Secrets and Lords. Justine Elyot
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was not a profitable line of speculation. She shut it down and forced herself to concentrate on conferring a high shine upon the poker and the shovel instead.
The only person to come and crouch beside her was Jenny.
‘Next room,’ she whispered. ‘Grate’s looking lovely, too, that’s a nice job you’ve done.’
Only because she had displaced all her thoughts about Charles into hard work, Edie realised. The next task might not absorb her so thoroughly.
She picked up her trug and tried to walk primly out of the room without looking at the indolent Lord in his chair of state, but at the last minute she flicked him a sideways glance and saw that he was watching her.
She lifted her chin higher and stared ahead.
‘Dinner at eight again? I’ll look forward to it,’ he drawled as she hurried through the door.
‘What was all that? Why are you flirting with him?’ hissed Jenny, once they had attained the freedom of the corridor.
‘Flirting with him! I’m doing no such thing. I didn’t even look at him, didn’t even answer his question.’
‘To him, that’s flirting. The more you run, the harder he chases. The worst thing you can do is ignore him.’
‘But that makes no sense. Are you saying that I should, should … make sheep’s eyes at him and then he’ll lose interest and pursue some other poor girl? Perhaps I should offer myself to him. Is that what I should do?’
Her agitation seemed to quell Jenny’s suspicions, but she did not sound entirely convinced when she said, ‘I’m sorry. You weren’t flirting, I know that. But I’d make sure I was never alone in a room with him if I was you.’
He ruins girls. He could ruin me.
Carrie, the indisposed housemaid, was better and so Edie was not called upon to serve the family at dinner that night.
Instead she sat in the kitchen with the cook, the scullery maids and various low-level male staff, drifting in and out of their conversation while she stitched at a rent she had made in her sleeve.
‘You’re accident-prone, you, aren’t yer?’ remarked Mrs Fingall, tiring of some talk about how Lady Mary had reacted to a mail delivery that morning.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Edie. ‘I’m fearfully clumsy. Have been from a child.’
‘Perhaps service ain’t for you,’ suggested the cook. ‘All that precious china up there. Clumsy people ought to keep away from it. Gawd, ain’t you never sewed before? You’re making a hash of that too. Here, let me.’
She sat beside Edie and took over the operation, her sausage fingers surprisingly deft with the needle.
‘Little bird tells me,’ she said in a low voice once the youngsters had started joshing each other about sweethearts, ‘that one or two fellas round here is sweet on you.’
‘Oh, no,’ protested Edie, wanting to get up and run away, but trapped by the thread that Mrs Fingall held taut.
‘I’m sure you’ve been warned about our Sir Charlie,’ she carried on. ‘So I won’t repeat what’s already been said. But Ted’s a lovely lad. A real prize. Do you think you could look kindly on him?’
Put on the spot, Edie could not pluck one single word from the air.
She swallowed and shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again.
‘Oh, I am not here for … for that kind of thing,’ she whispered.
‘Of course not. And quite right too. Just, you know, if you ever was so inclined … you could do a lot worse.’ She winked.
A bell rang and Edie glanced up at the complicated system of pulleys and levers that hung on the far wall.
‘Sir Thomas for you, Giles,’ Mrs Fingall called out.
The footman leapt up from the table and dashed away.
‘I’d get to my bed if I were you, dear,’ said Mrs Fingall, cutting the thread with her teeth and tying a final knot. ‘They’ll be finished at dinner soon and they won’t need you for anything more.’
‘Yes, I think I will,’ said Edie, eager for some solitude.
Alone in the attic, she looked out of the window and thought about how far she was from home, in more senses than the strictly geographic. She had never realised how easy her life was, nor how free she had been compared to most women. And not just the servants either. Lady Mary was discontented, straining against the yoke of her father’s expectations for her. Most women lived in prison. She had heard it said but had never understood it as fully as she did now.
She sat on the bed, pulled her knees up to her chin and thought of Sir Charles. It was different for him. He could do as he liked and nobody called him to account. It made her angry, made her want to seek him out and slap his face.
But, of course, that was impossible.
What about Lady Deverell? Was she the most imprisoned of all, forced to play a role for the rest of her life, even though she had fled the stage? If only she could ask her. If only things could be simple.
The thunder of feet on the back stairs drove her to undress quickly and slip into bed, where she feigned sleep before she could be questioned on anything further.
‘Sir Charles wants her,’ she heard Jenny say.
‘Do you think she’ll fall for him?’
‘They all do, don’t they?’
A sigh.
‘If only he’d fall back,’ said Verity. ‘But he never does.’
‘Surely Lord Deverell’d kick him out if he got another girl in the family way.’
‘Maybe. Remember how it was when they found out about Susie?’
There was a collective shudder.
‘You could hear the shouting right across the lawns.’
They fell silent then and Edie waited, curled up on her side, until each body creaked into its bed and the candle was snuffed.
As the girls drifted into sleep, Edie thought back to Mrs Fingall’s words at the trestle table. Could she think of looking kindly on Ted?
Ted.
It would not do to be mooning over a chauffeur. He was lovely, of course, but no doubt he was the same with all the girls. He was a natural flirt, that was all.
Besides, there was to be none of this lovey-dovey frippery for Edie Crossland. She had not spent the last seven years wedded to the Women’s Suffrage movement to be swept off her feet by a fellow in a peaked cap who dropped his aitches. It was inconceivable.
No, he was a helpful friend, and that was as much as he could be. Love was the silly trap into which so many good women fell. It was not going to catch her.
And why was sleep staying so stubbornly away tonight? An hour ago, as she toiled up the back staircase, she had been fantasising about her old bed with its pile of pillows and patchwork throw. Every limb ached, her feet were blistered and her eyelids were gritty with the day’s exertion, and yet her mind would not let her be.
It persisted in going back over the emotions of the last forty-eight hours, so that she swirled in a vortex of fear, exhilaration, curiosity, humiliation, attraction.
The narrow bed was less than comfortable, and the air of the high-up room was thick and humid. She needed to clear her head.
Slippers and dressing gown on, she stole out of the stifling dormitory and down the uncarpeted