by Wendy Reakes
I hadn’t eaten much all day so when I looked at the food, mine now, my mouth watered and my belly rumbled.
“Go on, keep it, Marley. It don’t matter none now.”
Pleased with her approval, I grabbed a piece of pie, and without worrying about whether or not I should save a portion for the following day, I ate the lot, all in one go.
“What have you done to your foot?” We both looked at the makeshift bandage covering my ankle above my foot gloves.
I shrugged. “It’s just a sprain.”
“Let me see?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want her to worry about that too. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
“I should get back now.” Celia said. “I’ll come back again tomorrow afternoon after my chores, when I’m free. Then we’ll talk about what we’re going to do.”
When we both stood up, Celia reached out and embraced me. The gesture was the most wonderful, reassuring feeling in the world; to have another human hold me with such affection.
After I took her to the door and she slipped through it guided by her candlelight, I went back to my little abode and crawled into bed. That night a storm raged outside. It was a violent storm, with lightning firing up the sky and torrential rain smashing against the windows and upon the lead roof above my head. I wasn’t afraid. I never had been afraid of storms. Instead I revelled in them, yearning to be part of them and imagining myself running over a meadow of flowers with the rain showering my face. I had accomplished that once, that night I’d run away, three months ago when I’d left my old life behind and started anew.
When Celia returned the following day, she brought with her a half cup of milk. It was the dearest of gestures and I secretly blessed her for having such a kind heart. That’s when I made a promise to myself, that if at any time in my life I saw someone needing, I would help them as much as I was able. But my thoughts turned dark when I imagined never being in a position to help someone else. I was needy now. Desperate for help myself.
As she handed me the cup and I poured it into our tea, making the dark transparent liquid turn a creamy opaque, all that time Celia chatted away and I relished in both. We sat on the floor in the same spot we’d sat the night before, looking out through the windows to the grey coloured sky beyond. “I’ve been so excited,” she said, “to finish my chores, I mean. Think of it, Marley. Everything’s going on as normal down there and here you are, hiding in the attic without anyone realising it. I feel like I’m writing a book and that this all fiction.”
I smiled. A bit of fantasy in Celia’s world was such a pleasure for me. “What would you call your book?”
“I think…‘Little Princess’,” Celia said. “It can be about a beautiful princess who becomes poor suddenly and has to live in the attic.”
I chuckled. “That sounds like an engaging story.”
She shrugged. “I’d have to work out the details.”
We both chuckled. “I can imagine you being an authoress, Celia.”
She nodded. “Me too. I have an aunt who writes novels… Aunt Francis Hodgson. She lives in Manchester. She married a man called Swan…her second husband…can you imagine it?” Celia’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “But Mr. Burnett…that’s Swan…he died this year. It’s very sad, but now we’re all wondering if she’ll marry again.”
“Well perhaps you can talk to her about your book.”
She shook her head. “That would give away my true princess, wouldn’t it?” We laughed together as we found ourselves doing quite a lot. “Besides, she’s moving to America soon. My mum thinks we will never see her again.”
“You may move to America too. It looks like such a wonderful place, Celia.”
“But I couldn’t leave you. Not while you need me.”
I placed my hand on hers. “Let’s pray that won’t be for long.”
“Hmmm, I can write about my princess going to America.”
“To escape the attic?”
Her eyes lit up. “Yes, wouldn’t that be wonderful? She could be happy then, couldn’t she?”
I thought about how Celia shaped her character on me and then I said. “You know, Celia. I think I am happy. I’ve never said that before…and even though I am hiding away in this place,” I looked around my parlour when I said that, “I feel free. I may not be a princess, but soon I shall have a daughter of my own,” I placed my hand on my belly. Nothing showed, but I knew she was in there, “and someone else will need me instead of the other way around.”
“How can you be sure it’s a girl, Marley?”
I pouted as I contemplated her question. “I don’t know…I just know it’s a girl. Is that queer?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it is.”
“What will you call her?”
“I don’t know that part yet.”
“Don’t you have any other family?” She had a look of hope in her eyes, perhaps hoping I would say yes, so that I could be sent off there…but I had no one. “You have your uncle and your brother.”
I suddenly felt sad. “Not anymore.”
Since the tides had turned on our happy-go-lucky conversation, Celia became serious. “We need a plan, Marley.”
I nodded. “Yes, but I don’t know what.”
“I was thinking about things last night. Maybe we should tell my mother.”
I grabbed Celia’s hand. “Oh, no please. I couldn’t bear to be sent back and that is what she’d do. She’d have no choice and then I would have to live in shame with the whole village knowing, and my uncle…” I started to sob. My situation seemed hopeless.
I felt her arm about my shoulder. “Shh! don’t worry I won’t tell. It was just a thought. You can trust me and I will take care of you. No one else shall know. I promise. Except…” Her thought process was beginning to make me feel on edge. “Old Porter…”
“No,” I gasped.
She hurried to explain. “He is a decent fellow. We could let him in on it. He wouldn’t give you up. Honestly he wouldn’t.”
“Please, Celia. Let’s just work this out for ourselves. The more people who know will increase the chances of me being discovered. We will think of a plan, and then I can leave and no one will be any the wiser. I think that’s a start, don’t you?”
“Yes, I think that’s a good start, little princess.”
End of Part One
Part 2
Chapter 11
Christmas came. Snow fell on the ground for three days ago, making the white landscape outside the attic window more beautiful than ever before. White trees, white meadows, white hedgerows and brambles, white fences and walls…but it was bitterly cold in the attic, colder than ever before. I’d been hiding in the attic for four-months now, but it had seemed longer.
Thanks to Celia, I was better equipped to deal with the cold that inched through the slates on the roof. Celia had provided me with four kerosene lamps. She told me about the existence of a large supply of lamps in the outside stores next to the stables, along with drums of Kerosene that wouldn’t be missed at all. The house –apart from the servant’s quarters- had been converted to electricity the previous year, so they were no longer needed; except in the event of a power cut. “Four lamps won’t be missed,” she’d said.
The lamps, along with a good supply of Kerosene, were a godsend. Not only did they provide light on the darkest of days and bleakest of nights, they also gave off some warmth. I spent most of the days in December in bed sewing, finishing off the quilt of mixed fabrics. Not only did it serve to keep me from becoming idle, but it covered me up at the same time. Along with my small fire -a flame really- which I used to cook my food and heat water for tea, I was kept comfortably warm, just as long as I wore my newly designed clothes and blankets.
Before winter had set in, I’d acquired underwear from the gentleman’s closet. The smell of the long johns had been most undesirable since they had been stored inside that old chest of drawers with moth balls among them and sachets of lavend
er, the smell mixing with that aging odour of ‘man’. With my needle and thread and silver scissors, I’d adjusted the size of the long johns and vests, until they fitted me like a glove. When I showed Celia how I had created something so practical beneath my frock, she’d gushed her approval and said how she wished she had some. On my feet, I wore two pairs of glove slippers, which looked a little strange but were very practical in the attic to keep my feet warm and to make my footsteps quieter on the floorboards.
One afternoon, when the rest of the household had been dining, Celia had performed what she’d called her ‘sound experiment’. The room she shared with her mother was just below the second section of the attic where my little secret bolt hole waited to be used in the event of an emergency. Celia had instructed me to walk quite heavily across the floor, while below in her room, she could judge if she heard any noises. When she returned, she asked me if I had done what she’d told me to do. I assured her I had, so she had been delighted to report that her experiment had worked and that even though I was moving around the attic, nothing could be heard in the rooms below. We were both thankful for that. Celia said the result of the experiment would allow me more freedom to move about, even when the servants were in their quarters but I still took no risks. If I didn’t need to move around, I remained still and quiet at certain times of the day, hardly breathing. I felt it was good practice to stick to a routine and to challenge my willpower by not doing what I wanted to do. It served as a punishment to myself, for being such a conniving sneaky wretch who deserved nothing in the way of allowances for deliberately intruding on that house.
One cold morning I took out the gentleman’s large black evening overcoat from his wardrobe. It was too heavy and cumbersome for me to move freely inside it, so I put it back and pulled out a green checked shooting jacket instead. The jacket was lighter and easier to wear as I moved around doing my daily chores. Chores? Necessities! To get me through the days ahead whilst Celia and I came up with a plan to get me out of there.
Providing food for myself was the most important of all. Celia had offered to sneak me half of her plate each mealtime but I wouldn’t allow it. I told her it was too risky and that if anyone suspected, we would surely be found out and we’d both be carted off to gaol. Instead, she smuggled the odd apple, or a handful of tea, or a piece of cheese or pie when she was sent to the pantry to collect something for the household’s meals.
Alongside her duties as a self-proclaimed general dogsbody, Celia had been given the job of trainee assistant housekeeper to her mother. The position, now that Celia was approaching her sixteenth birthday, was an honour for someone so young but Celia said she had been shadowing her mother for so long, she already knew the job inside out. Her mother said to her that she hoped someday Celia would carry on where she left off, thus securing a job for life and a permanent roof over her head. Thus, with her elevated position among the household staff, Celia had more freedom of the house than ever before.
The rest of my food supply came from the pigeons, still roaming around and settling on my terrace outside the windows. By the time Christmas had arrived, I’d worked out how to catch them, smoke them and preserve them. The concept was a wonder to Celia when I told her one day what I had found.
That day she’d smuggled three sweet biscuits in the pocket of her pinafore. The crumbling shortbreads had tasted sublime when I’d swilled them down with a nice cup of tea.
“What have you been up to today, Marley?” Celia had asked.
“Well it’s something strange and I’m worried you may not approve.”
Her eyes had stretched in wonder of what I was about to reveal. “What is it?”
I put down my cup. “Come and see.” We went out of the window door, onto the terrace where we turned left and stopped next to the wide chimney stack which pointed up to the sky like a towering furnace.
I fell to my knees while Celia waited. From the bottom of the stack, three rows up from the terrace floor, I removed two adjoining bricks protruding from the wall and pulled them out. As smoke billowed through the hole and caught the wind, rather than choke, I kept my face averted as I grabbed the fishing rod, taken from the gentleman’s sporting items, and reeled in my catch. At the end of the line were two pigeons, hanging lifeless and blackened with coal dust.
“What on earth, Marley!” Celia exclaimed.
“See, Celia! I’m smoking them instead of cooking them, so that the smell doesn’t waft through the attic to the servant’s quarters.” I laughed at her expression of bemusement. “They need a couple more days hanging in the chimney, but when they’re done I’ll strip off the feathers and eat the delicious flesh beneath the skin.”
“I think it’s a clever idea…but Marley, honestly, how do you have the stomach for killing these birds?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I was used to killing them by now, but I could see it must have looked strange to a house girl like she. “I’m a country girl, Celia. Catching and killing game is normal for us.”
She turned her head to see the birds cooing as they strolled about the terrace and perched on the balustrade. “But they’re so sweet.”
I could tell Celia disliked my tactics. And I…well, I resented her interrogation and her disapproval. For the first time ever, Celia and I didn’t see eye to eye. I put the fishing rod and the pigeons back inside the smoking hole and bunged it up with the bricks. When I stood up, I said to Celia. “They’re not pets to me, nor do they look sweet. They’re my food, and until I get out of here, this…” I swept my hand over the terrace to illustrate, “this, I’m afraid, is my pantry.”
That evening, Celia came bearing gifts of cheddar cheese, a slice of delicious ham and a chunk of homemade bread. I had been miserable all afternoon and sincerely regretted the stern tone I’d used with her. Not because I was frightened she’d give me up, but because I couldn’t have borne losing her friendship.
When she came in, she rushed to my side and we hugged. I cried as she put her arm around my shoulders and held me as a sister would. “I’m sorry, Marley. How can I judge you when you are so brave? I’m a terrible, mean girl.”
I laughed. “You’re not terrible or mean, dearest Celia. You are my greatest friend in the world and I would never want you to think of me as anything but your sister.”
The tension between us was suddenly dissolved as we both swore our eternal friendship and devotion. “Forever and ever, Amen.”
On the 25thOF December,Celia was unable to visit me, since the festivities between the family and the servants went on all Christmas day, but she did manage to sneak up for a couple of minutes mid-morning after she’d told her mother she was going to her room to fetch a clean apron. In her hand, she held a small gift wrapped in colourful patterned paper and a red bow tied about it. When she presented it to me, I took it and gazed at the little parcel in awe. Not because I was excited about what was inside, but that I had, just for those few minutes, become part of Christmas at Wilbury House.
“Go on, open it,” Celia urged.
“I can’t. It’s too pretty.”
We were both thinking the same. “Well, maybe you can wrap it back up after you’ve seen the gift,” she offered.
I laughed. “Yes, I can do that.” Now, I was excited at the prospect of finding out what was inside. I gently removed the ribbon and the little piece of holly tucked inside the bow and kept them in my hand as I unwrapped the paper. From inside, I pulled out a pair of thick black stockings. “Wonderful,” I exclaimed with perfect happiness.
“My mother gave me two pairs. My old ones are still wearable so I’m giving one pair to you. She shrugged. “She won’t notice, and if she knew about you, I’m sure she’d approve wholeheartedly.”
“Thank you, Celia,” I whispered. At the bottom of the parcel was a small booklet and attached to it was a long, thick piece of wood, painted yellow with a point at the end. “What is it,” I asked as I turned the contraption in the palm of my hand.
“It’s cal
led a pencil. Look…” Celia opened the booklet containing small squares of writing parchment. She used the pencil to scribe my name at the top, Marley.
I had never seen anything like it. A fountain pen and ink was the only instrument I knew of to write letters and sometimes white chalk in the classroom. Uncle possessed a set of fine pens to write his accounts for his business, but I was rarely allowed to use them. “That is so marvellous,” I gushed. “Oh, thank you, dear sister. Thank you.”
Quickly we both went quiet as the sound of music entered my loft space. We turned simultaneously to go through the window door and out onto the terrace. There, the sweetest sound wafted up from the grounds below as carol singers sang their song,
Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la, la la la la. Tis the season to be jolly, Fa la la la la, la la la la. Don we now our gay apparel, Fa la la, la la la, la la la…
The memory of that moment would be one I’d relish forever.
The day came and went. Celia had been busy throughout and when evening came she was ‘dead on her feet’, so she’d said the next day. She’d brought with her a linen napkin where inside, a feast of meat and vegetables made my stomach ache for something other than pigeon.
“That’s turkey,” Celia said pointing to the succulent meat. “It’s a Christmas tradition at Wilbury House, even for the servants.” Her eyes were alight with the joy of offering this wretch such a gastronomic delight. Sprouts, potatoes and golden parsnips sat aside it and a strange looking mixture which Celia told me was chestnut stuffing.
“I’ve never eaten so well…but Celia how did you manage to acquire such a feast?”
“Well, it’s a special occasion, so I took it from my plate.”
I gasped at the realisation of what she had done. “Celia, you can’t…”
“No one saw me.” She reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a handful of pudding. “I wish I could set this aflame with warming brandy as the family have it, but I’m sure you will enjoy it anyway.”
