August 1947
Things was…simple for a bit (Doris was saying, sitting next to Audrey on the sitting-down log as the sunlight was fading over Patchley House and Park).
Me and Emily, we wasn’t—we was young and we was friends more than anything.
Not even that really. Sometimes we’d go a day or a week and she’d not come looking for me at all.
But she’d kiss me when she were in the mood, and each time she did, it was like a gift.
Like something she’d saved up just for me.
They started winding up evacuation in forty-four, and since I was eighteen by then I was one of the first ones back. It was good to see the family again, though only one of my brothers made it home from the front. Still, it’s not that you want to hear about, is it? It’s this house.
(It was not, Audrey had long since suspected, really the house that was interesting to her, but she let Doris talk.)
I missed it, you know, when I first got home.
I’d not been as young as some of the others but I’d still grown into a bit of a country girl.
Got used to the trees and the grass and having sheep and cows and horses just a little ways off from when you wake up in the morning.
We wasn’t far from the Thames, where I come from, but—well—walking by the river at Patchley and walking by the river in Wapping ain’t the same thing now are they?
And I missed…I suppose I missed the house, and everything that came with the house.
Which is why when I was twenty-one, I come back.
Service was good work in them days. Not so good as it used to be, of course. The Downton Abbey days was gone and we’d not see that world again, but folk still needed maids, and I was a good one. A good enough one that they took me on at Patchley.
The train ride down was different than the one from thirty-nine.
I was bigger for a start, and the trains had been nationalised so it was British Rail that took me to Tapworth this time, and there was no little evacuee boy sitting opposite me.
There was just me, on me tod, with a suitcase not much different from the one I’d had with me the first time around.
There was no little line of us neither, no welcome from the master of the house.
Just the housekeeper—Mrs. Loris her name was, she’d been there while I was a kid and all, and she’d liked me well enough back then.
Remembered me when I come back, too. Said as I’d always been a good girl and that she knew I’d do well.
Got to sleep in the big house, then. Below stairs. The room weren’t that much better than I’d had in the Lodge but it felt different. Closer to the heart of things.
And I was close. Not touching close—I weren’t a lady’s maid, just a housemaid—but I’d set the family’s tables and turn down their beds.
I’d be there in the background—seen but not heard was the rule for children when I were a girl and it was the rule for servants when I were a young woman, and I don’t think it’s changed much since.
It was hard, them first few weeks, because I knew my place and my duties, but every now and then—maybe more often than that now I look back—I’d be in the room with her, with Emily, and she’d look at me.
Though there was normally company of one sort or another, she’d look at me with those knowing-too-much eyes of hers, and she’d smile.
Of course, she smiled at everybody.
I remember it was shooting season. A devil for the shooting was Sir Arthur, and Emily was no slouch with a shotgun herself.
A party was up from, well I think it was London, though if I’m honest they didn’t tell the likes of us, and we was all of us working double time to look after them.
They’d go out in the morning, come back with the kills, and dine on game in the evening.
’Course what with meat needing to hang that weren’t normally the same game, but most sportsmen don’t know much about cooking so they didn’t seem to mind the difference.
They was having a game pie that evening.
Nice thing about a pie is it’s basically a stew in a crust so you can use birds as hasn’t been hung for so long, or the ones what’s been gut-shot that you wouldn’t want to leave around anyway.
I didn’t cook it, didn’t even help to cook it—that was the cook and the kitchen-maids’ jobs—but I set the table ready so’s there’d be a centrepiece when the guests came in.
And that’s when I heard her.
“Hello, nymph.”
I’d just got time to put the pie down nice like before I dropped it.
And when I turned around I saw her—really saw her, not just cross-the-room saw her.
She was dressed in tweeds for the hunt and she’d got a brace of birds over one arm.
I reckon they was grouse, though I weren’t so good at telling one bird from the other in them days.
Gone too city in my time at home. “Hullo,” I said, like I were fourteen again and I’d just caught her throwing rocks at frogs.
“I thought it was you.” She came closer. There was a swagger to her. She’d always had a swagger, but it’d grown with her. Spilled off her like the sea off a mermaid. “My God you’ve barely changed.”
“Neither’ve you,” I said. And it was true. In a way. But also not true. She was everything she’d been and more. And I remember wondering if this was what the first Mrs. de Winter had been like when she were alive. This picture of everything a woman could ever want to be.
“The uniform suits you. Do something with these, will you?” She tossed me the birds underarm and I caught them. They’d not been dead long—I could feel they were still warm under my hands, and the blood was still wet where she’d shot them out the sky.
I nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
“Oh don’t yes ma’am me, nymph.” She was closer now. Closer than was normal for a servant and mistress, though not so close as I’d have wanted. “We used to be friends, didn’t we?”
There was something about the way she said the word friends that made me feel queer. “Yes m—yes Miss Branningham.”
“Please, call me Emily.”
I looked down, not wanting to make eye contact. Or not wanting to want to. It weren’t my place, though her eyes were beautiful and terrible, like the first storm of a hot summer. “Don’t seem right, miss.”
And she was closer again, taking the birds back out of my hands. “Of course, how thoughtless of me. And I’ve made you get blood all over your fingers. You must think me quite boorish.”
“No, miss.”
Without much care, she set the grouse aside, which meant now they were bleeding onto the white tablecloth and it’d need to be reset, though I reckoned Mrs. Loris’d understand. I’d only been there a little while and she’d already told me many times to watch out for the young mistress’s fancies.
“Still, won’t do to have you go about your duties dishevelled.”
She took my hand then, turned it palm up. There weren’t that much blood on it to be honest, but she was looking down on it like it was a wounded mouse.
“It’s not a worry, miss,” I told her. “Really.”
“Even so.” She began to smooth the blood from my palm with her thumb. She was wearing these soft leather gloves, and her touch sent a shiver through me. “It’s the least I can do.”
If that was the least she could do, I was a little worried what the most was. “My hands is easier to clean than your clothes.”
“Pish.” She shook her head dismissively. “This is my shooting getup anyway. Made to get dirty. Whereas you”—she raised my hand to her lips, smeared just a touch of blood across her mouth—“you should be taken care of.”
“I’m meant to be taking care of you, miss.” It weren’t exactly true. I was mostly meant to be taking care of the table, though that was shot to buggery if you’ll pardon my language, what with the dead birds and everything.
“When we were girls we took care of each other.”
I didn’t think that was really how she saw it. But I liked the idea. “That was years ago.”
“And you’ve never thought of me since?”
The right thing to do, I knew, was not to look up at her. But I did. And then I had nothing. “Every day.”
She smiled again. Blood mingling with her lipstick. “I think I would rather like to kiss you again.”
And I’d got no words. I never did when I was with her. I just nodded, and maybe smiled back, just a little.
So she kissed me. And it wasn’t like the first time, when we was barely more than kids.
Nor even like the last, when it was her way to say goodbye as I went off to London.
There was a fire in it that I’d always known was part of her but that’d got stronger in the years between, turned into something that melted me. That near broke me.
She was pulling me to her with a strength I’d not expected and I felt myself doing the same, and some little voice at the back of my mind was reminding me that I had work to do and that she was the master’s daughter and that no good would come of it.
But a much louder one at the front was telling it to shut up and just let me have this.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a good life.
I’ve had my joys and my tears and my in-betweens.
But where I come from you don’t think you’ll get the magic, and that’s what Emily was giving me, what she was pouring into me.
What made me feel like I really could be some nymph out the ocean what walked ashore and took a human girl away with her.
Somewhere I lost my balance and letting go of her—though I’d’ve given anything to not let go of her—I reached back to steady myself and I knocked the stand what I’d put the pie on, and it toppled over with this awful crash.
The pie split open, though it was so dense that the filling stayed mostly inside. She used to make a great pie, did cook.
“Ah,” Emily looked down at the mess, then at me. “That might take some explaining. Don’t worry, Daddy will understand.”
I weren’t sure what to say. My lips were still almost stinging from kissing her so hard, and I couldn’t quite think of anything except kissing her again.
She reached past me and broke off a piece of the pie and popped it into her mouth. “Waste not, want not,” she told me. And then she left.
I had to tell Mrs. Loris what happened. Parts of what happened, at least. That the young mistress had come in with a brace of birds while I was setting the table, and that she’d startled me and that’d led to the pie getting knocked but that I was very sorry and that I hoped how she wouldn’t dismiss me though I’d understand if she did.
She took me through to the pantry and sat me on a stool.
“What happened?” she asked again.
“I told you,” I told her. “And Miss’ll back me up, I swear.”
“No, I know that.” She looked grave. And she had a good line in grave looks, did Mrs. Loris. “But how did she—how did she startle you, exactly?”
“I just wasn’t expecting her.”
She didn’t say anything. Didn’t move. She just waited.
“I swear.”
“Very well.” She pulled up a stool of her own and sat opposite me. “And you don’t have to say anything else. But please listen.”
So I listened. Though in the end I didn’t much like what I was listening to.
“I have known Miss Emily all her life,” Mrs. Loris said, “and she has always been a girl with certain…qualities. She can be very charming and very persuasive. But if she had”—and she took a deep breath here—“if she had persuaded you into anything, you should know that you would not be the first and that you will certainly not be the last.”
The little voice in the back of my head said it’d told me so, but the bigger voice at the front didn’t want to hear it. “She didn’t persuade me of anything,” I told her. “Honest.”
I don’t think she believed me. But she was a kind woman so she left it there. She just said, “As you say.” And then she got up to go.
Except before she did, she had one more question. Though not one she expected me to answer.
“Are you in love with her?” she asked me. “You don’t have to decide right now, just—know it will be much harder, in the end, if you are.”
Then she left me. And I sat there on my stool, thinking about what she’d said, wondering if I was.
Which was a silly thing to wonder. Because I always had been.