Where Earth Meets Sky (2 page)

‘What did he say?’ Cook and the others were all agog to know. They had been told they would each have a turn to be called in.

‘She left me some jewellery!’ Lily told them with tears running down her cheeks.

‘Well what’re you blarting about?’ Cook demanded. ‘You’re a rum ’un, you are.’

‘She was so kind!’ Lily sobbed. Mrs Chappell had been her saviour and friend; she had raised her up from nothing, from her beginnings as an abandoned urchin off the streets. It felt unbearable that she was gone.

Lily went up to her room at the top of the house and sank down on the edge of her bed. She realized she was still holding the box and envelope. She wanted to look inside in private. Opening the lid of the box she smelled a lovely scent of lavender, and what she saw on the base of the velvet box made her weep all the more. Lying in a pale, glowing coil was Mrs Chappell’s skein of tiny seed pearls. Maud Chappell had always said to her, ‘You should wear pearls, Lily. They would look marvellous on your skin.’ She picked them up, feeling their warm, smooth weight, and held them lovingly to her cheek. ‘
Oh, thank you
. . .’ she whispered. Also in the box were a matching pearl bracelet and a beautiful opal brooch in a silver setting. Lily laid them out and looked at them in awe.

Then she remembered the envelope containing her references and she pulled out an expensive piece of notepaper. She could hardly read the warm, praising words through her tears. ‘. . . kind and sweet-natured . . . staunchly honest, hard-working . . . it would represent the greatest good fortune to employ her . . .’

Overcome, Lily lay on her side and wept heart-brokenly. What tugged so powerfully at her heart in those moments was not the shower of kind words, or the gift of precious jewellery, but the strength of Mrs Chappell’s love and kindness, flowing to her from beyond the grave.

Later, she got up from the bed and poured water from the pitcher to wash her face, sitting to look in the glass tilted over her little white chest of drawers. Her face was blotchy from weeping and her dark eyes stared mournfully back at her. Mrs Chappell’s death had taken away all the safety she had found for the last nine years in her employment and friendship, where she had settled into a household where she knew her place and was treated with ever-increasing kindness.

When she was fifteen, by which time Lily had worked for nearly two years on the lowest rung of the ladder, Mrs Chappell stopped her one day as Lily was passing through the hall carrying a heavy coal scuttle, dressed in her black maid’s uniform with a white cap and apron. She was pink-cheeked and strong, in good condition from the physical work demanded in the house.

‘My goodness!’ Mrs Chappell uttered the words in a shocked tone, as if she had just noticed some terrible fault in the domestic scene. ‘Wait, child! Stop and look at me!’

Lily paused, heart pounding. Although she had barely ever had anything to do with Mrs Chappell, by then she knew her employer was usually a gentle lady. What had she done so wrong?

‘Come a little closer, dear – er, what is your name again?’

‘Lilian Horne.’
I’m in for it now
, Lily thought, keeping her eyes lowered, seeing the lower edge of Mrs Chappell’s sage-green skirt and her elegant brown shoes on the polished tiles of the hall.

‘Do look at me,’ Maud Chappell said softly. ‘It’s quite all right. You’ve done nothing wrong. Put the coal down, dear – it looks heavy.’

Lily obeyed and looked blushingly up into her employer’s face. Mrs Chappell wore her hair swept up and pinned in a wispy, abstracted style which made her look rather artistic and vague. Wisps of it were forever escaping about her round face. In her eyes, Lily saw kindness, and a great yearning.

‘Oh, my dear . . .’ Mrs Chappell put a hand to her chest and her eyes suddenly filled with tears. ‘So like – in a way. Your lovely dark hair, your shape . . . A kind of essence . . . I’m sorry, dear, you must find me very strange. You’ll know we lost our daughter Naomi, bless her heart, oh, eleven years ago now! And when I saw you just then, of course you’re different, but you have a look of her . . . Why have I never seen it before?’ She sighed, wiping her eyes. ‘How lovely, to have you in our house . . .’

And she drifted away, lost in emotion. Lily picked up the coal scuttle, confused, but also surprised to find her own eyes full of tears, her own hunger for a mother and for love answering Mrs Chappell’s loss and grief.

That was how it began, her ascent in the house. By the time she was seventeen, the age at which Naomi Chappell lost her life, Lily had risen to be a maid of all work, and then, gradually, into personal maid and companion of Maud Chappell, a woman whose personal warmth covered a great inner loneliness. There was no shortage of money as Mr Chappell owned a string of carriage-building works, and the house in Hall Green, a pleasant suburb of Birmingham, was large and beautifully furnished. But with a mostly absent husband, two sons whose lives had long moved away from her into working the world, and a dead daughter, Mrs Chappell had lost a great deal that was dear to her. She adored young life and waited in hope of grandchildren.

‘Before my marriage, I was a trained nanny, you see,’ she explained to Lily one day in the flower-scented drawing room. ‘I lived with some beautiful families – and some of the dear little ones still write to me, now they’re older.’ Her eyes filled every time she talked about her charges. ‘There’s not much I don’t know about small children.’ She gave a sigh then, also. ‘I should have liked more of my own, but it was not to be.’

As time passed, she grew to require more and more of Lily’s company.

‘You’re such an intelligent, gentle girl, and so very lovely. I can teach you, you see, if you like. If you learn about looking after small children, and a little elocution to correct that accent, you could have a very promising future.’

Over the last five years, especially with the arrival of her five grandchildren, who she looked after as often as her daughters-in-law would let her, Mrs Chappell had more than made up for Lily’s lost education, and had also taught Lily everything she knew about the care of young children: diet and feeding, how to play with and handle them and all their infant needs of warmth and cleanliness, their training and how to remedy their maladies. Over the years Lily learned all sorts: how to soothe a child’s temperature with a wet pack, to put an infant with croup in a mustard bath or induce vomiting with ipecacuanha wine, to paint a tincture of iodine on a patch of ringworm, or treat scabies with Balsam of Peru. Mrs Chappell’s training of Lily became a labour of love and Lily was an eager student, thriving as much upon affection as education. She taught her to read and write beautifully, and speak in a more genteel manner, flattening out her Birmingham accent.

‘You really are turning into quite a young lady!’ she said sometimes, watching her with pride. As Lily grew older and entered her twenties, Mrs Chappell didn’t want to let her go to another position in the world. She needed her too much herself. And Lily had no wish to go either, from this home where she was loved and valued, after the cruel beginning life had dealt her.

Mrs Chappell never asked much about Lily’s past. Lily was grateful, since she could remember so little and what she could remember, about living with the Hornes, she preferred to push from her memory. Maud Chappell asked only a few gentle questions and Lily told her that Mrs Horne had been good to her, which she had, until she died, leaving Lily at the mercy of her drunken husband and cruel daughters. But she did not want to think of them, of the agony and loneliness of that time. And Mrs Chappell simply saw something in her that it suited both of them to develop. The other maids working in the house at that time had been envious and spiteful about Lily’s rise up the ranks.

‘You’re the favourite all right, ain’t you?’ they’d say. ‘What makes you so blooming special, Miss La-di-dah?’

Apart from Cook, those maids had all gone now, and the new ones coming into the house accepted things as they were. Lily enjoyed their company – Mary and Fanny and Joan – and knew she was going to miss them terribly now the household was all to be broken up. Only Joan, the youngest, was staying in the family, as she was being taken on by Mr John Chappell’s wife.

Lily gazed at her own face in the glass now, suddenly deeply confused and frightened. All these years she had had a place. Now she had to go out and face the world alone.

That week, Horace and John Chappell, with the help of the staff who they kept on for the purpose, were clearing the house with great speed. Two of the maids, Mary and Fanny, were paid off immediately, and there were tearful farewells as they left the house for the last time with their modest bags of belongings.

Lily found it heartbreaking, watching her home of so many years being taken to pieces and having no say in the matter. Furniture began to disappear, workmen in overalls came and took away dressers and cupboards, rugs were rolled up and now their feet clumped loudly on the bare floorboards. Mrs Chappell’s elegant curtains were taken from the windows in the drawing room. More than once, Lily found Cook weeping into the pastry in the kitchen, and she kept dissolving into tears herself. It wasn’t just the house. Although Horace Chappell was unkind, his brother John was a more gentle character, and she was genuinely fond of all their children, whom she had known since they were born. Now she would never see them again!

As her illness progressed, Mrs Chappell had said, ‘What you need to do, Lily dear, when I’m gone, is to apply for a position in
The Lady
. You’re quite experienced enough to work as a nanny for a family after all I’ve taught you. You’re just the sort of girl a good family would be crying out for.’

Remembering Mrs Chappell’s advice, she went in search of a copy of
The Lady
, a genteel women’s publication in which were advertised posts for nannies and companions. One hot afternoon she sat out on the terrace at the back of the house, half in the shade of a laburnum, and looked at the positions on offer. She drew a ring round two of them. One was for a family by the name of Clutterbuck, who had just had a baby girl and wanted a nanny very quickly. They lived in Dorset. Lily was not absolutely sure where Dorset was but it seemed a possibility. There was another similar in Scotland, but it was a place she always thought of as dreary and cold. But the third advertisement made her heart pick up speed. A nanny was required by a Mrs Susan Fairford, wife of Captain Charles Fairford of the 12th Royal Lancers, stationed at Ambala, India, for their son, aged two. The address to apply to was in Chislehurst in Kent.

Lily looked up from the magazine and stared unseeingly at the rose beds along the side of the house. India! Her head reeled. She was bewildered, afraid and suddenly full of excitement. India was the other side of the world! It was so different she could barely imagine it, except for other pictures she had seen in books of people riding elephants and one she remembered of a huge, waving grove of something called bamboo. But she was already captivated. She already knew she was going to apply for the position and go far away from this place, now all that had kept her here was gone. She had no one now. For a moment she thought about Mrs Horne. She was the only person she had ever called mother – but she was not her mother. Why had Mrs Horne brought her up in her kindly but rough and ready way? What had happened to her real mother and father?

‘They did a flit one night, according to the neighbours,’ Mrs Horne had told her. ‘Hadn’t been there long, in any case. They said she was dark and pretty like a gypsy, and expecting another child. All I know is, there you were playing in the gutter, all alone in just a little camisole, in the pouring rain. But I don’t s’pose you’ll ever find out now, bab. Best not think about it.’

Lily knew there was no hope of ever finding out about her origins, and it hurt too much, looking back. She had moved too far from Mrs Horne, from growing up in Sparkbrook. She would start again, clean and fresh, and with sudden resolve she hurried up the now uncarpeted stairs to her attic room, sat at her little table and took the references Horace Chappell had handed her out of their thick envelope.

But looking down at the sheets of paper with her name at the top of Mrs Chappell’s glowing reference, that desperate, lost feeling washed through her again. Her name,
LILIAN HORNE
, was written in capital letters at the top in Mrs Chappell’s immaculate copperplate script.

Little Lilian Horne. Whoever was she? Had she not been playing the part of someone else all these years, someone who Mrs Chappell needed her to be, and whose identity she had now taken on herself?

She stood up and went again to the glass on her chest of drawers and her face stared back at her, strong-featured, with her burning dark eyes, her thick, wavy chestnut hair modestly fastened back and her demure, white-frilled blouse at her neck. It was the look of a respectable young woman, one who was now nicely spoken, genteel. Not an abandoned slum child fit only for the workhouse, the way the two Horne girls had made her feel. They’d always made sure she was a cuckoo in the nest, with their cruel tricks, their slaps and scratches.

‘
Not Lilian Horne
,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not a Horne and I never was.’

She sat at her little table and opened its drawer, where she had some writing paper. Beside it in the drawer were three books. The one on top was a book of wildflowers, sketched by a John Waters. For a moment she picked it up and looked at it.