Secrets and Lords

Dinner in the servants’ hall had been surprisingly heartening, most of the staff having secret sympathetic smiles for her for her misfortune in getting on Mrs Munn’s bad side so soon. Nobody asked any awkward questions and only a couple of the girls looked askance at her when she came out with an overly London turn of phrase.

She had been sent on an errand after tea, a kind of test of her knowledge of the house’s geography. Unfortunately she had failed.

The first footman, Giles, had found her wandering about in the East Wing, wringing her hands as she passed the same door for a third time.

‘Hey,’ he said, appearing from behind a door – one of the family bedrooms, if she wasn’t mistaken. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I don’t know where I am,’ she said helplessly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Let me show you back to the basement. Too many stairs in this place, that’s the problem. Don’t worry. I was the same when I started here.’

‘How long have you been here?’ she asked, following him along yards and yards of crimson carpet patterned with gold fleurs-de-lys.

‘Couple of years,’ he said vaguely. ‘Straight after I demobbed.’

‘Gosh, were you in the trenches?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a bit different to that here.’

He turned around and gave her a very odd smile.

‘Yes. In some ways,’ he said.

No more was spoken until they reached the kitchen.

But now Edie was in best black-and-whites, listening to Mrs Munn’s pep talk on how to behave when serving dinner guests.

She felt like breaking in and telling the woman that she’d been to enough dinners to know what was done and not done, but she had to endure the sermon without interruption.

In the background, Ted was eating a chicken leg and grinning at her.

It was too bad of him – Edie was flustered enough already and when he winked at her she had to look away and block him from her mind.

She was already a little feverish at the prospect of being in the same room as Sir Charles again. What was this peculiar fascination he held for her? She had never been drawn to such characters before. The thought that Jenny might be accurate in her surmise that he would notice her and try to seduce her made her feel alternately hot and cold all over.

By the time Mrs Munn’s talk was through, Edie felt an uncomfortable band of sweat beneath the elastic of her cap. All she could think of was the way he had looked up at her from the forecourt below, a blend of curiosity and something else, something she had never thought much about because it frightened her.

The trap. The thing that caught so many good women and took them out of the world, where they could have forged a path of their own.

She thought about this all the time she helped to lay the table, placing forks within forks and spoons below spoons. Jenny showed her how to fold the napkins ‘the Deverell way’ but she was clumsy and could not manage to pleat them properly, so she was sent to set out the glasses instead.

Cars had been pulling up outside the house all evening. Ted Kempe had made several journeys to and from the station as well.

She could hear the muffled voices from the reception room beyond and she tried to make out what people might be saying, but it was too hard. Now and again she heard the fruity, theatrical tones of Lady Deverell, followed always by laughter. This made her knees weaken. Sir Charles’s voice was distinctive too, but he didn’t seem to amuse quite as much.

Stanhope, the butler, sailed into the room just as the last piece of crystal was set in place.

‘Take your positions,’ he muttered.

Like frilled centurions, Edie and Jenny stood guard by the table, with four other servants, while Stanhope threw wide the large double doors on the far side of the room to announce dinner.

There were twenty-four at table and Edie found a vicarious interest in looking at the gowns and jewels as they shimmered past, adorning pale aristocratic flesh.

She did not know the woman on Sir Charles Deverell’s arm, but she saw him cast the quickest little dart of a glance in Edie’s direction before pulling out his companion’s chair.

Lady Mary was gorgeous in royal-blue satin overlaid with net, beaded and jewelled at the neckline and on the sleeves. She was transparently a female version of her brother, his dark looks softened and made sleek on her smaller canvas.

The man who limped in behind her must be the other brother, Sir Thomas. He had a thin moustache that did not look as if it had much more growth in it and his eyes were tired and hooded.

And then – yes, it could only be Lady Deverell, in sweeping floor-length emerald silk that swished about her and was overlaid with a cloud of black tulle. The emeralds at her throat and in her tiara set off the deep red of her hair, while swirls of black beads decorated her bodice and the hem of her skirts. She was like a creature from another world, and yet she was so familiar that Edie’s throat tightened and ached.

Lord Deverell, at her side, was a grizzled, faded nobody.

Edie felt a blush of transferred shame, as if all the gossip that must inevitably be attached to their marriage had infected her. But she was nothing to do with it.

The guests were mainly elderly, it seemed, with a sprinkling of younger people, perhaps their children. Everybody was talking about the grouse and salmon seasons, so perhaps they were fellow landowners from the local area.

She could not take her eyes off Lady Deverell, who smiled as brightly as the electric lamps at the theatre, dazzling the candlelight into a dim second place. But her smile was strange, not quite natural. At times it almost looked as if it wavered at the edges of her lips and then it found renewed purpose and flashed again in its full glory. Her eyes wandered, frequently settling on Sir Charles, who seemed to know a lot about their baffling topic of conversation and held the floor with effortless authority. She leant towards him when he cut across or contradicted his father and gave him an extra gleam of her teeth. She was amazingly beautiful.

Lady Deverell looked towards her, sharply, as if she had noticed Edie’s unbroken gaze. Edie dropped her eyes and looked instead at Jenny, who signalled that they were to serve the soup which had been brought up from the kitchen.

When she reached the table, Lady Deverell was still looking at her, but not hostilely now. She had a distant, dreamy kind of look upon her face, but it disappeared when somebody asked her about her jewels, whisking her back into the social slipstream.

Edie had been consigned to the end of the table, serving six of the elderly guests, but even at this distance Lady Deverell’s radiance reached out to her. Her hand shook and she could barely breathe.

‘Be careful, girl,’ snapped a dowager in pink and black lace.

A splash of soup had escaped the ladle and spotted the cloth.

‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ blurted Edie, desperate not to draw attention to herself.

The tiny contretemps had reached the notice of Sir Charles, however, for Edie became hotly conscious of his eye upon her. If only he would look away.

She avoided his gaze as studiously as she could, attending to her other guests, but when she glanced back up, he still watched her.

Her grip on the ladle slipped and it fell with a clatter back into the tureen.

Lord Deverell frowned and several ladies tutted, their jewels flashing as they turned to grimace at each other.

Edie apologised again, on the verge of tears. This was all a terrible mistake. She would catch the mail train back to London and tell papa she was sorry, she had been wrong and he had been right, could she now take back her old life, please?

‘Leave her be.’

The voice was rich and commanding and it belonged to Sir Charles.

‘She is new, I think. Isn’t that so?’