By The Sea, Book One: Tess (2 page)

"I don't know why; she ain't much use at
washing. And she don't glaze linen worth a tinker's damn," he
added. "So Enid says."

"Enid is wrong," Tess said as she gathered,
with great effort, the cumbersome folds.

"She don't think much of you and your
lippiness either, princess. If I was you, I'd stay on the sunny
side of the head laundress. You'll go nowhere without her good
opinion, that I know."

"Please move, Mr. Boot. I need the table."
Tess spoke to the air just above the top of his slicked-down head.
Peter Boot fancied himself a fine figure of a man, but he was much
too short ever to serve upstairs. Unfortunately, the realization
had made him quarrelsome and aggressive.

The footman dropped his cigarette over the
side of the table onto the clean stone floor, then slid off and
ground the butt under the sole of his shoe. "You're a stuck-up
little princess, you know that? But you ain't got no title. You
ain't got no money. So why, I ask myself, is she so stuck-up? Sits
all to herself at the servants' mess; won't come out walking when a
young man kindly offers to take her. I ask myself, is it because
she can do her letters? They say a little learning is a dangerous
thing," he added, his voice dropping to a soft, menacing whisper.
"So what gives you the right to act like a stuck-up little ...
princess? Hey?"

He took up a place beside her, close enough
for her to tell that his pomade reeked of almond oil. Despite the
rapid hammering of her pulse, Tess was not actually frightened by
the footman's bravado: she was taller and perhaps stronger than he,
if it came to that. But with Maggie ill, Tess dared not react to
his provocation. She could not afford the simple luxury of slapping
Peter Boot's face.

The footman, with a cunning developed during
years of abusing lesser domestics, understood Tess's position
exactly. "I could make things easier for you, princess," he said,
"if only you'd let me."

He could not make things easier for Tess,
but he certainly could make them more difficult. Tess refused to
answer, instead focusing intently on fold after fold of the endless
cloth, hunting down the offending stain.
Damn
Master James
and his port.

"You hold it in real good, princess, I'll
give you that. In that way you ain't like the rest of the micks,
are you? No little tempers always on display—all your fire's in
your hair. And someplace else, I'll bet," he added slyly, slipping
one arm around Tess's waist from behind and clutching at her
breast.

She pulled away. "No! Please—please don't do
that," she begged. "Only let me do my work."

Once before Tess had been plagued by a
fellow servant: she was twelve, he was a hulking stable boy, and
when she ran sobbing to Lady Meller, the boy had been sent packing.
But Tess had hardly ever spoken to her American mistress, and the
housekeeper always sided with the butler and the men. "I just want
to finish my work and go back to sleep," she said faintly.

"You can't deny you like it," the footman
insisted, dogging her heels as she put on a kettle of water. "You
micks are all alike—all shy and holy on the outside, all hot and
sassy on the inside."

"I'm not like that at all," she answered in
some distress.

Rather self-consciously, she stretched the
soiled portion of the cloth over a large bowl and secured it with a
piece of twine, then sprinkled salt over the stain. All the while
Peter Boot remained silent, watching her lazily. The heavy iron
kettle on the furnace hot plate came to a boil, and Tess wrapped a
cloth around its handle and prepared to pour boiling water over the
wine spot from a height above the bowl.

"Stand clear lest you be splashed," she
warned the footman, hoping he would simply go away altogether; but
he did not move.

Suddenly from the sealed-off kitchen came
the loud crash of a tray of cutlery falling to the floor and the
sound of the cook's voice, angry and scolding. Tess jumped, and her
aim faltered: the stream of boiling water hit the edge of the bowl
and glanced sideways onto the underfootman's arm.

He hissed in pain and fell back. "You little
slut. You did that a-purpose!"

"I never did!" she cried.

"I'll get even for that, you stupid
bitch!"

A voice bristling with authority cut them
short. "What's all this?"

It was Mr. Waterman, the butler. "Ah—a
Moran. I might have known," he said in a pleasant, scathing voice
to Tess.

Holding one hand over the sleeve of his
scalded arm, Peter Boot muttered, "I was helping her with the cloth
and the fool splashed boiling water on me."

Tess swung her look from the butler to Peter
Boot, taking in with loathing the little man's thinning, carefully
slicked hair, his narrow, closely set eyes with their heavy,
drooping lids, his nervous, twitching hands, and said to herself:
he isn't worth it.
Aloud she said formally to Mr. Waterman,
"I'm sorry, sir. It was an accident."

"I dare say." To the footman he said, "Come
along, Boot, and get some bicarbonate for that." Mr. Waterman
turned one more time to Tess. "Never let me see you without your
cap again."

Tess was left alone with the damask
tablecloth and twenty-four serviettes, which she set to soaking in
a copper tub filled with soda solution. The stain was gone, but not
so her suspicion that Peter Boot was right: she had done it on
purpose.

I hate being in service.
That was her
thought as she lay quietly in her attic room at dawn, careful not
to wake her sleeping sister. The muslin curtains of the tiny
dormered window hung slack; there was no breeze to fan them. The
air was thick, hot, old, a mixture of August oppression and stale,
used up vapors from the floors below. Tess thought with longing of
the guest bedrooms, with their lofty ceilings and enormous French
doors open to the cool ocean.

She had been one of the first of the staff
to arrive from New York, shortly after the Morans entered the
employ of the Winwards, to open up Beau Rêve for the season. With
an upper housemaid, Tess had gone from room to room, awestruck,
stripping away the huge muslin sheets from the lavish, priceless
furnishings. Her imagination had recoiled from the gilded opulence
of Mrs. Winward's bedroom, but she had found herself enchanted by
the east-facing bedrooms of the Winward daughters, Isabel and
Cornelia, who with their brother would someday inherit not only all
of Beau Rêve but its domestic staff of nineteen as well.

To inherit. Tess turned the idea over in her
mind, tormented by its possibilities. To inherit meant that you
need never worry, really, about the future. It meant that you could
send someone you loved who was ill to take the cure at Hastings, or
on the south coast of France. It meant that fathers and brothers
did not have to live separated from daughters and sisters. Perhaps
it was true that the meek would inherit the earth. But the rich
would inherit most everything else: good health, happiness, lovely
manners.

It was a long night for Tess, filled with
forebodings.
That's from Mother,
Tess thought wearily.
Mother, who never saw the rainbow, but only the rain.

Ironically, Maggie had got her best night's
sleep in a long time. For once she awoke without an unhealthy red
flush in her cheeks, which made Tess immeasurably happy. Tess's
feelings toward her older sister had always been oddly maternal;
since their mother's death, more than ever.

Maggie came and sat on the side of Tess's
bed, very much as she used to when the two were little girls in
Cork. "I feel so much better today, Tessie. This afternoon when
we've done with our work, let's go off for a walk along the beach.
We'll have tea."

"So you plan to go leaping down the lane
like a deer, miss, and all because you've had one good night's
sleep?" Tess threw her blanket off and strode to the corner
washstand. "Whatever next? You'll be off to join the equestriennes
in the circus, I suppose," she teased. "My own thought on the
matter is that it's early days to be thinking of hauling yourself
cross-country," she said firmly. And then, in perfect imitation of
the cultured tones of the mistress of Beau Rêve, Tess, a born
mimic, added, "However, I daresay a stroll along Bellevue Avenue
would suit you perfectly, darling. I shall arrange your hair, and
you shall have my silk parasol."

"Oh,
never
the silk one!" Maggie
cried, delighted.

"Indeed, you shall have it."

But first the laundry. At most of the great
Newport houses, Monday was set aside as laundry day. Articles were
sorted and inventoried in the washing book, after which they were
set to soaking in soda or lime solutions until Tuesday morning,
when the fires would be lit for heating the huge copper tubs; and
soon after, washing would begin. But at Beau Rêve, entertainment
proceeded at a breakneck pace. Caroline Winward accepted
invitations only from half a dozen among her exclusive circle of
friends; mostly, she entertained. For practical purposes, there was
little to distinguish a dinner party at Beau Rêve from a state
dinner at the White House: Ambassadors and senators, English earls
and European counts were summoned with equal confidence to the
tables of both, the chief difference between them consisting, as
the Duke of Marlborough once had it, "of several square yards more
of elbow room, and several pounds more of food" for each guest at
the Newport table.

At any rate the linen, being in constant use
and of considerable value, required an uncommon amount of
attention. As a result, the huge coppers were filled three times a
week instead of once, and there was never a day when something was
not being soaked, boiled, rinsed, rubbed, or wrung in the wet
laundry; and mangled, starched, glazed, or ironed in the dry.

Still, this particular Sunday was less
grueling than some others, perhaps because both sisters were in
such cheerful spirits. Maggie was looking much better, smiling
often in happy anticipation of the afternoon holiday. She coughed
little, almost not at all, and insisted on helping Tess with the
wet, unmanageable damask tablecloth.

"We really could use more help with this,"
ventured Maggie.

"With this and with everything," said Tess.
"The Blessed Virgin herself would be hard put to keep up with this
laundry, if her Son was to turn out a different miracle every day
of the week. It's wearing
you
to the bone, that it is."

"How did you ever manage by yourself in
Wrexham?" asked Maggie.

"That was in a simple English country house,
goose. The laundry was a bit of a simplicity by comparison. Do you
think Lady Meller cared a fig if Lady Shaftesbury set a heavier
damask? That wasn't the point, was it? But in Newport, it certainly
is."

Tess shook her head and sighed. "The fact
is, I don't understand
what
the purpose of all this is," she
said as she stretched the cloth over the massive, specially made
drying rack. "To cart a piano, half a ton of silver, chinaware to
fill a dozen lorries, and rugs and tapestries to cover up a soccer
field, all the way from New York City to a wee speck of an island
no one in Ireland has ever even heard of, and in eight weeks to be
carting it all back again—whatever
is
the point,
Maggie?"

Tess looked more carefully at her sister,
who had lost much of her animation. "Maggie?"

Maggie managed a trembly smile. '"Tis the
air in here, Tess, I do believe it: I feel as if my breast were
made of sopping wet sponges. Do you think we can go now?" she asked
plaintively.

"In a bit, I should hope." Tess was not in a
position to say yes; permission must be got from the head
laundress, a lazy, flirtatious woman with good skin but very little
else. She was married to the head coachman, although Tess had never
once witnessed an exchange of affection between the two. After much
hemming and hawing and a stern look or two, Enid granted the two
girls their leave, admonishing them to be indoors by eight o'clock
or to risk the considerable and probably tragic consequences.

Maggie's spirits rallied when they returned
to their room and changed into walking clothes. She put on a blouse
of navy blue poplin fronted in a multitude of pleats and tucking
into a too-bright skirt of magenta poplin, edged with row after row
of white braid. Tess settled for a simple, very proper dress of
black twill, which fit perfectly and showcased her glorious auburn
hair.

Maggie was fitting on a black straw hat,
atop of which was perched a white feathered bird very like a large
seagull. "How do I look, Tess?"

"Oh, quite grand, Mag," Tess answered
affectionately. Maggie had little skill with the needle, and no
good eye for fashion. She was drawn invariably to bright colors and
outlandish hats, almost as if to compensate for her quiet,
washed-out manner. Tess found the effect to be in marginal taste
but utterly charming.

By the time the two young women slipped away
from the great marble cottage into the hedge-lined servants' path,
it was four-thirty and the carriage parade up and down Bellevue
Avenue was in full swing.

The daily coaching parade was one of the
more curious phenomena associated with the intensely competitive
and mostly hollow rituals that characterized a summer's day in
Newport. After a drawn-out, elaborate luncheon, Newport society
would take to their
demi-daumonts,
victorias, landaus, and
four-in-hands for the traditional exchange of calling cards. Those
who could compel their husbands to accompany them did so; those who
could not had their children in tow, hideously bored but spotless
in white gloves, clutching their own little card cases. The
coachman, rigid with stateliness, his black boots polished to the
same blinding perfection as the coach box he occupied, would bring
the superbly bred horses to a stop in front of a prominent entrance
along Bellevue Avenue (known simply as "the Avenue"), and a
liveried footman would alight to deliver the occupant's card to the
front door. No one was ever home, of course; each of the ladies was
out dropping her own cards at the castlelike "cottages" of her
friends.