The Adventuress: HFTS5

by M C Beaton

“That’s not nice,” said Lizzie hotly. “I never have any fun. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to go out?”

  “Very well, Lizzie. But only one hour. If you are not back, then we shall all go out looking for you.”

  Rainbird returned to the servants’ hall.

  “What was thet whispering all abaht?” asked Joseph languidly.

  “Never mind,” said Rainbird. “Sometimes I could shake you, Joseph. If you were more of a man…. Take some more coal up to the parlour and stop lounging about. There’s work to be done.”

  “So you are to be married,” said Fitz later that day. “And just like that! I feel you might have warned me your intentions were serious. I was on the point of trying for Miss Goodenough myself.”

  “I thought you might have guessed when I went out of my way to arrange that rout and set you up as a princess.”

  “But what of all those doubts of yours about her background?”

  “I decided to trust her—but there was no need. Her papers prove her to be of gentle birth.”

  “Then why all the secrecy about the marriage?”

  “Because my beloved wishes it that way. And I do not want my sister’s Friday-face to spoil my wedding. Come, wish me well, Fitz. You will make an excellent bride-man.”

  “I wish you all the best in the world with my better feelings. My nastier feelings, nonetheless, tell me that you deliberately tried to persuade me Miss Emily was common to put me out of the running.”

  “My dear Fitz, you never even reached the startinggate until that dinner party of hers!”

  “True,” said Fitz with a reluctant grin. “Ah, well, perhaps there will be another beauty to take my eye. I am feeling out of sorts. I have not yet grown into my new appearance and I confess I feel a dull dog in these sober clothes.”

  “You can peacock as much as you like on my wedding-day.”

  “So we shall be losing you,” said Fitz. “Where are you spending your honeymoon?”

  “At Sixty-seven Clarges Street.”

  “Bedad! Why?”

  “My love is attached to her rented servants. That Mrs. Middleton is none other than the housekeeper.”

  “I thought that you would not countenance an affection for mere servants.”

  “If I can have my Emily, I can put up with anything. The house has proved lucky for me. Besides, I shall only have to endure the place for a few weeks.”

  With her hair dressed up on top of her head, quite like a lady, and wearing a warm brown shawl over her green-and-white-striped gown, Lizzie stepped out proudly that evening on Luke’s arm.

  She barely heard what he was saying, but he was bragging about himself, and Lizzie, who had become used to just such monologues from Joseph, felt free to bask in all the glory of walking along beside this splendid young man.

  She saw Mary, the housemaid at Number 62, staring open-mouthed, and Lizzie felt her heart would burst with joy.

  It was early evening and a green and violet sky stretched out over the tops of the jumbled chimneys of Buckingham House as they walked down through the Green Park. Trees with their new buds stood silhouetted in the twilight like black lace and blackbirds carolled their spring song out on the quiet, sleepy, smoky London air.

  “Must be hard to be a scullery maid,” Lizzie realised Luke was saying. “You being eddicated and all.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” said Lizzie, who felt nothing could worry her on this lovely evening.

  “Still, you’re a pretty little girl, and it must go hard not having a dowry.”

  “Oh, I got a dowry,” said Lizzie. “Well, it’s my share of the pub.”

  “Pub? What pub?”

  Lizzie felt she should not tell Luke about their plans. But the desire to show off was stronger. She tossed her head.

  “We’ve been saving up ever so hard. We got nigh on three hundred pounds among us.”

  Luke whistled softly. “That’s enough to buy a pub already. Wot you all waiting for?”

  “Mr. Rainbird says as how we must have more for the stocks, the glasses, the linen, and enough laid aside to keep us till we get a trade.”

  Luke slid an arm about Lizzie’s slender waist. “That Rainbird’s a stupid fellow. He could make ten times as much by the end o’ next week if he used his brain-box.”

  “Go on,” giggled Lizzie. She made to pull away, but then she saw one of the grooms from Lambeth Mews at the end of Clarges Street, who was cutting through the park staring at them, and stayed where she was.

  “It’s the truth. Lord Hampshire’s got a filly running at Ascot at ten to one, and I ’appen to know the other ’orses, horses, has been nobbled. Now, say you took that money and gave it to me to put on, you’d be able to give ’em three thousand pounds. Think o’ the looks on their faces! Three fousand—thousand! Why, none of you’d need to work in a pub. You could invest that on Change and live on the proceeds.”

  “I’d never do that,” said Lizzie, pulling away this time. “ ’Member when Joseph took the money and put it all on a horse and lost it all?”

  “Joseph. That milksop!”

  “Thought he was a friend of yours. Anyway, he’s a friend of mine, and I don’t like you calling him names!”

  “He’s a friend o’ mine, too, Lizzie, but come now, you must confess he ain’t got much brain. This filly’s going to win ’cos I got it from Hampshire’s valet.”

  “How much you putting on?”

  “Five shillings. Don’t laugh. It’s all I got.”

  “They’d never let me have the money,” said Lizzie. “They’d laugh at me.”

  “Well, don’t tell them! Think o’ their faces when you comes in and throws the money on the table.”

  It was a lovely dream, but Lizzie shook her head.

  “You see, Lizzie,” said Luke earnestly, “the reason I’m asking is this. I’ve taken a fancy to you, so help me, I have. Your share o’ the winnings would give you enough for us to be married and set up a business on our own. I know, we’d buy a little cottage in the country, a little bit of land, and you’d keep house and I’d work the land.”

  He slid a coaxing arm about her waist. Lizzie closed her eyes and leaned against him. It was so like that dream she had had of herself and Joseph. But Luke was not Joseph. He was tall and strong and extremely masculine. She saw a pretty little cottage, a garden full of flowers, and now it was Luke who marched towards her down the country road, and not Joseph.

  “I couldn’t do it,” she whispered. “It would be stealing.”

  Luke turned her face up to his and kissed her gently on the mouth. A passionate kiss would have frightened Lizzie, but Luke’s soft kiss was warm and reassuring. “I am being proposed to by a first footman,” thought Lizzie dizzily.

  Then she remembered the days when Luke had been courting Alice, and how Luke had once twisted her arm so hard he had bruised it.

  “You was after Alice once,” said Lizzie, drawing away.

  “Alice ain’t the kind you marry,” said Luke with a scornful laugh. “Listen, let me tell you about that cottage where we’ll live….”

  He began to talk long and earnestly, interrupting his speech from time to time to kiss Lizzie and to stroke her hair. Dazed, flattered, happy, elated, and made thoroughly vain for the first time in her life, Lizzie listened to him, and the more he talked and the more he kissed and caressed, the more Lizzie hardened her heart against her “family”— the other servants. They had let her sleep on a damp pallet on the scullery floor, and her situation had only improved after she had fallen ill and one of the tenants had insisted she have a proper bed to sleep in. When they had nearly all been arrested for stealing one of the King’s deer and she had saved them by slashing her own wrist so that the blood on the area steps was believed to have been hers and not that of the stolen deer, they had not done one thing to make her lot in life any better. Yes, they had been kind when she was recovering, but after that, they had piled the menial jobs on her much as they had done before.

  The sk
y was growing dark. By the time Rainbird’s voice could be heard, shouting, “Lizzie! Lizzie!” she and Luke had become conspirators.

  Mr. Percival Pardon was back in London after a long absence. He was low on funds and could not entertain as lavishly as he would have liked, but he had invited his old friends, Mrs. Plumtree and Mrs. Giles-Denton and their daughters, Bessie and Harriet, to tea. He drank in all the gossip like a thirsty man who had been deprived of water for a long time.

  “And so,” said Mrs. Giles-Denton after a long bout of highly satisfactory scandal, “we have had quite a busy time. I forgot to tell you, we were persuaded to let the dear girls go to that wretched house in Clarges Street.”

  “Oh yes?” said Mr. Pardon, that wretched house holding bad memories for him, for his efforts to ruin one of the previous tenants had brought him nothing but disgrace.

  “Yes, and I wish I had gone with them. For the tenant is a most odd female no one has ever heard of—a Miss Emily Goodenough.”

  “And is she pretty?”

  “Nothing out of the common way,” said Bessie. “Fleetwood was monstrous taken with the creature. But I think she is vulgar. Didn’t you think she was vulgaire, Harriet?”

  Harriet reluctantly gave up her latest Attitude, which was of Pallas Athene looking down from Mount Olympus on Troy. It was an uncomfortable Attitude since it involved standing on one foot with the other foot raised behind and the hand shading the eyes while one arm clutched an imaginary shield.

  “Oh, yes, quite dégoûtant how all the men fluttered around her.”

  “A new beauty,” mused Mr. Pardon, correctly interpreting all this spite. “Must have a look at her.”

  Chapter

  Ten

  His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants’ hall.

  —Sir James Barrie

  The rigid hierarchy of the servants’ hall was not observed in winter. And during the Season, it was usually less strict than in most households in the West End of London. But the flurry and work and rushing about caused by Emily’s wedding kept the servants firmly in their appointed places. Only by working like a well-drilled regiment with Rainbird as their colonel could they cope with the work and preparations. And down at the bottom of the servants’ social ladder was Lizzie. No one had time to pay her any special marked attention. Angus, recovered from his sick-bed and wrestling over preparations for the wedding breakfast, rapped out orders to Lizzie, experimented with sauces, decided against them, and gave her the resultant sticky mess to scrub. Dave, the pot boy, was being used to run errands.

  And so Luke’s proposal and plans for their marriage sang in Lizzie’s tired brain. She forgot all the many kindnesses of the other servants, forgot she was allowed to study, to take walks, to wear pretty gowns, all favours not allowed to less fortunate scullery maids, and, for the first time in her life, grew tight-lipped and surly.

  Joseph alone noticed the change in her, but tried to jeer and tease her out of it instead of simply asking her what had come over her.

  Lizzie knew where their money was hidden. Palmer had once stolen it, and since that awful day, their savings had reposed in a tin box buried in the ground under a loose paving stone out in the yard. The day before Emily’s wedding was to be the day Lord Hampshire’s horse ran at Ascot. Lizzie had not been to church for some time. She forgot that gaining a position in a West End household had once seemed like the realisation of a dream.

  She became more tired and more irritable but would still have never dreamt of touching their money had she not fallen into disgrace two days before the wedding.

  Angus came back into the scullery carrying a copper saucepan and set it down beside Lizzie with a thump. “D’ye call this clean?” demanded the cook. “There’s still stuff sticking to the bottom of it.”

  “I’m tired of scrubbing pot after pot,” said Lizzie. “Leave it for Dave.”

  “It’s your job, girl,” said Angus curtly. “Scrub out that pot immediately.”

  “There was no need for this pot to be scrubbed in the first place,” snapped Lizzie. “You and your sauces! Trying one and then the other. You do it deliberately just so’s to give me more work!”

  “Don’t be daft,” said the cook, “and don’t put on those hoity-toity airs wi’ me.”

  “Why don’t you scrub the bloody thing yourself?” screamed Lizzie, her nerve snapping.

  Her voice carried clear through into the servants’ hall. Rainbird came striding into the scullery, demanding to know what the matter was.

  “This idiot of a girl is refusing to scrub the pots and she swore at me,” said Angus.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said ‘bloody,’” said Angus.

  Overworked and rushed off his feet, Rainbird forgot that Lizzie was a friend as well as a scullery maid. Without pausing for thought, he dealt with Lizzie as any other butler would have dealt with a foul-mouthed kitchen maid. He grabbed her by the hair, twisted her head under his arm, seized a bar of yellow soap, and polished her mouth with it.

  “That will be enough from you, miss,” he said. “Get on with your work.”

  Without a word, Lizzie bent over the sink. Rainbird hesitated in the doorway of the scullery. Lizzie’s thin shoulders were shaking with sobs.

  He shook his head in exasperation and walked out.

  That night, after all the servants had fallen asleep, Lizzie, white and tense, went out into the yard and lifted the box with their savings up out of the ground, replaced the paving stone, and went to bed with the box tucked under the end of her blankets.

  She had had a hurried consultation with Luke at the top of the area steps earlier in the day and had promised to hand him the box if he could contrive to be outside Number 67 at six in the morning.

  On the day of her wedding, Emily was feeling dazed and frightened. She had gone through a wedding rehearsal the day before with the earl in a dark and undistinguished church called St. Stephen’s in one of the back wynds of the City of London.

  Her wedding day dawned dark and rainy—a bad omen.

  Alice, Jenny, and Mrs. Middleton arrived in her bedchamber at nine in the morning to array her in her wedding gown. It was not a traditional wedding gown, none of them wanting to alert the gossipy dressmakers of London. It was of white Brussels lace, made more like a morning gown than anything else, and on her head, instead of a veil, she wore a coronet of white silk roses and pearls.

  Emily reflected she had not had a chance to talk to her future husband since his proposal. He had even left her immediately after the wedding rehearsal, saying he had some last-minute business to attend to.

  Mr. Fitzgerald was to be bride-man and Mrs. Middleton was to be bridesmaid. It was all so wrong, thought Emily wretchedly. She was getting married under false pretences. The marriage would stand, no matter what happened, for Emily Goodenough was, by law, her real name. But, oh, how pleasant it would be to be married openly with all the earl’s relatives present, even his obnoxious sister, instead of rushing off to some dark church in this hole-and-corner way.

  “But I am to be a countess,” Emily reminded herself fiercely, “and nothing else matters.”

  When Emily was dressed, Mrs. Middleton made a little shooing motion with her hands and Jenny and Alice left the room.

  Mrs. Middleton drew up a chair and sat down beside Emily. She was wearing the purple gown and turban she had worn when she was pretending to be the “princess’s” lady-in-waiting.

  “My dear Miss Emily,” she said gently. “I wish I were related to you and then I would know how to counsel you as a young lady should be counselled on her wedding day.”

  “Do not worry, Mrs. Middleton,” said Emily. “I have a good memory and will not make mistakes during the service.”

  “Ahem.” Mrs. Middleton dabbed at her mouth with a silk lace-edged handkerchief and turned a severe look on the curtains. “I am talking about the … hem … delicate side of marriage.”

 
“Oh.” Emily blushed. It all rushed on her at once. She had only thought of being a countess; she had thought no farther than that.

  “What is expected of me?” she asked in a whisper.

  Mrs. Middleton had searched her memory for suitable advice during the night. She had been bridesmaid a long, long time ago and had overheard the mother advising the bride, and so she decided the best thing she could do was to pass that advice on to Emily.

  “You will share a bed with his lordship tonight, Miss Emily.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must remember at all times to love and respect your husband, no matter what happens. Men have strange ways.”

  “Go on,” said Emily. “What do I do?”

  “You close your eyes very tightly and think of the king.”

  Emily blinked. “King George?”

  “Yes. His Majesty.”

  “But I do not see how thinking of a mad king will take my mind off things.”

  Mrs. Middleton was deeply shocked. “You must not utter such seditious words. His Majesty is unwell, that is all. He is a fine and noble gentleman.”

  “But should I not be thinking of my husband?”

  “The intimate acts of marriage are difficult for us ladies,” said Mrs. Middleton, and Emily, not knowing the “Mrs.” was only a courtesy title, thought the housekeeper was speaking from experience. “Only very low women share the lusts and passions of men.”

  “Like me,” thought Emily bleakly, although she did not voice that thought aloud.

  “But everything will be all right,” said Mrs. Middleton comfortingly. “I have never yet known a lady die from the experience.” She patted Emily’s hand. “Now I have put your mind at rest, I must go downstairs and make sure everything is ready for the wedding breakfast.”

  After she had left, Emily buried her head in her hands. How could she stop herself from responding violently to her husband’s kisses and caresses?

  “I will think of the king,” thought Emily fiercely. “I will think of the king.”