The Favoured Child (46 page)

‘Where first?’ James asked as he helped me into my seat and
his groom swung up behind us. ? good lodging-house, or Mrs Williams’s hat-and-glove shop?’

‘Lodgings first,’ I said. ‘I’d like it to be somewhere near here, so it is not too strange for them.’

‘We passed a little inn on this road,’ James said. ‘It looked all right, and it should only be for a few nights.’

He turned the phaeton in a sharp curve and drove us back to it.

‘Will you hold the reins while I ask if they have rooms?’ he said, and he passed the reins to me and went inside.

The sun came out, and it was warm on the box of the phaeton. I looked down at my gloved hands. They were trembling. I was trembling with anger. I was angry at the poverty of that miserable room and at the knowledge that there were rooms like that in every house down that filthy lane, and many and many filthy lanes in this pretty city. I was angry that every exquisite shawl, every embroidered glove had been made by young girls losing their eyesight bent over their work in dirty rooms.

James came out smiling. ‘That’s done,’ he said; but then he paused at the black expression on my face. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘You look like a thundercloud.’

‘It’s the children,’ I said. ‘Acre’s children. I am so angry at how they have been treated that I can scarcely speak.’

James nodded. ‘If you had not recognized Jimmy Dart, he would have been a linkboy all his life, unless someone bigger than him fought him for his torch. And that poor little foursome would have been there for ever.’ He paused. ‘Just as well for them that you have the sight,’ he said, and clicked to the horses and we moved off.

Mrs Williams’s shop was in Milsom Street. James pulled up outside the elegant facade with the white and gold swinging sign and waited for me to dismount from the carriage.

‘You’re coming in to speak to her?’ I asked.

‘I thought you would do it,’ he said. I could see some private smile behind his eyes, but his face was serious.

I remembered Airs Williams from when Mama and I had
been in her shop. She was an imposing woman, tall, with iron-grey hair and a sharp hard face. When we had decided not to buy her gloves, she had raised one eyebrow as if at some private derogatory thought, and gestured to the serving lady to pack the boxes away. There was always a lady customer or two in the shop taking tea or coffee; there was always a lady in the fitting rooms with a couple of sempstresses taking measurements. And there was a light muslin curtain across the doorway to the workshop at the back where the girls would stop talking and listen when a customer came in.

My heart sank. ‘Please do it, James,’ I said. ‘I’ll come in with you, but I cannot speak to her. I could not stand it if she made a scene.’

‘All right,’ he said equably and nodded to his groom to go to the horses’ heads.

The silver bell over the door tinkled as we went in, and one of the serving ladies came forward with a shallow smile which widened when she recognized James.

‘Mr Fortescue!’ she exclaimed. ‘How delightful! And Miss…Miss Lacey! I shall call Mrs Williams; she would want to serve you herself.’ She twitched back the muslin curtain to the workshop and called sharply to one of the girls. ‘Clarinda! Fetch Mrs Williams, please. Tell her that Mr Fortescue and Miss Lacey are here.’

She left the curtain open and I knew the sewing girls were all staring at me. I had on my oldest pelisse over my plainest gown, for I had not wanted to look too fine visiting Jimmy. Now I flushed scarlet at looking so shabby in this opulent blue-carpeted shop. I knew without glancing down that the hem of my gown was wet and muddy, and I feared very much that the smell of the dirty lane behind the Fish Quay was hanging about me.

A lady I did not know was sitting in the corner of the shop on one of the gilt and white chairs with her daughter. She raised her lorgnette and inspected me, from the top of my plainest bonnet down to my filthy boots, and then she leaned towards her daughter and whispered something behind her gloved hand, and they both laughed.

Mrs Williams came in through a side door, wreathed in smiles. ‘Mr Fortescue! What a pleasure. How is Mrs Fortescue? And your sisters? Please give them my compliments.’

James bowed.

‘And Miss Lacey!’ she said, glancing at me and managing to take in the muddy footprints I had left on the thick blue carpet. ‘How nice to see you again. What can I do for you today?’

I hesitated and glanced towards James. His eyes were on me. I felt a sense of utter relief that it would be his voice which would carry to the girls sewing in the back room, and his words which would be carried to every drawing-room in Bath by the elegant lady who had laughed at my muddy petticoat. AU I had to do was to stand a little behind him and nod my assent as he returned the gloves.

‘Miss Lacey has some business with you,’ he said politely. He turned to me and put his hand in the small of my back and gave me a hard little shove forward. Then he stepped back and left me facing Mrs Williams, who raised her eyebrows as the smile slowly left her face.

The serving lady returned to the little desk which served as a counter, and another came from the fitting rooms with the elegant lady’s other daughter, looking very fine in a walking dress. The seated lady raised a hand to her daughter to warn her to be silent. The whole shop waited to hear what my business might be.

‘I have come to return these,’ I said baldly in a small voice, and I thrust the package of half-finished work towards her.

Mrs Williams gave a puzzled frown and handed it to her assistant; the task of unwrapping it was clearly too menial for her.

The woman opened the parcel and held up a glove for her to see. Mrs Williams looked at me, her face blank, and waited for an explanation.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘but the girl who was doing the sewing is ill and should not work any more. I have brought the gloves back.’

‘How very kind,’ said Mrs Williams, icy.

‘She comes from the village on my estate,’ I said, my voice trembling a little. I could feel that the girls in the workroom had laid down their work and gathered in the doorway to stare at me with unfriendly bright eyes. ‘I am making arrangements for her to go home to the country. She will not be able to work for you again.’

Mrs Williams inclined her head. ‘Unfortunately, she is in debt to these premises,’ she said, as smooth as silk. ‘Unfortunately, I had trusted her with some valuable work which I had to return to be redone. I insist on the highest of standards because my customers are of the highest of the Quality. Unfortunately, I cannot release her from her contract with me until she has repaid her debt.’

‘How much?’ I said.

Mrs Williams sighed as if I were causing a great deal of trouble, and the young lady in the walking dress giggled aloud. Her mama glanced at her and put up a hand to hide her own smile.

‘Mrs Foster?’ Mrs Williams asked languidly.

The serving lady reached into a great drawer in the desk and drew out a ledger. With deliberate slowness she turned over one page and then another. ‘The name of the young person?’ she asked me.

‘Rosie Dench,’ I said.

Mrs Williams looked at the seated lady and her two daughters. ‘My dear Lady Querry, I do apologize for this. I generally see applicants for work at the tradesmen’s entrance, and by appointment only. Miss Lacey has chosen to come in at the customers’ door, during shop hours. I would hate to delay you for this rather complicated inquiry. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘We should like to see some shawls,’ said Lady Querry. Mrs Williams nodded to the other serving lady and she brought out a box of fine embroidered shawls. I knew that Lady Querry and her daughters were merely delaying their departure to see my discomfort. I looked around for James. He had taken a seat by the door and was waiting for me, arms folded. He looked as if he
had nothing to do with me at all. I shot him a look which was a clear plea for him to help me, but he just smiled politely at me as if we had agreed that he would simply drive me to the shop for my own private business.

‘Dench owes sixty-four shillings,’ Mrs Foster said languidly. ‘And if she is returning these gloves as spoiled, that will be, I suppose, eight pounds and four shillings.’

‘Spoiled!’ I exclaimed. ‘They are beautifully sewn, and all but finished!’

‘Unfinished work is called “spoiled”,’ Mrs Foster said, not raising her eyes from the ledger. ‘It is very hard, Miss Lacey, to persuade flighty young girls to complete work they have undertaken. We have to have a system of fines to encourage them in habits of self-discipline and responsibility. I hope you are certain that you are doing the right thing in encouraging Dench to throw up her work in this way.’

I gasped, and looked around for James. He was watching his horses out of the window. Lady Querry’s daughters were smothering their giggles, bending low over the box of shawls.

‘I hardly think this is the time or the place,’ Mrs Williams said grandly. ‘Tone matters so much to me. I really cannot be dunned in my own premises, Miss Lacey! Forgive me, but may I ask you to send Dench around to the tradesmen’s entrance with the money for her debt, or with the finished gloves? She is late with them already.’

There was a ripple of laughter from the sewing girls in the back room.

‘Was there anything you wished to purchase, Miss Lacey?’ Mrs Williams asked smoothly.

When I said nothing, for I was speechless with rage and frozen with shame at the way I was being treated, she nodded at Mrs Foster, who shut the ledger and glided past me with her nose in the air and opened the door for me to leave.

I could feel my face burning. Lady Querry and her two daughters had abandoned all pretence of looking at shawls and were openly staring at me. James had risen to his feet, ready to leave
with me without saying a word. I took two steps, and then I spun around on my heel.

‘No!’ I said fiercely, and as I spoke I felt my anger leap up in me, and I knew I had shed the discipline of being a pretty Bath miss. I was
not
a pretty young girl. I was the heir to the Laceys, I was a Lacey of Wideacre. And this arrogant woman had been ill-treating one of
my
people.

‘That is
not
how I do business,’ I said. ‘I have come to return these gloves to you, which I do not doubt you will get some other poor girl to finish and sell at a usurious price. And I have taken the trouble to come and see you to tell you that Rosie Dench will work for you no more. And if I had the power,
no
young girl would work for you again. You pay rates which barely keep a worker alive, and then you make them buy their materials from you, and fine them, and keep them in debt so they can work nowhere else. Rosie Dench is coughing blood in a dirty room, trying to sew gloves for you in half-darkness. So don’t tell me that tone is so important to you. You are no better than a madame in a bagnio!’

Lady Querry half screamed at the insult and Mrs Williams strode around from the desk to the door.

‘You had better go!’ she hissed.

‘I
am
going,’ I said. ‘And I am not coming back, and neither is Rosie Dench. And if I hear one word from you about calling Rosie a thief or about this ridiculous debt, I shall tell everyone that you are no better than a slave-driver. I shall tell them how Rosie was when I found her. And I shall tell them that you pay her five shillings for her most beautiful work, and how you sell the gloves for five pounds. And I will go on doing it until I have cost you far more than eight pounds and four shillings in lost custom. I shall go on doing it until you are ruined.’

I rounded on Lady Querry as she sat, mouth agape, drinking in every word. ‘And when you repeat this to all your friends, your ladyship,’ I said scathingly, ‘remember to tell them that their gloves and their stockings and their shawls are embroidered in filthy rooms by girls with consumption, and smallpox, and
fevers. That the shifts which you buy to wear next to your skin have been touched, every inch of them, by girls with sores on their hands. That they are sold to you at a price which would make all those girls well, and well fed if they saw even half of it.’

I spun round then and marched to the carriage and climbed up on to the seat, still trembling with rage and my head still ringing with things I wanted to say. In my fury I saw James sweep a low bow to Lady Querry and even to Mrs Williams.

‘Good day, ladies,’ I heard him say pleasantly, and then he strolled out to the phaeton, and climbed on to the box and took up the reins.

I said nothing until he had turned left into George Street.

‘How could you just sit there?’ I said through my teeth. ‘You said you would speak to her, and you left it all to me. I felt an utter fool and they were all laughing at me and you did nothing, nothing! And then you said, “Good day” to them when we left. “Good day, ladies.” Ladies! How
could
you?’

James waited for a sedan chair to get out of the way before turning up the hill to Gay Street. ‘I wanted to see how you would do,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how you would stand up to her.’

‘What?’ I shrieked.

‘I wanted to see how you are when you are being a squire,’ he said. He pulled the horse to a standstill and got down from the seat and came around to my side to help me down. I scrambled down on my own and pushed past him. If I could have knocked him down and walked over him, I would have done so. He seemed to me entirely part of the unfeeling Quality world who laughed like Lady Querry. I would never,
never
forgive him for saying, ‘Good day, ladies.’

I stormed up the steps and found I could scarcely see the door knocker for the tears of anger in my eyes. James reached over my shoulder and tapped at the door for me.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said as we waited for Meg to come to the door.

I shot him one angry look which should have warned him that
nothing he could say would draw a civil response from me ever again.

‘Will you marry me, Julia?’ he asked.

I could not believe my ears. ‘What did you say?’ I demanded.

‘I asked you to marry me,’ he repeated. I could hear from inside the house someone coming down the stairs to open the front door. I was still boiling with anger towards Lady Querry, towards Mrs Williams and her beastly shop and shopgirls and the whole unjust unequal cruelty of the Quality world. But more than anything else I was in a blind rage with James Fortescue, who had promised he would speak to Mrs Williams and then left me all alone to look a fool in front of the most fashionable modiste and the biggest gossip in Bath.