The Maid of Fairbourne Hall (11 page)

The feeling soon evaporated, however, because the stiff atmosphere in the servants' hall melted into relaxed conviviality once the uppers—the bosses—were gone.

Thomas, the dark-haired first footman, raised his glass of small beer. “Here's to the return of Mr. Upchurch.”

A female voice to Margaret's right said, “I wish Mr.
Lewis
Upchurch would return.”

Margaret snapped her head around in surprise. She took in the wistful expression of the heavyset stillroom maid she had met at breakfast.

“Do you? Why?” Margaret could not help but ask. She found it somehow disconcerting that she was not the only maid awaiting Lewis's appearance.

Hester gazed into the distance but did not answer.

Dark-haired Thomas slanted Margaret a look. “You've never seen him, or you wouldn't ask. All the girls flutter about Mr. Lewis.”

“I don't know why.” The second footman, Craig, shrugged.

“Come on now,” Jenny said. “We all know it isn't Mr. Lewis Hester pines for, but the young man what comes with him.”

Margaret turned to the kitchen maid. “Who's that?”

Jenny looked at her, incredulous. “His valet, of course.”

“Oh, right,” Margaret murmured, noticing how pink Hester's round cheeks had become.

“I don't know what girls see in him either,” fair-haired Craig pouted. “What's he got that I haven't got?”

“Class, that's what he's got,” Jenny answered. “And genteel ways.”

Another kitchen maid answered, “And so handsome in his fine clothes.”

Craig frowned. “Well, I've got fine clothes.”

Thomas threw down his table napkin. “You call livery fine?” The footman's lip curled. “For trained monkeys, maybe.”

Margaret was surprised the first footman despised the very livery he himself wore.

“Oh, now don't listen to Thomas,” Jenny soothed. “I think you're both quite handsome in your livery. Very smart.”

“Thank you, Jenny.” Craig added hopefully, “I don't suppose you have a sister?”

Thomas smirked. “Or a grandmother. Craig isn't fussy.”

Craig glared, but the others chuckled, enjoying the teasing nearly as much as their desserts.

The next morning Margaret began her first full round of work. If she had thought the day before taxing, this one promised to be more so. The previous day had been spent in learning and in observing Betty or assisting her. Today, Margaret was on her own. Betty had assigned her the drawing room, conservatory, hall, and steward's office to clean before breakfast, while she would see to the library, salon, morning room, dining room, and servery. Fiona, meanwhile, would take care of the early morning duties abovestairs—taking up water and emptying the slops in the bedchambers as well as cleaning the family sitting room.

In the drawing room, Margaret did as Betty had taught her. First she lugged all the furniture she could move to the center of the room: chairs, settees, tea tables, and end tables. These she covered with cloths to protect them from the dust she was about to raise whilst sweeping the carpet. She grasped a handful of damp tea leaves from a wide-mouth jar, gave them a final squeeze, and sprinkled the leaves over the carpet. This was meant to freshen the carpet and sweeten the air, but to Margaret it seemed illogical to cast debris on something she was meant to clean.

Selecting the carpet sweeper brush from her box, she went to work on her knees, sweeping the scant dirt and occasional pebble toward the hearth, from which she had already removed the fender and polished the grates. Afterwards, she wiped her hands on a cloth. She removed the dust covers and dusted the furniture and then began dragging the pieces back to their places. Perspiration trickled from beneath her wig and down her back, causing the skin beneath her long stays to itch. She was breathing heavily and her back ached by the time she restored the last piece of furniture to its proper—she hoped—place.

Gathering up her tools into the housemaid's box, Margaret paused to wipe a hand across her brow.

One room down. Three to go.

———

After breakfast, Betty hurried upstairs to help Miss Upchurch dress, leaving Margaret to sweep the main stairs and rub the banister with a little oil.

They attended morning prayers and then Margaret helped Betty clean Miss Upchurch's apartment—Betty still did not trust her with the family bedchambers, nor to make beds alone. She helped Betty tie back the bed curtains and strip the bed to air, emptied the washbasin, and tidied the dressing room.

As the afternoon wore on, Margaret found her knees aching and her hands dry and stiff. She helped Fiona collect the soiled laundry throughout the house and was then assigned to scrub the basement passageway leading from the servants' entrance on one end, all the way to the men's quarters on the other.

On her hands and knees, with a bucket of hot water heated on the stove, Margaret scrubbed a floor for the first time in her life. Her knees throbbed against the hard stone floor, and her hands burned from the harsh soap. She was midway down the passage when hall boy Fred came in the servants' door with a rangy wolfhound, its wiry grey hair slick and wet.

Margaret sat back on her heels. “I've just washed that floor,” she grumbled.

“It's all right,” Fred said. “Jester's cleaner than either of us. He's just had a swim in the pond.”

Suddenly the dog at Fred's heel shook himself mightily, spraying muddy water all over Fred's trouser legs and Margaret's face and bodice.

She squeezed her eyes shut, sputtered, and groaned. “Oh, no . . .”

“Sorry, miss,” Fred said.

Mrs. Budgeon appeared in her doorway nearby. “What is the matter?” She looked from Margaret, to Fred, to the dog and back again. Surveying Margaret, her lips thinned and she sighed. “Well, Fred, you've won the honor of finishing that floor. Nora, I would tell you to bathe, but we haven't time for all that now. Go on up to your room and clean up as best as you can. You do have another frock, I trust?”

“Yes, ma'am. Well, one.”

“Let's hope it suits.”

Margaret took herself up to her room and cleaned her face, neck, and hands as best she could at the washstand with her allotted bar of soap. She had peeked inside the servants' bathing room Mrs. Budgeon had referred to. The small room lay at the end of a narrow side passage, past the servants' hall. But she had yet to use the tub it contained. Until she figured out how to remove her stays, she would make do with sponge baths in her room.

She changed into the blue gown, eyeing her bed with longing, but forced herself back downstairs.

After the family ate their dinner, Margaret helped Mrs. Budgeon wash the china in the storeroom adjoining her parlor. The room was fitted with a special wooden sink lined with lead for the purpose. Once dry, the housekeeper meticulously examined each piece for damage before checking it back in.

As evening darkened to night, Margaret began longing for her narrow attic bed with the most ardent zeal—though she wondered if her wobbly legs would carry her up the many stairs even one more time. And to think she had to do it all again tomorrow! Tears filled her eyes from fatigue and self-pity. She would never live through another day of this, let alone three and a half months.

When they finished their duties at last, Betty walked with her up to the attic and followed her all the way to her room. There, Betty closed the door behind them and faced her. Her reddish-brown hair peeked out from under her cap after the long day. Her elfin blue eyes shone with concern. Margaret expected some private reprimand, but instead, Betty said, “I saw you sleeping in your stays that first morning. Are you still?”

Cheeks heated, Margaret nodded sheepishly. “I can't reach the laces.”

Betty shook her head and gave a long-suffering sigh. “Very well. Let's get them off you.”

She did so, and what blessed relief it was. After wearing the garment around the clock and through unaccustomed exertion, the stays had left their mark. Betty took one look at the welts and insisted she would help her morning and night from then on.

If I live that long
, Margaret thought.

Betty squeezed her arm as if reading her mind. “It'll get easier by and by. You'll see.”

When Margaret finally climbed into her bed after ten, she lay awake, sheet pulled up to her chin but the blanket folded at the foot, unwelcome on the warm summer night. She had opened the small window, but not a breath of breeze stirred the air. She lowered the sheet to her waist. Even that effort made her wince. Never had she been so physically exhausted. Her arms ached from strenuous effort—pushing brooms, wringing mops, scrubbing floors, brushing grates, flinging sheets and making beds, reaching high to polish windows and clear cobwebs, carrying heavy buckets of water and worse. Her light work with a needle and her watercolors, her hours on the pianoforte, had not prepared her poor spindly arms for such exertion.

She crossed her chest, massaging each forearm with the opposite hand—hands already blistered and dry from hot soapy water, blacking, and lye. Thank heaven she had not ended up as a laundry maid or she would depart Fairbourne Hall with stubs.

Margaret rolled over. Her legs were sore as well, from climbing up and down stairs carrying buckets, piles of laundered bedclothes, baskets of small clothes fresh from the laundry, and her housemaid's box. She would have legs like a pack mule in no time.

So tired . . . And yet she could not keep her eyes closed. In her mind revolved a painted carousel of objects, duties, instructions, and warnings. Shoe brushes, grate brushes, bed brushes. Open shutters by seven, make beds by eleven. Never drip candle wax. Never wax mahogany. Always scrub hands between blacking and bed making, and whatever you do, don't speak to the family unless spoken to. Around and around it went. Margaret groaned. She had never imagined the work of a housemaid could be so taxing.

She still found it difficult to grasp that she was doing such work in the manor of the Upchurch family. How strange to be under Nathaniel's roof. She had seen him at morning prayers, of course, but according to first Mr. Hudson, then Betty, it was unlikely she would see much of the family otherwise, except in passing. What would Nathaniel say to finding her living in his house, eating his food, polishing his floors? He might enjoy the latter, she mused, but resent the former. A good thing, then, that he was unlikely to see her.

Margaret thought about Helen Upchurch, whom she had seen at morning prayers as well. Helen was five years older than Margaret, and the two had had only a passing acquaintance. Still, Margaret had been saddened to hear of her disappointment in love when the man she hoped to marry died a few years before. Apparently she had now resigned herself to life as a spinster.

There was no sign of Lewis Upchurch, the only Upchurch she thought she might turn to—had she the nerve to do so.

Margaret massaged her fingers. She heard a whine, and for a moment feared she had moaned aloud, but then someone scratched at her door. She started up in bed, reaching in a flailing panic for her wig. The door creaked open.

“Just a moment!” she whispered urgently. But it was too late. Whoever it was walked into the room, feet clicking on the floorboards. Margaret's eyes adjusted just as a damp nose nudged her elbow. In the dim room, she reached for the wolfhound's grey head, silvery white in the faint moonlight.

“Jester . . .” she scolded mildly. “What are you doing up here—come to give me another bath?” She stroked the big dog's ears. “Your master would not approve. A beast with your bloodlines, consorting with a servant?”

Saying the word aloud gave Margaret pause. “I am a servant,” she whispered to herself, incredulous. She lay there, exhausted and sore, thinking she should just pack up and leave. Sneak out and go . . . somewhere. Anywhere. But at the moment she was too tired to move.

The next afternoon, Nathaniel took himself to the library to write to his father and the family's solicitor, apprising them both of the situation with the ship and with Fairbourne Hall. He'd hoped to use part of the sugar profits to begin repair work on the
Ecclesia
, but knew he must first bring the languishing estate into order. He and Hudson had completed an initial inspection of the place. The manor roof leaked into the old schoolroom, several laborer cottages needed repair, the orchard had grown wild, one of the tenant farms sat vacant, a fence was down, and the list went on. Nathaniel sighed. As much as he wanted to, he could not in good conscience funnel money into his ship. Not yet.