Wasp Page 5

  Footsteps outside the door. A knock. The Fixer rises from his stool. ‘Your Sisters are here to bathe you properly and provide fresh clothing. Do whatever they say and don’t pay any heed to their japes. They like a little blood sport with the new girls.’

  The Fixer is gone in a breath. Two young women dressed in plain smocks carry a sloshing tin tub into the room. They are maids, the girl supposes. Her ‘Sisters’? Is that her future? Working as a servant in a big house? At Russell Hall she’d been little higher than a kitchen wench anyway, and ripe for teasing from the other staff. Pepper in her tea, nettles in her bed, even a toad from the ornamental pond stuffed into her shoe. That had sent her screaming down the hall and out the front door.

  In one of her mother’s magazines she’d read of a house for fallen women in London where harlots were scooped out of jail and reformed into seamstresses or washerwomen. A humble new life, her mother supposed, but better than dying of the pox.

  The maids are watching her. One has a look that could slice butter and a prancing horse, painted all black, tattooed on her cheek. The other is softer about the face and sports a red flower design. They lower the tub to the floor and the woman with the horse motif beckons.

  ‘Off with that sacking, Kitten.’

  Beth is confused for a moment, then starts to tug at her smock. The maid snorts. ‘Too slow, too slow, you are as idle as you are ugly.’ She grasps the top of the gown and splits the fastenings from neck to hem. Cool air wafts over the girl’s body. She crosses both arms over her breasts but the maid bats them away. ‘No tomfoolery. Get in the bath.’

  Warm, scented water envelops Beth’s feet and she sighs despite herself.

  ‘Another one from the madhouse,’ the maid remarks to her companion. ‘Where does Kingfisher get this refuse?’

  ‘From the gutter, the same place he found us.’

  The woman laughs. ‘Looks like he cut it fine with this one. I don’t know why I should be tasked with pampering her.’

  ‘We all take our turn, Ebony Mare. ’Twas the same when you first arrived.’

  ‘Oh very well, let’s turn this weed into a blossom.’

  For all their scorn, the maids’ hands are as soft as butterflies. Face, hands and body are carefully cleaned. When satisfied, they dry Beth with a thick towel that smells faintly of jasmine. Her smock is exchanged for a linen gown that matches their own.

  ‘Now,’ the flower-cheeked woman says. ‘I think you are ready for the Abbess.’

  A Good Prospect

  Bethany’s parents waited until she’d turned sixteen before they sat her down at the kitchen table and laid out her future. Beth was forced to admit she hadn’t given much thought to the matter. She considered her education a lure to attract a well-appointed banker or corn merchant. Certainly she hadn’t foreseen pegging her future to the village and Russell Hall.

  ‘Lord Russell’s had an eye on you since you were a lass,’ Mother said, while Father folded and unfolded his hands. ‘You’ll do right by him and his family.’

  ‘You said we should mind our place.’

  ‘Our place just got bigger. Your father paid good coin to have you lettered. Lord Russell wants you at the Hall and that’s where you’re going. He’s too old to be running after children, his housekeeper’s a prune and his lad can barely keep a leg out of a hunting saddle. It’s time you chased the butterflies out of your head and put the things you’ve been taught to some use.’

  Mother was a woman you did not argue with unless you were ready to let a month pass and still not hear the end of it. She lifted a hand to no one, but her ability to wear a body down with words was as persistent as the tide. Though professing to be a fervent disciple of God she also believed that to spare the rod was to spare the body unnecessary hurt. Unlike her fellow parishioners, who beat their servants and children with equal impunity, Mother believed the doorway to contrition lay in the will.

  ‘You can blacken a rump with a leather strap but you can’t knock pride out of a person,’ she often asserted over the supper table. ‘Pride is the chief cause of disobedience. Some of those village boys think it a mark of bravery to suffer a beating at their father’s hands. They show off their bruises as if they were honours from the king. Only through humility can you find repentance and humility can be taught just like anything else.’

  She did charity work for the Wesleyans, giving out dead children’s clothes to the local urchins from a huge wicker basket tied to the back of her husband’s wagon. Sometimes these garments were little better than the rags the youngsters already wore, but their mothers could work patchwork miracles with the material, and many rainbow-coloured breeches were seen scurrying around the lanes outside the village. Most Saturdays mother and daughter spent the morning loading up the basket before taking it around the farms. Local children — a whirl of bare feet, bad haircuts and missing teeth — tumbled into the yard as the wagon squeezed through the gate. Beth’s ears were soon filled with whispered secrets, and forests of small fingers opened to reveal treasures gleaned from the fields surrounding their fathers’ steadings. Ever-in-a-hurry Mother kept her peace over this because it made the job go more easily.

  ‘You have a gift for working with children,’ she acknowledged, perched crowlike above the now empty basket. ‘More use could be found for that, I think.’

  Later that afternoon Bethany slipped into the village for bread and found a lad fetching a hiding from a boy twice his size. She swung the breadbasket across the bully’s ear. He was a good head taller and built like a barrel. Beth returned home with swollen eyes and her nose swimming with blood.

  Father took her into the kitchen. ‘I don’t understand what’s possessed you, Bethany. You have no friends to speak of, and at every turn you taunt the older village lads. I’m proud of my position, but not so high-handed that I forget who bakes the bread in this village, or puts shoes on the squire’s horses.’

  She gazed at him above the bloodied rag pressed against her nose and said nothing.

  ‘When I speak you look at me as if I’m not there, when you choose to look at all. You’re my flesh and blood yet sometimes it hardly seems I know you. Why can’t you be like everyone else?’

  ‘Why should I? I don’t see so many things in someone’s face as I do in a flower or an evening sky. Nor the sense in saying what isn’t meant. The truth might hurt, but being lied to then finding out later is worse. You all talk and think in loops. It hurts my head to try and work out your meaning. I try to be truthful and I’m scolded. I make an effort to play your games and say what I think you want to hear but only court more trouble. You say I’m clever in one breath then stupid in the next. What am I supposed to do?’

  Father struck his fist against his chest. ‘You think me a man happy to be caught in the middle of everything, too low for some and too high for others? We all have our place, Beth. If everyone sat in gilded drawing rooms no crops would be harvested, no homes built, no ships captained across the sea. Without me or my kind, Lord Russell would see his estate turn to ruin. Without the village seamstress, your dress would fall as rags from your shoulders. If every farmer disappeared in the night your belly would cramp in its craving for a meal, and without smithing my horse would limp for want of shoes. I have my position, Lord Russell has his, and you have yours. You can’t cross from one world into another any more than a milkmaid can turn into a silversmith. What I do is enough to put a sound roof over your head.’

  ‘It’s not your house, and neither is the land it sits on.’

  ‘By rights no soul owns anything in this world except God, but the squire has charge of it and we’re safe living here because of that. Don’t go envying the lace-clad ladies who turn up at the Russells’ tea parties. Such creatures don’t own the satin slippers they stand up in. They live in their fathers’ pockets and then their husbands’, men who were likely chosen for them. How’d you like that, Beth?’

  ‘I don’t see the difference, since any time one of these older village lad
s you mentioned looks at me you seem intent on breaking his jaw.’

  It was true Beth had enjoyed occasional attention when she was out bramble picking or pruning the roses in her mother’s garden. Her only actual suitor was a buck-toothed farmer called Toby Wetheridge whose first wife went under a cart two weeks after their wedding. Toby wanted to fill the cot he’d made from two old barrels and a length of planking. He called on Beth’s papa one Sabbath after church, wearing clothes that were only marginally less disgusting than his usual rags. He brought a spray of wild-flowers for Mother and a fill of pipe tobacco for Father. ‘I aim to court your girl,’ he declared.

  Father chased him off with an old army pistol. Once nothing was left of Toby Wetheridge but a retreating cloud of dust, Father called Beth downstairs and stood her in the middle of the parlour rug, where he shoved a Bible into her hands. ‘Did that man ever kiss you?’ he demanded. ‘Have you ever let him touch you anywhere?’

  Beth, conscious of the scrutiny of both parents, shook her head. ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Swear it.’

  Beth swore. Papa took the Bible and nodded. ‘Good. No daughter of mine is going to end up as some farmer’s brood mare.’

  She wondered whose brood mare she would end up as.

  ‘They have their world too,’ Father said now, ‘and you can’t go there either. Find a respectable merchant, or perhaps a young barrister. Men like that will fall into your path soon enough.’

  ‘So I’ve no more choice than those fancy ladies?’

  ‘You can’t do anything you want whenever you want. None of us are that free. Lord Russell knows it too. I’ve worked for that man longer than you’ve lived and I’ll respect him till the breath is gone from me.’

  ‘What if I reckon I do have a choice?’

  ‘Then you’ll likely bring calamity on yourself. Us too. Love is more than a tumble in the hedgerow with some comely village buck. It means doing what’s right for everyone, no matter the sacrifice. I don’t believe you ever understood that. I don’t know if you ever will. I pray I’m wrong.’

  In terms of Beth’s immediate future, Mother was more practical. ‘Your education will stand you in good stead at the Hall,’ she said over supper. ‘Working for the squire will knock some of the flighty notions out of your head.’

  So there it was. She was to look after Lord Russell’s niece and nephew whom she had never met. Not long after their birth, their mother had fallen down the village well. Her neck broke on the stone shaft before hitting the water. The incident oiled the gossips’ tongues for weeks.

  As for their father, he took a cannonball through the belly in the American War. Rumour said he sported a hole you could push your head through.

  Dressed in her Sabbath gown, Beth was summoned to the big house and into Lord Russell’s reception room. Oak panels gleamed in the light from tall windows puncturing the end wall. Lord Russell stood gazing into the gardens, fingers curled around a silver-topped walking stick. Though small in stature, he boasted a broad flat back and hands as thick as stumps. His land was said to stretch for forty fields across all points of the Dunston crossroads. It took in the fish-swollen stretch of the river Dun, most of Mapleberry forest and all of the village. Nobody starved on his land or went without a roof, even when one vicious summer had the corn withering on its stalks. Village folk cooked his meals, tended his gardens and kept the poachers from his woods.

  Beth dipped a curtsey.

  ‘Ah, the estate manager’s daughter,’ Lord Russell said, turning.

  ‘Yes, m’lord. We have met before.’

  ‘Indeed, and you were barely higher than my jacket cuffs as I recall. Well, I am happy to engage you at your father’s recommendation. I shall familiarise you with my household, then take you to meet the children.’

  ‘I have to say I’m no teacher, m’lord.’

  ‘I don’t require a tutor as such. I need someone to play with them, indulge them, permit them their fantasies while ensuring they are not starved of responsible company.’

  ‘A friend of sorts?’

  ‘Of sorts, yes. This part of the county is quite remote and they see little of their peers. You will provide a suitable distraction for the time being.’

  It was customary, he explained, for the squire himself to introduce new staff to their duties. ‘I like to know who’s under my roof’ was how he put it.

  As a ten year old she’d first met Lord Russell when her father took her round the grounds. Six years had not much weathered him. He was one of those men who, early in life, gains a comfortable face and exists happily with it into old age. He showed her all the in-and-out places of his grand house. Lord Russell was famed for collecting oddities. Rooms bristled with rare plants, primitive pagan masks, weapon collections and obscure texts. Rumour had it he once kept a lion in an upstairs bedchamber. Guests could hear the pad-pad of its paws across the floor. When Beth entered the greenhouse abutting the Hall’s eastern face, the heat and moisture hit her like a fist, and she tumbled backwards in a half-faint. With wiry strength, Lord Russell scooped her back to her feet and into the fresh air.

  Yet when shown the pretty bedchamber she was to make her own she blurted, ‘I dislike blue. It is a cold colour.’

  ‘Be thankful you are not packed into the attic with the servants,’ Lord Russell said, but his eyes were smiling. He tapped his skull. ‘You seem a quiet young woman, but your head, now that is a busy place.’

  ‘In the village talking too much earns a scold’s bridle.’

  ‘Indeed? I am sure it will never come to that here. Now you will meet the children. Their needs are as persistent as they are varied. You will not visit home often, I suspect, even living on my doorstep as you do.’

  Sebastian and Julia were presented to her in the schoolroom. Eight years old and so alike, as if someone had painted a boy, folded the paper while the colour was still wet to make a mirror image and, surprise, come up with the girl. Fair-haired, fair-eyed and with skin like milk, they carried little of their uncle’s rugged sallowness apart from a thin-lipped twist to their mouths. Julia dipped a sweet curtsey while her brother bowed.

  ‘What are you holding behind your back, Master Sebastian?’ Lord Russell enquired.

  He revealed his secret. A hunk of bread goldened with honey.

  ‘Another illicit feast with Julia in the coach house, is it?’ Lord Russell waited, face serene, while the boy shifted on his feet.

  ‘It’s for my pet,’ he confessed.

  ‘And what pet would this be?’ Lord Russell said, faking a frown. ‘A new hunting hound? A mare that I don’t know about?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Smaller.’

  ‘Do you want to show us where you keep it?’

  He nodded towards the windowsill. Lord Russell smiled. ‘Shall we have a look?’

  He took the boy’s hand and was led across the room. Beth followed, shoes whispering like dry paper on the rugs. At the window Sebastian stopped and pointed.

  ‘There.’

  Beth could see nothing at first except the corner of the frame. The afternoon sun threw fingers of light across the oak, and little patches of green mould seeped through cracks around the edge.

  Should I pretend to see something? she thought. Will he think I’m teasing him and get cross?

  Sebastian dropped the bread onto the sill. ‘Supper for you,’ he said, seemingly talking to the air.

  Beth looked again, then spotted it. On the wood, wings spread to catch the sun, was a small brown moth. She almost laughed but Sebastian looked so earnest she didn’t want to break the spell. He nudged the bread with his little finger. The moth remained indifferent. Beth thought about saying something when the door banged open and George Russell blustered into the schoolroom. George in cream riding breeches and glittering leather calf boots, always with that slightly startled look in his blue eyes. His smile was as wide as a river, a tumble of golden curls spilling out from the edges of his velvet tricorne. Beaming at them, his grin shone brighter t
han the sunlight.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t the new girl.’

  The first night in Russell Hall found Beth in her quarters examining the bed her employer had provided. A real four-poster, not some put-together box. Big and sturdy, with an oak headboard carved into the shape of a dozing cat, and drapes on top. It could sleep four at a pinch.

  A fire had been left burning in the hearth. The glow from it turned the room orange. Beth undressed and slipped into bed, relishing the soft kiss of the embroidered coverlet. The pillow was gentle on her head and she closed her eyes.

  An hour later she was awake and sweating, her breathing laboured. The fire was a demon. She’d never been this hot, even in midsummer with her bedchamber windows sealed. She pushed the coverlet onto the floor and pulled off her shift. Lying naked on the mattress, Beth struggled to get comfortable. It was hopeless. Frustrated, she picked up the wash jug from the dresser, stumbled over to the grate and doused it in water. Orange embers hissed and turned grey. Smoke whirled up the chimney.

  Retrieving the quilt, Bethany returned to bed. The room quickly cooled but she lay, wide-eyed in the dark, conscious of the high ceiling, the open space around the four-poster. Pulling the drapes only increased her isolation. In her cottage the walls were an arm’s reach away. Sometimes she’d soothe herself by running fingers over the plaster, tracing cracks or small imperfections, enjoying the comfort of their solidity.

  Finally Beth got up and dragged everything closer to the bed. The washstand, the chair, the footstool. She tried to move the dresser but a corner caught on the rug and it wouldn’t budge. She built her own walls with whatever else she could find.

  The estate, with its clumps of woodland and rolling lawns, was as quiet as the bottom of a well. Already she missed the sound of the wind stroking the tree outside her bedchamber. Mother twitching with dreams in the room below, her breath whispering in the dark. Father’s guttural snoring.