Love by the Morning Star

by Laura L. Sullivan

  Anna, to the best of her knowledge, had never met a Jew. She looked at herself in the mirror and thought, with about as much generosity and milk of human kindness as she possessed, If I can be mistaken for one, they can’t be that bad, can they?

  And so, in loving herself, she almost loved her fellow man.

  Uncertain, she drifted away from the mirror and looked out the window. There, below, she saw a manly form. Teddy, she was certain, and rapped on the window to try to catch his attention. But when he turned and looked up, she saw it wasn’t he. This man was of a height with Teddy, had his same broad shoulders and floppy hair, but his locks were browner, his brows heavy and dark, his appearance more intense, compelling. She felt a familiar weakening somewhere within her. It was a failing that had plagued her for years, absurd longings for the wrong man. But lord, he was handsome, even at this distance! Alas, he carried a pot of chrysanthemums under each arm. He was only a gardener, and thus beneath her notice. She turned away abruptly and tried, and failed, to picture Teddy’s face.

  I’ll play my part as long as I can, she decided. And if I get unmasked before I can do what Lord Darling demands, perhaps I can still be a step-cousin long enough to snag Teddy.

  All things considered, she’d much rather be the wife of a lord, eventually wife of an earl, than a heroine. Heroines, she seemed to remember, sometimes wind up dead.

  She shivered, and pinched her cheeks until the color came back.

  Hannah Meets the Heir of Trapp

  ECCENTRIC, HANNAH DECIDED. That was the only explanation: the family was eccentric. The trait ran in aristocratic blood, apparently—she’d learned that from Wodehouse. And there was the uncle who rode to the hounds in the nude (or occasionally, on a good day, in one of those pink coats that was really scarlet, and nothing else). So it stood to reason that the family should have some peculiar traditions. She unfolded that little inward crumpling that had begun when she was turned away from the front door and marched gamely to the rear.

  Behind her, Hardy tut-tutted. “Just my luck—the prettiest ones always get axed,” he muttered as he pushed his barrow.

  “This house is as big as a city block!” Hannah said as she dragged each weary leg a step further around Starkers’s walls.

  “It almost is a city,” Hardy said, wondering if he could steal a kiss before Cook heard about this girl’s effrontery and sent her off without a reference. “Well more than fifty on the staff, if you include the foresters and gamekeepers. We have our own laundry, our own plumber, an electrician, and a few carpenters. And of course if you include the village of Winkfield, you have everything else you might need. Lord Liripip owns Winkfield too, you know.”

  “And I’m to be a part of it all,” she said wonderingly, craning her neck to look up at the crenellations chiseled against an iris-hued sky.

  “For a minute or two, anyway.” Just long enough to get chewed out. Hardy tipped his hat regretfully. “I’ll be back and forth from the hothouse. They want chrysanthemums in the drawing room. Come and see me right before you leave.” He pointed to a crystalline wonder gleaming like a huge cut diamond in the late-afternoon sun.

  Hannah looked perplexed. “But that might not be for a very long time.” Perhaps the family wasn’t supposed to mingle with the servants, but she liked Hardy’s easy, friendly ways and hoped to see him much sooner.

  “Not nearly as long as you might think,” he said.

  She closed her eyes again, briefly, ecstatically, to see that world in her mind where her homeland was restored to its senses, where people were not imprisoned for their last names, where her family would be together again. She’d braced herself to wait, to endure as long as it took for her world to set itself aright, but could Hardy be correct? Maybe it wouldn’t be so long after all. “How kind of you to say so!” she said, and ran up to give him a feathery kiss on the cheek.

  Hardy walked off in a daze, and Hannah rapped her knuckles on the white-painted wooden door. A chip flaked off and fell to her feet.

  “Yes?” came a harried voice before the door even opened. Hannah saw a girl about her own age, tall and scrawny, with her hair slicked back tightly under a white cap, and a sheen of sweat on her brow. “Oh, you’re the one old Trapp said would come. Inside. Where’s your things?”

  “Lost. Stolen.”

  “No mind. You’re to get two dresses while you’re in here, returned upon quitting. You don’t need no best as you won’t have no time to yourself. Least, not ’cept when you’re too dead on your feet to think of fun with a young gentleman.” She heaved a mighty sigh, then perked up. “Oh, but with you here to help . . .” Her hips gave a suggestion of a sway. “Maybe I’ll have the strength for a turn or two about the village hall after all. This way.”

  She led Hannah through a spacious, spotless kitchen and pointed to a little antechamber where a pleasant-faced woman was sitting at a table, thumbing through accounts. “Cook,” the girl called out, “got a new leveret for you to skin and roast.” Distantly, a little bell tinkled. “Damn. I mean jeepers,” the girl gasped as she raced toward the dying peal. “This will be your job soon, leveret!” she called over her shoulder. “Hope you’re as fast as a hare.”

  “Less of your cheek!” Sally Mayweather snapped at the girl’s backside. Then she looked the newcomer over.

  Trapp—the old cook—had been a martinet of the highest degree. She didn’t actually carry a little whip on her belt, but the unlucky souls who worked under her might have preferred corporal punishment to the stinging lash of her tongue and the sometimes arbitrary discipline she doled out. By her word her minions might be denied their weekly afternoon off or their alternate whole day Sunday. They would be set to performing the same mind-numbingly dull task—polishing the stove or scrubbing the steps—over and over again until she deemed it perfect. Like nursery ne’er-do-wells, they might even have their pudding withheld.

  Sally and the ever-changing bevy of kitchen maids had put up with it all, though, because Trapp was the best in the business. Other grand estates insisted on having a male in the kitchen, an impressive continental chef with airs and an accent. That was only because they couldn’t steal Trapp away from Starkers. She might have been a beastly old harridan, as mean as a vexed badger, but she could single-handedly coordinate and cook the most elaborate and delicious meals anyone had ever tasted. When she prepared a banquet she went into a sort of frenzied daze, almost mystical to witness. Surrounded by her ingredients and equipment, she would pinch and slap anyone who didn’t do precisely as she was told. Once she even stabbed Sally with a fork—not severely, though that was more through Sally’s agility than Trapp’s intent. In the end, everyone (except Trapp) was in tears and utterly exhausted, bruised, and swearing to give notice. But the meals were brilliant.

  And the thing Sally learned early on about being a cook was that in service, it was absolutely the best job with absolutely the worst training period. A kitchen maid was a slave, pure and simple. In the old days they had scullery maids, at least, stunted and dimwitted drudges who could do the really unpleasant things. Now that they had fallen out of fashion (no doubt being too depressing to the upper classes when they had to read about them in those novels the rich write about the poor), their work fell to the kitchen maids.

  But on the glorious day that a kitchen maid transmuted into a cook, ah! Suddenly she had power, money, status. She ruled her realm absolutely, and overruled the housekeeper and even the lady of the house in matters of the kitchen. She had time off whenever she liked, so long as there was no meal to get ready or she could leave an under-cook in charge. She got tips and bribes from every merchant, for she decided which businesses got the biggest accounts. If she was good she was courted by other houses, and could demand raises accordingly to stay in her place.

  Other servants would serve all their lives, even the highest. A cook was a queen.

  Now Sally was queen, a quivering blancmange of a queen who could cook like a champion but was terrified of the prospect
of bossing people around. She was not a natural leader, so with Trapp as her only model, she was doing her best to emulate her.

  It was certainly effective—the kitchen maids wept at least as much as they did under Trapp’s reign—but keeping up the tough act was driving gentle-natured Sally crazy.

  “Well?” she said, cocking her head up at Hannah. “And what are you supposed to be?” It hurt to snap at another human being like that, especially one who looked so small and perplexed and pretty.

  Hannah gave a slow, heavy blink. “I’m supposed to be a debut coloratura contralto in the Vienna Opera House,” she said with deep melancholy worthy of the best tragedy or the worst farce. “But how many people are what they are supposed to be? Good morning. I am Hannah Morgenstern. I’ve come here to stay.”

  She held out a delicate, expressive little hand, and waited.

  What would Trapp do? Sally wondered. Could she possibly shake the hand of an underling?

  The hand hovered in midair, palpably yearning to be clasped, cupped slightly upward, offering a benediction as much as a shake.

  Knowing she’d cry about it later, Sally glared at the hand until it fell, as dispirited as a baby bird tumbled from the nest.

  “Stay or go depends on me and no other. You’re a refugee, aren’t you?” Trapp had mentioned hiring a girl before she was carted away to Lyme Regis, but she’d said nothing about her being foreign, as this girl so plainly was. They had been streaming into England for weeks now, and every household that took them in complained about their uppish ways and absolute ignorance of proper service. Just what she needed. “Hannah, you say? The last three maids were Jane. I ought to call you Jane too.”

  “I’ll never answer,” Hannah said, summoning a laugh. “Whenever I had to act—I mostly sing, you know, but at the cabaret we all do everything, and I was the understudy for five of the ladies—I would always miss my cue if it meant someone calling me by the character’s name. In the end they just named all the girl characters Hannah in case I had to step in and play them. Jane is such a lovely name, though, isn’t it? So plain and simple, but noble, you know, like Lady Jane Grey, and Jane Eyre, and Jane—”

  “Tongues are for tasting, not wagging,” Sally said with as sour a face as she could muster, though she secretly decided Jane would never do for this girl. “No jibber-jabber in my kitchen.”

  “Oh.” Hannah sighed. “I’ll just have to stay out of the kitchen, then. I’m afraid there’s no chance that I’ll ever stop talking, unless I’m singing, and that’s just as bad, I’m sure, if you prefer silence. My father used to say I never heard of a full stop. Though I’m much better now. At least I take a breath now and then so other people have a hope of breaking in. What a shame! The kitchen is my favorite room. At home we’d always gather . . . Yes, I see your look and I remember now, no jibber-jabber. Shall I go up to see Lord and Lady Liripip?” She supposed she should call them Peregrine and . . . what was his wife’s name? Enid? Edna? But it was probably better to err on the side of formality, since relations were historically strained. No doubt they’d want her to call them Aunt and Uncle, or something quintessentially English like Gaffer or Guv’nor.

  The poor little foreigner, Sally thought. She has no idea what’s in store for her. Already the girl’s cheerful patter was lightening the kitchen, making that day’s vast and heavy labors seem slightly more possible than they had lately. But Sally knew from Trapp that where there was spirit it must be crushed, and where there was frivolity it must be bent and twisted into drudgery, else dinner would never be served.

  “You will not be seen. You will never be seen by Lord Liripip. As for Herself, on most days she summons me to her morning room to discuss the menus, but occasionally she comes to the kitchen and talks with me here. She will not speak to you. She will not notice you. For her, you do not exist. Just consider yourself fortunate that you have a place at all, and don’t trouble your betters.”

  To think that only a few weeks ago Sally had been talking to Coombe of servants’ unions and the equality of all people, servant or served! She did not believe for one moment that Enid Liripip (it was Enid after all) was her better, or this new lass’s for that matter. Why, this girl had brought more nice things into the world in the last two minutes than Lady Liripip had in her whole life.

  Very politely, very diplomatically, Hannah folded her hands and said, “I understand that she might not want to spend a great deal of time in my company. I do not wish to impose. But it is only civilized that I thank her in person for her kind hospitality in allowing me to live here during my time of trouble.” She had rehearsed the speech, and thought she carried it off well. “I . . . we . . . my family and of course I am . . . are . . . Oh my, I have it muddled now. Let me begin again.” Her accent was encroaching. “Ahem. I know: hush. I mean you want me to hush, not that you should hush. I’m rarely rude except accidentally, and that doesn’t really count, but if I might just get through my speech to you I’ll do a much better job when I see Enid.”

  Enid! Trapp would have boxed her ears for that, though no one had had their ears boxed outside of stories for fifty years. Sally only just managed to suppress a smile and said sternly, “You will never dare to speak to Her Ladyship, or to any of the family. In fact, you will rarely be permitted to leave the kitchen.”

  It began to dawn on Hannah that something was most emphatically not right.

  “You mean . . . they won’t see me? Not at all?”

  I won’t do it, Sally told herself when she saw Hannah’s large, luminous eyes begin to well. I can’t do it. I’ll be a Trapp later, promise, but not right now. “What did they tell you when they arranged for you to come? Did you think you would be part of the family?” Trapp would have said the same thing, but the sympathy in Sally’s voice made one fat tear roll down Hannah’s cheek.

  “I didn’t think they’d love me,” she said, her rich, low voice cracking. “But I thought they’d at least see me. How can they be so cruel?”

  “They don’t view it as cruelty. Come now, buck up. I put just the right amount of salt in all my dishes—I don’t need your tears brining everything. You’re German, are you, and a Jew?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “I’ve read about some of the unpleasantness going on in Germany, and I do think it’s a shame. But you’re safe here now. All you have to do is work hard, and maybe one day you’ll be a cook like me. There’s no better place to train than Starkers.” She forced herself to become Trappish again. “If you don’t obey, you’ll be out on the street. If you’re here on a work permit, that means deportation back to Germany.”

  “They would do that to me?” All her mother’s warnings came rushing back to her. She hadn’t believed it. People might be grumps, ignorant and selfish. They might not want to take in stray members of their family. She’d braced herself to be lectured and insulted and given a tiny room and relegated to the worst seat at the table. She was ready for all sorts of criticisms of cabaret life. Don’t expect kindness from them, her mother had said.

  Not kindness, no, but civility. Human decency. Hannah remembered that night of broken glass, and wondered if such a thing as human decency still existed. Had it withered away in the human spirit, victim of some insidious modern disease?

  You must accept any treatment. Her mother had said that, too.

  Hannah smoothed the single fallen tear into her cheek until it disappeared. “To be sure I understand,” she began, her accent thick now as in her mingled fury and disappointment she reverted to her more natural pronunciations, “you mean that I am to work in the kitchen? To be permitted to live here but only to work?”

  “To serve, yes.”

  “Like a penitent,” Hannah said, settling her heavy-lashed dark brown eyes on Sally. She composed herself, making her small body somehow even more compact, folding in on herself to become an organism of profound self-sufficiency and inwardness.

  Sally felt a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to fall on her knees before the girl and
beg her forgiveness. But Trapp whispered in her ear: So she thought her life would be easy and it is hard. Should you care? You scrubbed your share of grates and slate floors. Your knees still ache with it. So she’s some European bluestocking with soft hands and too much to say. Peeling potatoes and plucking pheasants never killed anyone. Better than whatever is happening to her sort in Germany.

  “Shut up,” Sally muttered under her breath, too softly for Hannah to hear.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. One of the housemaids will show you to your room and fetch your uniforms. Two print, one blue, the other pink.” Horrid things they were, too. “Plus aprons and caps—cap to be worn at all times—and towels. Return here for lunch and you may begin your duties assisting at dinner. Fortunately it is only the family here tonight, and one houseguest, a distant relative of some sort. Tomorrow you will begin your official daily duties. Here is a list. Wait out there, and close the door behind you.”

  When she was gone, Sally had a quick therapeutic weep, the second of the day and by no means the last. Then she splashed her face, dusted her nose with powder, and set about making other people cry, as Trapp would have wished.

  Hannah May Eat as Many Bugs as She Likes

  HANNAH HAD JUST BEEN DECIDING with what exact degree of stiff, formal politeness she would greet the designated housemaid when she heard more singing—throaty, abysmally untalented singing in ribald German. She took a swift, sharp breath. It could not be . . .

  The door swung open, and in came Waltraud, the (mostly) female half of the Double Transvestite Tango.