Chapter 4
Fanny Murray’s, the next day
The door banged open before dawn.
A hand seized her upper arm and hauled her from the truckle bed. The grip bit into the soft part above her elbow. She stumbled, found her feet. Lagging only worsened it.
“The mistress is waiting,” Derek growled.
He smelled of wet wool and last night’s gin.
The corridor outside was narrow and close; lamp smoke clung to the plaster.
A girl in a wrapper peered from a doorway, then shut it quick.
They went up one flight, then another. Her bare toes caught the edge of a stair; he jerked her upright without looking back.
At the end of a carpeted landing, he rapped twice and pushed a door open without waiting.
The room was warm, red, deliberate. A long settee. A table with a tea service, steam ghosting from the spout. A pair of stockings lay over an upholstered chair back. The air smelled of roses.
The woman who bought her sat at a small escritoire by the window, hair pinned high, wrapper tied neat. She held a cup in one hand and a folded paper in the other. The man dragged Winnifred two paces inside.
“Unhand her,” the woman said, without raising her eyes. “You will not mark what I paid for.”
The man released his grip at once. Blood rushed back under Winnifred’s skin in a painful prickle.
“Close the door,” the woman added. “Stand there.” She flicked two fingers to a rug by the hearth. “Not you,” she said to the man when he moved. “Behind her. Where I can see your hands.”
He shifted. Winnifred felt him behind her left shoulder, close enough that his sleeve brushed her shift.
The woman laid the paper aside and looked up. Her gaze travelled from Winnifred’s hair to her bare feet, not lingering, not soft. She sipped her tea, set the cup down, and folded her hands.
She slid the folded paper across the escritoire and nodded to the settee table. “Read this. Aloud.”
The paper proved to be a bill from a wine merchant, items and sums in a neat clerk’s hand.
“‘Two dozen—’” She read the line, the next, the last. She kept her voice steady, careful over the long words. When she finished, she placed the paper where she had found it.
“And this.” The woman extended a magazine, folded back to show women’s fashion plates displayed at the top and bottom.
Winnifred leant in. “‘La mode de cette saison attirera très certainement l'attention des hommes sur les ...”
The woman’s brow twitched. “The schoolroom did not go entirely to waste.” She dropped the magazine to the floor. “Now—your history. Where did you call home?”
“Epsom Lodge,” she replied. “It was in Surrey.”
The woman’s cup rose. The squeeze came. Pain climbed the bone like heat up a poker.
“Was?”
“The bailiffs came for the estate. My father kept a house in Town as well.”
“Title?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Gentry, then.” The woman set down her cup. She poured a dark measure from a vial at her elbow, stirred it into the tea.
Another pause. The cup rose. The porcelain touched the woman’s lip. The squeeze came as the sip began: a single turn of pressure, not enough to leave a bruise if one were careful, enough to set a mark if one were not.
“You will find I value manners,” the woman said mildly. “If you have them.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The man’s hand eased.
She tapped the rim of her cup with a spoon—a bell before judgment. “Who had you before Maud Hatcher?”
“Mr King.”
“Mr King?” She let the title hang in the air a moment, then smiled without humour. “You’ll find I do not dress villains in courtesy.”
Winnifred kept her eyes on the carved mantel. The porcelain tilted again. The man’s hand tightened.
The woman set the cup down. “Do you play?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Winnifred replied.
“Of course, you do. Stand straight,” the woman said. “Chin level. Hands by your sides.”
Winnifred adjusted. The man’s hand followed to a new patch of skin as if on a string.
“Who sold you to King?”
Winnifred felt the question land in her belly. She fixed her eyes on the branch of the fire that popped and sank. The cup rose. The squeeze came on cue.
“My father,” she said.
“Does he drink?”
“Yes.”
“Cards?”
“Yes.”
“Debts?”
“Yes.”
She took another sip, unhurried. “How many steps led to my door?”
Winnifred glanced down and then away, as if the pattern might be on the carpet. “Two flights,” she said after a pause. “Twenty-three. The last creaks—near the top.”
“The hall boy’s collar?”
“Starched,” Winnifred said.
“Gloves?”
“He had none.”
“Eyes?”
“Blue.”
The woman’s mouth moved. Almost a smile. “You see what I require.” She set the cup down, then rested her fingers on the saucer. “Rules matter in this house. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you will learn them.” She slid open a drawer of the escritoire and took out a small leather-bound notebook. She opened the cover and turned it so the words faced Winnifred.
“Read it.”
Winnifred leant in. The hand was feminine and neat. Three lines.
“‘Rules for this house,’” Winnifred read. “‘One: be clean. Two: be prompt. Three: be clever without being seen to be clever.’”
“Good.” She took a pencil and added a fourth line and turned the page again.
“‘Four: answer when addressed.’” Winnifred lifted her head.
“Repeat them,” she said, picking up her cup.
“Be clean. Be prompt. Be clever without being seen to be clever. Answer when addressed.” The sip. The squeeze. The pain flared as she reached the last word. She held her breath.
“Again.”
She repeated the litany, ending a breath ahead of the cup. The man’s fingers hovered but did not close. She drew a clean breath.
The woman’s eyebrow moved the smallest amount. She set the cup down. “Once more.”
She spoke the words again, her timing perfect. The man’s hand fell away.
“Very good,” she said. “You learn quickly.”
She extended the notebook towards Winnifred. “This is yours. If you lose it, I will know. If you stain it, I will know. If you show it to anyone, I will know.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you like?” she asked suddenly.
Winnifred blinked. “Ma’am?”
“In the course of a day. A thing that is yours to like.”
Winnifred searched and found very little. “Music,” she said at last. “Reading. Quiet.”
“And what do you dislike?”
“Being watched,” she said, before she could stop it.
The woman smiled then—flat, almost kind. “Derek, take her to Mrs Ellison. She will be bathed, combed, and dressed, then start her lessons.”
She let the pause hang just long enough for the air to tighten. “She may eat after. Bread, not stew.”
“Yes, madam,” Derek said.
The woman rose. She was taller than Winnifred by a hand. “You will do as you are told,” she said. “You will listen twice before you speak once. You will keep my rules. And if you are clever without being seen to be clever—you will live well enough.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good girl,” she said. She stepped close, placed two fingers under Winnifred’s chin, and turned her face to the light. She smelled of violets and smoke. She smoothed a strand of hair back from Winnifred’s temple. The touch was neither cruel nor kind.
“My newest girl—unnamed. We shall remedy that.”
The tea cup sat empty on its saucer, no longer a signal for pain.
“Your Christian name?”
“Winnifred, ma’am.”
The woman shook her head. “Too long. Too heavy.”
Winnifred waited.
“This house is full of girls with pudding names,” she said, as if to herself. “Bridget and Anne and Harriet and Victoria. Squawking crows sitting all in a row.”
She tapped her lip with one finger, then uncorked the vial on the table and drank with practiced ease.
“You’ll be Catherine. It sits well on the mouth. Yes. Catherine you shall be.”
Winnifred’s father had gambled her away, Tom King had taken her virtue, and Maud Hatcher had sold her as livestock. Now her name had been erased.
She inhaled slowly, imagining her nose filled with the scent of brimstone.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Say it.”
“Catherine,” she said.
“Look at me.”
She lifted her chin and stared into the woman’s hard, cold brown eyes.
“My name is Mrs Murray. You may address me as madame or Mrs Murray.”
The curtsey came before she thought, easy as it had been in another house, before another mistress.
When she rose, Mrs Murray was still watching her.
“Madame, I am pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is Catherine.”