A Fatal Freedom (17 page)

By the time Millie was twenty-four, she reckoned she was fully equipped and took herself off to an employment agency for household staff. They had just received a request from Mrs Joshua Peters for an efficient lady’s maid.

‘I think we shall deal well together,’ Mrs Peters had said at the end of the interview. Millie thought so too. Softly spoken, sweet-faced, with a sympathetic manner, this seemed a mistress from heaven. No doubt the woman had little ways that could make her difficult but Millie reckoned she could deal with them.

Mr Peters also interviewed her and she was not so sure about him. He had dark, brooding eyes and a cold, incisive voice that questioned her qualifications. He wasn’t a tall man but his compact body exuded a sense of power that was unsettling.

‘Fail my wife in any department and you’re out,’ he said, looking at Millie in a way that made her feel like she was up for sale in some slave market. ‘She has the impression you will be the perfect lady’s maid. Prove it and you’ll be rewarded. Understand?’

Millie had dipped a little curtsy and told him she did, hoping she was not, after all, making a major mistake.

The Peters household was not as large as the one Millie had imagined herself joining, and her room was small, but at least it was her own. She never wanted to have to share with another maid again.

‘Hope you’ll be an improvement on your predecessor,’ sniffed Albert after Mrs Peters had introduced her to the other staff.

‘Heard she’d proved unsatisfactory,’ Millie offered, summing him up with one look: too pleased with himself and not much to be pleased about. Medium height, too-close-together pale eyes, sharp nose and carefully slicked-back dark hair. Nor did she think much to his red and orange striped waistcoat. Did he think he was some sort of dandy? She twinkled at him, ‘Shall try my best.’

The female staff were less challenging. Chief was Mrs Firestone, the cook; there was no housekeeper. Her food wasn’t the best Millie had eaten but it was a long way from the worst. And she was efficient and a worker. She organised her scullery maid with a rough kindness that ensured Abby understood what was expected of her and did her tasks to Mrs Firestone’s high standards.

Emily Barker was the senior upstairs maid. Her face might be plain but her character was warm and friendly. Millie felt it was important she maintained her dignity with her, though she was willing to chat in a way that demonstrated she regarded Emily as almost on her level – but not quite. Sarah, the under-housemaid, was another matter. With her, Millie enjoyed paying back the slights she had received at the start of her career in service.

Sam, ‘the Odd Man’, though he was little more than a boy, Millie paid no attention to at all.

Out running an errand for her mistress one day, Millie had tripped in a busy street and someone had run off with her purse. Before she’d had time to shout ‘stop, thief,’ the ruffian had been tackled and her property returned to her. She gave her rescuer a sweet smile.

‘Joe Banks,’ he introduced himself. ‘It seems to me as you need a little looking after, pretty girl like you out on her own.’

He had a twinkle in his eye that was very attractive. Millie had spent a long time fending off fellow staff members in various households, together with disdaining approaches made by such members of the opposite sex as she came into contact with from time to time. Now, though, almost without realising, Millie found herself dropping her guard and accepting Joe Banks’s invitation to a walk in the park on her afternoon off. After all, no harm could come to her in such a public place.

It was not only the delicious combination of Joe’s twinkling brown eyes and the way he married an obvious admiration of her looks with proper respect for her person that was attractive; Mrs Peters had recently stopped taking her maid with her when she went out shopping for fashion accessories, visited charity sales, exhibitions, or just for some exercise. This meant Millie had time to herself and a feeling she was being slightly ill done by.

‘Makes me wonder if she’s not up to something,’ she confided to Joe when he persuaded her to visit a music hall with him a couple of nights later. He was so easy to talk to and it wasn’t as though he had any contact with the Peters household and could pass on any information she gave him. Between the acts he kept her in constant hilarity with jokes and gossip about the performers. Normally Millie didn’t drink alcohol but somehow a glass of champagne was produced and it seemed only polite to drink it.

‘What time’s your lady expecting you on duty this evening?’ he asked as another glass of champagne appeared.

She giggled. ‘She hardly ever wants me to wait up for her, not unless she’s got masses of back buttons. She and the master have gone to a dinner tonight and then on to a ball. Mrs Peters said it was a Guild affair. Said she had to look her best for the master and though I say it as shouldn’t, she looked a picture when I’d finished with her. Her gown fastened in the front so she said she wouldn’t need me when they got back.’

Joe had wanted to know what her master was like.

‘I’ve been there nearly a year but I don’t see much of him. Leaves the house early in the morning, back after I’ve got Mrs Peters ready for the evening. She’s a pleasure to dress, nice figure and knows how to wear clothes. ’Course I guide her over what new fashions will suit her. She told me Mr Peters said as how she looks much more fashionable since I came.’ She drank a little more of the champagne, liking the way the bubbles teased at her throat.

‘Well-matched couple, are they?’ Joe asked.

If it hadn’t been for the champagne, Millie mightn’t have been so frank. ‘He’s much older than she is. She always seems to do what he says but there are times when I think she doesn’t like it.’

‘Rough with her, is he?’

Millie was shocked. ‘Oh, no!’ Then she thought for a moment. ‘There was that time she told me she’d tripped on the staircase and bruised her cheek on the banisters. Almost a black eye she had.’

‘Had she cheeked him?’ Joe joked, then said, ‘My big mouth; shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ agreed Millie. Joshua Peters was a daunting master yet somehow exciting as well. ‘He’s always polite to me,’ she added.

Then, suddenly, it seemed to Millie, events moved so fast she could hardly keep up. First, Mrs Peters disappeared without a word, Mr Peters spent the afternoon looking for her, then Millie had to undergo a blistering interrogation from him. He seemed unable to believe she didn’t know where her mistress was.

‘Please, sir. I promise you Mrs Peters didn’t say a word to me.’ Millie looked at him imploringly. ‘You have to believe me.’

He put a finger underneath her chin and forced her to look at him. She stood with her hands clasped behind her back, staring him in the eyes. And suddenly he laughed and spoke in quite a different voice.

‘No, you wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Millie?’

Two days later it was as though he’d forgotten all about Mrs Peters and for some dazzling days it seemed as though Millie’s ambitions need know no bounds. She hardly noticed that Joe Banks was no longer around.

Then, no sooner had her world been transformed than everything changed once again. Her mistress walked in and said she had had to have some medical treatment.

Millie was staggered by the way Mr Peters seemed to accept this story, and how Mrs Peters managed to stick to the details she’d given. Almost immediately, though, it became clear what she had been talking about.

Tightening her mistress’s corset every day as she did, it was not difficult to notice a thickening of a waistline she knew as well as her own.

The woman’s effrontery almost struck Millie dumb. Persuading your husband the child you were expecting was his when all the while it had been fathered by a lover! Alice Peters, she decided, was a bitch of the first water. And Joshua Peters not nearly as bright as she’d thought. How could he be so gentle with his wayward wife? It was as though he had flicked a switch. You’d think his attention had never strayed to another woman.

Filled with bitterness, Millie started to search for the diary she had so often seen her mistress writing in. If she could find that and show it to Joshua Peters, then surely he would have to accept what had been going on.

Then had come the dreadful morning when she had been faced with the sight of her master in a death agony. She had been so upset, Emily had had to take on the task of waking Mrs Peters and giving her the awful news that her husband had died of what looked like a heart attack.

* * *

Chaos had ensued. It had taken the arrival of Mrs Peters’ sister, Miss Fentiman, and her aunt, Mrs Trenchard, for some sort of order to emerge. Mrs Peters had been given a hefty dose of laudanum by the doctor and slept the day away.

Late that afternoon, still numb with the events of the morning, Millie had tried to tidy up Mrs Peters’ boudoir but found she was too clumsy to do much good. So clumsy that she knocked over the chair that stood by the desk. Righting it, Millie noticed that the seat was loose. Underneath she found Mrs Peters’ diary resting on a false bottom.

Restoring the seat to its rightful place, Millie sat on it and opened the diary. She went back to the weeks when her mistress had abandoned the habit of taking her maid when going around London. She read carefully, following the words with her forefinger. It was full of descriptions of the handsome young man who was a friend of her sister’s and had declared he was wildly in love with her. She had never, Alice declared to her diary, felt anything like this before.

Suddenly a phrase leaped out at Millie:
If only I could be free of this terrible marriage.

In the pages that followed there was more.

Millie felt as though a volcano was erupting in her stomach and she started to shake. Once again she saw the look of agony in Joshua Peters’ staring eyes that morning.

Then Sarah came upstairs. ‘The police are here, Millie. They’re taking away the master, they think he’s been poisoned.’ The girl seemed torn between excitement and terror. ‘They want to see us all in the kitchen.’

Poisoned! Millie picked up the diary. ‘I’ll see she gets what’s coming to her,’ she said to no one in particular since Sarah had gone already. She went downstairs and asked to see the inspector in charge in private.

* * *

With the arrest of Alice Peters, the Montagu Place household threatened to disintegrate. None of the staff could believe what was happening.

Millie spent most of her time in her room practising dressing in her mistress’s clothes. For she had received an invitation, one she intended to accept. She wished, though, she wasn’t waking every morning thinking she heard Sarah’s scream again.

‘It’s a ship what’s lost its pilot,’ said Mrs Firestone. It was midday. Few of the daily routine tasks had been accomplished. As usual, though, everyone had gathered in the kitchen for dinner. The end bits of a leg of ham had been served with boiled potatoes. They’d finished with a dried piece of cheddar cheese and oatcakes. Millie could not make herself eat more than a mouthful or two. The volcano inside her churned, a deadly mixture of anger laced with bitterness.

‘Hardly up to your usual standard, Cook,’ said Albert.

‘You’re unlikely to have to eat Mrs Firestone’s cooking for much longer,’ Millie said spitefully.

He turned his unemotional fish eyes on her. ‘Meaning?’

‘Why, with no master to attend to and run errands for, you won’t have a place. That’s all.’ She reached into her sewing bag and removed a crepe de chine bodice trimmed with Venetian lace and turned her attention to repairing a minute tear.

‘With no mistress to attend, you won’t have a place either,’ Albert said smoothly.

‘Don’t know why you’re bothering to mend that,’ Sam the young ‘Odd Man’ said quietly.

Millie, who had designs on the bodice and its matching skirt for herself, said nothing.

Cook interrupted her pouring out of cups of tea and rapped the table with a knife. ‘Now, I won’t hear this sort of talk in my kitchen. Mrs Peters will be set free any day now. The very idea of her doing away with the master is nonsense.’

‘Only way she’ll find freedom,’ said Albert unemotionally, ‘is via the hangman’s rope. There’s a place in hell being prepared for her now.’

‘Oooh, you can’t say that,’ Sarah protested. ‘Mrs Peters couldn’t … well, couldn’t do what they said she did.’

Millie could bear it no longer. ‘How do you know? She ran away, didn’t she? Left a husband who showered her with everything.’

‘As you should know,’ put in Albert,
sotto voce
. ‘A jealous bitch, that’s what you are.’

Millie rounded on him. ‘Yes, I know everything he gave her. All the dresses and the jewels. I saw them, didn’t I? Took care of them. And then, when she realises the stupid mistake she’s made, she comes back.’

‘And a right blow that was to some,’ muttered Albert again.

‘We knows why she did,’ put in Mrs Firestone. ‘Because she’s a decent soul. Thought a father should bring up his child.’

‘
His
child?’ screamed Millie, throwing down her sewing. ‘How could he know that? He was a fool and he signed his own death warrant.’

‘Whoever did it,’ put in Emily peaceably, ‘did us all a favour. He was a nasty man.’

Albert rose. ‘I can’t listen to such vile things. I have errands to run. I’ll be back for supper and shall expect better than the muck we’ve just had.’

‘I does my best with what I has,’ said Mrs Firestone. ‘Larder’s nearly empty, I’m not being given any more money and our credit’s exhausted. I’m at my wit’s end what to feed us on tonight.’

Through the turmoil of her anger, Millie heard a low gasp from the others. She found it as difficult as they obviously did to accept what she’d heard. Food in a household like this, even under the present circumstances, was taken for granted. Albert, though, appeared unmoved as he left the kitchen.

High up on the wall, the front doorbell jangled. Everyone looked at it for a moment without moving.

‘Just as I’ve settled to my tea,’ said Emily. She put the saucer on top of her cup.