Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 7

  Annie knows this, knows how impatient the Lady can be when she is made to wait even a few moments for someone whom she feels should be attending to her that very instant. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I have no desire to keep the Lady waiting.”

  “Don’t know why she bothers,” Cook says, arching her back into the flat of her hand. “All she does is complain about it afterwards. Used to come down here and pace up and down and tell me how much she hated going over there.”

  “But she still goes,” says Annie.

  “Yes, she still goes,” agrees Cook. “I guess she’s not one to heed her own good advice.”

  Isabelle is off having supper with her neighbour, Mrs. Robert Hill. She has left instructions for Annie to walk over and fetch her at nine o’clock. This is her way of ensuring an exit if she is not enjoying herself.

  “Missus,” asks Annie, sipping her tea to try and prolong the comfort of it. “Who was here before me? Who was it that I replaced?”

  Cook is now rubbing her shoulders, her eyes closed. “What?” she says, wincing from a particularly painful spot at the back of her neck.

  “Who,” says Annie, leaning forward over the table, “was the old me?”

  “No one, really. We had day-girls mostly. Mrs. Dashell was meant to hire someone and then she didn’t, and then she was meant to again, and didn’t. This went on for about a year.” Cook opens her eyes and smiles at Annie. “And then there was you. And a good thing, too. It was wearing on me, explaining the house always to someone new and only there for a month or so.” Cook pours them both more tea. “Would you like to see something?” she says, on her feet before Annie has had a chance to reply. She goes over to the stove, takes a biscuit tin from a shelf, and brings it back to the table. “Scoot over here, love,” she says, patting the chair beside hers. Annie obediently changes sides of the table.

  Cook removes the lid from the biscuit tin. There, stacked up inside, are piles of small photo cards. Cartes de visite. She takes them carefully from the tin, arranging them on the table neatly in rows, the same amount of space between each one.

  “Look,” says Cook. “My sister had her likeness done.” She taps one of the small photo cards in front of her.

  Annie leans towards Cook, towards the photograph, sees a stern-looking woman in a dark morning dress and bonnet. She stands facing the camera, her arms stiffly pinned to her sides. Cartes, unlike most portrait photography, usually include the whole body of the subject and Cook’s sister takes up most of the frame. To the left of her, Annie can see what appears to be the arm of a chair.

  “They put her head in a clamp,” says Cook. “To keep it straight.”

  “She looks”—Annie fumbles for a word that isn’t a complete lie—“nervous.”

  “I’m saving up to get mine done,” says Cook. “But I don’t want to look like that. I’ve been trying to decide how it is I want to be looking. A book might be good, don’t you think?” She glances up at Annie. “If I was sitting in a chair holding a book, I’d look the part of an educated Lady. I can’t read, but no one would be knowing that from the likeness, would they?”

  Annie studies the photographs laid out so carefully on the table. To be who we think we are. To look to someone else how we feel to ourselves. How hard that is to align. Cook’s sister might never have her photograph taken again. For people who don’t know her she will only ever be this stiff woman, her body so rigid in the photograph that there is nothing to read into it, into her. There’s no crooked elbow to suggest a casual ease with life, no chin tilted upwards to show interest in the world. And yet, who has decided that is what those things mean? If eyes are looking skyward, couldn’t it just be that something has caught the model’s attention? A bird has flown into the room or a drop of water has filtered through the ceiling plaster.

  “I’ll show you something, dear,” says Cook conspiratorially. She plucks one of the cards from the table and holds it in front of Annie. “What do you see?”

  “The Queen.” It’s a photograph of Queen Victoria before she entered her continuous and continuing mourning period for her husband’s death. She’s seated on a royal-looking chair, her dress splayed out around her.

  “If you look through a magnifying glass,” says Cook, “you can see that she has a hair sticking out of her nose. Imagine that! The Queen with a hair hanging from her royal snout.”

  What Annie can’t believe is that Cook would have spent time looking at the carte with a magnifying glass. Is such intense scrutiny desirous because this is likely as close as she will ever get to the Queen?

  “Do you do that with everyone?” Annie looks over the boxers and actresses, circus performers, heads of state.

  “Of course,” says Cook. “There are all kinds of things to see if one looks closely. Even in this house.” She replaces Queen Victoria into her allotted space on the table. “I think it’s such a shame that Mrs. Dashell won’t do likenesses. Don’t you?”

  “Isn’t it that a photographer who takes a likeness makes the photograph for the model,” says Annie, “and that Mrs. Dashell takes her photographs for herself?” She’s not sure what Cook means—Even in this house. Have her secret visits to Eldon’s library been observed?

  “Well,” says Cook. “Aren’t you the smart one. It would be a lot easier for me if I could walk out to the garden for my likeness instead of taking a horse and fly into town.”

  Annie doesn’t respond to this, keeps looking at the photographs in front of them on the table. It is not the ones of the Queen that interest her, but the pictures of the ordinary working people, like Cook’s sister. The men, stiff in their Sunday clothes, eyes wide with apprehension as they stare into the camera that will hold this moment for them forever, will treat it for the first time ever as equal to the moment the Queen settled herself grudgingly down on her royal behind and said, “Well then, let’s get this over with.”

  The Hills live a few miles from the Dashells on the road to Tunbridge Wells. The night sky is a net of stars and the moon gapes open wide enough for Annie not to need a light as she sets off to fetch Isabelle. It is a bit disconcerting at first, walking along the road with everything so quiet and close, but she soon recovers her nerve and begins to enjoy the soft darkness brushing up against her like a cat.

  The Dashell house had been an old farmhouse and it still has obvious remnants from those days. The past is close enough to touch. There is the orchard and the several outbuildings, now used for the laundry and the garden, but formerly used for the housing of animals. There is the large farmhouse kitchen and the flat land around the house that would have been pasture. The house itself seems to fit so perfectly into the landscape that it appears to have grown there, as naturally as a tree.

  The Hill house is a different matter altogether. The Hills used to live in London, but with Robert’s increasing success and the demands of London society, they had decided to choose a quieter country life. They bought a smaller house in town and had a new house built for them in Sussex in the south. Robert wanted it constructed in the style of a town house. The huge brick structure looks as if it has just suddenly dropped out of the sky and landed there accidentally. It has a large circular driveway and massive columns on either side of the great slab of a front door.

  Annie stands at the bottom of the front steps. She is a maid and therefore is required to call at the kitchen door. But since she is there to collect the Lady, and the Lady has to enter and exit through the front door, should she be knocking there?

  The Hills have a manservant, a butler. He opens the door to Annie’s tentative knock. “Yes,” he says, looking her up and down and quickly determining her societal position in relation to himself, determining that he need not be deferent to her. “Why are you not calling at the kitchen door?”

  “I’ve come for Mrs. Dashell,” says Annie. The hall behind the butler is bright. Beyond that Annie can see the curving banister of a staircase, beside it a cavernous vestibule lit by a chandelier.

  “Wi
lfred?” There’s a woman’s voice from behind the butler. “Who is it?”

  “A maid, ma’am.”

  “A maid?” A small woman engulfed in an enormous blue crinoline dress peers out from behind Wilfred. The vastness of the dress makes the woman’s head look abnormally small, like a tiny flower swaying in a giant vase. “What is a maid doing at my front door at this time of night?”

  “I’ve come for Mrs. Dashell,” says Annie again.

  “Isabelle!” The crinoline woman’s voice echoes shrilly in the hall. “There’s a servant here who professes to know you.” She speaks of Annie in a tone that makes Annie feel as if she is a piece of soiled linen, held out at arm’s length, too distasteful to gaze upon.

  “Annie.” Isabelle pushes in front of Wilfred, holds out her hands, and pulls Annie into the hall. “She’s mine,” she says to Mrs. Hill. “Aren’t you?” she says to Annie.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Annie feels relief singing through her bones. “I am.”

  Mrs. Hill still hasn’t recovered from the sight of a maid at her front door. “But, Isabelle,” she says. “I would have sent you home in a carriage.”

  Why am I here? thinks Annie. It is true that Isabelle could have easily gone home by horse and driver. She looks into her mistress’s face and sees that Isabelle has blushed slighdy. What is it? Why does Mrs. Dashell not have a ready answer?

  “There’s a situation at home,” says Annie slowly, thinking it up as she goes along. “A delicate situation. I have come to collect Mrs. Dashell so that I might have the walk home with her to explain it properly.”

  There is gratitude in Isabelle’s face when she looks at Annie. Something else, too, that Annie can’t read. It only takes a moment for Isabelle to recover herself.

  “Then there is not a moment to lose,” she says. “We must be off. My shawl,” she says to Wilfred. “Goodbye, Letitia,” she says to Mrs. Hill. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  The butler helps Isabelle with her shawl. Mrs. Hill fusses around, saying her goodbyes with a false sincerity that Annie finds painful. Then the door is closed behind them and Annie and Isabelle stand alone at the top of the stone stairs.

  “Thank you,” says Isabelle, as they begin their descent. “You saved my lying soul. Although now Letitia will be round tomorrow, trying to find out what was so urgent.”

  It feels to Annie as if the night has opened its arms to embrace them as they walk from the house. She is glad for each tufted hillock of grass along the road, each broken ache of earth. The world is suddenly lit with sound. The sharp sparks of crickets, glow of owl song from the darkened trees.

  “Why did you send for me, ma’am?” she asks. The Lady might have redeemed her lying soul, but Annie still has her own to account for.

  “Ah.” Isabelle is quiet for a moment. It is dark enough out that Annie cannot see her face properly. “The truth is, Annie Phelan, I wanted you to walk me home. I didn’t want to be sent with Wilfred, or have Wilks come for me like a parcel. Is that terrible?”

  “No.” It seems to Annie that there is something wrong with it, but it also feels pleasant.

  In the moonlit darkness Annie Phelan looks enough like Ellen that Isabelle can almost convince herself that it’s true, that she and Ellen have met again, at night, secretly, in the woods behind her father’s house. Isabelle, the daughter of a Lord. Ellen, the daughter of her parents’ cook.

  They walk along in silence. In all the rush and excitement Annie has forgotten to fall back a few paces behind Isabelle, as is customary when a maid walks with a Lady. But Isabelle doesn’t appear to expect it and tonight Annie does not feel that she is a few paces behind Isabelle. It feels to her that she is exactly where she is, walking along this darkened road with Isabelle Dashell beside her.

  “It’s so boring,” says Isabelle. “All she does is show me all the new things she’s bought. Horrid dresses and objets d’art. As if I’m interested. As if I’m the same as her.”

  “You’re not the same as her,” says Annie.

  “Thank God.”

  “But why do you go, then?”

  Isabelle tilts her head back to look at the stars. How wonderful it would be to be able to photograph a night sky. The absolute contrast of light and dark makes both seem so lovely. Heavenly. That is the right word for that. Perhaps if she exposed the plate for as long as possible before the collodion dried. Would there be enough light from the moon to cast even the faintest ghost onto the glass? “Eldon’s in London,” she says. “And I find it lonely to dine by myself. I expect Letitia asked me to come for supper for that very same reason. Robert’s in London. She didn’t want to be alone.”

  Annie thinks how strange it is, loneliness in a house full of people. In the kitchen there are always people—the Dashell servants, neighbouring servants who are visiting Cook, tradesmen. And yet, upstairs, there are only the two of them. How different their sense of being alone must be.

  “I was born near here,” says Isabelle. She tries to make out familiar objects, trees, but it is all a blur of darkness. “As a child I knew my way over this countryside. All the paths. All the fields. I would stay out from morning till night. My parents despaired of me ever changing from a wild animal into a Lady. But I had to,” she says, a tinge bitterly. “My father was a Lord.” She thinks of the day when she was ten and her mother told her she must no longer associate with Ellen. No matter that they had grown up together, were inseparable. When Isabelle was ten her world was suddenly divided into upstairs and downstairs. Ellen had to remain in the kitchen, a scullery maid-in-training, daughter of the cook. Isabelle had to stay upstairs and learn how to become a Lady.

  She remembers how Ellen would always surprise her, suddenly appearing from behind a tree, always the first one to arrive at their secret meeting place. Often she had something for Isabelle, a gift she’d found on her journey through the woods. Bird feather. Lace of fern. The slow surprise of Ellen suddenly there. The slow surprise into a pure kind of happiness she’s sure she has never felt since.

  “If you hadn’t had to be a Lady,” says Annie, “what would you have done?” She likes imagining Isabelle as a wild child, hurtling through a forest with her hair matted with leaves and sticks, her arms and legs scratched and smudged with dirt. She can almost feel the slick rise of the path beneath her bare feet, dirt worn smooth as the leather on an old saddle.

  “Oh,” says Isabelle. “I wanted to be a great artist of course.”

  Isabelle, as the only child, was expected to uphold the position she’d been born to. She wasn’t supposed to marry a man with few prospects, but she had persisted in spite of her parents’ wrath. She certainly wasn’t supposed to have been an artist. It was fortunate really that her parents were dead, as they would have very little to say to her now if they were alive.

  “But you still could be a great artist,” says Annie. It is not as though Isabelle Dashell is old. She seems barely into her middle-thirties.

  “Yes.” Isabelle looks over at Annie’s face, beautiful even in the murky dark, especially beautiful in the murky dark. That dark hair and pale skin. So like Ellen. “I could be. But then I thought it was to be as a painter. I was wrong about that.”

  Annie thinks of how slow modelling for a painting would be, how each time the brush was lifted Isabelle would have to raise her eyes to check the pose. “What you do is better than painting,” she says.

  Isabelle takes Annie’s arm. “Art is like a light,” she says. She almost says, like Love. “Isn’t it? Always burning with the same brightness, no matter how long we’ve been gone from the room.”

  Isabelle’s arm is warm against Annie’s. Their linked arms are a bridge between them. Light, Isabelle is saying something about light. Annie thinks of her life in Portman Square. How quiet and contained it was. How she worked, and studied the Bible. Her only escape from the dourness of that world was to fall into the comfort of reading. Annie remembers the darkness of Portman Square, how Mrs. Gilbey liked to keep the curtains closed be
cause she said the light from outside hurt her eyes. “My world was always shrinking,” she says. As a child she had wanted to play on the street with the other children, but Mrs. Gilbey frightened her with stories of men who would hurt her, steal her away. Always, it seemed, there were things she wasn’t aware of, and when she became aware of them it stopped her impulse to participate in anything beyond the confines of the house, beyond the watchful eye of Mrs. Gilbey. It wasn’t that she was afraid, but she became cautious out of habit, and that caution shut windows and pulled the curtains tight across them.

  “That is the difference between your world and mine,” Annie says. “Yours can expand. Mine shrinks.” She is probably enjoying the most comfortable part of her life, right now. In a few years the work she does will start to show on her body. Her knees will swell and ache from scrubbing floors. Her hands will grow stiff. What is there to look forward to? The future is more of the same. No, the future is less, and the same.

  Isabelle doesn’t say anything, and Annie suddenly feels afraid that she has spoken too freely. “I didn’t mean to suggest…” she says.

  Isabelle cuts her off. “I spend so much time with people like Letitia Hill,” says Isabelle. “I forget that one can speak from the heart.” That’s how it will be for Ellen, she thinks. Wherever she is, her world is small and getting smaller. She will never be able to equal the freedom she had when she was ten. “What was your last mistress like?” she says. “That one in London.”

  “She didn’t trust anyone,” says Annie. She thinks of her one act of defiance in Mrs. Gilbey’s house. “She used to try and trap me to see if I was stealing from her.”

  “How?”

  “She would hide coins under the carpet, as though they’d accidentally spilled there. Taking them would not necessarily be stealing, as she did not supposedly know they were there, but it would be an act of dishonesty. It would be a reason for her not to trust in me.”

  “So you were supposed to go to her with the coins and say, ‘Look what I found. You must have lost these?’” says Isabelle. She is always amazed at the time some employers spend trying to trick their servants into behaving badly. Don’t they have anything better to do?