by Mary Hooper
‘Well, it’s a hard life for all of us,’ Prudence said briskly. ‘When our pa died, Ma had our Tommy ’prenticed as a climbing boy. Up the chimneys he used to go, fast as a weevil, and he only seven years old!’
‘And I started my working life when I was eight – Ma used to send me out every morning to whiten the front steps of houses,’ said Patience.
‘Betsy is but four!’ I said, taking a year off her age.
I explained to Betsy that I had to work every single day so wouldn’t be able to spend a lot of time playing with her, and after we’d visited the barn, Will arrived to collect her for the day. While he spoke very humbly and thankfully to Mrs Bonny and Mr Griffin, I got on with my milking so that I could send him and Betsy on their way with a can of still-warm milk and some of the previous day’s butter.
In the days following, we got into a routine. In the mornings Betsy would go off to the river on her own, carrying a little parcel containing whatever I’d found for them to eat that day, while I stood outside the dairy, watching her running across the fields, turning every ten yards or so to wave to me. Smaller and smaller, deeper in the grass she got, until she reached the river, then she and Will would both turn and wave as a signal that she’d arrived safely. Sometimes, if the weather was bad, she would stay in the barn with the other children, but mostly she would choose to go down to the river and be with Will. In the evenings, after they had eaten, Will would either bring Betsy back to the house or, if he was busy with passengers, she would run up to me on her own.
Several weeks after she’d first come to live at the hall, something a little unusual happened. I was some distance from the house and shooing my cows down to the bottom pasture after their afternoon milking, when Miss Sophia came out of the gate to the kitchen garden, dressed very nicely in a gown of spotted muslin with a hat covered in soft veiling.
Hoping that she would be reminded that she had not yet thanked me properly for my part in the tableau, I made more of a fuss of the cows than usual, calling them my pretties, patting and cajoling them. When Miss Sophia approached and addressed me, I acted as if I hadn’t known she was there.
‘Kitty!’ she said. ‘Have you a moment?’
‘Oh! Of course, miss,’ I said, and I gave the final cow, Clover, a slap on the rear which sent her trotting through to the pasture, then shut the gate behind her.
‘Can you tell me if there’s a quick way to the village through here?’ she asked, pointing ahead of us towards the green lane through the woods.
I nodded. ‘It’s likely to be rather muddy in wet weather, though, miss – and we’ve had rain recently,’ I said, wondering why she wasn’t using the gig to go to the village.
‘Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.’ She looked down at her pretty sandals.
‘Shall I run back to the house and get more suitable footwear for you, miss? I could ask Christina –’
‘No!’ she said very abruptly. Then she softened it to: ‘No, that’s quite all right, Kitty. I’m late already and I don’t want to . . . to trouble anyone.’
‘I see, miss,’ I said, thinking it was more likely that she didn’t want anyone to know that she was going out.
She flounced her gown a little. ‘I’ll just go along here and hope there aren’t too many puddles.’
‘As you wish, miss,’ I said and curtseyed.
She went on her way with not a murmur of thanks nor a mention of the tableau, even though I’d worked so hard on getting Daisy prepared. I was to discover later that Miss had much more on her mind just then than a South Devons cow.
I looked after her, very intrigued, for usually when Miss Sophia went out it was with her sister. They would pay calls on nearby well-to-do families or visit the milliners or dressmakers, and always went in one of the carriages, open or closed according to the season. I didn’t think I’d actually seen either of them walking anywhere on their own before. In my mind, their feet hardly ever touched the ground.
A week later I was even more intrigued, for Miss Sophia was out in the herb garden, next to my dairy, wearing a pale green dress with a sky-blue parasol and scarf, cutting bits and pieces from herbs with a pair of silver scissors and placing them in her trug. This activity in itself was not unusual, for both the Misses liked to work with herbs in the still room making tinctures and balms, but her outfit was unsuitable and she could hardly manage the trug because of having to juggle the parasol as well, while the scarf kept slipping off her shoulders. What was really strange, however, was that one moment I looked out from the dairy and she was there, and the next she was gone. When I went into the herb garden later all I could see was her basket containing the scissors and some sprigs of rosemary, placed out of sight beneath a clump of feverfew.
It was not until sometime later, when I had finished for the day and my pans and bowls were all scoured and scalded to perfection, that I suddenly noticed she was back in the herb garden, snipping at things and placing them in the trug as before. She’d been absent for about two hours, I realised.
I noticed nothing puzzling for several afternoons after that, for Mrs Bonny was making cheese and, this procedure needing more than one pair of hands, Patience and I were required to help her. We hardly had time for gossip, either, for the making of hard cheeses was a complicated and somewhat unreliable process and there were not many in the kitchens who had success with it.
It was Will who, a few days later, came up with another part of the puzzle concerning Miss Sophia.
Most mornings I was left to more or less my own devices. As long as there was fresh milk for the family’s breakfast, and I had made enough butter and cream the day before, then my little dairy ran independently of everything else. If I stole a little time for myself after morning milking, that was my own business. This, of course, was another benefit of my ma having known Mrs Bonny, for that good lady trusted me and hardly ever interfered with what I was doing.
On this particular morning my cows had been more than usually compliant and were easily and quickly milked, so, as I had not seen Will for several days, I decided to walk down to the river with Betsy. She had adjusted remarkably quickly to her new situation and, as I had hoped, was being mothered by two little girls of eight or nine years who vied with each other as to who could baby her the most. This, it seemed to me, was as good as anyone could provide at the moment, and infinitely better than the prospects of many poor children, but would not do for ever. I felt quite sure that Kate and her husband would soon come back to the village and take Betsy off our hands.
Now she danced along beside me, talking of the field mice she was hoping to catch that day and how Will had said that living beside the river with your own ferry boat was the best job in the world.
‘Does he never speak of going to London now?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, he does!’ she replied. ‘And he said you and I shall soon go, too, and we will travel in carriages when we are there, eat meat every day and have muslin dresses.’
‘Do you want to go there?’
‘Yes, I really do,’ she answered seriously, ‘because Miss Sophia and Miss Alice go there in the Season to attend dances, and we would be able to see them in their ballgowns.’
‘Well, I declare there could be no better reason to go!’ I said, and Will, who had jumped out of his boat to come and meet us, heard the last of this conversation and laughed.
‘I have something to recount about Miss Sophia,’ I said, when Will had kissed us both good morning and enquired as to how we were faring. I told him of the two incidents and asked if Miss had ever taken the ferry.
‘Not she!’ Will said. ‘A common rowing boat wouldn’t suit. If she wanted to go into town she would surely go in a carriage to Thorndyke and over the bridge. But then . . .’
‘What?’ I asked, much intrigued, for there had not been much in the way of gossip in the hall of late, and we did all enjoy a little tittle-tattle.
We sat down together on the grass. ‘Well, twice this week I have ferried a certai
n person over the river from Millbridge. He was a young naval gentleman and something of a stranger to the area.’
‘Never!’
‘I did wonder what business he was on, to be coming over here twice.’
‘And did he say anything?’
‘No, but he sighed a lot and gazed towards the hall uttering lines of poesy.’
I gave a little gasp, but Will was laughing.
‘No, I am teasing you! He was a very correct young man and I believe from one of the ships at Plymouth.’
‘And did he go towards the hall?’
‘As I recall, he went towards the hamlet – perhaps going through the wood,’ Will said, ‘although I can’t be sure of that because I had several strangers on board that day.’
‘Oh! But you should have remembered something like that!’
‘I didn’t realise how very important it was going to be.’
‘Stop teasing!’ I begged. I made sure Betsy was employed in catching minnows before I asked eagerly, ‘But how old is he? Was he a handsome gentleman? Would he make a suitable husband for Miss Sophia?’
‘I have no idea,’ Will said. ‘I am no expert on marriage. Or love.’
There was a moment’s pause after he said that last word and we smiled at each other.
‘On the contrary, I believe you are,’ I said and, daringly, I leaned closer and kissed him.
We broke away from each other, for Betsy had become aware of the silence and had turned round to stare at us. ‘Now, about our naval friend,’ I continued. ‘What was he like? How tall, and did he show a good leg?’
‘I did not notice his leg,’ Will said, laughing, ‘but I believe he was an officer, judging from the number of stripes on his arm.’
‘But of course!’ I said suddenly. ‘At the tableau, there were two young naval officers in the back row who stood on their seats in order to see better. Perhaps it is one of those who is paying court to Miss Sophia.’
‘If he is, then old man Baysmith may not like it,’ Will said, ‘for he’s an Army man, is he not, and they hold themselves superior to the Navy.’
‘Do they?’ I thought back to the night of the first of May. Could I remember any more details? Yes, there were two young men standing on the chairs cheering, and Lady Cecilia had frowned at them, most displeased at this impropriety, and I was sure I could remember Miss Sophia gazing over the heads of the audience and smiling especially sweetly at someone. But maybe that had just been my imagination.
When I went to bed that night I thought of Miss Sophia and wondered how it felt for someone in her position to be in love, and if it was any different to the way I felt about Will. I concluded that it was not: that position and money did not alter feelings, that anyone could experience love, rich or poor, and that it was an excellent thing to happen to a girl.
Chapter Six
The month of May went into June. Clover, the oldest of my cows, developed foot rot and had to be taken across to the farm and – I presumed, for I never asked about these things – slaughtered. A new Clover arrived, younger and friskier, recently calved, and her antics leaping about the field seemed to infect the other three, so that they played up whenever I needed to catch them for milking, thundering up and down the pastures, making it near impossible to get hold of them. Once they kicked a fence down and got into a field of wild garlic, and for three days their milk was tainted with it and Lord Baysmith complained. Even when I’d got them safely into the dairy they would sometimes stamp and jitter, pull away from me or even kick over the bucket of milk.
As a consequence of all the frisking around, milking took three times as long as it usually did and, often feeling cross and exasperated, I didn’t have the leisure to keep a look out for Miss Sophia. The only thing that did happen concerning her was that one night in the servants’ hall everyone was agog because raised voices had been heard from the drawing room and Lord Baysmith had shouted, ‘Over my dead body, my girl!’ in a voice which carried right down to the kitchens.
Miss Sophia’s personal maid, Christina, could probably have told us more about it – and we were so desperate to know – but, of course, no one was so ill bred as to ask her.
Hearing the Lord Baysmith incident recounted, I was glad I hadn’t told the others my two little stories about Miss Sophia. If she was in love and her family opposed the match, then things were going to go badly for her and it would not help matters for everyone to know that she’d slipped off, unchaperoned, to meet a young man in the woods. And there was more!
When I next saw Will he gave me the news that he had ferried across the same naval gentleman again and, though he had cheerily asked him where he was bound and whether he was new to the area, the young man had not given any proper reply but seemed, Will said, very anxious.
Lovelorn was the word, I thought to myself.
The weather grew warmer and my dairy became the nicest, coolest place to be. Sometimes I even scoured things that didn’t really need scouring, or slowly reordered my tins and containers along their shelves, rather than have Mrs Bonny find me something else to do in the cloying heat of the kitchens.
One evening, finishing supper early, I walked down to the river to collect Betsy and, it being so muggy and unpleasant, Will proposed that we should dip in the water to try and cool ourselves.
‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I will teach both my girls to swim.’
Betsy squealed with delight, while I protested that we could not possibly do such a thing, that the waterweeds would wrap themselves around our legs, drag us down and drown us.
Will laughed. ‘The weeds haven’t caught me yet!’ he said, for he swam across the river and back again every morning. I would not be persuaded, however, and watched fearfully as Betsy stripped down until she was as naked as a duck and plunged in, shrieking. Another thing that stopped me from going in was that I could not dream of being naked before Will, yet how could I swim in my stays, smock and petticoats?
Will had no such modesty and, stripped to his breeches in the water, was uncommon patient with Betsy, holding her up, turning her over so that she learned to float on her back and teaching her to scrabble in the water like a dog. She found such amusement in it that she didn’t want to come out, and as a consequence was so tired when she did emerge that she fell asleep almost straight away. Will had to walk us both back to the hall, carrying Betsy over his shoulder.
Going indoors, the others told me that there had been more raised voices in the drawing room that evening and that, unbeknown to Mrs Bonny or Mr Griffin, Patience had gone up with a handful of scouring sand which she’d ‘accidentally’ dropped on the hall floor, near the drawing-room door. She had then, very slowly, brushed it up, listening all the while. That night in our bedroom she told Prudence and me that she had heard Lady Cecilia say that unless Miss Sophia ceased all communication with ‘a certain person’ then she would be cast out of the family forthwith and have to make her own way in the world.
The following day I became involved in the dispute myself.
It was a very warm evening and I decided to walk down to the river to collect Betsy again and, if I could not bring myself to swim, at least dip my toes in the water to cool off. My cows were happily chewing the cud in the second field and I called a greeting to them as I passed, only to feel mighty silly when I realised that someone had overheard me.
‘Good evening!’ a voice called in response, and I looked across to see a young gentleman in naval officer’s uniform standing behind a tree. He had not come over on the ferry, that was clear, for his horse was grazing nearby.
Automatically, I curtseyed.
‘You are the dairymaid at Bridgeford Hall, are you not?’
‘I am, sir,’ I said, knowing immediately that this must be he, Miss Sophia’s young gentleman.
This was confirmed by his next words. ‘I have heard both the Misses speak of you. I believe you kindly supplied the cow for the tableau vivant?’
‘I did, sir.’ I indicated the cows in the f
ield. ‘That was Daisy, that was.’ He began fumbling in his jacket pocket for something, and to fill the silence I found myself rambling on, giving him the names of the other cows and telling him that Clover was new and frisky, which I am sure he didn’t find the least bit interesting.
At last he pulled something out of his jacket and said, ‘I was hoping I might see someone from the house. I wonder if I can trust your discretion?’
I nodded, thrilled. ‘Indeed you can, sir. Do you want me to take a message to . . . to someone in the hall?’
‘To Miss Sophia, yes,’ he said, and he pressed a folded, sealed paper into my hand. ‘Let no one else see it – not even her sister!’
‘Of course not, sir,’ I said. I pointed to the river. ‘There is a child I have to collect from the ferryman but I’ll give the note to Miss Sophia on my return.’
‘I hoped to see her myself but I have to return to my ship forthwith.’
‘You can trust me, sir,’ I said.
He bowed slightly (which endeared him to me, for it is not something which gentry often do to maidservants), mounted his horse and rode off, leaving me staring after him and marvelling.
I looked at the letter, which was addressed in a flowing, educated hand, and blessed the day that I had been taught my letters, for I could read that it said: The Honourable Miss Sophia Baysmith and By hand. I put it carefully into the pocket of my petticoat and carried on walking down to the river.
There was a little bit of a panic when I got there, for Betsy had vanished while Will was on the other side of the river with a passenger. Eventually, after much running hither and thither, we found her flat on her back fast asleep by a rabbit hole, where she’d been sitting waiting for a rabbit to emerge. By this time, because of the anxious ten minutes or so spent looking for Betsy, I’d forgotten about the note in my pocket.
