The Mistress of Nothing (3 page)

There is no one here for me to bid farewell, apart from the rest of the household staff, and we are equally weighed down by our sorrow, so there is no need, nor desire, for leave-taking. They are losing their employer and thus their employment. But not me. I have a secret: for me, this departure is a joyful thing. I’m leaving Esher. I’m leaving the house and the people who live and work in it. It’s almost as though I am leaving myself, my old familiar self, behind.

Nothing holds me here. Oh, I am fond of Esher, I am fond of Cook, and Cathy, and Esther, who works in the grand house down the street. As everyone says, England in spring is a sight to behold; and, yes, I will miss my trips into town to visit the Museum. But my travels with my Lady have given me a taste for the world.

My life in the Gordon Arms is very narrow. My main preoccupation is avoiding people; avoiding talk. Not that I’m awkward and shy—far from it. Avoiding people: to be more specific, avoiding men. Men want things, they make demands, they make themselves obvious; like the man in the Mummy Room of the Museum in Bloomsbury, they put themselves in my way. But a lady’s maid’s loyalty must be to her Lady; ladies’ maids do not marry. At least, they do not marry and carry on being ladies’ maids. And I have no desire to leave my Lady.

I was working on my Lady’s travel trousseau earlier today; I want to have her clothes in perfect order before we leave. She has continued to lose weight over the summer—Cook’s efforts in that department have failed—so there is a great deal of taking in and remaking to be done. Laura, a young maid, was helping me. She’d been in the household only a few months but was already the subject of much gossip and speculation, the kind of talk I’ve spent my life avoiding, the kind of talk I will not miss once I leave. She was a chatty girl and I was barely listening to her.

“Aren’t you frightened?”

“Hmm,” I said. “Pardon?”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“We’ve traveled before, my Lady and I.”

“But not to live. Not to live in such a foreign place,” Laura said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“I wouldn’t care to go.”

“You prefer your adventures,” I said, “in the back alley.” I meant it lightly, but the girl gave me a shocked look and, much to my shame, burst into tears.

“I didn’t know,” she said.

“Didn’t know what?”

“It was only a bit of fun, I didn’t know it would have such …”—she struggled to find the right word—“consequences.”

I put my arm around her narrow shoulders and we sat down on the bed. It was my Lady’s bed, but I knew she wouldn’t mind, given the circumstances. I let Laura cry and I patted her on the back. “What has happened?” I asked, but I knew already.

“I’m—oh.” She looked at me; her face was very red.

“Will he marry you?” I spared her further humiliation by not asking who he was.

She shook her head. “He’s gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s too late. And now the house is closing. He won’t know where to find me.”

I suppressed a shudder as I realized the extent of her predicament. Predicament is too mild a word—disaster. How will she secure a place in another household? And if she finds a place, how will she keep it once the baby comes along? How will she live? I looked at her and saw myself: this is why I am glad to leave Esher; this is why I’m glad to leave England. “Let’s go and speak to my Lady,” I said.

“Oh no,” said the girl, “I couldn’t, I—”

“You must tell Lady Duff Gordon everything. She’ll help you. She won’t leave you to fend for yourself. Come on.” I pulled her up off the bed. “Come with me.” I gave Laura one of my Lady’s clean linen handkerchiefs and took her downstairs.

It’s not that I object to men. It’s not that I object to marriage. I have had offers, too many to detail. And a few were from men into whose arms I could well imagine falling. “You are lovely,” they say, and then they describe my skin, my hair, my figure, as though I’ve never looked in a mirror. And there have been handsome men of decent means among them: George Dawson the cooper and Robert Smith from the brewery. But I turned them away. I couldn’t leave her; she needs me more than they do. I couldn’t leave my Lady. And if I married George Dawson and had his sweet babies, would I see the world, as I will with my Lady?

AND SO, ONE BY ONE, IT IS GOODBYE, GOODBYE, GOODBYE. FOR MY
Lady, there is her beloved mother, Sarah Austin, and the other Lady Duff Gordon, Sir Alick’s mother. Mr. Meredith, Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Taylor, and all my Lady’s good, true friends. Her children. How can she say goodbye to Maurice and Rainey without knowing when she will see them again? As always, she wears her grief lightly. Sir Alick will accompany us on the first leg of our journey, and his will be my Lady’s last goodbye, as well as, no doubt, the most difficult.

WE SET OFF FOR EAUX BONNES ON 20 AUGUST. WE HAD HOPED FOR
a warm sunny spell in the French Pyrenees, but it was already cool by the time we arrived and, worse, raining. My Lady wrote to her mother:
The “good waters” of Eaux Bonnes are all pouring from the sky.
She fell ill almost immediately; she was weak, and travel served to weaken her further, the wet weather unwelcome, damaging. I did all I could to make her comfortable but the fever, and the blood spitting, returned. I did my best to make sure that my Lady and Sir Duff Gordon had plenty of time on their own, knowing as I did that they would not be together again for a long while, but Sir Alick was restless and anxious, due back at work in London, worried about his wife and the journey that lay ahead for her. My Lady had been ill for a long time, but there was a part of Sir Alick that still expected her to return to her extravagant old self any day. I could see this in him, and I felt it in myself; everyone who knew her felt the same. And when she didn’t get better, continued to not get better, Sir Alick reacted with a kind of subdued and baffled horror, a horror he endeavored to keep hidden from his wife but that was nonetheless in plain view to me and anyone else who cared to see.

Finally, my Lady was well enough to move from Eaux Bonnes on to Marseilles, where she and Sir Alick at last made their farewells. At the station I tried not to listen, tried to fold myself into myself, far away from the scene, but there was little for me to overhear:

“Goodbye, Alick,” my Lady said.

“Goodbye, my love,” Sir Alick replied.

And then he was gone, on to his train, waving, and I watched my Lady pull herself together as she had done so many times before. We moved on to the port of Leghorn in Italy, where the weather was considerably warmer and my Lady was able to stretch her limbs under the sun. We had a few days’ wait before the steamer on which we had booked passage to Alexandria,
Byzantine,
was due to leave. By then my Lady was feeling better once again. She is like no other invalid I have ever known; when feeling well she appears full of vigor and youth and I can’t believe, no one can believe, that the illness will cut her down, push her into her chair, her bed, once again. But it does, it always does. Yet in Leghorn she was fine and happy, which was a good thing: my Lady and I both knew that the Italians believe, mistakenly, that the complaint from which she suffers is contagious. Sufferers are banned from their spa towns and havens. So she must look well and pretend to be well, even if she is not.

T
HE BUMP, WHEN SHIP NUDGED DOCK, GAVE ME A QUICK SHOCK,
a spark of life: at last, Egypt. I turned to my mistress, who was beside me at the rail, looking out at the city smeary with smoke and heat, and said, “We are here.”

She smiled. “They say that Alexandria isn’t really Egypt at all.”

“No, my Lady?” I said, and though I knew this already, I still felt disappointed.

“An in-between place, Mediterranean, African, and European, full of phantom monuments that have long since disappeared.”

I looked at my Lady, unsure of what she was saying, the tone of her voice harsher than I was expecting. On the journey she had seemed as excited as me to be traveling to a place of such antiquity. I was reminded once more of all she had left behind. No doubt arriving at our destination had reminded her as well.

“But you are right, Sally,” she said, turning towards me and laying her hand on mine, as though to reassure me, “we are here. Egypt.”

Our first journey through the city horrified us both; nothing we had seen in the Cape last year had prepared us for this. Filth. Wretched little children begging for money every time the carriage came close to stopping, which was frequently given the terrible congestion in the narrow streets. One child came too close as the carriage moved forward; I saw a man pull him back off the road to the safety of a doorway, where he began to beat him with a slipper he’d removed from his foot for that very purpose. The language ran past our ears, slippery, unmanageable, full of unfamiliar shapes and growls and wheezes. “I’ll never learn a single word!” I said, and as the carriage jerked forward yet again, I saw my Lady go pale as though the precious health she’d regained during our sea voyage had left her body and flown out the window, up into the hard blue-white sky.

The Rosses’ apartment was cool and quiet. It felt odd to be there on our own—I slept in my sister Ellen’s bed every night and my Lady took up residence in her daughter’s bedroom—but I was pleased that I wasn’t being instructed in my duties by Miss Janet, as I had been back in England, and I suspect my Lady felt the same. However, there was no one there to greet us, no one there to smooth our passage; the Rosses kept no permanent staff in Alexandria. Miss Janet hadn’t thought to arrange any help for us, and my Lady hadn’t thought to ask. We would muddle along by ourselves. My Lady was able to rest in the roof garden that her son-in-law had planted; up there she could write letters home and read and consult maps as she planned our journey south up the Nile. I knew she had enjoyed the sea crossing and the ship’s exotic cast of fellow travelers—an Italian opera troupe, four Levantine ladies, and a charming Spanish consul to entertain her—but now that we had arrived, she grew subdued and melancholy. I could tell she was concerned about what was to become of us here in Egypt, and after a few highly unsuccessful outings into the dirty maelstrom of Alexandria, my Lady gave up and retreated. As well as the roof garden, there was a library that Miss Janet—I mean, Mrs. Ross—had shipped from England, and my Lady took to spending her days there, moving up to the roof garden in the evening. I was pleased to see her retire; it was plain the streets were full of disease and wherever I walked I heard coughs that sounded much like hers.

Alexandria was, as Mrs. Ross had warned us, moldering, the sea air giving the city’s buildings a salty frosting. I made my way through the streets lined with grand white European façades, glimpsing Egyptian interiors of orange and red and gold and green. Mr. Ross’s roof garden was orderly, English, shaded, verdant, while the courtyard gardens I peered into whenever I could were full of color, unfamiliar trees laden with flowers, their sweet scent cutting through the base smell of the city. There was no real sightseeing to be done, as Alexandria’s historical monuments consist of mere rumor and conjecture—phantom monuments, as my Lady said, no more, no less. This
might
have been where Alexander the Great’s tomb lay; Pharos Lighthouse, one of the Wonders of the Ancient World,
probably
stood here; but there was nothing to see. Instead there was the wildest mix of cultures imaginable, all attempting to sell something—a slick Italian barber next door to a Syrian baker with a mud oven, a gorgeous French patisserie with a gaggle of peasant women buying and selling oranges right outside its polished glass doors.

On my own, I made forays into the street markets and shops but too often was defeated, returning home empty-handed with a great crowd of unruly children following behind me. In the streets people smiled when they saw me, and I was unable to tell whether they were greeting me or laughing at me. I had never been anywhere as truly foreign as this place.

ONE DAY, AS I WAS GETTING MYSELF READY FOR ANOTHER OF MY
raids on the market—perhaps this time I’d actually succeed in buying a potato or two—two friends of Mr. Ross pitched up, unbidden, at our door: Mr. Hekekyan Bey, an Armenian gentleman, educated in England, dressed in an English suit and wearing a red
tarboosh
with a dark blue silk tassel on his head, an extraordinary combination that somehow suited him, and Mr. William Thayer, the American consul general, young and handsome, with an open, kind face. They were greatly amused by my Lady’s tales of our failure to adapt and survive, and as I watched my Lady rise up on their amusement, I realized, once again—how could I have forgotten?—that this is what she needs in order to thrive: other people. She’s at her best in company; as soon as they arrived it was as though she began to breathe more freely. Someone to talk to; someone to quiz and coax and debate with; someone to make life more interesting. And here was not one but two gentlemen, both of whom were more than willing to entertain and be entertained. When Mr. Thayer asked my Lady what she thought of Alexandria, she said, “Isn’t this the city where Cleopatra took her own life?”