Love by the Morning Star

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “Hardly public,” she answered, rubbing the last bits of sleep out of her eyes. “A mile from the gate and five miles from a good road.”

  “Insolence will avail you naught,” he said, so theatrically that a giggle burst from Hannah’s lips.

  She stifled it with her fingers, but her eyes danced. Really, these English were so wonderfully false, always acting every moment of their lives. Sally, who Hannah could plainly see so desperately wanted to be kind and maternal, but who forced herself into sharpness. The Liripips, who had acted their aristocratic parts so long, pretending to be some elevated form of life that transcended such mundane things as servants, that they never broke character. And Coombe, who so obviously wanted to gossip, who understood what it is to be tired, playing the perfect unemotional butler.

  And then the humor of it all abruptly vanished.

  “I’m afraid I must give you notice,” Coombe said.

  “Of what?” she asked, tipping her head again in that most beguiling fashion.

  “You will be paid for the remainder of the week, certainly, and provided transportation back to London.”

  “No!” she cried. “You mustn’t! You can’t!” Since her arrival she’d thought again and again about leaving, to beg for help from the refugee agency, to peddle her voice at the lowest music halls until she could support herself. Her promise to her mother had held her at Starkers. But now she had something else: Teddy’s friendship. More than friendship already, she was sure, and she wouldn’t give that up. Not until he’d come home again, or at least until she’d gotten his first letter, so she could write back and explain everything.

  “Technically, Cook or Mrs. Wilcox should be the one to fire you, but when I have explained the situation I’m sure they will defer to my judgment. No, don’t cry. Oh, Lord!”

  Hannah tumbled out of the chaise and now knelt melodramatically at his feet, her head bent.

  “My dear, ahem, this is most . . .”

  “Please do not make me leave.”

  “Take your hands off my—Oh, my!” She had reached up blindly to clasp him in supplication, and the view that Anna got when she swept into the room was blackmail material if she had ever seen it.

  Coombe saw her and stepped back sharply. Hannah, still clutching his midsection, fell forward.

  “Miss Morgan, this is not what it appears to be,” Coombe sputtered. “Forgive this unfortunate spectacle . . .”

  “Of the Unfortunate Fruit,” Hannah said, scrambling to her feet. “I quite agree with your disapproving look,” she added, regarding the newcomer. It was the stunning blond woman who had taken her place in the car. When Teddy had smiled at her the night before with his world-embracing cheerfulness and goodwill, Hannah had been jealous. But it was not this large gold and cream woman he’d talked with for hours, not her gloved fingers he had held. It was not her thumb he had kissed, or she who would get the first dance at the Servants’ Ball. She smiled at Anna now; she had nothing to fear.

  “I do not make a habit of clutching at men or kissing their feet,” Hannah went on. “Begging and abasement are terrible, don’t you agree? Yet there are times when they are necessary. I was being cast out, you see, so that is one of the times when one might sink to one’s knees—I did it elegantly, don’t you think, like a dying swan?—and plead with all one’s heart. Do you know, I think Coombe believed I was going to attempt something scandalous, another and much more drastic way of begging, but I am not such a fool as that. To begin with, the parlor is not the proper venue, and then—”

  “You will not fire her, Coombe,” Anna said, mustering every ounce of pretend authority she had taught herself over the years.

  “But, miss, she has absolutely no experience—we were misled. And then she is incorrigible in her behavior: speaking out of turn, sleeping on the job. I’m very much afraid she won’t do.”

  Anna looked at the dark little maid. “You speak German?”

  “Yes, of course. I am German.”

  Anna stared evenly at Coombe, until that dignified butler felt like a dickey bird under a cobra’s baleful, hypnotic gaze. “I have need of her,” Anna said.

  Coombe knew the tone. It was the reason he had never married.

  He stiffened and made a little bow, then removed himself.

  “Freshen yourself up and then come to my room,” Anna said, and swirled out in a cloud of rose scent.

  Anna and Hannah Discuss the Slum Disease: Love

  “I AM WITHOUT A LADY’S MAID at the moment,” Anna said breezily when Hannah entered her room. Anna was sitting at a florid rococo vanity, idly dusting her nose with powder and blotting it off again to achieve the exactly right artificial naturalness. “Do you have any experience?”

  Hannah gave a deep, regretful sigh. “I sometimes feel that I have wasted so many opportunities for experience in my life. There are times when people—young men mostly, but older ones too, and sometimes those who one would think are quite too old—make propositions and you say no, because of course you do not care to, and then you think, Ought I to have? Because if you are at a nice restaurant and you are served a very small octopus, you eat it, do you not, even if the idea of eating such a perfect little animal who is looking at you and seems to be still alive makes your stomach flutter, because you might not ever have another chance, and then afterward, for all your life, you could say you had—do you see? An experience. Do you think people should sometimes do things they don’t think they want to, just for the experience?”

  Anna gave her that disjointed look with which so many people regarded Hannah, as if they had fallen too many words behind to ever catch up.

  “I would not say such a thing to a man because it would give him ammunition against future women, but to you I can say it. I can tell by the look of you that you must receive many offers of experience, probably more than I, because you really are quite spectacular, almost as frighteningly pretty as Traudl, but then you are an English lady and I think men might not make as many offers to ladies as they do to cabaret singers.”

  Anna froze mid-powder. An electric sensation coursed through her, sudden and shocking, accompanied, as a real charge might be, by paralysis and a strange overpowering buzzing in her ears. German. Jewish. The stage. A kitchen maid.

  How could I have been so stupid? Anna asked herself. It was there, all of it, right before me. But there had been so many German and Austrian and Czech girls trickling in over the last year, taking jobs in service, making her father complain bitterly about unemployed English girls being deprived of honest work. There was another one in Starkers—she’d heard her muttering in her foreign lingo as she fluffed the pillows. It was too remarkably obvious: Could she have somehow simply switched places with the girl who was the real step-cousin-in-law? There was not some missing girl waiting to unmask her. The girl was here, in Starkers. But why had she said nothing? Why would a girl who was supposed to be welcomed into the family accept a place as kitchen maid?

  With a chill of uncertain dread giving her goose bumps, Anna asked, “What is your name?” Silently, she pleaded, Let me be wrong.

  “Hannah Morgenstern, and you are? But no, I am not to ask.” She gave Anna a sweet smile, without malice. “You see, I hadn’t intended to be a maid. I forget sometimes—no, all the time—how I am supposed to behave. I am to be invisible to the family.”

  For all her small stature, she was perhaps the most visible person Anna had ever seen.

  Hannah, she thought. The name Lady Liripip called me when we first met. Hannah to Anna, not much of a change. Just the thing an integrating foreigner might do. Just as a foreigner might change her name from Morgenstern to Morgan.

  “What had you intended to be?” Anna asked carefully.

  “An opera singer, eventually, though truthfully I have nothing against low singing. Comic singing, I should say, or sentimental. I can’t get beyond mezzo soprano, so everything I sing is low. Operetta is splendid too, but no one takes you very seriously when you sing Gilbert and Sul
livan. And I could only do the harridan parts. Ruth and Buttercup are never kept by marquises, are they?”

  “Do you want to be kept by a marquis?”

  “Heavens, no. I want to fall in love with one very nice man whom I will be with all my life, just like my mother did. He can make me expensive presents and buy me pretty little bijou villas if he likes, but it won’t be necessary. Love will be enough.”

  “Love is never even close to enough,” Anna said passionately. “Without money, love is like a disease. A slum disease. You must avoid it at all costs, and get rid of it ruthlessly if you catch it.”

  “You sound as if you know what you’re talking about,” Hannah said softly. “I’m very sorry.”

  Anna gulped. “I—” She stopped herself. She could not tell Hannah—she could never tell anyone. Her scheme of personal improvement had not been without a price. One hardship was that there was no one to share her struggle with. And another . . .

  There had been boys before, nice boys, who had smiled at her or sent her flowers or affectionate letters. Their fathers had been drapers or clerks, and they themselves had been clever, ambitious, hard-working lads who might have given her a good life, if she’d let them try.

  There had been one in particular: He had just inherited his father’s flower shop, and he had courted her with all his might. But Anna had never given him a chance. She’d dreamed about him, but she wouldn’t encourage him. In her mind she’d built their house together, a snuggery filled with the end-of-day’s half-wilted blooms, the rose and jasmine scents deepening as the flowers died. She had decorated that dream house with a grandfather clock that ticked away each happy moment of their long life together. And there had been dream children, too, chubby babies rolling in petals, gleefully tearing flowers apart with their clumsy, imperious hands.

  But he had not been good enough for her, and he had married someone else.

  Anna had always felt an instinctive attraction to men who worked with flowers. That fellow she’d seen from her window, and later in the garden, for instance. What deity had so little insight into the creation of man that he made gardeners poor and rich men indifferent to flowers? Even now, that glimpse of the fetching laborer with his dirty hands and an armful of blossoms made her breath catch, her heart race, far more than the thought of Teddy. Yet rich, titled—and admittedly just as handsome—Teddy had to be her goal. Why did it ache, that traitorous heart of hers?

  “It is hard,” Anna said, wondering why she was confessing to this servant. No, she wasn’t a servant, she was practically an aristocrat, a relative of the Liripips. What are our relative positions? Anna wondered. Am I higher or lower than she? It was always the vital question for Anna: Who was superior, and how could she position herself so that she would be perceived as superior?

  She went on: “It is hard to be born in one place and then move to another. The old place drags at you. My mother told me stories about Jenny Greenteeth, a fairy who pulls children down into ponds and eats them. People who haven’t been in the pond are never afraid. It is those who have felt her claws on their ankles, and then escaped, who know fear.”

  Hannah looked at her quizzically. “I think, like me, you talk about a great many things at once, and you don’t really expect other people to understand everything you say. That’s all right, though. Talking helps the talker best.” She sighed. “It is another sacrifice of my current position. I am told I must not talk to myself, or speak so much at all. It is very difficult. Perhaps Coombe was right to get rid of me. Still, thank you for saving me. I have a particular reason for wanting to stay. Tell me, is this green-toothed fairy dragging at you now?”

  The two girls looked at each other. This is preposterous, Anna thought. I have every reason to fear her, and she has every reason to hate me, if only she knew. But I need help. I need . . . a friend. If only the secret holds!

  Anna was perched so precariously, right at the very pinnacle of success. She might step off that mountaintop into Olympus, or she might tumble off it to her doom.

  I could tell her, Anna thought. She seems kind. Unorthodox, slightly insane, but kind. Maybe if I explained that I just need to be in her place long enough for Teddy to propose, she would allow it. But Anna could not confess. There was so much she didn’t know. Why had Hannah accepted her lowly position? Who was Hannah to this family that a stranger could so easily slip into her place?

  I can’t do it, Anna thought with despair. I’ll be found out, humiliated. Have I committed a crime? It felt as though she had. The risks are too great, particularly now, with Hannah here. I should confess right away.

  But two forces, one weak, one strong, still held her tongue. There was her unknown mission to ally England and Germany and keep them from going to war against each other, for which it was absolutely necessary to be in Starkers. That, though, was less important by the moment, overshadowed by Teddy. Darling Teddy, who would save her from a life of struggle and pretense. Anna knew she was false now, but he would make her true, a legitimate lady. He loved her, and love levels all ranks. She’d thought she would have weeks of work ahead of her—a good start is much, but far from a proposal—but this morning there had been the note slipped under her door.

  My darling girl,

  Last night was the most incredible of my life. Incredible, quite literally, because I can hardly believe that I could feel so much for someone in such a brief time together, with so few words exchanged. But how deep those words were, deep and broad, and yet never solemn, but like a wide rippling river, merry on the surface, dropping down to unknown profundity.

  Love, Anna was beginning to believe, did strange things to people. She’d worked hard to educate herself, to know a little bit about many things, and where her learning failed, to have a few stock phrases that would make her sound passably intelligent and encourage other people to talk. But even she—who thought so highly of herself—could not describe herself as deep.

  But there it is. You’ve stolen my heart like a silver cow creamer. And, I might add, have been remarkably helpful. I’ll use what you taught me in the next few weeks, and when I return (one should really say if in this line of work, I suppose, so as not to tempt fate, but really it won’t be dangerous this time out) I will claim your hand again.

  My hand! she thought. Breach-of-promise suits had been won with less.

  Fortune, she had heard, favors the bold. She would stay. She would keep flying her false colors, and by the time Teddy found out she wasn’t who he thought she was, he’d love her so much, he wouldn’t care if she were a pirate.

  “I need a lady’s maid,” Anna told Hannah. “Would you be willing to help me?”

  “You kept them from forcing me to leave,” Hannah said simply, remembering the feel of manly fingers stroking the scar on her thumb. “I would do anything for you.”

  “Why is it so important that you stay?” Anna asked.

  Hannah blushed. “A slum disease, I’m afraid,” she confessed, though she knew Teddy would never care if she didn’t have money or a title. And she was, after all, the daughter of an aristocrat. A disgraced, impoverished aristocrat who had fled her natal shore and taken up a disreputable profession, but still, the Curzons had been a great family once.

  “You’re in love? With someone here? Who?” Anna felt a frisson of dread. Not Teddy. Certainly not Teddy.

  “Oh . . .” Hannah couldn’t tell her. What would be worse, for Teddy to love a servant or the despised Unfortunate Fruit? The family could never know until it was too late.

  “Is he here?” Anna pressed. “Have you been meeting him?”

  “Yes,” Hannah admitted guardedly. “Out in the garden.”

  Anna, fighting a sharp pang of jealousy, gave her a conspiratorial but slightly superior look. “I bet I know who it is!” She smirked. “It’s that black-haired gardener, isn’t it? Aha! I see from your blushes that I’m right!” His image rose again in her mind’s eye, against her will. He was as fine a piece of manhood as one might find in a mo
nth of Sundays, but alas, not a lord who would one day be an earl. Still, good enough for someone else. She had seen him that second time while she took air in the more cultivated section of the garden (most of it was frankly too wild for her, an overtly picturesque mock wilderness). He’d looked at her, long and hard. Though of course she didn’t return his look, she’d felt his admiration warm on her skin. She’d glanced sidelong at the play of sinew in his forearms, at the bulge of bicep below his rolled-up sleeve—and liked what she saw, very much. No, you foolish girl, she told herself, and pinched her arm where it would not show.

  “You must tell me all about it,” she said to Hannah. “And you must tell me everything, absolutely everything, about yourself.”

  If she was to act the part, she’d better study the character.

  She ignored the prick of jealousy. She had Teddy. Why should she care if a gardener liked someone else? The fellow was nothing. There was no future in a gardener, any more than there would have been with a florist. A romantic might see a life full of flowers. Anna, who had taught herself to be ruthless and pragmatic about her prospects, saw a life full of dirt.

  How funny, she thought, that the one who should be living with the family is content to slave in the kitchen and fall in love with a servant, while I, daughter of a grocer, bask in Liripip luxury and am a whisker away from being Lady Winkfield.

  There was a phrase that stuck in her head. Where she had heard it she could not remember, but it had resonated deeply—“the will to power.” It is my will, she thought, that puts me here. I am a superior being, and so I rise, through sheer force of will and by the natural order of things, to my proper position.

  Why, then, was she deeply afraid of what might happen when her false colors were stripped from her? And why, when Hannah had gone back downstairs and Anna lay on her bed to daydream of future happiness, did her hero have dark hair and dirt under his fingernails?