All I Want Is You (6 page)

‘I know you and he are old friends,’ she said with an unexpected twinkle in her eye. ‘And look, Will’s sent a note for you.’

I opened it quickly.
Dearest Sophie, I am back and I should be very glad to meet with you again. Yours ever, Will.

His writing was clumsy, though I despised myself for noticing it. Meanwhile Mrs Burdett had gone to sit behind her desk again, putting on her spectacles before studying the day’s work rota. ‘Now,’ she said after a moment or two, ‘I think we can spare you.’

‘Spare me?’

‘For the afternoon, I mean.’ She positively beamed. ‘Go and visit your young man, Sophie.’

Will was outside the Baxters’ tumbledown cottage with his back to me, mending a fence by the vegetable patch with his younger brothers and sisters all clustered at his side.

He was still in his army uniform. He had grown, of
course, and he looked so sturdy. But he swung round when I spoke his name, and I noticed how his face lit up in the old way. Quickly he sent the young ones packing, then we walked down the hill to a place where we used to sit, near the river.

He told me he and thousands of other soldiers had been kept on in Germany after the war, in somewhere called the Rhineland. ‘We’d been ordered there in case the Boche decided to play any new tricks,’ he declared, with a swagger he’d not had before. ‘But then we were told we could go home, and about time too.’

He recounted the journey by ship from France to England, and how half the soldiers had been seasick. He told me that to celebrate their return to Blighty their captain had bought them each a pint of bitter and some jellied eels in Dover, which, he laughed, made many of them even sicker.

But once Will had told me all that, he began to look serious and so sad. ‘Sophie,’ he said, ‘Sophie, I saw things in the fighting that I don’t want to see ever again.’

‘Oh, Will.’ My heart turned over, for him and for all of them. ‘Was it so very bad?’

He nodded. ‘But tell me how
you
are, Sophie. Tell me what life is like at the Hall.’

So I talked to him lightly, but I didn’t tell him anything really about how most of them – except Mrs Burdett – despised me. I didn’t tell him about what went on downstairs sometimes late at night, and the kissing game they’d played. I didn’t tell him about my dream of getting away from there and being a dancer, and what I’d let Lady Beatrice’s maid do to me.

He listened to my stupid chatter about the menial jobs I did and the food I ate, then he said, ‘I’ve brought you something, Sophie.’

He reached into his pocket. And I realised he’d bought a ring for me, a little silver ring. I whispered, ‘Oh, Will.
No
…’

‘I’ve been offered a job at the mill,’ he broke in eagerly, holding my hand. ‘Once we’re married, you can leave service. Oh, I won’t earn a fortune, but it’ll be enough to rent a small cottage and keep you and our children…’

His voice trailed away. He said in a different sort of voice, ‘You don’t want that, do you? Even though it’s all I’ve ever dreamed of. You don’t want…
me
.’

I couldn’t answer. My throat was thick with sorrow. I was lying to myself when I’d thought he’d changed. He’d not changed at all – but I had.

‘Sophie,’ he said, in a voice I’d not heard him use before, ‘Sophie, it was a living hell out there, with the guns and the bodies and all that. I only kept from going out of my mind by thinking about you.’

I swallowed down the lump in my throat. I touched his hand, then got to my feet, whispering, ‘Will, it’s just that we’re both so young.’

He stood up too. ‘I’ve killed men,’ he said in that different voice of his. ‘And I’ve seen men younger than me die. I’m old enough to know there will never be anyone but you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said blindly. ‘So sorry.’

And I hurried away, leaving him standing there.

I heard a few days later that there’d been a fight in Oxford between the demobbed soldiers and some
miners from the Gloucestershire pits who were marching to London. The miners were striking all across the country for more pay and a seven-hour day, and the soldiers were angry because of course most of the miners hadn’t been in the war.

The soldiers had won the battle, as you would expect, but several of them spent the night in the town gaol, including Will. The soldiers had all been heavily drunk, I heard, and I was dismayed to think of Will going to the alehouse and downing pint after pint to drown his grief at my callousness.

I’m sorry, Will.

I was still desperate to better myself in any way I could. I secretly borrowed books from His Grace’s library to read in my bed at night, and I practised dancing when I was alone, trying so hard to remember how the guests had moved to the music they’d played on Lady Beatrice’s gramophone. I hummed those tunes to myself with longing and I dreamed, oh, how I dreamed. If a man with blue eyes came into those dreams of mine, who could blame me?

Dear Mr Maldon
, I wrote that night.
I’m still writing as you told me to, although I don’t think now that my letters reach you. Will Baxter my friend is back from the war at last. He asked me to marry him and I said no. Will is kind and good, but I don’t love him, you see.

I crossed out what I’d written about Will and started again. I told him how Harriet and Betsey had been to see
Her Heritage
at a picture house in Oxford and hadn’t been able to speak of anything else for days. I told him
how we’d heard there was some union for servants being started in London, but the Duke had said that any servant of his who joined it would be dismissed without pay.

The Duke was already filled with rage over the miners’ strike. The Belfield estate, Mr Peters informed us in his important way, had owned vast coalmines in the Midlands for over a hundred years. During the war, the government had taken all the mines into national ownership so they were no longer the Duke’s responsibility, but His Grace still took the miners’ dissatisfaction as a personal insult.

Everyone thought the end of the war would make things better
, I wrote to Mr Maldon.
Everything is changing here at the Hall
,
and so much is different. But I promise you my devotion, as always. Your Sophie.

‘Save your love, Sophie,’he’d told me on that day long ago in Oxford. And I did. For him, God help me. For him.

We heard in the New Year that the Duke’s heir, Lord Edwin, had become very ill, and as usual Robert was our source. ‘It’s said His Little Lordship won’t last out the month,’ he declared gleefully in the scullery. ‘So it’s just as I predicted – the old witch has cast her curse.’

‘Hush your wicked gossip, young Robert!’ Mrs Burdett had come into the kitchen just then and she knew he was referring to the Duchess. ‘The poor little lad maybe has a touch of fever. He’ll pull through, that’s for sure.’

But Lord Edwin died in the spring of 1920, when I was seventeen.

The funeral took place at Lord Edwin’s home in Chichester, but of course the Hall was cast once more into mourning. I wondered if Lady Beatrice had attended the funeral, but didn’t ask, chiefly because talking about her reminded me of Margaret, and I’d been trying to forget Margaret and the things she’d done to me that night in Lady Beatrice’s sitting room. Were it not for the coins she’d given me, I’d have thought it all a dream.

Will had got his job at the mill on the Belfield estate and somehow all the servants knew what had happened between him and me. ‘They say he’s not smiled since you turned him down,’ they muttered. ‘Poor Will.’

Only Nell remained my friend, and she was still head-over-heels in love with Eddie. ‘Oh Sophie,’ she’d say with glowing eyes. ‘I quite understand, about Will. You want to feel
real
love like I do for my Eddie, don’t you?’

I said nothing, because the other night out in the back courtyard, as I emptied the kitchen scraps into the swill bin, I’d seen ‘her Eddie’ kissing Harriet in the shadows.

Because of the mourning for Lord Edwin, there were no house parties. But there was always a service every day in the family chapel of the Hall, at which the Duke, confined to his bath chair, read out a Bible lesson, and the vicar led us in prayers that seemed to go on for ever. What the Duke and Duchess were really praying for, Robert slyly informed us one evening in the servants’ hall, was for the new heir to meet with some disaster. ‘Their Graces are absolutely furious at the idea of him
inheriting,’ Robert declared. ‘But the London debs are wild with excitement.’

‘Why?’ asked Nell.

He looked at her pityingly. ‘Use your sense, Nelly. This man’s already filthy rich, he’s unmarried, and some day he’s going to be a duke.’

‘How old is he?’ asked Betsey. ‘What is he like?’

‘Who cares? He could be fat as a tub of lard and as old as Methuselah, he’s still easily the biggest catch for years…’ Robert broke off and looked at the wall clock. ‘My goodness, is that the time? Now listen, everybody. Listen to this…’

Robert was beckoning us over to his crystal set, where with great drama he fiddled about until, after the usual crackling and hissing, we heard a lady’s voice faintly singing ‘Home Sweet Home’.

‘That’s Dame Nellie Melba.’ Robert grinned. ‘How about that? The lady herself, singing in Chelmsford, right this minute.’

‘You ain’t half a clever-clogs,’ muttered Betsey.

Mrs Burdett had come in and was listening in amazement. ‘Chelmsford? How…’

Robert began to explain about radio transmissions, using words none of us could understand. I just listened to the music, entranced, but soon enough the bells began to summon us upstairs, and we all went rushing off to do our jobs again.

One day when we were in the sluice room, Nell pulled me aside. ‘Oh, Sophie,’ she said. ‘Oh, Sophie.’

Tears were running down her cheeks. I went quickly
to close the door, after checking nobody else was around outside. ‘Nell. What is it?’

She told me she was pregnant. My spirits sank, but I tried to say what I thought best. ‘Eddie loves you, doesn’t he, Nell? He’ll marry you, he has a good job as the Duke’s chauffeur…’

‘He’s saying it’s not his.’ She began sobbing noisily.

‘Not his? But…’

‘He told me that I’d – that I’d been with lots of other men for all he knew. But it’s not true!’ She looked distraught. ‘There’s nothing else for it – I’m going to have to get rid of it.’

‘Nell.
Nell
…’ But someone was coming; I could hear footsteps in the passage outside, and quickly we got on with our task of emptying the contents of the chamber pots down the drains then swilling them out. I worked in silent anger, because Eddie would get away scot-free just by saying she was a slut, and also because I’d heard terrible tales about women taking poisons like pennyroyal in desperate attempts to end a pregnancy.

Later, when I got Nell alone again, I told her I thought there were church charities that would help girls like her; I said we could take the bus into Oxford on our next afternoon off, to find out.

But it was all too late.

Two days after Nell told me her news, I was up first as usual, for though I’d been here four years it was still my job to clean out the kitchen and scrub the huge oven before breakfast began. I’d just started to sweep the floor when the other servants came running in to tell me
that Nell was ill in her bed. They were horrified, and asked me to come back upstairs to her. ‘You’re her friend, Sophie.’

Betsey actually offered to take over my tasks, and I hurried up the many flights of stairs to find Nell lying on her narrow iron bed in a pool of blood, her face as white as chalk.

‘Oh, God,’ I breathed. ‘Oh, Nell…’

We did our best. We cleaned her, we made her sit up and drink a little hot tea, and someone found laudanum to ease the stomach cramps that seized her so badly.

‘She was expecting a baby,’ I told the others. ‘She must have a doctor.’ I think my voice was raw with despair; I didn’t know if she’d taken something deliberately, or if it had just happened. And either way it didn’t really matter, a doctor
had
to come to her.

But Mr Peters had arrived by then – I could hear his stern voice outside our dormitory. ‘Doctor Blakey cannot be sent for,’ he declared. ‘That would mean Their Graces would have to know what has happened, and they would be shocked beyond belief. Besides, we are expecting important guests.’

It sickened me that Nell should be lying there in her own blood, possibly dying, and she was being ignored simply so that the Duke and Duchess shouldn’t be troubled. Suddenly I realised how much I hated this place. I hated the Duke and the Duchess and all their grand visitors; all the people for whom I and Nell and the others had to turn our faces to the wall as they passed by because we weren’t fit to look at them.

Nell continued to have terrible cramps all day and
was still bleeding. I wanted to tell Mrs Burdett what had happened, but house guests were indeed expected that afternoon and Mrs Burdett was closeted with the Duchess taking orders, which could take hours.

The other maids said they’d do my jobs, so I stayed with Nell up in the attic, and I grew more and more afraid for my friend. I changed her sheets, I held her hand, and as I toiled up and down the flights of stairs with hot water for her, I realised dimly that the guests had started to arrive. I hadn’t even had time to wonder who they might be.

But on my way up the stairs yet again with a tray of tea for poor Nell, I suddenly heard Margaret’s voice behind me.

‘Why, Sophie. I’ve just been looking for you in the servants’ hall…’ She broke off. ‘Whatever is the matter?’

Beyond caution, I blurted out Nell’s tragedy. Margaret pursed her lips and hurried away; I thought – I
hoped
– that was the last I’d see of her. But we maids were just having our usual snatched meal before starting to prepare the guests’ dinner when Lady Beatrice burst into the servants’ hall, looking magnificent and furious.

Poor Mrs Burdett, who’d just come in, was unfortunate enough to catch Her Ladyship’s full wrath.

‘You’ve a very sick maid upstairs,’ announced Lady Beatrice, her hands on her hips. ‘You’d leave the poor girl to die? You want to pretend nothing’s happened?’ Mrs Burdett didn’t know yet about Nell because I hadn’t had a chance to tell her. ‘My God,’ said Lady Beatrice, ‘would you all smuggle out her corpse and bury her somewhere at the dead of night?’