by Maeve Friel
To her surprise, the room was empty. Her first thought was that she had come to the wrong place for she still didn’t really know her way around the huge house. She laid down her tray on the table in front of the white marble fireplace and looked around. It was a long room, with high windows facing out on to the gardens at the front and side of the house. The ceilings and walls were decorated with plaster motifs of viols and flutes, harps and other musical instruments. It had to be the music room, just like Mrs Stringer had said. She gazed up at a fat cherub playing a lute, and a choir of angels with round open mouths, wondering what to do next. Should she carry the tray back to the kitchen, leave it where it was, or take it with her while she hunted for the French maids? The sound of voices at the door made her jump. For a moment she thought of hiding behind the velvet curtains but waited too long. She froze as the double doors opened once more and in came, not the maids, but Lucien’s wife, Alexandrine, and the Bonaparte children, all chattering and laughing.
There were two very little ones, a boy of about two and a girl of three each holding their mother by the hand, then two more, another boy and girl, both about seven or eight. Behind them came three older girls, the smallest about the same age as Annie herself, but dressed like an angel. Her dress, bright scarlet silk shot through with threads of gold, glittered in the light of the log fire. Annie thought she had never seen anyone so beautiful.
‘Parlez-vous francais?’ the mother asked Annie.
Annie looked at her with wide horrified eyes.
‘Non? It doesn’t matter.’ She picked up the smallest little boy and absent-mindedly stroked his head while, with the other hand, she held out biscuits to the other children. ‘Will you pour out some tea?’ she said to Annie. ‘I am quite exhausted from the coach journey. Charlotte, my dear, call my maid. Christine-Egypta, come and take Paul-Marie.’
Christine-Egypta, the girl in the scarlet dress, moved across the room as if sliding on castors beneath her long skirts. She lifted the baby from her mother’s lap and set him down on a rug in front of the fire. Watching her graceful movements, Annie felt ashamed; ashamed of her scrubbed red hands jerkily pouring out the tea, ashamed of her stiff creaking apron and her starched collar which had been digging into her neck all day. It had already left a nasty red weal like a ring of scorched skin. She wanted to be downstairs in the kitchen, safe among people she knew, people who spoke like her. No, more than anything, she wanted to be back home in Corve Street with her mother and Libby.
She was waiting for Madame Bonaparte to dismiss her when there was a knock at the door and Arthur the footman entered. ‘Madame, Prince Lucien wishes to advise you there are visitors from the town who have called to pay their respects. Will you see Mr Leonard Evans?’
Annie’s blood ran cold when she heard the name. She backed towards the recess of the window and stood, halfhidden behind the curtains. The baby, Paul-Marie, thinking she was playing hide-and-seek with him, chuckled and started to crawl towards her.
Lady Alexandrine laid down her china cup and raised her eyebrows as if at a loss to know why she should have to see people she did not know so soon after her arrival. She could hear her husband’s voice outside. This situation with the English was so difficult. How was she to know if they were prisoners or guests of the nation?
‘Thank you, young man. If my husband wishes, I shall be happy to see Mr Evans.’
The visitor came in clutching a flat black box against his stomach. Mr Evans was a large round man on short bow-legs so that when he moved he swayed like a dancing bear. He advanced into the room, bowing from the waist, which placed such a strain on his waistcoat buttons that one popped off and sprang across the room in front of him. He seemed put out by the sight of so many children.
He took Alexandrine’s small white hand in his podgy one and kissed it, then, worried that perhaps that was not quite ‘the done thing’, placed it abruptly back on her lap.
‘Leonard Evans, at your service, Madame. Master Glover of Ludlow. With your permission?’ He laid his handsome black lacquer box carefully on a side-table and bent down to undo the gold catch. Annie bit her lip. She shrank back further into the window recess, terrified he would recognise her and say something. The young princes and princesses gathered around the table to see what his box contained.
The box was full of gloves, gloves of every size and variety and colour. There were gloves made of the finest kid leathers, silk gloves and satin gloves, ones all done up with ribbon and lace, velvet gloves with tiny pearl buttons that buttoned right up to the elbows, gloves that would have been perfect for balls and dances, others trimmed with white rabbit fur for the coldest winter days. All the young princes and princesses began to seize them, pulling them from their orderly rows in the beautiful box, chattering and exclaiming in their strange language while Mr Evans looked on with mounting alarm. ‘Dear me,’ he said, frowning and smiling at the same time, as he smoothed the discarded gloves and hunted on the table for matching pairs. His face, which was always a little purplish, had become quite red.
‘It would be a great honour, Your Royal Highnesses, if you would accept these gifts from the Guild of Glovers of Ludlow. The town is renowned for the quality of its gloves,’ he said, swelling slightly. ‘We are honoured to have a family of such distinction here and hope we may be of service to you …’
Alexandrine withdrew the tiniest pair of soft white leather gloves from the box and held them out towards her daughters admiringly.
‘Look, they are scarcely big enough for the baby, for Paul-Marie.’
‘How sweet they are,’ said Christine-Egypta. ‘Let me see if they fit him.’ She glided over to the window where the little boy had now plopped down at Annie’s feet and was busily inspecting his toes.
‘Come on, bébé,’ she said, giving Annie a dazzling smile, as she scooped the baby up in her arms and carried him back to his mother. The children gathered around as Alexandrine pulled the tiny gloves on to the boy’s small plump hands.
‘Oh, monsieur Evans, they are divine. They could have been made especially for him. Look, Christine-Egypta, Letitia, do you see how tiny the stitches are around the fingers, the little thumbs. Only a fairy, a small English fairy, could make such perfect stitches.’
Annie Spears watched Leonard Evans’ smirking face and felt sick. She thought of how she and her sister Libby used to have to watch out for him as he came swaggering down to the glovers’ cottages on Corve Street every Saturday, and how he would stand over their mother, wetting his pencil in his mouth and smirking as he calculated the mean wages he owed them. She began to gather up the teacups and load the tray again. No, not sewn by a fairy, she thought bitterly as she backed towards the door, but by my little sister, as you ought to know, Mr Evans.
She shut the door quickly behind her so that she did not have to listen to Mr Evans’ slippery compliments or watch his swaying fat behind for another moment. If they only knew what that man was really like, she thought.
Downstairs, the kitchen was still hectic. Mrs Stringer grabbed her by the ear as soon as she came in.
‘There you are, you lazy good-for-nothing. Don’t you know there’s work to be done?’ She stopped suddenly, snapping her mouth shut like a trap. ‘Saucepans,’ she declared all of a sudden and when Annie frowned at her, she pulled her head around to face a mountain of blackened pots and pans by the stone sink. ‘Look smart about it, girl, and don’t stop until they’re all washed and hung up in their place.’
It was a good hour before Annie had scrubbed and dried them and hung them up on their hooks above the range. Long before that, poor Sam the chimney-boy had got fed up waiting for his promised food to arrive and had wandered off to the Angel Inn to see if Israel Bessell was drunk enough to throw him a few pence.
Chapter 2
The smell of ammonia at the bottom of Corve Street was enough to skin the inside of your nose. It came from the tanners’ yards which backed on to the river. Here the men dressed, cured, dried and cut up the le
ather hides for the glovers, soaking them first in great vats full of urine. Only the shambles, the part of town where the abattoir was, smelt worse. The glovers’ cottages were in front of the tanners’ yards. It was easy to tell which of the cottages in the row were the glovers’ houses because there was a tier of overlapping wooden slats under the eaves of their roofs. Up there, in those top rooms, the leather skins were hung to dry on makeshift lines strung out above the heads of the women and children who hand-sewed and embroidered the gloves. The open slats made the room cold and draughty. The early morning mists which lay over the river at the back of the houses whistled under them, seeped into the walls, settled on the steaming leathers, and left a damp film on every surface. Libby Spears, Annie’s little sister, and her mother, Kezia, worked, ate and slept in one of these upper rooms.
Libby was not yet five years old but she was already one of the best stitchers in the town, a town where nearly five hundred children under the age of ten worked for the wealthy glove merchants like Mr Evans, turning out beautiful hand-stitched and embroidered gloves that would be worn on some of the richest hands in the land.
On the table in front of her stood the donkeys, the wooden stands which held the work she still had to do before she could go to bed: three ladies’ gloves. That meant fifteen fingers to sew, up and down and around, from the fifth little finger to the slender thumb, doing twelve tiny stitches to the inch, each one precisely the size of the one before it. Her fingers ached as she pushed her little needle through the fine cream kid leather, taking care not to puncture it or, worst of all, stain it with blood, for she often pricked herself. Beside her on the bench, her mother embroidered the wrists of the gloves with fine gold thread, holding the material close up to her eyes, for working in bad light had made her sight poor and it was getting poorer all the time. The flame of the candles trembled in the draught.
Snip, snip, snip went her mother’s scissors. Libby’s eyelids drooped. She could hear outside the night owls calling to one another as they swooped down from the castle battlements to hunt along the banks of the river. She was hungry and the little ball of leather that she had been pushing around in her mouth had long since given out all its flavour. Down in the street, a cart trundled past, a horse whinnied and a dog barked far away. Her head jerked forwards. The glove she had been stitching fell to the floor beside her. She looked sideways at her mother to see if she had noticed. She sighed loudly.
Mrs Spears raised her head from her work and stroked Libby’s cheek. ‘One more hour or two, Libby, and it will all be done. I promise.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘I know, pet. But the work must be done. It’s collection day tomorrow and Mr Evans will be here looking for his rent.’
‘Why?’
Mrs Spears didn’t answer. She pushed Libby’s hair back from her forehead and placed the fallen glove back in her hand. Then, turning away from her daughter, she snipped the end of her thread, pinned the finished glove to the other half of the pair and laid them on the pile on the table in front of her.
‘Come on, Libby, sit on the floor for a while and lean your back against the table leg. That way, you won’t feel so sleepy.’
‘It’s not my back. It’s my fingers that ache. My feet feel fizzy. My eyes are sore.’
‘Poor Libby. Soon we can stop.’
Libby’s eyes filled with tears. She climbed down off her chair and sat rocking on her heels on the floor.
Downstairs there was a loud banging at the front door, four sharp knocks that showed the visitor meant to come in even though it was so late. Libby and her mother looked at each other in alarm.
Mr Evans? thought Kezia, wondering if she dared ignore his knocking. Would he be so bold as to call on her at this time of night? She wished her son William was there. Then came a shout from a familiar voice.
‘It’s Annie,’ cried Libby. ‘Annie has come home.’
She jumped up, tossing the hated glove aside, and rushed down the stairs with her mother following close behind.
‘They’ve let me come home for the night. I don’t have to be back at Dinham until six in the morning,’ said Annie as soon as her mother and her sister had stopped kissing and hugging her and let her speak. ‘And I have something for you: three slices of sultana cake.’
‘Cake?’ squealed Libby, who had eaten nothing that day but some oatmeal at mid-day.
‘Then I shall make tea,’ said her mother, ‘and you can tell us all the news from Dinham House. It is so good to see you, my pet, after so many weeks. I have been so anxious for you, alone among all those strange people.’
‘Are there really princes and princesses where you work?’ asked Libby, when they were back in the upstairs room.
‘Oh yes, ever so many of them. First there are two daughters of Prince Lucien by his first wife who died. They are called Charlotte and Christine-Egypta. Then there are two younger girls, Letitia and Jeanne and two little boys, Charles and Paul-Marie. I often have to bathe the littlest one and put him to bed. And there are lots of other people too, a nephew and a French priest who has come to England with them, and they are all so noisy! They all talk so loudly in their own language and sometimes they say things when I am in the room and they laugh and I go red. And, you know,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, ‘the girls all wear beautiful silk dresses and their middles are never where their middles ought to be for they’re cut high up on their chests or else low down on their hips with pretty sashes.’
Annie rattled on, all her news tumbling out in a rush for she had hardly heard the sound of her own voice in the three weeks since she had started work. While her mother made the tea, she told them about bossy Mrs Stringer and Arthur, the friendly footman.
‘And what do you do there?’ asked Libby, picking out the currants from her slice of cake and popping them one by one into her mouth.
‘Well,’ said Annie, thoughtfully. ‘First I clean the boots every morning – sometimes there are twenty pairs! Then I bring hot water up to the bedrooms and empty the chamber pots.’
‘Yuck,’ said Libby, grinning. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘You would if Mrs Stringer told you to. It’s “Do this, do that, stop dawdling,” all day long. “Annie Spears, take this tray, wash out those pots, polish those door handles, sweep out the kitchen floor and get a move on.”’ She mimicked the fat housekeeper’s whining voice.
‘You’re too thin, Annie,’ Kezia said when Annie finally stopped talking. ‘Are they not giving you enough to eat up there in that fancy house?’
Annie smiled. She was so pleased to be at home with her own family, listening to the familiar sound of the scissors snipping and the clack of her mother’s thimble as she tapped it on the table, watching the snippets of leather and thread collecting on the floorboards as her sister worked. But she also saw Libby’s peaked little white face, the dark circles under her eyes and her stifled yawns.
‘I’m not thin, mother, just tired. I must have run up and down those kitchen stairs a hundred times today. Let’s all go to bed. I could sleep and sleep.’
Since they had told her she could go home for the night, she had been looking forward to lying under the quilt beside her little sister, listening to her quiet breathing, instead of Mrs Stringer’s snoring or the weeping of the homesick French maids in the room next door.
‘You go on to bed, Annie,’ her mother told her, ‘and have your rest, but Libby and myself must get on with our work.’
‘Oh, mother, have a heart and let Libby come to bed with me. You can see the poor mite is worn out.’
‘We cannot stop yet, Annie. All these gloves must be finished by morning for Evans will be here first thing to collect them. As it is, we have done only enough to cover the rent. We shall end up in the workhouse if we do not deliver all of these for I have nothing left to sell, neither furniture nor clothes. Nothing at all.’ She rubbed the empty space where her wedding ring should have been. Annie watched her mother’s face, knowing she was t
hinking of Annie’s father, but said nothing.
‘What time will William be back?’ she asked after a while. ‘Surely he should be home by now?’
‘Poor William won’t be back until Saturday next at the earliest,’ said her mother.
‘Oh,’ said Annie, ‘that means I won’t see him for weeks.’
‘It’s on account of all the orders for new hats that Mr Smart has got recently. William has to sleep over in the workshop in Quality Square until they have them all made up.’
‘That will be because of the ball,’ said Annie, pleased to pass on a bit of gossip. ‘Arthur told me there’s going to be a ball at the Assembly Rooms next week with the Bonapartes invited: all Ludlow society will be there.’
‘Well, thank God for Lucien Bonaparte, I say, for new hats for rich folk mean extra work for William and more money in our pockets. You mark my words, Annie and Libby too, we will hold our heads up high in this town again. We will never go cap in hand to the churchwarden asking for help like paupers. We may have to work till we drop, Annie, but we shall never set foot in that workhouse. Just three more years and the worst will be over.’
Annie looked at her mother’s tight angry face. ‘Have you heard any news of father?’ she asked.
Her mother shook her head. ‘May God have mercy on him and keep him safe.’
‘Has there been no ship in at all with the mail?’
‘Not a one. It’s because of the war with France, they say. No ship has sailed for the Colony for months and the fleet that went to Australia last summer and that ought by rights to have got back by now was requisitioned at the Canary Islands on its way home and sent directly into battle. I dare say there’s a letter on it that will reach us when the ship returns to Portsmouth. They say that the poor wretched convicts that are waiting to be transported are being pressganged in to the army to fight instead. Until they start sending ships to Australia again, we can expect no news.’
‘But it’s been four years since he was sent away. Surely he could have got word out to us in all that time. Why does he not write?’
