The Parting Glass

by Gina Marie Guadagnino

  “Well.” I laughed. “They’ll cut a striking figure, certainly. A matched pair, was that what Mr. Dawson had in mind?” For the slim, ruddy horse was Charlotte in equine form, if such a thing could be. As if echoing my thoughts, the little mare tossed her finely made head.

  Mr. Vandeman and Mr. Gregory chuckled at my quip. “You can keep a secret, can’t you?” Mr. Vandeman asked. “Mr. Dawson will be greatly disappointed, see, if we’ve spoiled the surprise.”

  I smiled tightly. “Oh yes,” I assured them. “I can keep a secret. Has she a name?”

  “Mr. Dawson thought perhaps Felicity—do you suppose that will serve?”

  “I can think of no greater Felicity than to ride such a pretty beast as she,” I said. “Yes, I imagine Miss Walden will be greatly pleased. You have my assurances that I will keep this secret.”

  I excused myself and turned back to the house, uncomforted by having visited the stables after all. No gentleman would give so intimate or extravagant a gift to a lady to whom he was not engaged. The message was clear; the greatest felicity Mr. Dawson could imagine was beneath Charlotte’s nethers. There would be time enough for me to visit the stables after they were married.

  That night, dressing Charlotte, daubing buttermilk against her creamy skin, I felt the same lackluster heaviness of anticipation, taking no joy in the simple tasks for which I lived. The routine, devoid of comfort, had become oppressive. Though the previous evening’s rage had passed, Charlotte herself seemed weighted down with anticipation, her shoulders slumping. I smiled wanly at her in the mirror, but she did not smile back. We both knew that tonight would be the night; I sent her down to supper as though she were going to her doom. It took me a full ten minutes to compose myself before I felt I could go belowstairs. Grace, who was in no better state than I, chewed her nails nervously in the hall all evening, but I was too agitated myself to find any real fault with the behavior.

  Tonight, any curiosity I might have had about the servants of Salisbury Park—my future companions—was overshadowed by a strange, pricking anxiety as I watched the smooth workings of the house. The domestic staff appeared to go about their tasks so seamlessly that Charlotte’s words echoed in my head, and I was put to mind of clockwork figures. The same maids smiled at the same serving men, while Mr. Lindeman engaged me in the same pleasantries as he had the evening prior before darting off to black Mr. Dawson’s riding boots. The sameness and the uniformity weighed heavily on me, and I began to feel the familiar flutter I had felt that morning in the Waldens’ kitchen, smothered in the fear that my brief life would be snuffed out in such dull routines before I had really lived it. I kept my mouth closed, frightened that I would scream in frustration if I allowed my lips to part.

  Twice or thrice, Grace made as though to speak to me, then left off in agitation. Her discomposure rattled me even more than Charlotte’s spiritlessness had. I was more than a little startled to find a sudden spot of blood on my apron where I had picked at the cuticle of my little finger until it bled—a habit of which Mrs. Morgan had broken me nearly a decade earlier, and sucked the bit of raw skin clean of blood. The coppery taste called to mind the Boyles’ housekeeper’s scolding, and though I knew not if that venerable woman was still living or dead, I felt a sudden pang of guilt. Everything was wrong, and everything that had led me to be here, so far away from the place that I was born, so utterly bereft of allies, and so distant from my brother, left me feeling queasy with guilt. This pass we were in, Charlotte and I, felt like my fault. I wished heartily for the first time that I had never met Charlotte Walden. And then, I thought, why not wish I had never had cause to leave Ireland? Why not simply wish never to have been born? And thus, in misery, I passed the dinner hour.

  When I answered Charlotte’s bell, I found her sitting fully clothed on the bed. Her face looked worn and weary, her eyes red-rimmed. She glanced up as I came through the door, smiling grimly.

  “Congratulate me, Ballard. I’m to be married.”

  I stood still a moment, struggling to quiet my racing pulse and school my rebellious features. I took a breath, and, when I spoke, my voice was calm. “Congratulations, miss.”

  She choked back a sob. “For Christ’s sake, Ballard,” she said, her voice trembling. “Don’t be a bigger fool than I am.”

  “No, miss.”

  “Come here.”

  I was beside her in a moment, her arms winding about my neck like a drowning man reaching for succor. She sobbed silently onto my shoulder, great, racking shudders heaving through her frame. My skin grew damp where her tears soaked through my dress, and I stroked her hair, holding her tight. She pulled me onto the bed, her arms still viselike about my neck, and I lay down with her, letting her muffle her sobs against my neck and throat until she had cried herself to sleep.

  Da used to say that there are moments in your life that show you who and what you are, and that those moments, however rarely they may come, define your character and the course of your history. I wanted so badly, with Charlotte in my arms, to take hold of her face and kiss her tears away, for I knew in my soul I should not be unwelcome to do so. How I ached with the wanting of her, and the wanting to comfort her! There were two things that held me back, and the first—the knowledge that Charlotte’s tears came from mourning the life she could not share with Johnny—might not have been enough to dissuade me had not then the memory of another night, another girl clinging to me in tears, froze me cold.

  I would remember that night later, remember it all my life. How we lay face-to-face upon the same pillow, Charlotte’s breath slow and heavy at last, and her tears drying upon her cheeks. The candles had burned low, guttered, and gone out, and I watched her sleeping, knowing that the smooth veneer of peace spread over her features belied the turmoil within. I lay beside her, at war with myself, going mad for wanting her, for knowing—perhaps only for this night—I might have her. But even the temptation of that bliss was not enough to overcome my fear of the morning, of what lay beyond. I was no longer one who could act without thinking what came next, and neither was Charlotte. I could not face what might follow—her coldness, her regret, her spurning of me. For here was a girl, a woman, who had loved my brother to madness, to distraction, beyond reason or propriety, and had given him up wholly rather than risk her position. What could a single night with the likes of me be when compared to that overthrown love?

  I lay beside her, and, as her cheeks grew dry, mine grew wet, for this knowledge that held me back tortured me all the same, and that was the night I began to give up Charlotte Walden.

  Reflect, then, seriously, before temptation lead you astray: reflect that when once you break through the barrier of good principle, it is difficult, if not impossible for you, ever to return.

  —The Duties of a Lady’s Maid

  It had been months now since I’d heard tell of Johnny Prior, or Seanin O’Farren either. In the wake of our rupture, he had come by to Dermot’s a few times at first, to make arrangements and collect the wages he had banked there from the past three years, and then he had simply disappeared. He and nearly a third of the regular patrons at the Hibernian had stopped coming around, a loss of business that might have troubled Dermot had Liddie not taken rapid steps to fill the void.

  When Seanin had cleared out of the Hibernian, Quigley had left off coming around to Liddie’s, and suddenly her wages, such as they were, were her own again. I say such as they were, for, in the wake of the rupture, she had noticed a distinct drop-off in custom and clientele. She had given up wearing the Order’s medal, and her life returned to what it had been before the fiery night that Johnny Prior had stepped into it.

  There were now but few secrets between Dermot and me, and I lost no time in bringing Liddie around to the Hibernian on my nights off. Now it was I who took my pleasure after seeing Charlotte to bed, meeting Liddie in whatever alley or convenient place we could find before tripping merrily into the Hibernian together, smelling faintly of our mingled sweat and hair oil, calli
ng for rounds to slake our thirst.

  Dermot, it must be confessed, did not, at first, take this new development in stride. He bore Liddie’s initial few visits with uncharacteristic ill grace, muttering churlish and cutting remarks pertaining to both Liddie and myself until, after the second night of half-spoken slanders reddened our ears, I slapped my hand impatiently on the bar and asked him to declare once and for all what, exactly, he objected to.

  “It’s not that she’s a stargazer,” he said, once half a bottle of whiskey had begun to loosen his tongue. We were all down in the basement, slung about on the pillows and blankets in various stages of undress, passing the bottle amongst the three of us. Dermot and I were the ones conversing, while Liddie was attending to her toilette and mine in a languid if somewhat theatrical manner.

  “It’s not that she’s a stargazer,” I prompted him, for he had trailed off as Liddie, clad now only in her corset, boots, and stockings, began unpinning my hair.

  “Sure and who hasn’t needed a friendly hand now and again?” he agreed. “Why, it’s practically charity work, what she’s doing.”

  “My gratitude is endless,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Liddie, who had seated herself splay-legged behind me in order to unbutton my frock at her ease.

  “And it’s not that she’s one of the Order’s molls, for I know she isn’t any longer.”

  “Indeed I am not,” murmured Liddie, easing the dress from my shoulders and sliding my arms from the sleeves.

  “And it isn’t even that she’s colored, though I’ve never known a colored lassie before,” Dermot said, taking another swig directly from the bottle.

  “Oh, indeed?” Liddie said lightly. “If you’re not opposed, I could introduce you to a few. I promise you we taste just the same.” By now, her nimble fingers had made short work of my stays and I was clad in only my thin shift.

  “It’s only,” Dermot said, shifting uncomfortably, “that I’ve never in all my born days seen the English treat the Irish well, and it’ll be a cold day in hell when an Irishman or woman gets any comfort from a London accent like hers.”

  “Why, my dear Mr. O’Brien,” Liddie said, her face now inches from mine. “If you only knew what comfort I intend to provide your friend Miss O’Farren, I think you might be convinced of my devotion.”

  The last thing I remember before Liddie’s kiss was the sound of Dermot swallowing audibly. Then her lips were on mine, and the whiskey we’d been drinking gushed hot through my veins and I no longer cared if Dermot O’Brien watched or approved, and his muted groans seemed to come from very far away to penetrate the haze of my pleasure.

  In the morning, Liddie and I awoke alone in the basement and found breakfast for three laid on the potbellied stove in the back of the bar. Dermot was just returning from the pump with fresh water for coffee, whistling merrily as we sat ourselves at the bar to tuck in. Chatter over breakfast was pleasant, and, as we departed, he kissed each of our hands quite formally and bade us each a good week.

  Within a fortnight, Liddie had flattered, cajoled, and charmed Dermot from a grudging tolerance of her presence to admiration and respect, which only deepened as she took over the ordering of his account books—a task he detested—and set his records neatly with her carefully printed hand. By the end of the month, they’d together hired carpenters to make over the second floor of his establishment—empty since the departure of his tenants from the Order—and, a few weeks later, Liddie installed herself and four other girls whom she had recruited into the new apartments. In a magnanimous move, she allowed the other light-skirts who had infrequently worked the fringes of the Hibernian to remain on the premises, and, in a more calculated move, she began tithing them for the privilege. She closed up the house on Chambers Street, and my Thursday nights were now spent in her fine linen sheets instead of in a pallet on the cellar floor.

  “Come up in the world, haven’t we?” Dermot asked, grinning, a month or two into the arrangement. It was a balmy night, a thin band of sunset reddening the sky, a riot of flowers blossoming in the park. It had been a pleasure to walk down to Mulberry Street, the trees from which it took its name coming back to life after the bitter, snowy winter. After my laboring each day over Charlotte’s trousseau, pausing only to ready her for this ball or that dinner in honor of her pending nuptials, my Thursdays began to come as a relief, and I found myself ready to forget Charlotte for a few hours in Dermot’s ale and Liddie’s arms. It was something to see my own sort of people prosperous and successful in their own right, and not at the beck and call of those who’d call themselves their betters. I was in a fine mood for the first time in I couldn’t remember when, and the grin I returned Dermot was genuine.

  “Sure and I thought it wouldn’t do to be whoring,” I said, jerking my chin toward the ceiling. “And with a col—”

  “Ah, and they aren’t such bad lasses after all,” he interrupted, filling his dudeen. “The care I’ve seen her lavish on you, and sometime when you’re too fashed to care much o’er yourself. You could do worse than that Liddie of yours.”

  “What makes you think I haven’t?”

  He spread his free palm toward me, a gesture of warding, of retreat. “Christ, lass. You keep your own counsel, but what hints you do drop fall like hailstones, and just as welcome.”

  I laughed at this. “Now and here I was thinking you’d no need of my counsel, for you always seem to know all my secrets anyway.”

  He shrugged, the pipe between his lips, the lit lucifer igniting the contents of the packed bowl. The sweet, peaty aroma of the lighted tobacco curled up in plumes around his face as he puffed rapidly a few times to start it smoldering. He took a long draw, regarding me soberly before he answered.

  “I’ll be free with you, Mar. I don’t know as I’ve ever quite had your measure. Lass as clever as you, as ambitious as they come, with only ever an eye on working in service. Why’s that now, I’ve always wondered.”

  “I’ll have some service out of her,” Liddie said, sliding up beside me at the bar, and wrapping her arms about my waist. “What do you think, Miss Maire O’Farren? Can I press you into my service?” I could feel her small, high bosoms pushed up against my back, straining over the top of her corset. Dermot leaned back behind the bar, regarding us with mirth.

  “You’ll not mind then, Dermot, if I take her off your hands now? There’s a service I think she owes me.” And winking pertly at him over my shoulder, she led me quite willingly up the stairs.

  Afterwards, my flaxen locks mingling with her stiff black curls on the pillow, we lay together as Liddie traced patterns on my stomach with a feather.

  “He’s right, you know,” she said. “You could do better than service.”

  “Like whoring?” I asked, and, when she sat up, indignant, I pulled her back down, pressing myself to her lips. “I’m no more cut out for that than you are for service. You have your way, Liddie. You convinced me of that some time past. And I’ve mine.”

  She shrugged, settling herself back down into the crook of my arm. “Were you always a lady’s maid? Back in Ireland, I mean?”

  “I was never a lady’s maid in Ireland. I never maided for a lady proper till this cut Dermot found me. Before that—back in Donegal, I mean—I was a scullion.”

  Liddie laughed. “What, like blacking grates and hauling water? You?”

  “I’d just worked my way up to housemaid there, when I left. I would have got to lady’s maid, eventually.”

  “So what stopped you?”

  I nestled her closer to me, as though the heat of her body next to mine, the slick, sweaty places where our skin pressed together, had the power to dispel the chill I still felt speaking of it. “I was dismissed.”

  “Wicked thing.” She was still laughing good-naturedly. “For making love to your lady, I suppose.”

  “No,” I said. “To one of her maids.”

  It is owing, indeed, to this single mistake, of trusting some one person, that the breaches of faith and
divulging of secrets have disturbed the quiet of so many families.

  —The Duties of a Lady’s Maid

  Nuala Begley was fifteen to my sixteen, and had never seen the world outside of her Donegal parish before, but I could tell from the way she kissed me, knowing and sure of herself, that I wasn’t her first. She arrived at Michaelmas, fresh as the autumn air, and presented herself in the kitchens of Ballyboyle Manor, confident with expectations of a warm welcome. She had come with a single set of clothes plus the one on her back, a small banded box, and an excellent character from the rectory in Glencolumbkille. Mrs. Boyle had come to the estate from Dublin only two years before. A young wife, anxious over her first child, and priest-ridden to boot, she took in Nuala with good grace. A year as a maid of all work under her, with her eager, winning ways, she started off as a housemaid straightaway.

  The first time I saw her, she was making up the bed we were given to share, shaking out the sheets as a few dark tendrils spilled from under her cap. The bed, only recently vacated and open to the likes of us, I regarded with trepidation, and the bedmate too, for I had been used to roosting with Seanin in the loft above the stables. I tugged nervously at my first new dress, jealous of the way the strange girl snapped the linens efficiently and comfortably, realizing that, in her last home, she probably had sheets every day. She looked up at me and smiled.

  “You’ll be Maire, I suppose. I can tell by the carpetbag, for Missus said you’d be coming up to share with me. Who shares the other bed, d’you know?” She spoke softly, in the leisurely, rolling lilt of the more desolate parts of Donegal. I brightened considerably at the friendly note in her voice, but was still too nervous to converse properly.

  “Them’s Katie and Rosie.”

  “Rosie!” Nuala smiled wryly. “I’ve a sister called Rosie. Roisin, really. And Mrs. Boyle, she’s just had a baby called Rosalie, hasn’t she? Sure and it seems roses’ll bloom where’er I go.” She was still smiling at her own joke with a mirth that didn’t match the unease in her eyes. It occurred to me then that this was probably the farthest she’d ever been from home, and though I might feel out of place sleeping in a different part of the estate where I’d spent my entire life, it must be nothing to packing up and moving away from everyone and everything you know. I cleared my throat, but the bells began then.