Love by the Morning Star (6 page)

Anna, trying and failing to discreetly fix her disarrayed high-piled curls, followed Lady Liripip to the bedroom she'd selected for her guest. She'd actually ordered two made up—one quite grand, quite near to her own, with a view of the terraced gardens, another cramped and insignificant, overlooking some gloomy yews. The girl was well spoken, showed none of the bohemianism or defiance she expected in the offspring of Caroline Curzon, and seemed to have no designs on her beloved boy. She put her in the larger room.

“Dinner is at eight,” she said, and swept out, thinking she had done an act of almost saintly charity and goodness, yet still relishing the sense of triumph over the girl's mother and late aunt, her erstwhile nemeses.
How bitter it will be for Caroline
, she thought,
to know that her daughter is safe only because of me, that she owes the clothes on her back, the very food in her stomach, to my generosity
.

And so, doing good but meaning ill, she sat to her toilette in perfect spiritual contentment.

As soon as she was alone, Anna collapsed into the deep eiderdown of her bed, breathless, giddy with elation. The bright golden arrow of her life had been aiming for this ever since she could put her desires into coherent thoughts. Her father, rising higher than his birth and education ever led him to expect, had pulled her up on his coattails to what she had once thought were lofty heights. But this! A castle, an estate—a titled heir! All placed in the palm of her gloved hand. She had dreamed it might be possible, had schemed to make it so, but here she was, almost without her volition, placed squarely in luxury and position.

Anna squeezed the downy voluptuousness of the thick bedspread and laughed, softly at first, then like a maniac. She sprang up and ran to the gilt-edged mirror hovering over a most elegant vanity table and looked at her beauty, regarding it as a beloved old friend, a loyal companion, a partner with whom she would make her fortune.

He adores me already
, she told herself, mistaking his humor and native friendliness for passion (just as Lady Liripip said she would, though one would hate to admit she might be right about anything).
Kissing cousins!

Then, before she even realized she was afraid, she saw the roses flee her cheeks, replaced by ivory pallor. Her body knew before her mind that she was sailing in dangerous waters, under false colors. How on earth had she been mistaken for a—what had Teddy decided on?—step-cousin! Was it all part of the machinations of the Von and Lord Darling, in which Lady Liripip and family were complicit? It seemed a rather complicated cover story. Perhaps they had decided that for whatever service to cause and country she needed to perform, she must be sitting on the parlor couch, not plumping its cushions; that she must be eating succulent mock turtle soup, not preparing it. She would just have to play her part, and all would no doubt become clear in time. Meanwhile, there was Teddy, Lord Winkfield, to ensnare.

That, however, was looking on the bright side. There was another possibility. What if there were indeed, somewhere in the world, a step-cousin? Lady Liripip had said she was not to speak of Germany, or the stage, that her name was meant to be Hannah, a Jewish name. Lady Liripip did not appear to be acting a role. She seemed to really expect a Jewish girl to appear on her doorstep, to be taken under her wing.

Father wouldn't like that
, Anna thought. One of her father's favorite rants of late was about Jewish intellectuals (how he spat those words, one more abhorrent to him than the other) sneaking into the country and stealing the honest livings from good English girls. Let a Jew into your scullery and you might as well invite the rats and beetles, he would shout (forgetting that his own English grocery had been the one with the vermin). Let a Jew cook your supper and you'll be poisoned. How he would roar at the notion of Jewish girls being taken into aristocratic families.

Anna, to the best of her knowledge, had never met a Jew. She looked at herself in the mirror and thought, with about as much generosity and milk of human kindness as she possessed,
If I can be mistaken for one, they can't be
that
bad, can they?

And so, in loving herself, she almost loved her fellow man.

Uncertain, she drifted away from the mirror and looked out the window. There, below, she saw a manly form. Teddy, she was certain, and rapped on the window to try to catch his attention. But when he turned and looked up, she saw it wasn't he. This man was of a height with Teddy, had his same broad shoulders and floppy hair, but his locks were browner, his brows heavy and dark, his appearance more intense, compelling. She felt a familiar weakening somewhere within her. It was a failing that had plagued her for years, absurd longings for the wrong man. But lord, he was handsome, even at this distance! Alas, he carried a pot of chrysanthemums under each arm. He was only a gardener, and thus beneath her notice. She turned away abruptly and tried, and failed, to picture Teddy's face.

I'll play my part as long as I can
, she decided.
And if I get unmasked before I can do what Lord Darling demands, perhaps I can still be a step-cousin long enough to snag Teddy
.

All things considered, she'd much rather be the wife of a lord, eventually wife of an earl, than a heroine. Heroines, she seemed to remember, sometimes wind up dead.

She shivered, and pinched her cheeks until the color came back.

E
CCENTRIC
, H
ANNAH DECIDED
. That was the only explanation: the family was eccentric. The trait ran in aristocratic blood, apparently—she'd learned that from Wodehouse. And there was the uncle who rode to the hounds in the nude (or occasionally, on a good day, in one of those pink coats that was really scarlet, and nothing else). So it stood to reason that the family should have some peculiar traditions. She unfolded that little inward crumpling that had begun when she was turned away from the front door and marched gamely to the rear.

Behind her, Hardy tut-tutted. “Just my luck—the prettiest ones always get axed,” he muttered as he pushed his barrow.

“This house is as big as a city block!” Hannah said as she dragged each weary leg a step further around Starkers's walls.

“It almost
is
a city,” Hardy said, wondering if he could steal a kiss before Cook heard about this girl's effrontery and sent her off without a reference. “Well more than fifty on the staff, if you include the foresters and gamekeepers. We have our own laundry, our own plumber, an electrician, and a few carpenters. And of course if you include the village of Winkfield, you have everything else you might need. Lord Liripip owns Winkfield too, you know.”

“And I'm to be a part of it all,” she said wonderingly, craning her neck to look up at the crenellations chiseled against an iris-hued sky.

“For a minute or two, anyway.” Just long enough to get chewed out. Hardy tipped his hat regretfully. “I'll be back and forth from the hothouse. They want chrysanthemums in the drawing room. Come and see me right before you leave.” He pointed to a crystalline wonder gleaming like a huge cut diamond in the late-afternoon sun.

Hannah looked perplexed. “But that might not be for a very long time.” Perhaps the family wasn't supposed to mingle with the servants, but she liked Hardy's easy, friendly ways and hoped to see him much sooner.

“Not nearly as long as you might think,” he said.

She closed her eyes again, briefly, ecstatically, to see that world in her mind where her homeland was restored to its senses, where people were not imprisoned for their last names, where her family would be together again. She'd braced herself to wait, to endure as long as it took for her world to set itself aright, but could Hardy be correct? Maybe it wouldn't be so long after all. “How
kind
of you to say so!” she said, and ran up to give him a feathery kiss on the cheek.

Hardy walked off in a daze, and Hannah rapped her knuckles on the white-painted wooden door. A chip flaked off and fell to her feet.

“Yes?” came a harried voice before the door even opened. Hannah saw a girl about her own age, tall and scrawny, with her hair slicked back tightly under a white cap, and a sheen of sweat on her brow. “Oh, you're the one old Trapp said would come. Inside. Where's your things?”

“Lost. Stolen.”

“No mind. You're to get two dresses while you're in here, returned upon quitting. You don't need no best as you won't have no time to yourself. Least, not 'cept when you're too dead on your feet to think of fun with a young gentleman.” She heaved a mighty sigh, then perked up. “Oh, but with you here to help . . .” Her hips gave a suggestion of a sway. “Maybe I'll have the strength for a turn or two about the village hall after all. This way.”

She led Hannah through a spacious, spotless kitchen and pointed to a little antechamber where a pleasant-faced woman was sitting at a table, thumbing through accounts. “Cook,” the girl called out, “got a new leveret for you to skin and roast.” Distantly, a little bell tinkled. “Damn. I mean jeepers,” the girl gasped as she raced toward the dying peal. “This will be your job soon, leveret!” she called over her shoulder. “Hope you're as fast as a hare.”

“Less of your cheek!” Sally Mayweather snapped at the girl's backside. Then she looked the newcomer over.

Trapp—the old cook—had been a martinet of the highest degree. She didn't actually carry a little whip on her belt, but the unlucky souls who worked under her might have preferred corporal punishment to the stinging lash of her tongue and the sometimes arbitrary discipline she doled out. By her word her minions might be denied their weekly afternoon off or their alternate whole day Sunday. They would be set to performing the same mind-numbingly dull task—polishing the stove or scrubbing the steps—over and over again until she deemed it perfect. Like nursery ne'er-do-wells, they might even have their pudding withheld.

Sally and the ever-changing bevy of kitchen maids had put up with it all, though, because Trapp was the best in the business. Other grand estates insisted on having a male in the kitchen, an impressive continental chef with airs and an accent. That was only because they couldn't steal Trapp away from Starkers. She might have been a beastly old harridan, as mean as a vexed badger, but she could single-handedly coordinate and cook the most elaborate and delicious meals anyone had ever tasted. When she prepared a banquet she went into a sort of frenzied daze, almost mystical to witness. Surrounded by her ingredients and equipment, she would pinch and slap anyone who didn't do precisely as she was told. Once she even stabbed Sally with a fork—not severely, though that was more through Sally's agility than Trapp's intent. In the end, everyone (except Trapp) was in tears and utterly exhausted, bruised, and swearing to give notice. But the meals were brilliant.

And the thing Sally learned early on about being a cook was that in service, it was absolutely the best job with absolutely the worst training period. A kitchen maid was a slave, pure and simple. In the old days they had scullery maids, at least, stunted and dimwitted drudges who could do the really unpleasant things. Now that they had fallen out of fashion (no doubt being too depressing to the upper classes when they had to read about them in those novels the rich write about the poor), their work fell to the kitchen maids.

But on the glorious day that a kitchen maid transmuted into a cook, ah! Suddenly she had power, money, status. She ruled her realm absolutely, and overruled the housekeeper and even the lady of the house in matters of the kitchen. She had time off whenever she liked, so long as there was no meal to get ready or she could leave an under-cook in charge. She got tips and bribes from every merchant, for she decided which businesses got the biggest accounts. If she was good she was courted by other houses, and could demand raises accordingly to stay in her place.

Other servants would serve all their lives, even the highest. A cook was a queen.

Now Sally was queen, a quivering blancmange of a queen who could cook like a champion but was terrified of the prospect of bossing people around. She was not a natural leader, so with Trapp as her only model, she was doing her best to emulate her.

It was certainly effective—the kitchen maids wept at least as much as they did under Trapp's reign—but keeping up the tough act was driving gentle-natured Sally crazy.

“Well?” she said, cocking her head up at Hannah. “And what are you supposed to be?” It hurt to snap at another human being like that, especially one who looked so small and perplexed and pretty.

Hannah gave a slow, heavy blink. “I'm
supposed
to be a debut coloratura contralto in the Vienna Opera House,” she said with deep melancholy worthy of the best tragedy or the worst farce. “But how many people are what they are supposed to be? Good morning. I am Hannah Morgenstern. I've come here to stay.”

She held out a delicate, expressive little hand, and waited.

What would Trapp do? Sally wondered. Could she possibly shake the hand of an underling?

The hand hovered in midair, palpably yearning to be clasped, cupped slightly upward, offering a benediction as much as a shake.

Knowing she'd cry about it later, Sally glared at the hand until it fell, as dispirited as a baby bird tumbled from the nest.

“Stay or go depends on me and no other. You're a refugee, aren't you?” Trapp had mentioned hiring a girl before she was carted away to Lyme Regis, but she'd said nothing about her being foreign, as this girl so plainly was. They had been streaming into England for weeks now, and every household that took them in complained about their uppish ways and absolute ignorance of proper service. Just what she needed. “Hannah, you say? The last three maids were Jane. I ought to call you Jane too.”

“I'll never answer,” Hannah said, summoning a laugh. “Whenever I had to act—I mostly sing, you know, but at the cabaret we all do everything, and I was the understudy for five of the ladies—I would always miss my cue if it meant someone calling me by the character's name. In the end they just named all the girl characters Hannah in case I had to step in and play them. Jane is such a lovely name, though, isn't it? So plain and simple, but noble, you know, like Lady Jane Grey, and Jane Eyre, and Jane—”