The Downstairs Maid Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Part One: 1907–1914

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Two: Spring – Christmas 1914

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Part Three: 1915–1917

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  She is a servant girl …

  When her father becomes ill, Emily Carter finds herself sent into service at Priorsfield Manor in order to provide the family with an income.

  He will be the Lord of the Manor …

  Emily strikes up an unlikely friendship with the daughters of the house, as well as Nicolas, son of the Earl. But as the threat of war comes ever closer, she becomes even more aware of the vast differences between upstairs and downstairs, servant and master …

  If you like Downton Abbey you’ll love this!

  About the Author

  Rosie Clarke was born in Swindon. Her family moved to Cambridgeshire when she was nine, but she left at the age of fifteen to work as a hairdresser in her father’s business. She was married at eighteen and ran her own hairdressing business for some years.

  Rosie loves to write and has penned over one hundred novels under different pseudonyms. She writes about the beauty of nature and sometimes puts a little into her books, though they are mostly about love and romance.

  Part One

  1907–1914

  Chapter 1

  ‘Under there and hide quick!’ Emily’s mother pushed her towards the kitchen table. A heavy chenille cloth hung down over the sides, almost touching the brownish red of the polished quarry-tiled floor and, once hidden beneath its folds, Emily could not be seen through the window. She hurried to obey, knowing that such a warning could only mean that the tallyman was on his way to collect money Ma didn’t have. ‘Don’t come out until I tell you – and keep quiet.’

  Emily scuttled into safety beneath the faded cloth she knew had once been her mother’s pride and joy. Bounded by the four legs of scarred pine, she felt safe, securely hidden from the enemy, her senses alert to danger. She heard Ma walk quickly into the pantry and held her breath. The tallyman wasn’t easily fooled. He would guess that they were hiding and he might bang at the door for ages, shouting threats through the letterbox of the ancient thatched cottage that was their home. Emily trembled at the thought, waiting for the ordeal to commence.

  ‘Mrs Carter, I know you’re there,’ the tallyman’s voice was pleasant at the start, coaxing and friendly. ‘It’s silly to hide, because you know the debt isn’t going to go away. All I’m asking is that you pay a shilling every week.’

  There was no answer. Emily’s mother never answered him, even though she could hear him perfectly well in the large, cool pantry. Whether she was as frightened of him as Emily was, Emily could not tell, because when Ma had a few pennies to offer she opened the door and invited him in for a cup of tea and a bun, but too often the jar on the mantel was empty and they had to hide and wait until Mr Thompson gave up and went away.

  Emily hated having to hide under the table, because it was stuffy and airless beneath the cloth. Sometimes she felt as if she couldn’t breathe, especially if the tallyman kept on banging at the door and she had to hide for ages. It was during these times that she would try to block out what was going on around her and think of nice things – like the day she’d been taken to see Pa’s rich uncle, Albert Crouch.

  Albert Crouch was as old as Methuselah, so Ma said, and when he died he was going to leave them a fortune. At least that’s what Pa had promised her years ago when Ma married Pa, but Uncle Albert didn’t seem to want to die. Ma said he’d taken against them because Ma hadn’t provided him with a male heir to follow Emily’s father. Pa said he could keep his rotten money and didn’t care whether his uncle left him a penny – but then, he didn’t have to hide from the tallyman.

  Emily had liked it at Uncle Albert’s house, because it was filled with pretty things, like the clock on the mantelpiece, which Pa said was French and bronze, and the cranberry epergne on the sideboard (Pa had one similar in his barn, but that was cracked, while Uncle Albert’s was perfect). For tea they’d had cakes and jelly with ice cream, as well as ham sandwiches.

  Uncle Albert had a housekeeper with a sharp tongue and she’d warned Emily to keep her feet off the antique furniture, because she didn’t want it kicked or scratched. The dining chairs were made of a dark polished wood. Pa had told Emily later that day that the wood was mahogany. The legs were curved inwards in a strange way and the back was square with bits of brass inlaid into the wood. Pa said they were called sabre-legged chairs, Regency, and worth a lot of money, which was why Miss Concenii thought them too good for children to sit on. Ma had taken exception to her speaking to Emily like that and they’d had words, which was perhaps why the invitation for tea hadn’t been repeated.

  Emily had thought how smart Miss Concenii was with her long dark hair swept high on her head and fastened with shiny combs. Her ankle-length dress was a pale silvery-grey and made of much better stuff than Ma’s Sunday-going-to-church dress. Her shoes were black and shiny with shaped heels and she wore a huge sparkly ring on the third finger of her right hand. Emily thought it looked pretty and on the train taking them home later that night, she’d asked her mother what kind of ring it was. Ma had sniffed and said it was a diamond and then she’d muttered something strange.

  ‘She’s no better than she ought to be and he might think he’s fooling us by calling her his housekeeper but we all know the truth.’

  When Emily asked Ma what she meant, she shook her head and looked angry. She’d refused to answer even when Emily repeated her question so she’d given up asking. It was just one of those things people thought a nine-year-old child shouldn’t ask. Emily was ten now and she still didn’t know why Miss Concenii was no better than she ought to be.

  The tallyman had started banging on the door and shouting at them. Emily put her hands over her ears to shut out the words, which she knew were abusive. Mr Thompson always started out by being polite but then he ended by yelling and swearing. Emily didn’t know what all the words meant, but she knew they were rude. She was trembling and feeling sick but she hunched her knees to her chest and kept as still as she could. If he saw the cloth move he would guess she was under the table and then he would just keep on and on banging. She forced herself to think of other things.

 
; Emily liked being ten. She was ten years old and the year was 1907 so she’d been born in the sixth month of the year 1897; the figures had a sort of ring to them and she was good at sums. She could add up in her head faster than Pa could with a bit of paper and a pencil. It was early October now and she ought to be at school, but her mother often kept her at home to help her, because she said she was having another baby. Emily had noticed she was getting fatter, but she wasn’t quite sure what having a baby meant.

  The vicar, who ran the Church school, charged the families of people who could afford to pay, but took poor children for free. There was a school in Ely that was entirely free, and all children under the age of thirteen were supposed to attend, but it was nearly four miles to walk and the bus fare to get Emily there every day would have been too expensive. Because Pa had a smallholding, he was supposed to pay three pennies a week for her to attend the vicar’s school, but sometimes he didn’t have enough money. If Emily didn’t attend, her father didn’t have to pay the three pennies, so when money was tight, Emily stayed home to help her mother. She wasn’t the only child to be kept off school to help out at home or in the fields, but most of her friends didn’t care; they would rather be at work earning a few pennies than at school.

  Emily hated it when she had to miss school. She liked the vicar’s house, which was almost as big as Uncle Albert’s. He had a lovely parlour with green brocade curtains at the windows. His furniture was shabby and old, but it was comfortable and Emily was sometimes invited for tea after school. The vicar’s wife was a plump, friendly lady who had three sons but no daughters and she always made a fuss of Emily. Emily often wished she could live in a house like Mrs Potter’s, but of course she always had to go home to her father’s cottage. She wouldn’t have minded that so much if her parents hadn’t quarrelled most of the time.

  Emily didn’t remember it happening so often when she was small but of late they always seemed to be at each other’s throats – and it was always over money. Joe Carter wasn’t much of a farmer, so Ma said, and she let him know he was a failure in her eyes. Stella Black had come from better things. She was the daughter of a Fen farmer. His land was in Chatteris and, according to Ma, much more fertile than the few acres Pa had inherited from his father.

  Pa’s smallholding was situated between the village of Witchford and Ely, a small market town, with the status of a city, and famous for its wonderful cathedral and rich history. At the vicar’s school they learned about Oliver Cromwell, who had cut off King Charles’s head in the name of democracy and then become a sort of king himself.

  ‘He allowed his men to destroy beautiful stonework in the cathedral,’ the Reverend Potter told them in accents of utter disgust. ‘The cathedral was begun in the time of Saint Etheldreda, and is one of the finest of its period. Cromwell was a bigoted man and though he may have been just in many ways, I cannot forgive him for his wanton destruction of such beauty.’

  The vicar knew a lot of stuff about history and books, and Emily enjoyed listening to him. Sitting under the kitchen table, waiting for the tallyman to stop banging at the door, she wished she was in class learning about history and sums and all the other things Reverend Potter taught them.

  The banging had stopped now. Emily was tempted to peep out from under the cloth, but she knew it wasn’t safe yet. The tallyman was crafty. He would make out he’d gone and then sneak back as soon as they came out of hiding. Emily counted to ten and then twenty. She could scarcely breathe under the table. Surely, it was safe to come out now? He must have given up and gone away, because she’d been here ages.

  Unable to bear the tension a moment longer, she crawled out from under the table and stretched, easing her shoulders. She went over to the deep stone sink with its one tap. Pa said they were lucky to have running water in the house rather than having to fetch it from the well. In Uncle Albert’s house there was a bath and a proper toilet with a chain that you pulled to flush it with water, instead of the wooden seat out in the privy that had to be cleared from underneath and stunk something awful in the summer.

  Emily thought that if you had to be no better than you ought to be to live in a house like Uncle Albert’s she wouldn’t mind being like Miss Concenii and having fancy chairs to sit on and a diamond ring to wear on her finger.

  As Emily turned on the tap to get herself a drink of water, an angry face appeared at the window and the tallyman banged on the glass.

  ‘I can see you, Emily,’ he shouted. ‘You tell your mother I’ll be back next week and if she doesn’t pay up, then I’ll take something from the house to cover what she owes me.’

  Emily shrank back, frightened by the red, angry face that glared at her once more before turning and stalking off. She filled a cup of water and was drinking it when her mother came from the pantry. Her face looked like blue thunder and she grabbed Emily by the shoulders, shaking her until her teeth rattled.

  ‘Why won’t you ever do as you’re told?’ she demanded. She suddenly let go of Emily and then slapped her across the face, making her stagger back and crash into one of the assorted chairs at the table. They had six wooden chairs, none of which matched the other. Pa was always buying things cheap from the cattle market in Ely and sometimes from other people. He said the things he bought would be worth good money one day, and now and then he sold something for a few bob or even a pound or two; those were the good times, because he would have money in his pocket and Ma could fill up her jar on the mantelpiece. She could pay the tallyman what she owed then and Emily didn’t have to stay off school or hide under the table.

  ‘It was hot under there and I couldn’t breathe,’ Emily said, her eyes smarting with the tears she was too proud to shed. Ma didn’t often hit her, but when she did it hurt. ‘I wanted a drink of water.’

  ‘You should have waited a bit longer. Now he’ll know I was here and next week he’ll ask for double.’

  Emily stared at her. Her cheek stung from the hard slap and she felt like crying but if she did Ma would shout at her again and call her a silly little girl. Emily wasn’t a silly little girl and she didn’t want her mother to be angry with her. So she just stood looking at the floor saying nothing, until the door opened and her father came in. Pa was a tall man with dark hair and broad shoulders. She thought he was handsome, even though her mother didn’t seem to like him much. He had a lean, craggy face and Emily adored him. She wanted to run to him and bury her face in his body, inhaling the scents of the horses, hay, cowsheds and milk, but if she did that her mother would accuse her of being her father’s spoiled baby.

  ‘What’s all this then?’ Pa asked and looked at Emily. She hung her head and didn’t answer.

  ‘I told her to hide from the tallyman but she came out too soon and he saw her – now he’ll ask for more next week and how am I to pay?’

  ‘I saw him on my way through the yard just now and gave him five shillings,’ Pa said. ‘I was lucky today. I sold an old lead pump for scrap and a set of chairs for twelve shillings.’

  ‘You should have given the five shillings to me,’ Ma said, looking annoyed. ‘I would have paid him two next week and kept the rest. How do you think I’m going to manage if you give all our money away?’

  Pa didn’t speak immediately. Emily wondered if he minded Ma nagging at him all the time. He never seemed to get cross and she knew he never raised a finger to his wife, which a lot of men did. She knew that because her best friend, Polly, told her that her father gave her mother a black eye most Friday nights, after getting drunk on his wages.

  ‘Well, maybe things are going our way at last, lass,’ Pa said. ‘I’ve heard from Uncle Albert’s lawyer. He passed away last week and I’m to go into Cambridge when it’s convenient and he’ll tell me what’s been left to me.’

  ‘Thank God!’ Ma cried. ‘I thought the old goat would go on for ever.’

  Pa looked at her as if he didn’t approve of what she’d said but he didn’t answer her back. He just sat down in his chair by the fire and unl
aced his boots, then took his pipe down from the mantelpiece. His tobacco jar was empty, because there was not often money enough to fill it, so he just sucked at his empty pipe and looked at Ma.

  ‘Pop upstairs and fetch me my Sunday coat down, Em love,’ he said. ‘I want a few words with your ma.’

  Emily nodded and shot out of the room. She closed the door on the stairs leading to the landing above, but even with it closed she could hear the raised voices and she shivered. Sticking her fingers in her ears so she couldn’t hear what was being said, she ran up the remaining stairs and down the hall to her parents’ room. She found Pa’s coat immediately but lingered a while so that they could get their argument over before she returned.

  Her throat felt tight and she wanted to cry but she knew crying wouldn’t do any good. She loved her father and her mother too, in her way, but it seemed that neither of them loved the other.

  Emily felt sad that Uncle Albert had died, even though she’d only met him once. He’d smiled at her, patted her head and given her two toffees wrapped in gold paper from his pocket. She’d liked him, even though Miss Concenii was no better than she ought to be, had a diamond ring Emily coveted, and didn’t like children sitting on her chairs.

  Emily was sorry that she wouldn’t see Uncle Albert again. She knew what it meant to pass away, because they’d buried Grandfather two years earlier and, although Emily hadn’t been taken to the funeral, she’d visited his grave with Ma since to place flowers there and say a little prayer. She couldn’t remember much about Grandfather now, except that he’d smelled peppery and had whiskers that scraped her chin. He’d left Emily his silver watch and chain, but Ma said it should have been Pa’s and she’d sold it when she needed some money. She didn’t even give Emily a penny for sweets; though Pa had brought her a packet of Tom Thumb drops a day or so later.

  ‘I’m sorry your ma did that, Em,’ he’d told her. ‘Your grandfather wanted you to have it to remember him by but it’s my fault for not giving your ma the living I promised her.’

  Pa always made excuses for Ma. He would stop her hitting Emily if he knew what happened, but Emily never told. She knew that if she did her mother would get her own back eventually so she just accepted the slaps and harsh words and got on with her life.