The Downstairs Maid Page 3

  She finished the ironing and was wondering what to do when the door opened and a young man entered. Emily frowned, because she didn’t like her uncle very much. He was her mother’s brother and Ma thought the world of him, but there was something about the way he looked at Emily that made her feel he wasn’t to be trusted.

  ‘Been doing the ironing, Em?’ he said and she scowled, because that was her father’s pet name for her. ‘Where’s Stella?’

  ‘My name is Emily. Ma is upstairs sleeping – she’s lost the baby.’

  Derek sat down abruptly, the colour washing from his face. ‘I told the stupid woman not to do so much. She ought to have had help while she was pregnant. If your father had anything about him he would have got a girl in to help out.’

  ‘I help sometimes.’ Emily was defensive, because no one was allowed to find fault with Pa.

  ‘What can you do? A bit of washing up or ironing? What about making the butter, scrubbing floors and all the rest of it? Stella works too hard and always has done. She should never have married that loser.’

  ‘Don’t talk about Pa that way …’ Emily was furious. She had the still-warm iron in her hand and without thinking just threw it at him. It missed and fell a few inches short but it shook him up. For a moment he stared at her, his eyes narrowed in anger.

  ‘You want to watch that temper, girl. What you need is a good smacking …’

  ‘You’re not my father.’

  ‘You little bitch …’ Derek lunged at her, grabbed her by the arm and hauled her across his knee. He slapped her hard several times and she gasped with pain but struggled and then nipped his leg through his trouser. He yelled and hit her harder.

  ‘Beast. I’ll tell Pa …’

  ‘Hurts your pride does it?’ he said and then his hand caressed her backside through her knickers. ‘Rub it better shall I?’ His hand had slipped beneath the cotton drawers and he was caressing her bottom. She felt a surge of revulsion mixed with anger and bit his bare arm hard. Derek shouted with pain and jerked. She rolled off his lap and ran across the kitchen, pulling open the back door and making a run for it. Her heart beat wildly as she made her escape, fleeing through the yard and out into the fields beyond. The air was cold and damp but she hardly noticed in her panic.

  Derek was horrid! She hated him now. What did he think he was doing, pretending to make it better after he’d hurt her? The thought of him touching her made her feel sick and dirty. She didn’t know why, but it had seemed wrong and nasty and she would have done anything to get away.

  Emily knew that she would have to be careful when her uncle was around in future. He was mean and spiteful and he would get his own back one of these days.

  If Emily had dared to tell her father he might have sent her uncle packing but she couldn’t do that, because it would cause another quarrel between her parents. Ma thought the world of Derek. He could never do anything wrong in her eyes and she was always telling Pa how much better her brother was at farming than he could ever be.

  All Emily had done was to throw the iron at him in a fit of temper, because he’d been rude about Pa – and he’d punished her. Pa never hit Ma whatever she said or did. He just looked at her in his hurt way and went out without speaking. Derek was a bully and he made her feel uncomfortable whenever he touched her.

  She wouldn’t tell on him, because Ma wouldn’t believe her and if Pa did there would be a row – so she’d keep it to herself, but she wouldn’t give him a chance to touch her again like that …

  She made a bolt for the open fields. Ma was sleeping and if Derek woke her up she wouldn’t want Emily around. All Ma really cared for was her brother and money – and, apparently, the son she’d lost. The son and heir that had made Pa lose his smile.

  The tears building inside her, Emily ran and ran. She climbed the stile at the edge of her father’s meadow, where the cows were feeding on the meagre grass, raced across the dividing lane and scrambled over the stile into the next meadow, where she threw herself down on the damp grass and wept. The ground was soaking wet, because it had been raining and heavy clouds scudded across the sky even now. It was getting darker and turning much colder. Emily was too miserable to notice. She didn’t know why she was so miserable but her life just seemed to get worse and worse. She’d always been able to run to her father, but now suddenly she felt alone, forced to stand up for herself.

  She couldn’t ever tell what Derek had done so she would just have to keep her secrets inside her head.

  Emily cried for a while longer and then sat up and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She was chilled because she didn’t have a coat but she didn’t want to go back to the house in case Derek was still there. Instead, she stood up and looked about her. She saw a youth riding on a pony and there were two smaller girls with him. It was almost dark now and she couldn’t see them properly until they came closer. Until this moment she hadn’t realised that she was on private land, but she remembered now that these fields belonged to Lord Barton. Pa had warned her not to play here but she hadn’t thought about it when she jumped over the stile from her father’s land into the lane and crossed it.

  She wondered whether to run away but curiosity made her stay where she was a little longer. Emily liked horses, but Pa just had a couple of heavy horses that pulled his plough and the wagon, Saracen and Whistler. She could see that the ponies the children were riding were beautiful; a grey with a silvery mane and two chestnuts. For a moment she felt a pang of envy as the well-dressed children rode up to her. The girls were both wearing riding habits, short jackets over long, divided skirts under which were some kind of trousers. The youth had tight-fitting breeches, long brown boots with the tops turned down and a tweed jacket that fitted to his shoulders and waist. His stock was white and he wore a black velvet cap on his head, his gloves of tan leather; in his hand he carried a riding crop. Emily had seen people dressed like that riding through the village now and then, and also on the road when Pa took her into Ely on the wagon, and she knew they were rich. Her head went up and she stared at the youth boldly, expecting to be told she was trespassing.

  ‘Hello, little girl,’ he said and to her surprise his tone was gentle. ‘Are you lost?’

  ‘I’m not a little girl,’ Emily said, her eyes sparkling with ire. ‘I’m ten and I’m not lost – I live just across the lane.’

  ‘She must be the Carters’ girl,’ the elder of the two girls with him said, looking at Emily curiously. ‘Have you been lying on the ground? Your dress is muddy and so is your face.’

  ‘She’s been crying,’ the younger one said in a tone similar to the youth, who Emily surmised must be her brother. ‘Are you in trouble, girl?’

  ‘I’m Emily. I just forgot where I was. I’ll go now.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the youth said. ‘I’m Nicolas. My father owns these fields – at least Granny does. Father had his own estate until we moved here.’

  ‘Why are you telling her that?’ the elder girl asked. ‘She’s just a common farm girl and nothing to us.’

  ‘Do you have to be rude, Amy? I’m just being friendly. Emily is clearly upset about something.’ He gazed down at her, kind but autocratic, seeing her as the common little girl his sister thought she was. ‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’

  ‘No thank you, I can manage.’ Emily looked at him proudly. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her, even though she’d been feeling sorry for herself a few minutes earlier. ‘I’m sorry to have trespassed …’

  She turned and ran back the way she’d come earlier. She was cold, dirty, humiliated and envious. The clothes those girls were wearing and their ponies told their own story; they were gentlefolk and she was a common farm girl. Emily had always known there was a difference but it had never been brought home to her in that way before.

  Nicolas had been kind and the younger girl might have been, had Emily given her the chance, but she didn’t want their kindness when she knew what they must be thinking of her. Looking
down at the dress her mother had washed and patched so many times that it was little more than a rag, Emily felt ashamed. Most of the girls in her school had dresses their mothers had mended more than once and she’d never really bothered what she looked like before, but the look in that posh girl’s eyes had made her squirm.

  Wiping the dirt from her face with the sleeve of her dress, Emily made a vow. One day she would have proper clothes – not the shapeless things her mother made on her treadle machine, out of remnants from the market or the cut-down dresses that came from second-hand stalls, but stylish clothes – like Miss Concenii had worn that day they visited Uncle Albert. She would have a big diamond ring too, though she loved the pretty, daisy-shaped ring of different coloured stones that was her bequest from Uncle Albert. Her father had shown it to her, telling her that it was a keepsake ring and had belonged to Uncle Albert’s mother. All the stones were a different colour and the first letter of each stone spelled the word Regard. ‘That’s a ruby, emerald, garnet, agate, ruby again and diamond,’ Pa had said, pointing to each stone in turn and then he locked the ring in a tin box in his rolltop desk with his other papers and important things. She could have it when she was seventeen but not before because it was too precious for a child to wear.

  The thought of her ring comforted Emily. At least she had something of worth, even if she did have to wear shapeless old clothes.

  She saw Bert coming towards her as she approached the farmyard. He was grinning in his vacuous way, heading towards the barn, but stopped when he saw her, lifting his greasy cap to scratch his head.

  ‘There you be, little miss. Your Pa be looking for you – and he bain’t pleased. He bain’t pleased ’cos you ran off and left your Ma alone in the house.’

  ‘Derek was there,’ Emily muttered but ran across the uneven cobbles towards the back door. The black paint was peeling off in lumps and it looked dilapidated in the fading light, as did most of the sheds and the house itself. Emily hadn’t realised how poor they were until now. She was used to the shabby interior and the chairs that didn’t match; they hadn’t mattered but suddenly they did and she felt resentful. How dare that posh girl look down her nose at her!

  As she opened the door and went in, she saw her father come downstairs with a tray. He’d taken some food up to her mother but by the looks of it she hadn’t eaten very much.

  ‘Your mother wants a cup of tea. Do you think you could manage that – or will you run off again as soon as I’ve gone?’ The tone in his voice was one that Emily hadn’t heard before and it stung her.

  Pa was cross with her. He was never cross with Emily usually, but he was now. She felt as if she’d been beaten black and blue as she stared at him.

  ‘Derek was here. Ma wasn’t alone. I didn’t mean to leave her alone.’

  ‘Well, if he was here he didn’t stay long. Why did you run off – he didn’t upset you?’

  Pa’s eyes were narrowed and angry. Emily was shivering inside but she lifted her head and gave him a proud look, then shook her head. She couldn’t tell him about that humiliating episode with her uncle.

  ‘I’m disappointed in you, Emily,’ her father said and his look of hurt bewilderment stung worse than anything that Derek had done. ‘I thought I could trust you to look after your mother while I’m working.’

  ‘You can, Pa. I promise I shan’t leave her alone again while she’s ill.’

  He looked at her for a long moment and she’d never seen him so stern. ‘Well, I shall trust you this time, but I’ve got my eye on you, miss – let me down again and I shall have to punish you, Emily.’

  He never called her Emily. The name was a reproach, because she’d let him down.

  Her cheeks were flaming but she didn’t answer him back. She couldn’t tell him why she’d run off like that because it would cause more trouble in the house – and perhaps he wouldn’t believe her.

  Emily had always felt secure in her father’s love, but now she wasn’t quite sure. Ma had lost the son he’d wanted – Granny Sawle had told her so. Perhaps he was so disappointed that he no longer cared about Emily in the same way.

  Choking back her hurt, Emily went to fill the large copper kettle and set it on the range to boil. The outside of the kettle was blackened by use but the inside was clean because her mother scoured it out to keep it shiny. Emily hadn’t truly realised how hard Ma worked to keep things right, but in the next few days she was going to learn.

  She would learn to do everything Ma did, because she had to make Pa smile at her again. If he didn’t love her in the same way, Emily still loved him and she wanted things to be as they were before it all started to go wrong …

  Chapter 3

  Lizzie Barton listened to her mother and father having an argument. Lord Henry Barton disliked having had to come to live at his mother-in-law’s home and was unsympathetic when his wife complained about the way Lady Prior dictated to her.

  ‘If you hadn’t been such a fool we should never have had to sell the estate,’ Helen Barton said. ‘I don’t see why you should complain, Henry. I am the one who has to put up with Mama’s demands.’

  ‘Will you never allow me to forget? It isn’t as if I threw the money away at the card table. I was told the investment was sound …’

  Lizzie crept away, going up the magnificent carved mahogany staircase to the rooms she and her sister Amy shared, which were close to the schoolroom. Amy was two years older than Lizzie and she too resented the move to Priorsfield Manor, complaining that the house was old-fashioned and over-crowded with too many knick-knacks.

  Lizzie, by contrast, didn’t mind that they had come here to live at the manor, and she liked her grandmother, who seemed very old, the backs of her hands blue-veined. She wore lots of rings on her fingers, which flashed fire in the candlelight when they gathered in the big drawing room at night. The room was crowded with bits and pieces Granny had collected over her long life, but everything meant something to Lady Prior and she sometimes told stories about the curios that fascinated Lizzie.

  They often sat together in the afternoons, when Miss Summers, their governess, had finished lessons and gone home for the day. Miss Summers was a pretty young woman and her father was a farmer, quite prosperous for a man who worked the land, so Papa said when talking to Mama. She didn’t live in as the governess usually did, but cycled back and forth each day. She’d been away to a good school and Granny said that if she’d been a man she would probably have been a politician or a lecturer – but of course ladies didn’t do that sort of thing.

  Lizzie felt it was a pity that Miss Summers couldn’t be a politician if she wanted to be, but she wasn’t sure that she did, because she was wearing a ring on her engagement finger. Amy said she was going to be married soon and that, when she did marry, both Amy and Lizzie would go away to school instead of being taught at home. Lizzie wasn’t sure what she would feel about that, because although the boarding school was only in Cambridge, just over twenty miles away, they wouldn’t come home very often.

  Lizzie would miss her grandmother and the stories she told. She wouldn’t miss hearing her parents argue, but she’d begun to feel at home in the big, rambling old house.

  Of course Nicolas and Jonathan had both been away to school and Jon to college. He was the eldest and he would be finishing at college next year. Amy said that Jon would run the estate for Granny. Emily wondered why she didn’t ask Papa to do it for her, but perhaps she didn’t trust him because he’d lost most of his money in that silly bubble, as Mama called it.

  Papa wasn’t usually silly. In fact he was stern and whenever Lizzie did something wrong and was called to his study, she quaked in her shoes. Nicolas was always being called to account for getting into scrapes, but he didn’t seem to mind Papa’s temper – even when he got the cane.

  Lizzie loved Nicolas the best of all her family. She sometimes wished that she could live with just him and not see any of the others, but of course that wasn’t possible.

  Nicolas wa
s so kind. He’d been kind to that poor little girl they’d seen in the fields. She’d looked so awful, her face streaked with tears and her dress filthy where she’d lain on the muddy grass. She’d seemed so very poor to Lizzie, her boots scuffed and her dress patched so many times that it looked a mess.

  Mama complained that they were poor, but Lizzie had lots of pretty clothes in her wardrobe. For a moment she wondered if Emily would accept a dress from her, but then she remembered what Amy had said about giving things to the poor.

  ‘They only take advantage if you’re not careful, and if they don’t do that – they resent you for offering charity.’

  Amy had been so rude to the poor girl. Lizzie had felt ashamed for her sister, but Amy was always like that, thinking she was above everyone else.

  ‘Lizzie, dearest, will you do something for me please?’

  Lizzie forgot about the girl in the field as her grandmother called to her and she ran to her grandmother’s side. It was probably best not to send the girl a present, she had decided, because she would only think Lizzie was being condescending.

  She would probably be going away to school in the autumn and then she wouldn’t have much chance to go riding with Nicolas – and she wasn’t likely to see the farmer’s girl again.

  Chapter 4

  Emily was at the kitchen table baking, her mother upstairs seeing to the new baby. It was six years now since Ma had lost her first son, because the doctor had been late in coming and the birth too hard. Granny Sawle had done all she could for Emily’s mother, but she had not been able to save that baby, because it had come too early. This time, however, the doctor had been present and she’d given birth to a healthy boy. Ever since the birth Ma had been walking about the house looking like the cat that got the cream, a huge smile on her face. Her hair was still as dark as it had always been and a slight plumpness in the face suited her. Emily had expected her father to be delighted with his new son, but to her surprise he’d seemed distant and, as far as she knew, he’d hardly touched young Jack.