrupt suddenness, his head fell to one side and he began to snore.

The lad came to the door at night,
When lovers crown their vows,
And whistled soft and out of sight
In shadow of the boughs.
“I shall not vex you with my face
Henceforth, my love, for aye;
So take me in your arms a space
Before the east is grey.
”When I from hence away am past
I shall not find a bride,
And you shall be the first and last
I ever lay beside.“

—A. E. HOUSMAN
A Shropshire Lad

 

 

B
ack home at Bishop's Keep, Amelia's responsibilities as lady's maid to Miss Ardleigh (in which, truth be told, she took a great pleasure) were only part of her duties. Since the Bishop's Keep household was small, Amelia helped the parlor maid dust and sweep the main rooms, assisted the butler with the silver, and from time to time laid tea in the servants' hall and helped the little kitchen maid with the washing up.

But here in the grander surroundings of Easton Lodge, Amelia's duties were confined to serving Miss Ardleigh's personal needs—sponging and pressing her dresses and ribbons, laying out her undergarments and outer garments, helping her dress, and arranging her hair. These duties, she had discovered, were light in comparison to those of other lady's maids, for Miss Ardleigh's wardrobe was not elaborate and she wore her hair simply. Thus, Amelia found herself with time on her hands and the freedom to use it as she chose. As long as she kept to herself and did not interfere with others' work, she was free to look around the great house, to be amazed at its size, dazzled by its magnificence, and dumbfounded at the thought of the price that must be paid for such grandeur—a sum that seemed to her (who had only once in her life seen a five-pound note) to be equal to all the gold in the Exchequer.

Of course, Amelia's freedom of access, like that of most servants of her time, was severely restricted. She was not permitted to enter the main wing of the house, so she could not marvel at the sixteen Siena columns that lined the massive entrance hall, supporting its arched and paneled roof, or gape at the veritable zoo of Lord Warwick's hunting trophies that lined its walls and were spread on its floors and displayed in its corners: the heads of antelope and oryx and sambur and stags, of lions and tigers and panthers; the skins of zebra and leopard and polar bear; the horns of rhinoceri; the stuffed bodies of pheasants, even the stuffed head and shoulders of a magnificent giraffe. (Hunting in East Africa, Lord Warwick and his friend Colonel Patterson had shot four giraffes. “A little cold-blooded,” he admitted in his memoirs, which Amelia herself would read in after-years, “but we had had a long chase, and we didn't stop to think that one trophy apiece of such harmless and beautiful beasts should have sufficed us.”)

If Amelia was not permitted to marvel at Lord Warwick's trophy hall, neither could she wonder at the grandeur of his wife's gold and white Louis XIV drawing room, or the library with its wealth of richly bound poetry and classical literature (shelved together with the cheap paper detective novels in which Lady Warwick took a passionate interest). Nor was she allowed to wander, mouth open in awed amazement, up the broad stone staircase to the state bedrooms, where elaborate beds spread with cashmere coverlets and hung with silk canopies embossed with ancestral arms waited in stiff formality for their Royal occupants.

Amelia could not intrude into these areas of the house because they were reserved to the use of the family and their guests. In these latter Victorian times, for the most part, servants were required to remain behind the green baize doors that separated the domain of the master and mistress from that of the employee. An intricate system of uncarpeted and unlit back stairs and back corridors ensured that hot water and fresh linens could be carried to the bedrooms, dinner could be conveyed to the dining room, and morning and evening trays could be transported to those in need of a little something to wake them or put them to sleep—all quite invisibly, of course.

This separation of the classes and the reduction of the servants to invisibility was sometimes carried to extremes of apartheid. The Duke of Portland regularly sacked any housemaid he encountered in the corridors. Lord Monfred, according to his butler, never spoke to an indoor servant except to give an order, and his maids had to turn and face the wall when a family member or guest approached. In 1888, a writer in the
Fortnightly Review
observed, “Life above stairs is as entirely severed from life below stairs as is the life of one house from another.” And while the Countess of Warwick was not inordinately strict about such matters, servants at Easton Lodge were not to be seen; they were, in fact, deemed (and deemed themselves) invisible.

So when Amelia went for a walk, as she did shortly after tea on this Saturday afternoon, it was in the region belowstairs, in the servants' wing of Easton Lodge. For the sake of the servants' efficiency, this first-floor and basement area was divided (as it was in most grand houses) into three distinct regions, each of which was under the command of one of the three upper servants: the male house steward, Buffle; and the female cook, Mrs. Bagshot, and housekeeper, the elderly Mrs. Lynnford. For the sake of the servants' morality, a great concern to late-Victorian employers, these daytime working areas (and the nighttime sleeping attics as well) were carefully segregated by sex, the menservants being confined to one region, the women to another. While their betters might enjoy sexual high jinks in the sumptuous bedrooms of the Folly and the main hall, such pleasures were strictly forbidden to the servants, whose virtue was additionally enforced by morning and evening prayers and by compulsory chapel.

Buffle's region encompassed the plate scullery, the steward's pantry, the strong room, the wine and beer cellars, and the small rooms where the footmen and valets brushed clothes and shoes, cleaned and filled the lamps and trimmed the wicks, and sharpened knives. Although Lawrence did a great deal of lounging about in the steward's room and Amelia would have loved to join him there, she could not enter this male zone, nor would she have felt comfortable there. Amelia's mother may have taken in washing to supplement her husband's weekly ten shillings, but she had raised her daughter to know the difference between a man's place and a woman's.

The housekeeper's domain included Mrs. Lynnford's own comfortable parlor (also used as an office, to conduct the purchase of supplies), the stillroom, the servants' hall, and a separate storeroom filled with cleaning provisions and equipment and lined with china cupboards and linen presses. Amelia had felt emboldened to peek into these and was then so impressed by the magnificence of the contents that she shut them up speedily, lest she inadvertently soil or break something. Mrs. Lynnford was also responsible for the preparation of tea, and used the stillroom for this purpose. Amelia was familiar with this room, since it was there that she prepared the night and morning tea trays she carried to Miss Ardleigh's bedroom. When she was free, she occasionally dropped in to see whether a biscuit had been left lying about, or a small cake. She was usually disappointed, however, for the estimable Mrs. Lynnford was a careful woman and wise in the ways of servants, and locked up the tea provisions between times.

The cook, Mrs. Bagshot, ruled over the kitchen, sculleries, the game larder, fish larder, pantry, ice and coal rooms, and (since much game was taken on the estate and had to be cleaned and prepared for eating) a separate building for salting and smoking. She also had her own spacious parlor, where she kept the kitchen's accounts and met with the tradesmen who supplied her small kingdom. Mrs. Bagshot was justifiably proud of her kitchen, which was equipped with the latest innovations in roasting ranges, stewing stoves, boiling stoves, turnspits, hot plates, and hot closets, but she was also a kind soul who was rather pleased than otherwise at Amelia's goggle-eyed wonderment at these technological miracles. (They were not that miraculous, since each stove consumed almost three hundred pounds of very real coal each week, which had to be carried in by the sculleries, mostly young girls, and returned one tenth that weight in ash, which the sculleries had then to carry out.) The kindly Mrs. Bagshot had invited Amelia to sit on a stool in the corner and observe the hurly-burly of food preparation.

In most grand houses, the laundry was a fourth belowstairs domain, ruled over by the laundress (whose stature was almost but not quite as high as the other three Uppers) and set somewhat apart. This segregation was owing both to the history and to the nature of the laundering process. In previous decades, when the household was much smaller, Easton's laundry had been sent out to a laundress in Little Easton; when, for the sake of greater efficiency, a laundry was installed, the laundress was more independent than the other servants. Further, laundering produced a great deal of steam and smell and had to be adjacent to a drying-ground. The laundry, then, was usually located on the outskirts of the main servants' area, readily accessible to the gardeners, grooms, coachmen, and footmen. The strict segregation of the sexes which took place in the other household regions was therefore difficult to maintain. If the servants played hanky-panky tricks, it was in the laundry that the games typically took place.

Amelia enjoyed her tour of the kitchen, but she could expect no such invitation into the laundry. It was the dominion of Winnie Wospottle, Lawrence's old lover and Amelia's avowed enemy. But Amelia's bedmate Meg worked there, and since on this Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Wospottle was still at tea with the other upper servants in Mrs. Lynnford's parlor, Amelia went to talk to Meg. The last time she had seen her new friend was in the corridor outside the servants' hall after lunch, where Amelia had overheard the argument between Meg and her footman-lover Marsh, Marsh urgent for the two of them to go off together somewhere, Meg reluctant to leave on account of her sick father. Remembering Meg's distress, and wondering where in the world the two could possibly be going, Amelia was anxious to talk with her. She could not give away the fact that she and Lawrence had overheard the quarrel, though. Meg might think they had been spying.

In fact, as Amelia came around the corner of the corridor and made to enter the main laundry room, she was nearly bowled over by Marsh, who was on his way out of the laundry room door, his eyes slitted, his face pulled together in a frown that was even darker than usual. She flattened herself against the wall as he brushed past, wondering what had made him so furious.

The laundry was a large, windowless room with a low ceiling, plaster walls, and stone floors. Buckets, washboilers, and scrub boards were neatly stacked in the corners, and the whitewashed walls were lined with wooden and stone sinks, drying racks, and shelves for laundry supplies: bars of soap (to be shaved into the hot water), bluing, and starch. In the middle of the floor stood several wooden hand-turned washing machines, with wooden wringers attached. But while two other laundry maids were up to their elbows in hot water at the sinks, there was no Meg.

With a little hesitation, Amelia went into the adjacent ironing room, where she found her friend at work at a wooden ironing table, ironing sheets. The iron Meg was using was a heavy affair weighing at least eight pounds, which had been heated on a stove in one corner on which sat two other irons, similarly heating. Owing to that stove and a large coal-fired hot-water boiler in another corner, the room was very hot.

Meg looked up from her work, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. She bit her lip. “H'lo, Amelia,” she said in a low voice.

“Y've been cryin',” Amelia said. “Was it Marsh?”

“Ye better not stay,” Meg said, setting her iron on the stove to heat. “Mrs. Wospottle doan't like ye.”

“Winnie Wospottle is ‘avin' 'er tea in Mrs. Lynnford's parlor wi' th' rest o' th' Uppers,” Amelia said. She frowned. “Is't Marsh yer cryin' fer? I saw ‘im leave. Nearly knocked me down, 'e did.”

Meg shook her head dumbly, then nodded, then shook it again and burst into tears. Without another word, Amelia gathered her friend into her arms, and the two young women stood in a mutual embrace. After a minute, Amelia fished in the pocket of her apron for a handkerchief.

“Remember wot ye said t' me?” she said, drying the tears from Meg's cheeks. “Wotever ‘tis, 'tain't bad ‘nough t' carry on so.” She paused. “An' d'ye remember wot else ye said? Ye ought t' do wot th' upstairs ladies do an' ‘ave lots o' men, so when ye fall out wi' one, there's another one waitin'.” She smiled. “That's wot ye said.”

But this small comfort produced only fresh weeping. Amelia stroked Meg's curly brown hair, and when she was calmer, led her to a scrubbed pine table stacked with embroidered and lace-edged linens, all carefully ironed, and sat her down on the bench.

“Now, tell,” she commanded.

Meg wiped her nose on her rough cotton sleeve and shook her head. “I daren't,” she whispered.

“It'll make ye feel better,” Amelia said. She touched Meg's cheek. “Truly ‘twill.”

Meg sighed heavily. “‘E's leavin', Marsh is.”

“Ooh, Meggie, that's too bad,” Amelia said sympathetically. And although she already knew the answer, she added, “Are ye goin' wi' 'im?”

Meg shook her head sadly. “I've got t' look after my dad. He ain't well.”

“Where's Marsh goin'?”

“T' Lunnon.” Meg gulped at the thought. “An' after that, Paris, ‘e says.”

“Paris?” Amelia asked, as surprised as if Meg had announced that her lover was flying off to the moon.

Meg nodded. She leaned forward, lowering her voice to a whisper. “‘E's a Anarchist, ye see.”