Chapter 10 - Vera #2
Vera dithered for a moment in the small entryway.
To her right was a small parlor with clean but worn furnishings that spoke of a lifetime of comfortable sitting.
No fire burned in the grate, and she moved quickly through to the doorway that led to a kitchen with a stone floor.
Here, at least, there was a fire, as well as the aforementioned girl.
She couldn’t have been more than two years old, with deep blue eyes set in a face smudged with soot and dirt.
Limp curls hung on either side of her face.
Still, she smiled and held her hands up to Vera in a silent request to be picked up.
Vera complied, finding the girl much too light for her liking.
She was grateful that Hortense was at her back. Where had this child come from?
“What’s your name?” Vera asked gently.
“Anne,” the girl warbled.
Vera shot a glance toward Hortense for guidance on how to proceed, but she’d momentarily forgotten that Hortense was only supposed to assist her and act as a chaperone. She had no more experience being a nurse than Vera did, and she’d not been hired to do so.
Vera straightened. “Hortense, please heat some water. If there’s tea to be found, we’ll have some.”
“I believe Lord—Dr. Winthrop put some in the basket.”
Hortense set said basket upon the kitchen table. At the fireplace, a heavy cauldron of water hung on an iron arm; the maid pushed it back so it would heat over the flames.
Vera turned back to the silent girl, who watched Hortense and Vera with wide, frightened eyes.
Her grubby hands clasped the front of Vera’s muslin.
The girl’s own dirty dress wasn’t a dress at all; upon further inspection, it appeared to be a man’s tunic that had been rolled up numerous times at the sleeves.
Vera frowned. There was so much she wished she could ask about the situation, but the girl couldn’t answer. Besides, she shouldn’t be the recipient of those questions. Perhaps Vera would have more answers when Stephen returned from upstairs.
“Well, let’s get you clean,” Vera said once the water over the stove began to steam.
There was a wide pot with a thick bottom in the corner that Vera suspected acted as a bathing tub for the house.
Hortense set it on its side and rolled it to the center of the room, then went out the back door.
Vera was left to stare down at the little girl she held.
The little girl stared back, regarding Vera with patient interest.
When she returned, Hortense filled the bathing tub with water and rummaged in a small supply cupboard before emerging with a large block of soap and two worn towels.
Thus prepared, Vera attempted to set the little girl into the pot.
But instead of frightened silence as she expected, the girl let out an earthly howl.
“I don’t want to. No bath. No wash!”
Vera jolted from the sheer volume; she looked at Hortense for assistance, but Hortense wore a similar wide-eyed expression.
“Anne, if you behave nicely, there are muffins for after your bath. Won’t it be nice to have a muffin with jam?” Vera asked soothingly.
“Want muffin now!”
“If you behave…” Vera began again.
“Where’s muffin?” the girl shrieked.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a little water—”
But the girl howled, “Don’t want bath. Don’t want.”
“I’m sorry, but you simply must. You’re very dirty.”
“No!”
“Anne,” Vera tried again. “I’m sorry but –”
“Oh, enough of this,” Hortense said briskly. She strode over to the squalling girl and, in one fluid motion, yanked the foul tunic from her body.
The howling didn’t abate; it was only muffled for a moment while the tunic passed over the girl’s face.
Vera was surprised to find the little girl naked beneath the shirt. She had no bloomers, no pelisse. Hortense lifted the girl and deposited her into the water.
Her yowling increased by what felt like a hundred decibels. Instead of one angry cat, now there was a chorus of them.
“Vera,” Hortense prompted. “The soap, please.”
Vera did as she asked—Hortense was in no position to reach for anything. She had one hand firmly on the wiggling girl’s shoulder, and the other dumped mugfuls of water over the screeching girl’s head.
Vera gathered the soap and a small rag and dunked them both into the water—which was already growing cloudy.
She knelt and briskly chafed the soap with the rag.
Vera took courage from Hortense’s gentle but firm ministrations and soaped the girl’s legs and feet.
The little girl squirmed in their grasp—with the addition of the soap, Vera thought it was quite like trying to wrestle a greased piglet.
Hortense doggedly kept pouring mugfuls of water over Anne. The sheer volume emitting from the girl didn’t seem to flummox her in the least. Vera wished she could say the same. Her heart pounded.
“Perhaps a toy—” she murmured to herself.
Her own governess had given Vera a rubber ball to play with in the tub, in order to distract her. Vera glanced around, but the closest thing she could find to a toy was a wooden spoon.
She lunged for it and offered it to the little girl. “How about this, then?”
Anne opened her eyes long enough to grab the spoon, then flailed and whacked Vera upside the head with it.
Hortense let out a little huff that sounded suspiciously like a laugh—Vera frowned at her while she wrestled the waving spoon from the girl’s strong grip.
She finally succeeded and tossed it, clattering, against the stones.
In an instant, the girl’s yelling ceased, replaced instead by deep, bone-wrenching tears. Vera looked at Hortense with wide eyes, but Hortense was determinedly focused on the task at hand. The maid’s unspoken stance was clear—they would deal with Anne’s emotional upset once she was clean.
Vera finished soaping her quickly from head to toe while the little girl sobbed. Unbidden, tears of her own pricked at the corners of her eyes. Who was this girl? How had she ended up here in the home of Mr. Douglas, who had no children of his own? And why was she so terrified of water?
Vera set to her job grimly as a new round of wailing began. She prayed that Stephen would ask the questions of Mr. Douglas that Vera could not ask the little girl.
When they rinsed her with a fresh bucket of warm water that Vera brought to sit alongside the pot, the girl began to scream again, but they persisted until her face and hair were as clean as the rest of her.
Vera unwrapped a worn, clean towel, and Hortense lifted her. Vera swaddled Anne tightly, took her upon her lap, and sat in the lone rocking chair that faced the fire.
There she rocked her, making soothing noises and offering encouragement. “See? That wasn’t all that bad, and now it’s over and you’re clean. It’s important to be clean. You smell nice and pretty and now you can have a clean something to wear and something good to eat.”
As she rocked the girl, the crying tapered off into a sad sort of hiccuping, then slid all the way down to a periodic sniffle. Vera ran her arms up and down the child’s whole body, drying her as best she could while she was on her lap.
Hortense emptied the tub out the back door with a splash that sounded upon the stones. Then she bustled about, wiping up the deluge on the floor and cobbling together a tea tray from the mismatched pottery in Mr. Douglas’s small kitchen.
“It isn’t the royal silver, but everything’s clean,” Hortense said, finally setting the tray on the little table next to them.
Vera chose a biscuit and handed it to Anne. The girl gripped it with ferocity and began to gnaw it. Her eyes went wide. The crying cut off sharply, soothed by the alchemy of butter and sugar.
Now that the girl was dry, Vera realized that she and Hortense were both sopping wet. Vera’s hair hung in limp ringlets on either side of her face. Her bodice clung and her skirts were far heavier than they’d been a half hour prior. Hortense’s dress was splattered a darker blue.
Still, the little girl was clean and warm, and was now mowing her way through a ham-and-cheese sandwich.
Nearly a quarter hour passed before the little girl sniffled, looked up at Vera with her huge blue eyes and announced, “Don’t like you.”
Vera smiled. “I don’t blame you at the moment.”
Anne appeared to consider the words, her eyes serious.
Then she looked back up at Vera and grinned. “Muffin?”
Later, when the three of them were bundled back into the cart, their basket much lighter due to the appetite of the little girl in the kitchen, Vera waited only until they were a little ways past the house before she turned to Stephen.
“Who on earth is that little girl?”
“I don’t rightly know,” he admitted.
“You don’t know? Didn’t you ask?”
He shrugged. “Mr. Douglas said that he found Anne. He wasn’t inclined to go into detail, but I don’t think she was in a good situation.”
“Found her? She isn’t a dog.”
“Indeed not.” Stephen held the reins casually. “Most people care for dogs.”
“You’re being purposefully obtuse.”
He arched an eyebrow. “If that’s true, I hardly think that pointing it out will change my stance. Remember—you called it purposeful.”
“What about her parents?”
“Dead. At least Mr. Douglas was forthcoming on that point. The girl has no family and neither does he. I think perhaps he saw an echo of his same loneliness within her.”
Vera blinked and did her best not to let his poetic words soften her heart. “But you can’t just take a child.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Vera trailed off, stunned by the realization that there was nothing truly in place to stop someone from doing so.
If the girl was an orphan, common thought prevailed that she should be in an orphanage, or a workhouse if she were old enough. Except Vera had brought soup to orphanages many times. They were the same as any other home in London—some were decent, some were awful.
Much like families, she thought.
She batted the errant thought away and tried to focus.
“But why would he want her?”