The Kitchen Maid

by Val Wood

  A sudden smile lifted his gaunt features and he picked up the tray. ‘Nothing just yet. I’ll be in later. Then I’ll have two rashers of bacon, two fried eggs and three slices of bread. You’ll find everything in the larder.’

  After he had taken the tray upstairs and then come down and gone out again, Jenny went up and knocked on her aunt’s door. Agnes was sitting at a dressing table with her back to the door and looking into a mirror. ‘Come in, Jenny. Come and see me as I really am.’

  Jenny smiled and went across the sunny room towards her. ‘As you really are –’ she began, but her smile faded as her aunt turned towards her. Agnes’s rosy cheeks and bright eyes had gone, as had her pretty curls. Her face was sallow and dark shadows sat beneath her eyes, whilst her hair hung listlessly about her neck.

  ‘Are you not well today, Aunt?’ Jenny whispered.

  ‘I am not well on any day, Jenny,’ Agnes replied softly. ‘It takes a great deal of effort to make myself as presentable as I was yesterday. Stephen is the only one who has ever seen me looking like this. Not that we see many people. We live very quietly, just the two of us.’ She smiled and nodded. ‘And now we are three. Perhaps you will be able to help me be presentable for a little while longer?

  ‘Look.’ She opened a wooden box. ‘This is my beauty box. Stephen sees me as I really am every morning, then when he comes in later he sees the woman I once was, except of course,’ she added, ‘a little older.’

  She took out a palette of colours. Peach dusting powder for her face, carmine for her lips, and powdered rouge to uplift her cheeks. ‘Watch what I do, Jenny,’ she said, ‘so that when I am too tired to do it myself, you can do it for me.’ Holding her powder brush with a pale languid hand, she first hid her deep shadows with white chalky powder, then proceeded to colour her face, blushing her cheeks, touching her lips with a hint of red and darkening her eyebrows with soot which she kept in a small box and applied by delicately spitting on a miniature brush, then dipping the brush into the soot.

  ‘Now for my hair.’ She opened a drawer and took out some false fair curls. ‘Perhaps you would fasten these for me?’

  Jenny took the hairbrush and gently untangled her aunt’s hair, smoothing it out and trying not to notice the loose strands which came away with the brush. She carefully twisted it into a chignon and pinned the curls around her face.

  ‘Goodness,’ Agnes exclaimed, turning her head this way and that as she looked in the mirror. ‘How well it looks. Thank you, Jenny.’ She gave a brilliant smile, which quite transformed her face into the one Jenny had seen on her arrival the day before. ‘Stephen is going to think he has found another wife.’ There was a catch in her voice as she spoke of her husband. ‘My poor darling,’ she whispered. ‘He tries so very hard.’

  Jenny suggested that her aunt rested in her room until Mr Laslett returned for breakfast and she had finished some chores. ‘I could bring Mr Laslett’s breakfast up here, Aunt,’ she said. ‘If we put the table in the window you could sit with him whilst he eats.’ She didn’t know if she was being very forward in suggesting such a thing, but she thought how pleasant it would be to look out over the countryside whilst eating. Agnes thought it an excellent idea and said she would have coffee at the same time.

  ‘I’m so glad you came, Jenny,’ she said. ‘You are going to be an asset, I can tell.’

  ‘Did Mr Laslett mind about my baby, Aunt Agnes?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘He said if I didn’t mind, then neither did he,’ Agnes said. ‘And I told him about Christopher Ingram. He knew of the family at one time. He was sad for you.’

  He didn’t seem sad, Jenny pondered later, when Stephen Laslett questioned her about Christy. He must have been merely considering his wife’s feelings, not wanting to upset her.

  ‘Why were you so sure that young Ingram would marry you?’ he said brusquely after he had carried his breakfast tray downstairs. ‘He might have been just playing games.’

  Jenny choked back her tears. ‘He did play games,’ she said. ‘But he believed they were real. No-one understood him like I did. I wasn’t bothered about getting married. But I wanted to be with him, to look after him.’ She turned her face away. ‘I loved him, and he loved me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘Of course,’ and then went on, ‘Agnes looks very well this morning. She’ll come downstairs shortly. Perhaps you’d help her down?’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘I thought Beverley was country,’ Jenny admitted to her aunt one morning as she dressed her hair. ‘I didn’t know that ’country was like this.’

  ‘And do you like it?’ Agnes wheezed. Sometimes her breathing was laboured. ‘Or are you bored? We see few people.’

  ‘No, I think it’s lovely,’ Jenny assured her. ‘I love all ’smells of meadow grass and sound of birdsong and the way that ’animals seem so content.’ There were a few sheep, a dairy cow and a pig, and a dozen or so hens and ducks.

  Her aunt smiled. ‘It looks so idyllic, doesn’t it? I thought ’same when I first came here. I didn’t know what hard work lay in front of us. Lavender Cott was nothing more than a hovel when we first saw it.’ She stretched and grimaced, but put on a smile, which didn’t fool Jenny at all. She knew that before the morning was over, Agnes would want a dose of the medication that Stephen had obtained from the doctor.

  ‘There’s so much to do, Jenny,’ her aunt went on, ‘and I don’t mean just in the house. The cow has to be milked, ’pig to be fed, ’vegetable garden to see to, apples to pick and store for winter. We don’t have much money; we have to grow the food we need.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny said. ‘I know.’

  Stephen Laslett had shown her over the land he had bought from a local farmer. The farmer was reluctant to sell the ten acres but he was in need of cash, which Stephen Laslett was willing to pay. On the land set into a hollow was a dilapidated shepherd’s hut, built of chalk and flint, and there was a stream running through the sloping pastureland. Rabbits which had escaped from a neighbouring warren swarmed over the land.

  He and Agnes had made the hut habitable, had the roof thatched, rerouted the stream so that it ran close by the building and dug and built a brick well. They bought two lean and thin-ribbed shire horses, which was all they could afford, and fed and cosseted them until they were fit and able to pull a single-furrow plough. Then they ploughed an acre of grassland and sowed corn. Stephen trapped and sold the rabbits at market and so they were provided with food and money. Over the years they grew vegetables, planted fruit trees, kept hens and ducks, bought sheep and pigs, cut down timber, extended the house and waited in vain for children to fill it.

  Could we have done that, Jenny wondered, Christy and me? And she knew that they couldn’t. Christy wouldn’t have had the stamina for such hard work, she decided. He couldn’t have dug ditches or laid hedges as Stephen had. He would not have noticed the sly fox which stole the hens, or the shy deer which grazed the hillside, nor seen the distinction between the owls that hooted at night and the kestrels which hovered by day. He was made for a gentleman’s town life, she realized. He would have allowed me to do everything for him.

  ‘I’m strong,’ she told her aunt as she put in the final hairpin. ‘I can do all of those things that you did. I just need to be shown how.’

  ‘When is your child due, Jenny?’ Agnes asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘I think sometime in ’spring,’ Jenny said. ‘March or April. I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘We must take care of each other over the winter then,’ Agnes murmured. ‘I hope I shall still be here.’

  ‘Oh, Aunt.’ Jenny was distressed. ‘Please don’t think such things.’

  ‘I must,’ Agnes said softly. ‘I must plan for Stephen.’

  Jenny understood that, for hadn’t she planned with Christy? Though those schemes had gone disastrously wrong. But what would she do if her aunt died? Would Stephen Laslett allow her to stay on? Would he stay here, left only with Agnes’s memory? Or would he go back hom
e to his family?

  ‘Are Mr Laslett’s parents still alive, Aunt Agnes?’ she asked. ‘Does he ever see them?’

  ‘His mother died some years ago.’ Agnes got up from her chair, then leant on the bed and took deep breaths. ‘His father is still alive. He would welcome Stephen back if it were not for me. He’s never forgiven me for marrying his son, though if we had had children,’ she said pensively, ‘I think he might have done. There’s no-one else to take the family name, you see; there are no other sons, only daughters.’

  She gave a wistful glance at Jenny. ‘But Stephen doesn’t see him. He says he won’t ever go back, not after the way I’ve been ostracized. Even now I am not accepted, though we are legally man and wife, married in church before witnesses.’

  ‘It’s a pity that Mr Laslett’s father doesn’t know you, Aunt,’ Jenny said softly. ‘He would recognize your worth, if he did.’

  ‘He calls us peasant farmers.’ Agnes gave a dry laugh. ‘And of course that is what we are. Stephen’s father has hundreds of acres of land, whereas we have only ten. We hire itinerant labourers, Irish migrants or tramps to help us with haymaking and harvest. Everything else we do ourselves. Or we did.’ Her voice softened. ‘Now, Stephen does it all.’

  Although she couldn’t do outside work Agnes still cooked and baked and showed Jenny how to bottle fruit, make jams and chutneys, pluck a chicken and preserve eggs in brine. Jenny had never baked anything in her life. At her home in Hull pies and pastries had been bought from the baker. Now she took great delight in producing a golden crusty rabbit pie out of the oven, or making a pot of steaming vegetable soup.

  ‘We’ll make a countrywoman of you yet, Jenny,’ her aunt said as they ate a dish of game stew one evening. ‘Won’t we, Stephen?’

  Stephen glanced at Jenny and then at his wife’s plate. She had eaten little. He nodded. ‘Just as we did of you.’ He got up from the table, excusing himself, and went from the room.

  He doesn’t want to think of me taking Agnes’s place, Jenny thought, watching as her aunt’s eyes grew wistful again. I shall have to move on. He won’t want me here.

  ‘I was a town girl, just like you, Jenny,’ Agnes said with a catch in her voice. ‘But I learnt by my mistakes and Stephen was always a farmer at heart. Since he was a child he had watched the men on his father’s land, though once he had thought of being a soldier.’

  As autumn turned into winter, Jenny grew heavier and more cumbersome. She thrived on the fresh food, eggs and milk; her complexion was rosy and blooming whilst in contrast her aunt, day by day, grew paler and thinner.

  ‘Aunt Agnes told me’, Jenny wrote in her notes, ‘that Stephen said he loved her as she was, and that there was no need for her to paint her face, but I believe that she wants to. She doesn’t want to look into the mirror and see someone there that she doesn’t recognize. So I carefully apply the powder to cover the shadows beneath her eyes and give a little blush to her cheeks, and they both pretend that that is how she really is.

  ‘I grow fatter by the day. My skin is good and my hair is glossy and if Christy was here to see me, he would say I was beautiful. When my son is born, I will call him Christopher in memory of his father and to remind me of happier times before disaster overtook us.’

  Winter came on fast and hard. The sheep were brought down into the barn. Water from the stream was carried in to them every morning and a pail filled for the house, for the iron pump to the well was frozen. The disconsolate pig grunted in its pen and the ducks huddled in a corner of the barn, occasionally paddling across the snow to the stream, where they dipped their heads and cleaned their breast feathers before they waddled back to the warmth of the straw-filled barn. The hens stopped laying, so some of the older ones had their necks wrung and were put into the cooking pot.

  ‘It’s going to be a long winter,’ Stephen said one morning as he brought in a pile of wood and kindling for the fire. ‘For goodness’ sake don’t give birth until the spring, Jenny. The roads are impassable. The doctor wouldn’t be able to get through.’

  Jenny was plucking a chicken and had feathers all over her aproned lap, but she stopped what she was doing and stared at him. She had felt so well. She hadn’t given thought to having a doctor visit her. ‘The doctor?’ she said. ‘Would I have to pay?’

  Stephen glanced back at her. ‘Do you have any money?’

  She shook her head. She hadn’t been given any wages. It hadn’t been mentioned, and she didn’t know quite how she stood. Her situation wasn’t the same as a hired servant’s. It hadn’t seemed right to ask her aunt about such a thing and she was still rather in awe of Stephen Laslett, even though he wasn’t quite as distant as he had been, and had recently told her to call him Stephen, which she did only rarely.

  ‘I have a friend who’s a doctor,’ he said. ‘He’s been giving Agnes medication for her illness. We were at school together,’ he muttered. ‘He’s the only one who has kept in touch. I’ll ask him nearer your time.’

  Christmas came and Jenny cooked her first Christmas dinner. Stephen carried Agnes downstairs and she sat in an easy chair with her feet on a footstool and a blanket wrapped around her. ‘What a fraud I am,’ she said weakly. ‘Letting you two do all the work.’

  ‘You must tell me what to do next, Aunt,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ve been boiling this plum pudding for hours, since first thing this morning. It’s surely done by now?’ She took the rattling lid off the pan where the pudding was steaming, wrapped in a cotton cloth.

  ‘A little longer,’ her aunt smiled, ‘and then if Stephen can find a drop of rum, I’ll tell you how to make a sauce.’

  Stephen rummaged in a cupboard and brought out a half-bottle of rum. ‘I’ve been saving this for a special occasion.’ His voice was tight. ‘And I can’t think of any other occasion that will be more special.’ He poured some into a jug for Jenny to use in the sauce, then took four eggs from the larder, cracked them into a bowl, whisked them with honey and melted butter and stirred in a glassful of rum. He poured half a glassful of the mixture and kneeling down by Agnes’s side handed it to her. ‘There you are, my darling. This will pick you up.’ His voice broke and he put his head on her knee.

  She stroked his face and took a sip of the mixture. ‘I feel better already,’ she said softly, and Jenny hustled out of the room, too choked by emotion to stay.

  In January they were marooned in the house and yard, the snows too deep to venture further than the stream, which fortunately didn’t freeze. Jenny looked at the white landscape, at the peaks and troughs and the trees bowed down by the weight of snow, and marvelled at the beauty of it. She saved crumbs and scraps of meat to feed the birds, and a cock pheasant daily braved the dog to feed by her feet. For gathering the few eggs and milking the cow, which Stephen had taught her to do, she wore an old coat of his and a pair of her aunt’s stout boots, for she had come ill equipped for country weather.

  By the beginning of March Agnes was confined to bed, too weak to venture downstairs, and Stephen rode to the nearby village of Etton to fetch the doctor. When Dr Hill came, he nodded amiably at Jenny as he passed her to follow Stephen upstairs. ‘You look well, young lady,’ he said. He was a tall, broad-set man who topped his friend Laslett by several inches. ‘Will you be needing my assistance or will you manage on your own?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’ Jenny blushed. ‘It’s my first time.’

  ‘I’ll get a woman to come to you,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  When he came down alone a quarter of an hour later his demeanour had changed. He motioned to Jenny to come and sit beside him. ‘Birth and death,’ he said. ‘Both perfectly natural occurrences. But one brings joy and one brings sorrow. Are you prepared for that?’

  ‘I’ve already had sorrow in my life, sir,’ she answered. ‘I shall be glad to have some joy.’

  ‘Stephen will take it hard when Agnes leaves him,’ he said in a low voice. ‘As leave him she will. Can you help him?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,
’ she said. ‘He might not want me to stay. I’m not his responsibility.’

  ‘No, I realize that.’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘But perhaps you can help each other.’ He got up to leave. ‘I’ll come again next week. The weather is improving, spring will soon be here.’ He looked squarely at her. ‘A spring birth, I think? A renewal of life!’

  Jenny went into labour, though she didn’t know that was what it was, on 31 March 1860. She felt some discomfort during the morning and put it down to overeating the night before. ‘I’m such a pig,’ she said to Agnes as she propped her up in bed and plumped up her pillows. ‘But that rabbit pie, if I say so myself, was scrumptious. I wish you’d tried it, Aunt. Stephen ate hardly any, so that’s why I ate so much.’

  Jenny was doing her best to be cheerful, though it was hard when she saw Agnes getting weaker and frailer, and spending every day in bed.

  ‘You’re eating for two,’ her aunt said hoarsely. ‘I’ll try some tomorrow. But persuade Stephen to eat. He needs his strength.’ She put her hand over Jenny’s. ‘You’ll stay with him, won’t you, Jenny?’

  ‘If he wants me to, Aunt Agnes.’ There were no secrets between them. They were both aware of the inevitable. It was only when Stephen was with them that they all pretended that life was continuing as normal.

  ‘I’ll tell him that you must,’ Agnes said. ‘You must have a place for your child.’ She gazed wistfully at Jenny. ‘It’s what we have always wanted. A child around the house.’

  As Jenny continued with her tasks during the day, she thought of how when Agnes was still able to come downstairs she had followed her with her eyes, watching her every move. Not checking on her work, but as if she was reassuring herself that all would be well after she was gone. By little hints on what to do during the year, it seemed as if she was planning for Jenny to take her place.

  By teatime, Jenny was decidedly uncomfortable. She pulled herself upstairs to take Agnes a cup of tea and paused to breathe deeply. ‘I’m a bit out of sorts, Agnes,’ she said. ‘That pie is giving me some gyp. I’ll have to go and have a lie down.’