Secrets and Lords

‘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 back stairs, as quietly as she could. At first, she had no notion of where she might wander, but it soon occurred to her that she could find Lady Deverell’s room and stand, albeit divided by the door, in the close presence of that fascinating woman.

She had had the opportunity to drink her in at yesterday’s dinner, but today had brought disappointingly few glimpses of the red-haired beauty. She had watched her cross the lawn in her riding habit, head low and stride determined. How much better, though, to perhaps see her, through a keyhole, in repose. The mask she wore every day would be stripped away and she would see the woman behind it, unadorned and unshielded.

Edie slunk on silent feet along the confusing maze of corridors she had negotiated earlier in the day, trying to remember which had led where.

A wrong turn took her to the library, and she was at once thrilled and soothed by its familiar bookish smell, naturally drawn to the shelves where she squinted to make out the gold lettering on the spines. But the night was too cloudy and the light from the arched stained glass windows too dim as a consequence.

There would be no reading in here tonight.

She found at length the right staircase and the corresponding corridor and walked along it swiftly, taking no notice of portraits and busts that might otherwise interest her, until she was in the wing that housed Lady Deverell’s private rooms.

Did she sleep with Lord Deverell? He had a private bedroom and dressing room at the far end of the same corridor. She knew this was a usual arrangement in the grandest of the old family houses, but it struck her as strange. Did they make appointments for love? Or were the separate rooms a mere formality, an age-old habit they did not possess the modernist urge to break?

Here was her door.

And, oh.

What were these noises coming from behind that door? Surely Lord Deverell was in London? He must have returned straight after the gathering, Ted driving him through the night back to his wife’s side. He must be in the grip of passion.

Edie put her hands to her furiously heating cheeks, guilt-ridden at her snooping now. She should not be here. She should go back to bed immediately.

And yet she found she could not come away from the luxurious moans and sighs that poured through the keyhole.