Lady's Maid

by Margaret Forster

  ‘To be me?’

  ‘To be near such poets and part of that adventure!’

  Wilson was silent. The elder Miss Wynne, Miss Millicent, frowned a little at her sister and was embarrassed. ‘Violet reads poetry,’ she offered by way of explanation, ‘especially Mrs Browning’s. She has whole passages of Aurora Leigh by heart, or so it often seems.’

  ‘Do you think,’ Miss Violet said, leaning forward excitedly, ‘do you think, Signora Romagnoli, do you think that one day I might meet Mrs Browning in this house?’

  ‘Violet!’ her sister remonstrated.

  ‘Mrs Browning does not like visitors,’ Wilson said, ‘and as to meeting her, I could not say.’

  ‘Of course you could not,’ Miss Millicent agreed, ‘and Violet is silly to expect an introduction. Let us forget it at once.’

  But Wilson did not forget it. On the contrary, the question she saw hovering behind Miss Violet’s innocent query remained at the forefront of her mind right up to the day the Brownings returned to the Casa Guidi. The question was, on what footing would she now be with her old mistress? The more she thought about this, the more uncertain she became. Were they to be friends? And if so, how was the friendship between maid and ex-mistress to be defined? She did not know what assumptions she could make. Would she be free to come and go in the Casa Guidi as she liked? Would Pen be allowed to visit her as and when he liked? And what of Ferdinando, her husband? How would they succeed in living together? What would be allowed? Everywhere she looked there were areas of doubt and her apprehension grew.

  In every way except one her worries proved unjustified. Both Pen and Ferdinando rushed in immediately the carriage drew up at the door and wonderful was the reunion; then within the hour the kindest of notes came from Mrs Browning begging her to find the time and energy to visit whenever she was able. Wilson was able straight away. Pausing only to change her dress and smooth her hair she went into the Casa Guidi, laboriously climbed the stairs and arriving in the drawing room in some distress through lack of breath, was hastily urged to sit down and put up her feet and take a dish of tea. It was only when the tea came that her pleasure in such a welcome, in being given such evidence of the continuing affection in which she was held, abruptly waned. The tea was brought in by Annunciata. Looking at her, Wilson felt an actual spasm of pain. The girl was not only twice as pretty as she had remembered but graceful and vivacious with the most beautiful smile. But it was not the face or the manner which struck Wilson most so much as the lithesome body. Perhaps because her own was at that time lumpen and awkward she seemed to feel the contrast painfully – such high, generous breasts, such a neat waist, such slender wrists and ankles! Wilson instinctively tucked her own swollen legs more securely under her gown and covered her enormous belly protectively with her arms. Annunciata turned to her, as she put the tea down, and respectfully enquired for her health. The girl’s skin glowed, her eyes were bright. It was all Wilson could do to thank her for her concern. And then to watch Annunciata trip back to the kitchen, where her own Ferdinando was preparing supper, was too much. She had difficulty attending to Mrs Browning’s questions and replied in a strained voice. Looking up, she saw her old mistress understood perfectly her misery and confusion and was sorry for it but there was also an air of what looked remarkably like satisfaction about her. It seemed to say that all this inconvenience had ended well and she, Mrs Browning, had after all gained more than she had lost. Wilson could hardly bear it.

  With Pen, there were no such changes in allegiance. If he had had his way, he would have stayed in Wilson’s house all day long and as it was managed to be there a good half of it. But Wilson played fair – she did not encourage him. Whenever Annunciata came to fetch the child she was firm: he must go at once or otherwise his mother would be displeased and might not allow him to come at all. And this was not simply because she wished to be above reproach: it was also because, nearing her time, she found the eight-year-old boy exhausting. He had not quietened down at all as he had grown older – far from it – and could not now be still for a single moment. He was still pretty, still was obliged to wear his hair in long curls and was attired in the same silks and satins but underneath all this there was a tougher character emerging. Wilson saw Henry Barrett in him and even a flash of his Grandfather Barrett. Mentioning this once to his mother she was speedily put right: Pen was all his father, lacked entirely the characteristics of those other Barrett males. But when he was with her alone Wilson watched him kicking a ball down her stairs and fight with Ferdinando in her kitchen and knew the time would come when his mother must face facts.

  Pen wished, above all else, to see a baby born. To Wilson’s embarrassment, he would not leave the subject alone. He cuddled her and felt the bump in a way that made her uneasy as to the propriety of it and asked constantly how this baby was to climb out. What should she say? The normally so frank Mrs Browning was no help when asked to suggest what should be said. ‘Birth is a natural event,’ was all she offered, ‘and I will tell Pen so.’ She may have told him but it did not stop the questions. ‘When the baby is ready,’ Wilson said, ‘it will find a way out and if you wish to know more you must ask your mother and father.’ Whether they explained further she did not know but the questions changed in direction. ‘When will it be born, Lily?’ was the next refrain and here she could be truthful. ‘Nobody knows, only God,’ she told him, only to be asked if God would divulge the information if prayed to very hard. He wanted a promise that as soon as the baby appeared he should be sent for, ‘even in the dead of night’ so that he might be the first to kiss it. In the event, he very nearly was. This birth was so quick and easy, Wilson could not think it the same process as Oreste’s. One moment she was directing Maria in the making of knead cakes, the next she was taken with a sensation of wishing to bear down, no pains preceding it, and had a struggle to get herself to bed and to have Ferdinando and the midwife sent for. Half an hour later, her second son emerged, as strong and healthy as the first, and Pen Browning arrived two hours later to go into paroxysms of delight.

  Lying in bed that November day, Wilson looked at the baby cradled in her arms and felt dizzy at the sight of his uncanny resemblance to his brother. Only the room she was in and the company she was among marked the difference. All around her were the smiling faces so lacking at Oreste’s birth, for Ellen and William could not match the pride of Ferdinando nor the ecstasy of Pen, and she felt loved and treasured not pitifully alone and bereft. Yet the baby, in looking and seeming the same, distressed her. Tears ran down her cheeks as she thought of her first-born, of how he ought to be here, a part of the family circle. Writing to Ellen as soon as she could manage it, she could not help confessing:

  — holding this second baby Ellen puts me in mind more and more of Oreste and I grieve to have him. It is not right we should be parted. In no manner does the birth of this child put the other out of my mind nor can I accept he is a substitute but rather a reminder as if God wished to show me what I have lost and reprimand me for my carelessness. When you tell Oreste that he has been blessed with a brother I beg you to remind him that he is his mother’s first-born and as such has pride of place in her heart. We are to christen this child Pilade, being the name of Ferdinando’s maternal grandfather whom he wishes to honour. Teach Oreste how to say it. It is pronounced ‘Pil’ as in pill ‘a’ as in the exclamation ‘ah!’ and ‘de’ as in day. The whole together is three syllables and pleasing I think to the tongue.

  Mrs Browning at least thought so. Wilson took the baby in to see her as soon as she was about and he was admired but, she fancied, with some sense of distancing. Mrs Browning did not wish to hold him, saying she feared her arms were not strong enough and that her cough might disturb him. She coughed, Wilson noticed, all the time, not the hacking, tearing deep coughs of a bad attack but persistent little coughs, as though trying and failing to clear her throat.

  ‘So are you well, Wilson?’ she asked, lying back on the sofa, white and drained-looking
.

  ‘I am fair, ma’am.’

  ‘Better than I, at any rate.’

  ‘Is it the old trouble, ma’am?’

  ‘Oh yes, nothing more. Except the life has gone out of me and in some curious way I hardly care.’

  ‘And do you write, ma’am?’

  ‘Write? Good heavens, Wilson, I have nothing to write now, only lines here and there that add up to precious little. If I could take up my pen again and find some hard, satisfying work it would be the better for me.’

  ‘Only there is a young lady as lodges with me, who asks me every day what Mrs Browning writes and is eager to know for she announces she lives for your poetry.’

  This produced a laugh which unfortunately brought on such a fit of coughing that Wilson was obliged to put Pilade down and attend to the invalid as though she were still her maid. Relieved, Mrs Browning did at least say, ‘You are the best of nurses, dear, and I miss your skill.’

  ‘It is nothing, ma’am, and I am glad to assist you. If ever you should need me I will come, night or day, and gladly.’

  Then she saw Mrs Browning’s eyes fill with tears and her hand was pressed. Annunciata, coming in singing with coffee, was reprimanded for causing a headache to begin on that instant and Wilson could not help feeling triumphant.

  But she knew perfectly well it was a foolish and misplaced sense of petty triumph for the old order had changed irrevocably. Though she might be an ever welcome visitor in the Casa Guidi, though the traffic between the two houses might be unrestricted, she saw all too clearly by the start of that New Year of 1858, that her part in the Brownings’ life was peripheral. She felt excluded from their world even though she could not have been better informed; the trouble was Ferdinando still belonged to that world. He came to spend the night, by agreement, twice a week and she saw him every day but there was no denying that he seemed a visitor and never a member of her household. What concerned her did not truly concern him, however much she sought to involve him. He did not want to be bothered with the problems she encountered, with water that seemed brackish or ceilings that had cracked – they were her concerns and, as she complained in a letter to Minnie:

  — I am driven to distraction with those household concerns with which you will be familiar Minnie but then in your case you have but to report them for them to be seen to by the master who will instruct the butler to bring in workmen and I am obliged to go out and seek my own help which is no easy thing. The landlord is abroad and the caretaker seems to have no power to maintain these dilapidated premises. In other ways I suppose I could be said to prosper tolerably well. I have this day bid farewell to the Misses Wynne, two English ladies who have been as friends to me and I am sorry to see them go, and have taken in Miss Hawarth, an old friend of Mr Browning’s together with two other ladies who will stay until Easter. I am pleased to have ladies since they are more comfortable to be with and understand better the difficulties I labour under with a young baby and poor help and no husband constantly at my elbow. But I tell you Minnie, for all the independence, I had rather have my old job back and be in service with Mrs Browning. I daresay you find this strange and may think I am ungrateful when after all I have been given the chance to set up for myself which is not given to many of our station but it is a surprise to me too. I have upon my shoulders so many cares as a landlady that I feel bowed down whereas, and I do not think my memory faults me, I was freer as a maid. It would be otherwise if I had my husband with me and my first-born but as it is I feel neither one thing or the other. There is more to running a boarding house than ever you would think Minnie and hardest of all is the impossibility of finding reliable and trustworthy staff who are not forever thinking of themselves first in a way we would not have dared.

  But bit by bit, Wilson became aware that she had some small skill in the matter of keeping a boarding house and that her future, and her family’s, might indeed lie in that direction. She seemed at any rate, to satisfy lodgers. The Misses Wynne sent two other ladies, rather considerably older than themselves, with a heavy recommendation and they in turn sent a widow and her daughter. Miss Hawarth likewise procured several paying guests, moving Wilson to declare she could not imagine why any lady would wish to lodge in her poorly decorated and furnished house when they might find themselves a place a good deal more attractive and comfortable. ‘Ah, Wilson,’ Miss Hawarth had said with a smile, ‘the keeper is more important than the house and then there are your connections, you know.’ ‘Connections?’ she had echoed, entirely bewildered. ‘Why yes, dear, you are the good friend of the Brownings.’ And so it seemed. Lady after lady breathed heavier when Pen dashed in and out, and on the days when Wilson was a little late with the supper – which she now undertook to provide – on account of having been delayed taking tea with Mrs Browning there was not a word of complaint but only a diffident enquiry as to how the venerable poetess had seemed. If it had not been for the shamelessness of it, Wilson felt she might have been sorely tempted to exploit this extraordinary advantage.

  As it was, she concentrated on organising her household to better effect. Her days were very full. She now had a girl to watch over Pilade and, as well as the still indolent Maria, another young woman, rather more energetic, who fulfilled the combined roles of house- and parlour-maid. Wilson sent the washing out and did the cooking and marketing herself. It gave her great satisfaction that after a couple of months she proved as expert as Ferdinando, learning rapidly how to drive a hard bargain. Ferdinando, she came to see, had never done that, however much the Brownings were convinced he did. Watching him in the market she saw how popular he was, and certainly he had an eye for the best produce on offer, but when it came to the exchange of cash he parted with it too readily. She saw women, old gnarled Italian housewives, who did not care about popularity, who were quite composed in the face of sour looks, getting fruit and vegetables and even meat at a quarter the price paid by her affable husband and she resolved to become one of these women. She let Ferdinando teach her how to judge an aubergine ripe and a chicken fresh and then she copied those older women she had seen for the rest. She learned to keep her face absolutely still, not to smile, and to look as if, on the brink of completing a bargain, she was going to walk away in disgust. At first, her face burned and she was often defeated in her purpose but within a few weeks she was indistinguishable from the seasoned bargainers. Ferdinando did not like it. The market people passed comments on his wife and, he said, threw doubt on his ability to better her. He frowned when reporting this and said it was not good that she should be so hard. He preferred her, he said, to be the gentle creature he had married.

  Wilson, telling Mrs Browning of this, laughed. ‘Gentle, indeed!’ she said ‘And if I were as gentle in the market as I have been for him at home, how does he think I would manage?’

  ‘All men wish all women to be gentle,’ Mrs Browning commented, ‘just as all women wish men to be strong and to alter this we must first start with our sons and what they are brought up to. We ought not to admire them when they put up their fists and fight nor mock them when they are afraid and tell them they must be a man.’ Wilson looked doubtful. It was not at all the response she wanted, but Mrs Browning was again in full flow. ‘Penini knows I think it good that he is considerate and sensitive – he has been brought up to see no merit in violence, and when he is a man he will be as his father, entirely lacking in those so-called manly virtues of domination and arrogance towards women.’ There was a pause and before Wilson could think how to reply, she added, ‘But I may never see him as a man,’ in a low voice.

  ‘Oh, now come, ma’am, do not speak so. You are stronger than you were and with summer arriving you will once more pick up.’

  ‘Pick up? Perhaps.’ There was no confidence in her answer. Wilson saw the doubt in her eyes and the droop of her body and felt a shiver pass through her own. It was easy to keep promising that some sun and heat would work its usual miracle but it had been a hard, cold winter and almost everyone had suffe
red from influenza, Mrs Browning worst of all. It seemed a long time since she had been out of her apartment, longer still since she had taken a walk. Wilson knew that some visiting Americans had let it be widely known in Florence that they considered Mrs Browning little more than a ghost and though she had laughed such gossip to scorn she now saw there was perhaps real cause for alarm. ‘What you need, ma’am,’ she suddenly said, ‘is a holiday, a proper holiday.’

  ‘I know, and I have plans to have it, if I can but gather the energy in a month or two.’

  It was a while before these plans were divulged and when they were, Wilson’s first reaction was one of alarm. The Brownings, it appeared were going to France, to some seaside place, in Brittany perhaps, where they would be joined by members of both their families, somewhere new, somewhere stimulating away from the tired attractions of Lucca. All very well, but did it mean Ferdinando would be taken with them, together with Annunciata? It was all she wanted to know and did not dare ask directly. What wounded her was her husband’s indifference. When she pointed out this might mean she would be on her own yet again throughout another summer he shrugged and said it could not be helped and he had no choice. She boiled at his lack of thought for her and replied, louder than she had intended that indeed he had, that, unlike last year, there was a choice. Then she brought him her account book, which she had kept faithfully from the first day of opening her house, and showed him the state of things. Since the Brownings’ present had paid the year’s rent and since she had managed the household so economically there was an actual income, growing monthly, from the boarders, upon which they could live. If Ferdinando left the Brownings’ service and came in with her, adopting his rightful position, then she could manage even better and take more boarders and they would be self-supporting besides living together always.

  No one could have mistaken the hesitation in his manner. She could see his brain struggling to find an escape route and that he should want one hurt and shocked her. She watched him, waited scornfully and yet was taken unawares when he blurted out, ‘And Oreste? The money we remit to England, to your sister? It would not be possible.’ It would not indeed. All of Ferdinando’s wages went to Ellen, save for the smallest amount he kept for his personal pleasure. Often, she had felt for him as they both stood in front of Mr Browning as the money order was made. ‘All, Ferdinando?’ Mr Browning would ask him and he would nod, but squeeze her hand and hang his head. She had always told him how proud she was of him, that he should work so hard to support his son in a far-off country and how one day she would tell Oreste it was due to his father’s efforts that he had been so well looked after. Now, if he left service, it was true they would no longer be able to afford to remit the regular payments. What was she asking him to do? To throw over that stability she had insisted they must have. It was too soon to do so. In September, another year’s rent must be paid and the money for that would not this time come from the Brownings. Writing to Ellen, she could not help be bitter, remarking: