Authors: Irene Carr
Gillespie noted it.
‘Anyone else?’
‘
No, sir, but my mother taught me a lot. She worked in big houses.’
‘
Let me see your reference,’ Gillespie said, hand out-stretched.
Liza swallowed and said miserably,
‘I haven’t got one.’ She tried to explain, ‘Her niece — I’d known her at school and—’ How could she put it? ‘We didn’t get on. She caused trouble for me.’
Gillespie
’s outstretched hand was up now, signalling silence. ‘Are you saying you were dismissed without a reference?’ Liza could only admit it. ‘Aye, sir, but—’
The hand was up again.
‘How long had you been there?’
‘
Four weeks, sir.’
Gillespie rubbed his face. He laid down pen and spectacles and shut the notebook.
‘So you’ve had only one position and that was with Mrs Fanshaw. You were dismissed after only four weeks without a reference. Your only knowledge of the work in a house like this is what you’ve learned from your mother.’ He, like many in his position, had seen the results of that before, in girls who thought they knew the work but had to be taught all over again. ‘Is that correct?’
‘
Aye.’ Liza could not deny it. ‘But that lass tripped me when I was carrying a tray and then Piggy trampled all over my clean step—’
The hand was up again and Gillespie was shaking his head,
‘Oh, aye, I expect you have an excuse.’
There was a rap at the door.
‘Mr Gillespie? Mr Gresham would like a word, if you please.’
‘
Oh, aye, I’ll be there right away.’ He got up from the chair. ‘Wait,’ he told Liza.
*
* *
George Gresham was in the library, wrapped in a rug before a roaring fire, a listless, wasted old man.
‘Ah, there you are, Gillespie. Pour me a whisky, please, there’s a good chap.’
‘
The doctor said not until after dinner, sir,’ the butler remonstrated mildly.
‘
Never mind the doctor. It’s my whisky, not his. And he only wants me alive because he knows he’ll get no money from me when I’m dead.’
Gillespie had made his token protest, as he did every day, and now poured the weak whisky and soda.
‘Would there be anything else, sir?’
Old Gresham waved a skeletal hand, and Gillespie left with a stiff little bow. As he returned to his pantry he reflected that his difficulty in getting and keeping staff was down to
the gloom of the house. There was always a hush about the place, as if its occupants were in the presence of death, which they were. Frederick Gresham was dying.
And this little girl, hardly more than a child, would not do. She was too small, inexperienced, probably undisciplined from the tale she told. If he took her on she would prove another Bridie, here today, gone tomorrow
...
*
* *
The ship Liza had seen had come from the Baltic and was bound for the Tyne with a cargo of grain. The smoke she trailed came not from her funnel but her hold where a fire had raged. William Morgan now climbed the ladder up to the deck with an unconscious man on his back. Hands came to take his burden from him as he reached the head of the ladder. Relieved of it, he swung his legs over the hatch coaming to stand on the deck where the canvas hoses snaked, fat with seawater.
‘It looks to be out but soak it down,’ he told the men who were playing the jets of water into the hold. Then he grinned. ‘Although the weather’s doing a good job of that anyway.’ He wiped off the rain that washed over his face, which was grimy from the fire below.
He had just turned nineteen and this was his first voyage as mate. He was the most junior officer aboard but his captain was impressed with the tall young man, and even more so now when he reported on the bridge:
‘Gallagher was overcome by the smoke but I brought him up. I think the fire’s out but I’ll go down again when the smoke clears and see what damage has been done.’
‘
Well done,’ his captain said.
*
* *
Gillespie shoved open the door of his pantry and strode in. Liza stood bedraggled where he had left her, a pool of water around her feet. He remembered when he was twelve years
old and in his first pair of shoes, leaving home for the first time to work in the big house. ‘I’ll give you a week’s trial,’ he said. ‘Now I suppose you’ll have to go for your box.’
‘
I hid it down by the gate,’ Liza said, in a small voice.
Gillespie sent one of the gardeners, who had been sitting in a potting shed watching the rain, to fetch it on a barrow.
That night Liza wrote a postcard to her mother: ‘I have a better position now in a big house. This is my address.’
*
* *
Before the week was out Gillespie had decided to keep her on. He found her eager to work, hungry to learn and well trained by her mother. Before the month was out old Gresham had died. In the autumn his heir and nephew, Jonathan Gresham, returned from South America with Vanessa, his wife, and their children. The house came to life with a new young regime. The following year Jonathan rented a house in London for the Season and Liza was one of the maids who travelled south to work there through the summer.
* * *
Jasper Barbour had reached man
’s estate and also come to work in London. He had learned his trade in the back-streets of Liverpool and left to seek richer pickings and to avoid a growing reputation. In his first week in the capital he accosted a lone, elderly man in a dark and empty alley. Jasper was not tall but a thick-set, powerful man, brute-faced and fearsome in the gloom. He hefted a club and demanded, ‘Give us your purse.’ He expected it to be handed over, as it always had been before, his victims fearful for their lives.
But the old man, too, had a weapon, a walking-stick, and defied him:
‘You scoundrel! I’ll give you nothing!’ He lashed out with the stick. Jasper was taken by surprise. He was too late to avoid the blow but deflected it so that it landed on his shoulder. He grunted with pain and rage, and madness gripped him. He beat down the walking-stick with his club and felled the old man, then belaboured him until the body lay still under his blows. He stooped over it, searched for and found the wallet. He took out the money, tossed aside the wallet and walked away.
He went to a squalid tavern near the room he rented. The men in there had already summed him up as dangerous and gave him room. The young woman serving behind the bar was small-waisted and big-busted in a grubby blouse. She wore a beer-stained white apron over her dark skirt, and had a bold eye.
‘Give us a pint, Flora,’ he ordered. He tossed some coins on to the counter, took a long pull at the beer and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. This was only the second time he had seen Flora, but he knew what she wanted. He looked her over deliberately and saw her breathe faster.
‘
Quiet in here tonight,’ he said. There were only a dozen in the bar and Flora was listlessly polishing glasses. She moistened her lips and nodded.
‘
So come out wi’ me and see a bit o’ life.’
‘
I’ll have to ask him.’
‘
Ask be buggered. Tell him. I’ll make you a better offer than he will.’
She went to the publican, taking off her apron.
‘I’m knocking off for the night.’
He scowled at her.
‘Wotcha mean? Ye can’t walk out whenever you like.’
‘
Aye, she can,’ Jasper said.
The publican glared at him, but shrugged and turned his back. Flora tossed her head and reached for her coat. Outside, her arm in his, she asked Jasper,
‘What’s this better offer you promised?’
‘
You’ll find out.’
He took her to a music-hall, then to a succession of pubs and
bought her supper. At one point they peered in at a tattooist’s window. ‘Go on!’ she challenged him. ‘Get a picture done on your chest.’ He laughed but had it done: a naked female with the name Flora beneath. She almost blushed.
And at the end he took her to his bed.
* * *
Liza did not read the newspaper report of the murder in the alley, did not cross the path of Jasper Barbour, but one day his life would be bound up with hers.
SUMMER 1901, LONDON
Flora panted and moaned with passion. Her discarded clothes lay with Jasper
’s in a trail from the door to the big bed. A distant clock chimed one in the morning and he sighed and was still. Their coupling done she lay beside him. ‘What did you get tonight, then?’ she asked.
‘
A box wi’ a lot o’ jewellery and a purse full o’ sovereigns.’
‘
Let’s have a look.’ Flora rolled, naked, off the bed in a flailing of legs as Jasper watched. She padded downstairs to the hall, picked up the leather Gladstone bag and carried it back to the bedroom.
‘
Come here,’ Jasper said.
Flora glanced sideways at him, narrow-eyed.
‘You wait a minute.’ She up-ended the bag to empty its contents on to the carpet. ‘Ooh! Look!’ She picked out a gold necklace with a ruby pendant and slipped it over her head. The jewel gleamed in the valley between her breasts. ‘There’s some good stuff here.’ She shook the purse and counted the coins that fell out: ‘Twenty!’
Jasper reached for a bottle that stood by the bed, pulled out its cork with his teeth and drank from the neck. Now Flora climbed on to the bed again.
‘What can I have?’ she wheedled.
‘
No jewellery, I’ve told you that afore. If you go waltzing around wi’ diamonds hung all over you, people would wonder.’
Flora pouted, and reached out a hand to fondle him.
‘Well, can I have a housemaid in here to do some o’ the work about this place? Every house in the street has a maid and some o’ them has a cook an’ all.’
Jasper had made — stolen — a lot of money over the last two years, and a few months before, they had moved into this house, detached and with rooms for servants. It was one in a street of middle-class dwellings, the homes of solicitors, accountants, a doctor or two. Now he said,
‘No maid. I won’t have one because there’s too much to be seen. Gawd knows what she’d find when she was cleaning.’ Most of his loot he sold to a fence and banked the proceeds, but some items he kept. There was a handsome clock, an oil painting of a nude, and others.
Flora tried again:
‘The neighbours might talk ‘cause we haven’t got anybody.’
‘
No, they won’t. Not them. They’ll keep themselves to themselves like they always do. You just smile nicely and say, "My husband works in the City," in your posh voice, and they’ll be happy. Now, come here.’ And he dragged her down to him.
*
* *
‘Why, they’ve not been properly married for years!’ Ada’s voice was lowered but Cecily, standing in her father’s study, could hear the maid clearly. She stood still, dressed in only a thin robe but warmed by the morning sunlight streaming through the windows.
Jane, newly up from the country and being shown the ropes by Ada, said
‘Ooh! Really?’
‘
Well, they’ve got separate rooms. He’s always going off for days at a time. He’s been in France for the past week, supposed to be on business. I know what sort o’ business
that
is. And she has men come here. They stay in one of the guest rooms so it all looks right and proper, but we’ve seen them going back to it in the mornings.’
‘
When the cat’s away ...’ Jane sniggered.
‘
... get another Tom,’ Ada finished. They both laughed, then she went on, ‘That’s done.’ They had lit the fire in the breakfast room and now returned to the kitchen.
Cecily was no more than irritated. She had overheard that kind of conversation more than once over the years. She knew that whatever her parents did was right, and those who whispered behind their backs were prissy or envious. Now she decided that if
she
ever had the ordering of this household Ada would go. She looked in the bookcase, found the volume she wanted and carried it upstairs to the schoolroom. It had once been the nursery, but the nurse had long since departed and Cecily, now fifteen, was taught by a governess. The latest in a succession of appointments was Miss Estelle Beaumont. She had told her pupil to write an essay on the Norman Conquest but the subject bored Cecily. She had other things to do with her time so she would copy out a chunk of the encyclopedia.
Estelle Beaumont was slender, comely, shy and of good family, but she was without money and had been alone in the world since the death of her father. In the schoolroom that morning she read the hastily written essay and ventured,
‘It is — scribbled, rather.’
‘
Well, you’ve read it so it’s clear enough,’ Cecily said carelessly.
‘
And it seems to be a copy of the entry in the encyclopedia.’