Slipper Read online

  Nor did the interiors disappoint. The servants’ quarters were vast. The kitchen ceiling was at least two stories high, she reckoned, and filled to the rafters with foodstuffs—braces of pheasants nicely decomposing, several hams drying, pigs’ bladders, a pair of freshly slaughtered geese, bunches of herbs, sacks of meal, turnips and onions, a rack of cheeses pungently ripening. Not one, but two fireplaces, each large enough to roast an ox, their spits turned by a team of dogs on a treadmill; and even a stove made of bricks along one wall. (Bessie had heard of this new-fangled contraption—it meant you could stir soups and sauces with scarce any risk of burning yourself—but she had never before today seen one firsthand.) There were also a staggering number of windows—Bessie counted at least six—each glazed with real glass.

  Even this magnificence, however, did not prepare her for the gala grandeur of the main house. She gaped at gilded panels on walls and ceilings depicting glorious scenes of a place she took to be heaven, since the elegant people in them were being fawned over by cherubs; dark portraits of grim men and women glowering into old-fashioned ruffled collars; sparkling chandeliers; gleaming floors that echoed impressively underfoot; the most ornately carved chairs lined up against the walls.

  “Do you like it, pet?” she whispered to her charge. “This is where you belong. This is how the fine sirs and madams live. Nothing but the finest for you, my lamb.”

  The interview with the lady who was the lamb’s grandmother was brief.

  “So this is the child,” she said distastefully. The child had chosen the moment to let out her most piercing wail.

  “Yes my lady, madam,” said Bessie. She kept her lips compressed in a tight circle, in an effort to sound elegant. “Our Lucinda is such a good girl usually, she just…”

  “Lucinda?”

  “So I’ve been calling her, milady, but…”

  “Lucinda will do.”

  Lady Hempstead indicated that she could not bear the noise any longer and flicked her illegitimate granddaughter out of the room with a flip of a bejeweled hand.

  It was sitting by the servants’ hall fire that Bessie heard the juicy details of the scandal. The infant’s mother was Olivia, Lord and Lady Hempstead’s fifth daughter. Lady Olivia had always been an obedient child and was perhaps less closely watched than her older sisters. Her innocence, however, had landed her in trouble when she’d made eyes at a debt-ridden baron who had allegedly had her in the bushes while her sisters were dancing the gavotte.

  “And it was five months before milady found out, when anyone could see she was with child. Although it isn’t as if some of us didn’t have our suspicions, what with her secretive ways and feeling so poorly…”

  Bessie nodded, and in doing so caught the eye of a footman who had a delicious crease running from the side of his mouth all the way up his cheek.

  “Well, as you can imagine, Milord declared she would never be allowed back in this house. Milady had a family friend arrange for a place…”

  “In Chiswick,” Bessie supplied.

  “No, that may be where she died, but that is not where she was sent. And all the trouble milady went through, too, to make the arrangements! She was to board with a person who takes in ladies in her condition, up at Aldringham, I think it was, wasn’t it, Nell? We heard she never arrived, but if you ask us, there was some as was relieved to be rid of her.”

  Bessie raised her eyebrows.

  “Well, you know, the shame of it, the good family name and all.”

  And so Bessie never did discover how Lady Olivia had wound up in the house in Chiswick, but she had other things on her mind just then, including the footman’s creased cheek. It occurred to her that she could not possibly leave her little Lucinda, her lamb, her pet, with these indifferent, although clearly very wealthy people. For Bessie, who had seen not one of her own offspring live this long, was beginning to feel she had a legitimate claim to the infant. After all, after having delivered the little sprite, hadn’t she been the one to christen her too? She, Bessie Goose, had chosen Lucinda’s name, and milady had approved it. And then, in the absence of a godmother, it was Bessie who had placed the silver spoon upon Lucy’s tongue for good luck—none other!

  Bessie decided she would go to Lucinda’s grandparents and offer her services as the child’s nurse. It was the right thing to do.

  Of course the crease in the footman’s cheek may have been another factor in her calculations.

  “Very well,” said Lady Hempstead, probing beneath her curved fingernails with an ivory implement. “That will do, I suppose.” Bessie’s application saved her the effort of having to find some other candidate. It really was better for her health if she did not trouble herself any further with that pitiful token of her youngest daughter’s shame.

  And so Bessie Goose and her pet-lamb became members of the Hempstead household. They were assigned a garret in the top of the west wing where the servants lived, and had nothing to do with the elegant folks living below for a good long while.

  3

  THE ART OF LOVE

  Once the question of her staying at Wriggin Hall was settled, Bessie set about winning over the household staff. With her midwifery background, Bessie had picked up a fair deal of expertise in simples, salves and other remedies, and was always ready to provide a medical opinion, whether called for or not. Her enthusiasm came as much from a need to mother everyone as from a desire to impress people with her knowledge. But here was the unfortunate thing: Bessie had yet to master the art of holding her audience’s attention. Not that what she had to say wasn’t interesting; it was her voice that let her down. It was not a voice to inspire confidence; it was a tentative, chirpy thing. Her sentences tended to end on an upward note, seeking approval, asserting a good-natured willingness to be contradicted or overruled. And so people usually became bored with her chatter, and, since they assumed she did not know what she was talking about, seldom heard her out.

  Winning over the footman, however, was an easier matter. Although she was at the end of her childbearing years, Bessie was blessed with certain attributes that still made a man look twice. For whereas some women in their prime are unappealingly pulpy, Bessie Goose was dimply, twinkly and eminently kissable. Weather and age had given her face the beauty marks that only the true connoisseur will appreciate, but none the less precious for that: a pleasant sunburst of lines at the outer edge of the eye, giving her a look of perpetual merriment. Under her pretty plump face, the neck and freckled shoulders spread out soft as a featherbed, and from there the eye traveled down to an ample, although not immodest, bosom, an uncomfortably cinched waist over full hips and rump, and brisk little feet peeping out beneath her petticoat.

  It had been some time since Bessie had buried her last husband, and the odd romp in the hay or the master’s library no longer satisfied her. Bessie longed for a companion with whom she could gossip and share her wages, a mate who would like to be pampered and cuddled on a more permanent basis.

  The footman with the creased cheek was, she lost no time in discovering, unattached. He had a wide-eyed, almost puzzled gaze, a nose flattened in boyhood games, and delectable little curls at the nape of his neck.

  At first Bessie worried that the attraction might not be mutual, and lost two nights’ sleep fretting over that possibility. But sitting herself down calmly and going over the facts one by one, she concluded her fears were groundless. For did he not turn up wherever she happened to be with greater frequency than could be mere coincidence? Were his cheerful efforts at making himself useful not met, by the others, with arched eyebrows and glances in her direction? Did he not studiously avoid looking at her, feigning an indifference that his bright-eyed interest in everything else, including the dogs and the cook’s doddering mother, left open to reasonable doubt? And what were his self-conscious swagger and sheepish grin whenever he did have to address her directly, if not the very earmarks of an infatuation?

  Turning these facts over in her mind, Bessie decided the fo
otman would not be able to resist her subtle encouragement.

  “Thomas,” she murmured, prying loose Lucinda from her breast, and neatly tucking everything back into her corselet, “Thomas, could you assist me with something?”

  Thomas, staring straight ahead, mumbled, “Ah—Mum…”

  “It’s the babe’s cot, I want to move it over by the window upstairs, you see the sun’s the best thing for an infant’s constitution, much better than the elixir, I’ve always told my ladies a dose of sun and a sip of mother’s milk is worth any bottle of Daffy’s…” She gazed up at him, helpless. “But I cannot manage it myself.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed up.

  “So I was wondering, Thomas, if you wouldn’t mind…”

  “When—now?”

  “Are you needed elsewheres?” Lord and Lady Hempstead had left the previous day for Newmarket, and the household was taking it easy.

  “No, I suppose…”

  She swayed up the stairs ahead of him. Thomas practiced looking nonchalant, aware of the eyes following the two of them out of the hall.

  They worked up quite a sweat pushing the furniture about. For to make room for the cot by the window, the chest had to be moved next to the bed, and the bed had to be angled into a corner. Finally Bessie flopped onto the pallet, as if to try it out, fanning herself. Thomas looked enquiringly at the door. Bessie sighed heavily.

  Thomas suddenly noticed a splinter in his thumb. He examined it intently.

  “Thomas…”

  “Mum?”

  “No—Never mind.”

  Thomas looked up from his thumb and saw that her eyes were cast down and her shoulders hunched.

  “Is there…?”

  “No, nothing. Please, please…Just go away. Really.”

  She turned her face to the wall.

  It now dawned on Thomas that this performance might very well have something to do with him.

  “You want me to go?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, just go. Go, I said!”

  She had snapped at him! It was so unjust and so unexpected that Thomas now found himself at a loss. He clenched his teeth, dug his nails into his palms and stepped back toward the door, eyes on the ground. But as he lifted the latch, he could not resist one last glance at the bed.

  What he saw was that she was holding herself very still, as if listening for his next move.

  Experimentally, he took a step forward again. “But…” he began.

  She spun around to face him. Her grey eyes locked defiantly with his.

  He swallowed. But he stood his ground like a man. It was she who had to look away first, her chin trembling—with confusion or excitement, it was hard to tell which.

  Thomas approached her with new resolve.

  He reached down and touched her waist, clumsily slipped his arm around her back and pulled her up to him.

  “No, Thomas,” she whimpered, struggling deliciously against him. “No, you mustn’t…”

  And there we will leave the couple for now, the ardent seducer and his willing prey, and the infant quietly asleep under the window.

  4

  THE UGLY STEPPYS SISTER

  Whereas Lady Hempstead was an established member of the aristocracy, a granddaughter of the Marquess of Stornton, her husband’s credentials were of more recent vintage. He had been born Willie Stepps the sail-maker’s son: humble origins he was glad to put behind him. Willie’s grandfather had amassed a fortune before the boy was born by landing a monopoly on the manufacture of sails for the Royal Fleet during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The judicious application of that fortune, and some adroit maneuverings during the Civil War period, had enabled his heirs to add a “y” to the family name and to switch their allegiance from Whig to Tory just in time to qualify for a title when a grateful King Charles was restored to the throne.

  Suffice it to say that the Steppyses had long since ceased to trouble themselves with canvas or hemp. They had moved from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to an area southwest of London, allied themselves with the nobility by means of generous marriage contracts, and taken on the monotone accent and distinctive pursuits of England’s upper classes.

  The Earl of Hempstead’s pursuit was politics: he could often be found meddling in internal affairs at Westminster when his social or hunting engagements allowed. Let it be noted for the record that he was at this time suffering from a touch of the pox. Happily, he had acquired that disease some years after Lady Hempstead’s bedroom door had been shut to him—happily, that is, for that good lady, who knew nothing of such sordid matters as venereal diseases. No one had ever considered clouding the countess’s perfumed universe with the stench of the gutter, and she lived in Elysian ignorance. For her own life’s calling, she had focused largely on dress and outward appearance, and had seen to it that fourteen confinements, or accouchements, as she called them (only half a dozen offspring, all but one female, survived childhood), had not significantly spoiled her looks. She did not take much interest in her children, except in tracking down good matches for her daughters. It must be said, however, that she was extremely fond of her spaniels.

  Three of the daughters had made very satisfactory marriages indeed and were suitably installed in mansions of their own, with the requisite number of servants and bedchambers. The spirit of sibling rivalry, however, was not left behind: the sisters were in the habit of scrutinizing each other’s porcelain, plate and tapestries as shrewdly as a milliner examining a knot of ribbons.

  The last Steppys sister—if, that is, you discount the disgraced and deceased Olivia, whose name was now taboo—was not married, and her mother despaired of ever pairing her, whether suitably or not. Her face was, if you wanted to be kind, homely, or, if you wanted to be blunt—“A kitchen-maid’s face, by Jove!” according to her insensitive father, “and a figure to match!” And it must be admitted that Lady Arabella’s eyebrows did grow in dark tufts over the bridge of her nose, and that there was a patch of scaly skin around her mouth that no amount of powder could conceal. Her wrists were crawling with black hairs, and it was distressingly clear that her waist was not made for corsets. But most off-putting of all to even the most hardened dowry-hunter was the squint—the legacy of a childhood infection that had left her with a milky left eye.

  It would be nice to be able to report that the disfigured maiden had a heart of gold and that a compassionate prince was eventually found for her, but alas, even her personality contained no redeeming feature. Her wit was loaded with tactlessness, her sense of humor was distressingly underdeveloped, and, having been cheated of affection at too early an age, she had perfected an annoying whine and snide temper that made all who knew her avoid her like the pox.

  Now it eventually occurred to Lady Hempstead that her unmarriageable daughter could be turned into an asset if she were given the responsibility of running the household—a task necessitated by the death of Barking, the last housekeeper.

  Arabella took on the job with touching enthusiasm. Delighted with the opportunity of venting her spleen on hapless inferiors, she made pernicious lists of finicky tasks for the cleaning staff, snooped in pantry cupboards to catch culinary misdemeanors, and set impossible standards for all who fell under her exacting command. She became the scourge of Wriggin Hall, and her high-pitched outrage rang from garret to cellar. Where none of her class had bothered to tread before, Lady Arabella now roamed obsessively, leaving nowhere for a loyal retainer to find respite from her eagle eye or vicious tongue.

  Arabella’s promotion did not happen until the fifth year of Bessie’s employment at Wriggin Hall, long after Lucinda had become the entire household staff’s pet. For Lucy, life was one long round of treats and surprises. All she had to do was to act winsome, and to reward the adults from time to time with her coveted dimpled smile.

  Meanwhile Bessie and Thomas had set up house within the larger house. Thomas had been more than happy to give up his pallet in the stables, and had moved into Bessie’s room without delay. She pr
epared special little meals for him at times when the kitchen was not busy, and made an art out of concocting salves and tonics for him that would “make him feel better”.

  Thomas felt so much better most of the time, and the effect of his wellbeing was so noticeable in the glowing contentment of his companion, that Bessie soon found a market for her potions among the household staff. Who, it must be said, became slightly more respectful of Bessie’s arts, although they still quickly changed the subject whenever someone accidentally set her off on one of her perorations.

  Lady Arabella, in her new role, examined the wages ledger for Wriggin Hall.

  “What is this Elizabeth Goose person, nursemaid, who is costing us ten shillings every quarter?” she asked her mother.

  “I have no idea, my dear,” replied her mother vaguely, “I thought you were taking care of these things now, Arabella. Do not trouble me with such matters.”

  Arabella took her quest to Tucker, the steward.

  “Bessie has been taking care of our Lucinda,” said Tucker, surprised at Lady Arabella’s ignorance.

  “And who, may I ask, is our Lucinda?” said Arabella spitefully.

  “Uh, if I may, ma’am, she is…is…your niece. The child. The Lady Olivia’s baby,” he explained, embarrassed.

  “Olivia’s baby! Aha!” exclaimed Arabella, who had until this moment not realized that her sister’s peccadillo had had any consequence other than banishment from the parental home and a sorry death.

  Arabella stomped down to the kitchen and after grilling the head cook, sent for Bessie.

  “Now, I have reviewed your service here,” she said peevishly, “and it appears that your only function has been to look after—the child. Is that so?”