Untitled (2 page)

   The door is right behind her. She grabs the heavy brass knocker and sends it thundering against the plate. She's shivering hard—all the warmth has been washed from her thin coat, a pass-me-down from Mrs. Saunders's youngest sister, yet it's not that but fear that makes her tremble. She knocks again and the street echoes with the
rat-a-tat-tat
. From the other side of the door, silence. Someone must be in, though. There's always a servant at home.

   The grate of wood on stone, and she turns. He's dragged her box onto its end and has his arms around it.

   "You!" she shouts. "No—no, you mustn't. You won't get away with it."

   He tries to lift the box higher and grunts with the effort.

   "Put that down. Please." Her voice turns in on itself as she repeats, "Please."

   From behind her comes light and a rush of warm air. The door has opened and there, in a black suit, stands a stout man with a slick of white hair combed back, and a chin so small he seems barely to have one.

   "Oh sir." She stumbles towards him. "Sir—"

   He raises one finger for silence, and stares down to where she stands on the step beneath him. Then he flutters his hand at her. "Away, away. You must use the other entrance," he says, pointing down to the sunken area behind the railings. He leans towards her conspiratorially, one fat hand on his belly. "And if you ever use the front entrance again, you will be dismissed immediately. I shall see to it."

   "Yes, certainly; yes, sir."

   A distant voice comes down the corridor, and he lifts his head to call, "Merely the young person who—" and pushes the door closed.

   In the sudden darkness she spins around to see what has become of her box and steps back, missing her footing and falling hard against the railings—so hard that she will have bruises across her ribs for days to come. She saves herself only by grabbing hold of the finials that top the railings, though the sharp edge of one scrapes the skin of her palm. She snatches for her hat too late: it sails over the railings and into the area.

   The young man is waiting, her box balanced on his shoulder. "Could've told you that was a mistake, knocking on the door. They don't want to see the likes of you on their front doorstep, now do they?" With that he starts down the steps and leaves her to follow as best she can.

        
W
ith all the laundry that hangs from the ceiling racks, the kitchen feels like a ship about to set sail. There's nothing fresh about the air here, though. No, it's swollen with steam and the hot smell of roasting beef. Jane stands at one end of the table with her hat in her hands. The brim is damp and covered with something dark that may be mud, or mold, or worse. In the light of the gas lamps it's hard to tell.

   The cook bustles between the stove and a set of serving dishes. So far all she has said is, "You'll just have to wait. I'm right in the middle of getting dinner started and I can't be dealing with you right now. Albert"—that, it seems, is the name of the young man who carried her box down the stairs—"you'll catch it if Mrs. Robert knows you've been hanging around again. But I'll thank you for moving that box out of my way." She talks a little like Albert, and Jane has to hold the words, just for a moment, to make sense of them.

   The box is by the door that opens onto the area, and the cook's dress has brushed against it a couple of times. Albert obliges. He leans down and hugs it in both arms, then carries it over to the corner, between a dresser and the wall. "Good enough, Mrs. J.?" he calls over.

   She has a ladle raised to taste the soup. "None of your cheek," she says. Then she glances over to a girl at the sink, sullen and bowshouldered, who is halfheartedly peeling apples. She's lanky and pale, like a plant grown up without enough light. "You can't still be working on those apples," the cook barks at her. "You need to shift yourself, Elsie. There's a sinkful of pans waiting for you in the scullery. Come on now, put a bit of effort into it."

   But the girl just goes on peeling, sleeves turned up on her thin arms, her apron stained and drooping with damp. She hasn't glanced at Jane, not even once.

   Albert leans against the dresser and starts picking at his nails. The cook sets down the ladle and turns to him. "I told you—you'd better be off."

   "Sarah busy, is she?"

   "Out on some errands." She wipes her forehead with a cloth hanging from her apron strings and rests her thick hands on the table's edge. "Now, you're not going to wait for her. I can't have my kitchen cluttered up like this. Besides, if Mrs. Robert catches you here again, you'll be sorry."

   He lifts a hand, about to say something it seems. Then his face closes in on itself and he lets himself out without a word. Behind him the door swings closed and a gust of cool air sweeps into the kitchen. In moments it has dispersed. Jane fans herself with her hat, says, "I'll take off my coat, then."

   From over by the stove the cook eyes her. "You wait a moment. I don't want coats and boxes and all God-knows making a mess of my kitchen."

   So Jane waits. Not leaning on anything, not standing with her legs crossed, but as she's been taught: heels touching, back straight, chin up but not jutting into the air. Above her the sheets swing gently, and a cold drop of water falls on her head. Is there nowhere outside this closed-in place to hang laundry? She shivers, not just from the drip sliding across her scalp but from the thought of it— being trapped in this house with no garden to go to for a breath of fresh air.

   Elsie picks another apple from the bowl beside her. Her knife rasps as she cuts away the peel in a ragged ribbon, then the apple slips and it's out of her hands, bouncing from the edge of the sink to her hip to the floor, rolling towards the table. But Elsie's fast—she spins around and crouches, stretches out her arm, and she's snatched it up. There's something animal in her quickness, something familiar. Oh yes, Jane recognizes it—a girl brought up in an institution learns to be fast, to grab what she must, to hold it to her without giving herself away. Already Elsie's back at the sink peeling the apple, hair dangling into her thin face. The cook hasn't noticed a thing.

   The cook dips her hand into a pot. She sprinkles salt into the soup, then pulls open the oven and peers in. The roast hisses back at her. Even from where Jane stands she feels the lick of the heat. Already her back is uncomfortably sticky, and despite the fact that she has been sitting most of the day—in carts, in trains—she would do anything to pull out one of the chairs ranged around the table and let herself down onto it. Her stomach is roiling, and she has the strange sense of herself as being less substantial here than she ever was in Devon. How is it, then, that she feels her presence is a nuisance, when she's doing nothing more than standing at the side of a long wooden table loaded with plates and cutlery and trays?

   The kitchen is smaller than she'd expected from outside, and grimier. Soot clings to walls that must once have been white but now are grey and hung with cobwebs. The gas lamps shed a sallow light that catches in the laundry overhead and leaves the corners dark. In one corner she catches a flicker of movement—beetles, or something larger. She shivers. More than anything she'd like to take off her coat, to lie down and close her eyes to shut out this new place that she's sold herself to—because that, she thinks, is what it comes down to. She has sold herself for fourteen pounds a year to clean up other people's dirt. Ladies are ladies because they don't get their hands dirty—it didn't take her long to understand that. As for the likes of her, they're not to expect anything better, not being born to it.

   The door on the far side of the room opens and the stout man who opened the front door comes in. "Ah," he says. "I see you found your way to the right entrance." He shuts the door behind him in a manner both graceful and final. "But how long did it take you, my dear? I find you still in your coat." He glances at her, and at her hat, which she's holding.

   What a sight she must look, she thinks—her head uncovered, her hair untidy because she hasn't had time to put it straight, and who knows what soot motes on her face from the train and this filthy city.

   He comes towards the table, light on his feet as though about to dance. "My dear—" he starts. Then lifts one pale eyebrow. "Your name?"

   "Jane, sir. Jane Wilbred."

   "Wilbred? That's a familiar name. Now, why is it familiar?" He lets his eyes rest on her face as though he will find the answer there.

   "It's a common enough name in Devon, sir."

   "Ah. Indeed." He presses his lips together in a way that signals he is not convinced. "Well, Jane Wilbred, if you want my advice, you'll make yourself useful. You are here to work, not to—" he pauses "—not to stand about or be waited on. Maybe Mrs. Johnson needs a hand preparing dinner. Maybe the table needs to be laid for our evening meal." His voice is gentle but his eyes are not. They hold hers uncomfortably long.

   "Yes, sir; yes, of course. I'm sorry."

   For a moment she thinks Mrs. Johnson—for that must be the name of the cook—will explain that she told Jane not to take off her coat, that she should wait out of the way. But Mrs. Johnson busies herself with the soup. She doesn't even turn around.

   Jane has to tug at her coat to get it off her arms—it's tight, meant for a slightly smaller woman, though God knows, she's not exactly large herself. Indeed, it would be hard for anyone to have become large on the meager food that the orphanage provided all those years that she was growing into a young woman.

   Then she unwinds a woollen muffler from around her neck, and together with her coat lays it over her box at the end of the room. Now she feels naked, despite her print dress. It has a design of tight rosebuds and leaves. It's not one she would have picked. The fabric was her Christmas gift from Mrs. Saunders the year before, but what kind of gift was that, to be given fabric for a work dress, and to have to pay out of her wages to have it made up? She wouldn't have had the time to sew it herself, even if she'd known how, and though they'd been taught sewing at the orphanage it hadn't amounted to much. Hemming, darning, making aprons—skills to fit them for a life of serving others.

   Her aprons are packed in her box. Still, once she has smoothed her dress with her hands, she approaches the cook. "What needs to be done, Mrs. Johnson?" she says, and glances behind her at the table, at the piles of plates and the trays waiting to be laden.

   Mrs. Johnson is lifting a pot of potatoes from the stove. "Elsie," she snaps, and the girl steps to the side, wet hands lifted high. In the gaslight they look huge—red and glistening, bent at the joints like an old woman's, as though she has been peeling and scrubbing for so much of her young life that they have grown into the shapes best suited for holding knives and brushes, but not good for much else. Elsie closes her eyes as Mrs. Johnson tips the potatoes into a colander, then shakes it vigorously. Steam swells around them, gathering on the windows, which show nothing except the darkness outside.

   When Jane sees her slide the potatoes back into the pot she says, "I'll mash them for you. I can do that to help."

"No you won't. There's the table to see to."

   From over at the table the stout man calls out, "Mrs. Johnson is particular about her potatoes. You wouldn't want to be taking over her work, now would you? Not unless you have aspirations." He lingers over the last word in an unpleasant way.

   She makes herself look from him to the table, to make her tired thoughts come together. "How many will we be for supper, Mrs. Johnson?"

   Mrs. Johnson is working the masher through the potatoes, but she looks up. "Five. Only five, as you can see." She nods to the pile of plates and the cutlery heaped on top. But there's no room to set them out—the table's taken up with a chopping board and a long fish dressed with herbs waiting for the oven. The cook watches her, and gives a sigh that billows out with the steam from the potatoes. "The bread—cut the bread. Fetch the butter. And bring out the rest of the pie—Mr. Cartwright likes a bit of pie after his dinner." As though surely Jane should know all of this already, from where the bread is kept, to the butler's name, to his liking for pie after dinner.

   She cannot do this, she thinks, she cannot work in this place, with these people. Her cheek twitches and she presses her fingers against it. Think, she tells herself, think. Yet even as she looks around the kitchen for the bread box, the knife drawer, the pantry where the pie must be, she notices—dinner, not supper. This is a whole new world, one she doesn't know her way around. She wants to ask— where is the bread? The knife? But Mr. Cartwright has unfolded a newspaper, and Mrs. Johnson is cutting chunks of butter into the potatoes. As for Elsie, she has retreated to the scullery.

        
T
he clock above the stove is so grimed with soot and dust it has faded into the grey of the wall. Mrs. Johnson glances up at it, then tips the soup from the heavy pot into the tureen, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

   When the door to the area swings open she spins around, the pot pressed against her apron, her face flushed with effort. "Sarah," she hisses, "Mr. Cartwright has already sounded the gong for dinner. You're going to catch it if you're found out, and you know it."

   In the doorway stands a young woman with a delicate face, and a small hat pinned above blond curls. "Oh, Mrs. J.," she says in a singsong, "you
know
I always make it back in time."

   She gives a smile, but Mrs. Johnson isn't looking; she's shaking the last drops of soup into the tureen. So Sarah turns her smile on Jane. Tugging off one glove, she holds out a hand. "You must be our new housemaid," she says, giving Jane's fingers a squeeze. "I've been waiting for you to get here—it's been more than I could do to get everything done by myself this last couple of weeks." She looks past her to the corner of the room where Jane's coat and hat lie across her box. "Goodness, Mrs. J., haven't you even shown her up to her room yet?"