“His work?”
“Ais, ’im’s a great squire, owns a mine an’ land an’ sheep an’ what-not. Mrs. ’Owe d’ say such a thing about ’im bein’ particular t’ make up for losin’ so many girls. She can’t keep ‘em, is what.”
“Why do you stay, Lowdy?”
“Pick me liver, where would I go?”
“Don’t you have family?”
“Naw. Hired on ’ere at me first fair, right out o’ orph’nage.”
They were both quiet for a time. Lily thought Lowdy had fallen asleep, and spoke softly in case she had. “Is the master ever a violent man?”
“Master? Nay. Nay, ’im’s just grim-like. Scarcely ever speaks, not t’ us, not t’ anyone. His wife runned off an’ left ’im, I heard. She’m dead now.”
“When, Lowdy? How long ago?”
“Don’t know. Afore me. He d’ have a brother, the young master, but ’e lives somewheres else. In Devon wi’ their mother, I b’lieve. Only comes ’ere when there’s smugglin’ afoot—an’ they d’ say ’e’s comin’ tomorrow. He’m a free-trader an’ d’ captain ’is own ship.”
This Lily definitely did not believe. As she lay pondering her next question, Lowdy began to snore.
She closed her own eyes and shifted on the hard, uncomfortable mattress. At least there weren’t any bugs. The casement window must face the sea, for in the new quiet she could hear its secretive whispering. She tried to put her thoughts in order, but memories butted and shuffled against each other and it was impossible. In her mind’s eye she saw her cousin sipping canary wine beside the fire, his great heavy legs braced against the fender. She saw the faces of the children she’d fled past in the alley. She saw Trayer Howe’s crude and patient staring. His mother’s black, spiteful eyes, and the two white streaks blazing in her dark hair.
Then Devon Darkwell’s bitter, hard-edged face filled her mind. The odd gentleness that had suffused it when he’d asked, “What are you doing in my house, Lily?” Later, he’d called her the bleeding maid. Would he remember her if they met again? If she went away from this place tomorrow, she knew she would never forget him.
Three
AT FOUR-THIRTY THE next morning, half-awake and nearly numb with exhaustion, Lily splashed cold water on her face and fumbled into her clothes in the chilly pitch dark. She found the uncarpeted back stairs by almost falling down them, and negotiated the three narrow flights to the basement by holding onto the wall. Dorcas was already busy in the lamp-lit kitchen. She told Lily to lay the fire in the kitchen hearth—in tones that suggested she’d never told anyone to do anything in her young life—and then two more upstairs because it was cold this morning, in the dining room and the master’s library. Lily swept the kitchen hearth clean, fetched coal in the scuttle, and set to work.
“Don’t ee want t’ clean the basket first off?” Dorcas said timidly, coming up behind her. “Ee did ought to, miss, for Mrs. ’Owe d’ say we must, for every fire, each morning.”
“Oh yes, I—I forgot.” Lily sat back on her heels and contemplated the sooty, fire-blackened grate. She and her father had been through lean times, but they’d never been so poor that they hadn’t kept at least one servant. Thus she could make and light a fire easily enough, but she had never cleaned a grate. “How, um … Dorcas, how do I…”
“Don’t ee know how?” Her listless eyes widened in amazement.
“I was parlormaid in my last post, you see, so I didn’t have to.” A ridiculous excuse, but all she could think of on short notice.
Dorcas’s face reflected awe and disbelief in equal measure. Nevertheless, she showed Lily how to brush, black-lead, and polish the grate and the fire tools, and burnish the steel parts with emery paper. It was a filthy, tedious job, time-consuming and physically taxing, and as she went from one fireplace to the next and then the next, the reason for doing it became more and more elusive. What was the point? she wanted to know by the time she reached the third. You got it perfect, you lit a fire, and you ruined it. Why not do it every other day—even once a week?
There was, of course, no one to whom she could put that futile question. But it would occur to her again in other contexts as the morning wore on. Why was it necessary to scrub the stone floor in the scullery every day before breakfast? What was the point of whitening the area steps each morning? Did all the brass door fixtures really need a daily polishing?
By seven-thirty she was shaking with hunger, and as weary as if she’d done a full day’s work. But breakfast in the servants’ hall was only a hasty meal of cheese and dough cakes left over from last night’s supper, washed down with a mug of beer. Every bite was delicious; she savored each one as if it might be her last. Mrs. Howe sat at the head of the long wooden table—over which a painted sign on the wall proclaimed, “Cleanliness Comes Next to Godliness”—and her stern presence set the tone for what little, almost furtive conversation there was. Stringer, the butler, presided at the foot, silent and uninvolved. Between them were the other household servants—cook, master’s valet, parlormaid, housemaids, kitchen and scullery maids, a groom and two stable lads, coachman, three footmen, dairy and laundry maids—all arranged in some subtle hierarchical order too obscure for Lily to comprehend.
She understood that she was at the nether end of it, though. The advantage of this was that hardly anyone spoke to her, so her Irish brogue could languish all but unheard a little longer. The only one who paid any attention to her was the groom, a roguish-looking fellow with bright orange hair. His name was Galen MacLeaf, and according to him there wasn’t a man in Cornwall who had a more cunning hand with horseflesh. Or, his blue eyes seemed to twinkle, with the ladies. Lily found his flirting outrageous and inoffensive. He was small and wiry, with beautiful hands and a cast in one eye—a defect that didn’t diminish his attractiveness, even enhanced it somehow. He was a charmer. Listening to his exaggerated boasts, she had almost begun to enjoy herself when she happened to glance across the table at Lowdy. Gone was her new roommate’s sweet, friendly expression, replaced by anger and unmistakable jealousy. After that, Lily kept her eyes on her plate and her mouth shut.
More chores in the kitchen occupied the rest of the morning. She received shy orders from Dorcas and less shy ones from the cook, Mrs. Belt, an arrow-faced, white-haired woman. Close to noon, Mrs. Howe found Lily toiling in the scullery and informed her, with a brittle anger out of proportion to the offense, that she hadn’t cleaned the grate in the library properly and must do it again. Weak and weary, she returned with her heavy firebox and set to work.
Lowdy found her there a quarter of an hour later. “Lord, look at ee, your face’m darkerer’n Lady Alice’s blackamoor footman. ‘Ere, take this.”
Lily took the wadded-up handkerchief Lowdy held out and dragged it across her cheeks, dismayed at the quantity of greasy black ash that came away. “Who’s Lady Alice?” she muttered, wiping her arms, which were black to the elbow.
“Master’s lady friend, comes t’ visit wi’ his mother onct in a while. ‘Ere, take this too.”
“Oh, Lowdy.” It was a cap, gray from washing, strings bedraggled. “I’ll pay you back when I can, I promise I will.”
“Phaw. Come on downstairs now, afore master gets back.” A housemaid’s duties above-stairs, Lily had learned, had to be finished before dinner, so that no one “above” would have to set eyes on anything as disagreeable as a humble cleaning servant after one o’clock in the afternoon. “ ’Owe d’ say you’re t’ scrub the area steps again, didn’t do it right first time, an’ then come back in ’ere an’ finish.” She watched Lily put the cap on and tuck her dark red hair under it. “Ee d’ have pretty hair,” she said wistfully, fingering her own short, dark locks.
Lily remembered how Galen MacLeaf had flirted with her this morning at breakfast. “That’s what my young man’s always after tellin’ me,” she said impulsively—and suddenly remembering she was supposed to be Irish.
“ ’Ave ee got un, an?”
“Aye, we??
?re betrothed.”
Lowdy’s big, chip-toothed smile lit up her face. “Well, now,” she said, guiding Lily out of the room with a soft hand. “Well, now, edn that grand?”
Dinner was another dour, silent meal, and afterward Lily wasn’t sure she had the strength to get up. It had become impossible to think of what was happening to her even remotely as an adventure. She was plagued and haunted by the idea of lying down somewhere, anywhere, and closing her eyes just for a few minutes. Every muscle pleaded for a rest; the skin on her palms was raw, her fingernails blackened and torn. Food no longer had the power to restore her, so profound was her fatigue. But there were still steps to be whitened, and after that birds to be plucked, peas to be shelled, pots to be scrubbed, and a hundred miscellaneous chores to be done for any servant who was superior to her—which was all of them. The single bright moment in the awful, exhausting day came when it was finally over and she was allowed to have a bath, in the last big tub of hot wash water in the laundry house. She made the most of it, washing her hair and taking as long as she possibly could, knowing it would be her only all-over wash for the week.
When supper finally came—a bowl of watery soup and a pilchard on a chunk of bread—she’d lost her appetite and had to force the salty fish down. Even then, bedtime had to wait. The servants gathered in the hall for an hour every evening, to talk and do mending or other personal tasks. Lowdy told her in a whisper that she couldn’t go up yet even if all her chores were done, for Mrs. Howe had to lead them first in evening prayers, and those didn’t begin until nine o’clock. Lily fell asleep waiting, slumped in a hard chair at the table, her chin on her chest.
“Rose is sick,” Mrs. Belt said one morning a week later, pointing at two covered trays on the kitchen table. “Take these up to the master an’ the young master, then come right back an’ help me with this sourbread.”
“You mean—to their rooms?”
“No, to your room. Then call ’em an’ make ’em come up there an’ eat it.”
She flushed. The cook was famous for her sarcasm, and Lily was frequently the butt of it. She picked up the trays and hurried out.
As she climbed the two flights of stairs to the second floor—gentry stairs; she’d never been allowed on them before—she felt a flutter of trepidation, and scolded herself for it. She had not seen the master since the night of her arrival. But he would not be drunk and raving at half past eight in the morning—so how foolish, how absurd, how silly of her to be nervous. That was what she told herself all the way down the hall to the door of the room she’d been told belonged to the younger Mr. Darkwell. Putting one tray down on a table beside the door, she rapped out a timid knock.
“Yes!”
“Breakfast, sir.” Sar, I should have said, she worried as she straightened her cap.
“Yes, bring it!”
Was she just supposed to walk in, then? He’d sounded impatient. She opened the door and went in.
And stopped dead. Mouth open, eyes wide. Shocked, but unable to look away from the riveting sight of the young master’s bare backside. He glanced at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror, in front of which he was standing and shaving his chin. “On the bed is fine,” he tossed over his naked shoulder.
It took half a minute for the words to penetrate. They did so at the same moment he turned completely around to face her, perplexed by her hesitation. Some sound escaped her involuntarily. Certainly not a scream, and not really a squeal either, she would later assure herself repeatedly, merely a—sound. Then she did the only thing she could think of, which was to set the tray down on the nearest flat surface—the bed, fortunately—pivoted in the opposite direction from nude Mr. Darkwell, and scampered out. Just before the door closed, she heard him start to guffaw.
She stood in the silent hall looking straight ahead, face flaming, reliving it all. The irony wasn’t lost on her that for almost a week she’d been hoping to catch a glimpse of the young master, without success—and now that she’d gotten more than a glimpse, she had no idea what his face looked like. She tried hard to find what had just occurred as amusing as he did, a laugh on herself if nothing else. Or an educational experience, for she’d never seen a naked man before. But it wasn’t possible to feel anything except nervousness and anxiety, because the joke or the lesson wasn’t over yet. She had one more tray to deliver. What if, at this very moment, the master was at exactly the same stage in his morning toilette as his brother? Why this would be even more unnerving, she wasn’t sure. It just would.
On the way back down the hall to the other side of the staircase, she succeeded in pulling herself together. She was behaving like a child. Still, it took courage to bring back a shy fist and knock on the door. No answer. Another knock, hardly audible even to her. She shook herself impatiently and gave a good rap.
“Come in!”
She jumped, rattling cups and spoons. With eyes closed, she pushed the door open and stood still.
“Well?”
She opened one eye and hazarded a quick survey of the room. And went weak in the knees with relief, for the master was sitting at his desk, fully dressed in somber black, and glaring at her from behind a pair of steel spectacles.
“Oh, good mornin’, sar,” she gushed, flashing what she hoped was a friendly smile. He didn’t answer. His room, she saw with a corner of her attention, was sparsely furnished and absolutely devoid of clutter. She set the tray down on the bed, its rumpled sheets the only untidy element in the neat whole—which must be why the sight of it unsettled her so much—and turned to go.
“Not there, here.” He pointed at the top of his desk, above the papers he was scribbling on. He looked very formal, she though, sitting in his own bedroom in coat and waistcoat and white ruffled shirt, back straight and shoulders rigid.
“Oh, o’ course, sar.” She curtsied rather awkwardly, picked up the tray again, and brought it to him. When she set it down with a bit of a clatter, his scowl deepened. Thinking to redeem herself, she reached for the teapot, to pour his first cup out for him. His arm went out at the same moment and their hands collided. The teapot overturned for an instant before he righted it.
“Bloody hell!” He whipped off his glasses, stood up, and kept on swearing, flicking his scalded fingers in the air to cool them.
His straight brown hair was neat today, Lily though distractedly, and tied back in a queue. He had a proud face, the bones fine and jutting. An expressive face, she saw, but closed now, and cautious, lips tight, blue-green eyes cloaked. But the bitterness of his expression came from two deep vertical lines slashing down from his cheekbones to the corners of his lips. Although his tall, broad-shouldered body looked tough and ruthless, she noticed that he moved with a careful, silent litheness that hinted at enormous self-control—as if he must keep some unpredictable emotion in check.
She bit her lips in dismay. “Oh, sar, I’m that sorry! It’s a great clumsy beast I am, not warth shootin’ for me hide. Is the pain terrible?”
Devon recognized her then. He even remembered her name. He saw the same kindness in her serious gray-green eyes that he’d noticed that night, and felt the same pull to her. And then the identical angry retreat. “You’re Irish,” he said stiffly.
She searched his face for incredulity, but saw only a frown. “Aye, I am.” The words were hard to say; she was conscious of a sharp reluctance to use her inexpert brogue on this man. Why? Because he was shrewd, and he would see through it quickly—but it wasn’t only that. What, then? She didn’t want to lie to him, she realized with a shock.
“Are you afraid of me?”
“No.” And that was the surprising truth.
Her answer dissatisfied him; he wasn’t interested in the trust of this girl, this housemaid. But he said, “Good,” with his bitter smile. “Gunshots are a rarity here, and I’m quite harmless.”
“O’ course, sar,” she murmured.
He thought he heard skepticism, and raised one dark brow. Her dress was shabby, he noted, her shoes o
ld and broken, her maid’s cap disreputable. For all that, she didn’t much resemble a servant. Something about her face. Her skin, perhaps? Too smooth and white, too … healthy. Or her eyes, clear gray-green and fine, with a look in them that hinted there was more going on in her head than serving him breakfast.
He swung away from her abruptly. “Well? Haven’t you anything to do?”
“I do, yes—”
“Then go about your business.” The irritation in his tone startled even him.
Lily drew in her breath. She gazed at him for another second, then crossed to the door and closed it softly behind her.
Devon sat down at his desk and took a sip of tepid tea. A dozen thoughts curled and turned in his mind, like restless fish caught in a drift net. One kept surfacing again and again, no doubt because among them it was his only remote certainty: The girl called Lily was anything but a maid.
Four
CLAYTON DARKWELL JERKED ON the bell rope a second time, and almost immediately a breathless parlormaid trotted into the library. “Coffee!” ordered the young master. “Right away, and in a very large pot.” The girl bobbed a curtsey and scurried back out the door. “Well? What are you looking at?”
Devon watched his brother collapse on the sofa and cover his eyes with one hand. “When you don’t come home until dawn,” he said dryly, “it’s always a relief to know you’ve not been up to anything more foolish than getting blind drunk.” What hypocrisy, he drought with an unamused half-smile. A week ago he himself had gotten worse than blind drunk, coldly and deliberately. The fifth anniversary of his wife’s death had seemed as good a time as any to pull out a pistol and start shooting up his house.
Clay pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. “I swear it was the rum at John Poltrane’s. And he’d even paid duty on the swill. But I beat him out of twenty guineas at loo, so there’s some justice.” Devon didn’t return his pained but cocky grin. “Well, I don’t see what you’ve got to be self-righteous about. I saw your light on when I stumbled in, after all. The only difference between us is that I drink with my friends and you drink alone.”