Chapter Five
By the time Helena reached the next village, she had been travelling for the better part of a week, and she had learned, in that week, a great many things she had never once needed to know as Lady Helena Winford.
She had learned that a stagecoach seat cost more than she had accounted for, and that the remainder of her small hoard of coins dwindled far faster than she had imagined possible once meals and lodging along the way were subtracted from it.
She now knew that a woman travelling alone drew exactly the kind of attention she had hoped to avoid, and so had spent much of the journey saying as little as possible, keeping her hood low and her eyes on her hands.
She had also discovered that her feet, accustomed to nothing rougher than a ballroom floor, ached once you were actually using them for walking, and that hunger, real hunger, was an entirely different creature from the delicate appetite she had spent her whole life cultivating at her father's table.
The village of Rowan was nothing more than a cluster of grey stone buildings gathered around a market square.
Helena kept to the edges of the market square, listening as she walked. Because with just four coins left to her name, she was desperate to find work and a place to stay.
"New baron settled in proper now, they say," the butcher told a customer, as he briskly wrapped a parcel of meat.
"Come up from London a week past. My boy delivered a side of beef to the Hall Tuesday and says the whole house is being turned out top to bottom.
New staff wanted, repairs needed, more custom for the lot of us than we've seen in a decade, if the old baron's neglect is finally being put right. "
"They say he's no proper gentleman at all," the customer replied, lowering her voice. "A prizefighter, if you can credit it. Fought for money in London same as any common brawler, and now he's Lord Rowan, sat in that great house like he was born to it."
"Common brawler or not, his coin spends the same as any lord's, and Lord knows this village has need of it."
Helena absorbed this with a growing, cautious interest.
A household turning out top to bottom meant servants were being hired.
She had spent the whole of her journey turning over increasingly hopeless plans for how she might survive beyond London's reach, and here was the first genuine opportunity fortune had offered her since she'd slipped out through Winford House's servants' entrance.
She moved on, but stopped again, this time near some young women gathered by the village well.
"Off to see about the positions at the Hall?" she asked, keeping her voice as flat and unremarkable as she could manage.
"That we are," said the eldest of the three, eyeing Helena's travel-worn cloak and the satchel over her shoulder with open curiosity but no particular suspicion. "Mrs Ellis is taking on maids, they say, and cooks besides, now the house is to be properly run again. You looking for a place yourself?"
"I am." Helena hesitated only a moment before adding, "My name's Nell. I was in service in London, before… before the family let go most of their staff. I've been looking for a new position since."
It was, she reflected, a plausible enough story, near enough to true that she thought she could sustain it without too many missteps.
The young woman accepted it without apparent doubt, only nodding and falling into step beside her as the small group set off along the road toward Rowan Hall.
"London," another of the girls said, impressed. "Long way to come for work."
"I'd family up this way," Helena lied.
As they walked, Helena watched and listened to the other women with desperate attentiveness, cataloguing every small thing they did.
The particular way they held themselves, the plainness of their speech, the practical, unhurried confidence with which they discussed the work ahead, as though she might absorb how to be a servant through careful observation alone.
When Rowan Hall finally came into view above the trees, it was larger and grander than Helena had expected.
The grey stone was weathered by centuries of sun, rain, and snow. Ivy climbed one wing of the fa?ade. The whole of it possessed a kind of imposing, slightly neglected majesty that spoke of old wealth insufficiently maintained.
A fresh wave of nerves settled over her as they approached the servants' entrance, and she reminded herself, with as much firmness as she could summon, that she had already survived a week alone on the road with no experience whatsoever. She could survive an interview.
Mrs Ellis received the small group of applicants in a plain sitting room off the kitchens.
She was a stout, kindly-faced woman whose sharp eyes nonetheless missed very little as she worked her way through each candidate in turn, asking after their previous positions, their families, their particular skills.
Helena watched the interviews ahead of her own with mounting anxiety, trying to absorb the pattern of question and answer.
By the time Mrs Ellis's attention finally turned to her, she had rehearsed her responses so many times in her head that they emerged, she hoped, with something approaching genuine confidence.
"Nell, is it? And you've been in service before?"
"Yes, ma'am," she lied. "I was working in London, for a family whose name I'd rather not trouble you with; they let go most of the household when the master's fortunes turned, and I've been seeking a new position since."
Helena kept her eyes lowered, partly from nerves and partly because she had noticed the other girls did the same, a posture of proper deference she hoped might disguise whatever remained wrong about her manner.
"What duties did you perform there?"
She paused for a moment before answering, drawing on nothing but a lifetime of watching servants move through Winford House.
"General housemaid's work," she said, "Tending fires and making beds, cleaning and laundry."
Mrs Ellis studied her for a long moment, and Helena's pulse spiked. She was certain the housekeeper's sharp eyes had seen through the thin fabric of her story.
"You're very quiet for a Londoner. Most girls from the city have more to say for themselves."
"I've had a difficult week, ma'am," Helena said.
This was, at least, true, and something in her voice must have carried the genuine exhaustion beneath it, because Mrs Ellis's expression softened into something like sympathy.
"Well," she said. "We've urgent need of hands, and you seem willing enough, whatever your nerves.
I'll take you on as junior housemaid, a trial period to start, and we'll see how you manage.
Fair wages, your keep provided, and you'll share the small attic room with Peggy—she'll show you your duties. "
Mrs Ellis rose, evidently considering the matter settled.
"Welcome to Rowan Hall, Nell."
Relief moved through Helena with such force that she nearly swayed on her feet.
"Thank you, Mrs Ellis."
Then she turned and followed a young maid named Peggy up a narrow back staircase toward the attic room they would share, still scarcely able to believe that she had done it.
The attic room was small and plain, two narrow beds and a single window looking out over the kitchen gardens.
Peggy proved an easy, chattering companion as she showed Helena where to store her few belongings and explained, with evident relish, the gossip that had consumed the household since the new baron's arrival.
"Come up from London, they say, some sort of prizefighter," Peggy confided, as they made their way down toward the kitchens for the evening's instructions.
"Mrs Ellis says he's perfectly civil, but Sarah in the kitchens swears he's got a temper on him, on account of his line of work, and old Whitby won't say a word either way, which if you ask me means there's something to it.
Cook thinks he's kind enough, mind, on account of he thanked her personally for the first meal she served him, which she says the old baron never once did in thirty years. "
"Which is it, then?" Helena asked, genuinely curious now herself.
Peggy shrugged. "No one's rightly decided yet.
He's only been here a week. But he's certainly not what anyone expected a baron to look like, from what I hear.
Great scarred hands, and a nose that's been broke more than once, and shoulders like he could carry the whole house on them if he'd a mind to. "
Helena found this description more curious than alarming, although she thought little more of it as the evening's work absorbed her attention.
She had watched servants her entire life. She had watched them make beds, lay fires, carry trays, fold linens, and had believed, in some distant, unexamined corner of her mind, that these were simple tasks, the sort of labour requiring little beyond willingness and a strong back.
However, within her first full day at Rowan Hall, she discovered exactly how mistaken that assumption had been.
Making a bed properly, she learned, required a particular technique of tucking and smoothing that she fumbled through twice before Peggy, with more patience than judgment, showed her the trick of it.
She nearly dropped an entire tray of china attempting to carry it down a narrow back staircase, saved only by a desperate lunge that left her heart hammering and her arms aching for an hour.
She folded linens so badly that the housekeeper's assistant, a sharp-tongued woman named Bess, refolded the entire stack behind her with an exasperated sigh Helena pretended not to hear.
Carrying water proved its own particular misery: buckets heavier than anything she had ever lifted in her life, her arms burning within a few dozen steps, water sloshing over the rims and soaking her skirts no matter how carefully she tried to balance the weight.