London in Chains (2 page)

They reached the southern end of the bridge and led the horses and the mule under the arch with its grim decorations. Geoffrey mounted up again, and William vaulted on to the gelding's back and offered a hand to Lucy.

‘I would be pleased to walk a while, if I may,' she said, looking down demurely. ‘To stretch my legs.'

‘Your arse, more like,' muttered William, disappointed, but Cousin Geoffrey merely shrugged. ‘Please yourself. It's no distance now.'

He turned the mare left, into one of the wider streets. Lucy followed, already regretting her decision to walk: the street was filthy. There were narrow channels cut on either side for drainage, but these were half-choked with dung and sweepings from the shops and houses. At one point a channel was completely blocked, and half the street was flooded. A pig was wallowing in the dirty water, chewing with evident pleasure on something it had found in the drain. Lucy held her skirts up and tried to pick her way around the side of the puddle without stepping in anything foul. The horsemen had been drawing further and further ahead, and when she looked up after negotiating the obstacle, she found that they'd vanished.

She stood still for a moment, alone on a strange street. She was cut off from everyone and everything familiar, adrift in a world where she knew no one and no one knew her.

It was exhilirating.

She drew a deep breath, shocked by her own response. It was because she knew she was in no real danger, she told herself. Geoffrey and his servant had simply turned up the next cross-street, and even if she had lost them, she could ask directions, now that it was ‘no distance' to her uncle's house. She was not, she told herself, so desperate for escape that she really
wanted
to be alone on the streets of London. She drew another deep breath, then let it out again and picked her way onward.

The men were indeed just around the next corner, standing outside a shop; they had taken off their hats respectfully. The shopkeeper was speaking to Cousin Geoffrey, but he looked round when Lucy came up, then smiled broadly. She halted, shocked. Yes, it was Uncle Thomas, but he was
old.
It had been only six years since she saw him last, but from his looks it might have been twice as long: his face was lined and his hair was mostly grey. She remembered her manners abruptly and curtsied.

‘Lucy!' he said and came forward to kiss her in greeting. ‘Little Lucy! Oh, Lord, how you look like your dear mother! Welcome!'

Being embraced by a man who was to all intents a stranger jerked a scream into her throat. She swallowed it, forced her fists to unclench, tried to smile. Uncle Thomas didn't notice: he'd already turned back to Cousin Geoffrey and was telling him where he could stable the horses.

‘And you, child, come in!' he exclaimed, taking Lucy's arm and leading her to the door. ‘Agnes! They've arrived!'

There was no one in the shop, and nobody responded to Uncle Thomas's call. Lucy, catching her breath, glanced round. Thomas was a mercer – a wholesale dealer in cloth – and the family had always referred to him as ‘rich Uncle Thomas, the London mercer'. His shop, however, didn't look rich. It was dingy and dark. The sample racks around the walls were half-empty, and what cloth they did hold seemed all the same drab colour.

‘Agnes!' Thomas called again.

A flabby old woman in an apron appeared, scowling, mending in hand; Lucy took her for the maid, until she demanded, ‘What is it?' in a tone no maid would use to the master of the house. Lucy stared. She'd met her uncle's wife only once and her memory was of a fine young matron, vain about her plump good looks.

‘They've arrived,' repeated Uncle Thomas. ‘You remember Lucy, my poor sister's girl?'

Agnes regarded Lucy with unfriendly eyes. Lucy curtsied, and her aunt sniffed. ‘Well, you still
look
like an honest woman! That's well.'

Lucy felt her face heat, and her hands fisted again. ‘Why should I not look like an honest woman, Aunt?' she demanded sharply.

Agnes blinked, taken aback by the tone and offended by it. Lucy glared at her, choked by the impulse to start shouting. She struggled to crush it. Why, she wondered despairingly, did she keep getting angry? It was a kindness in her aunt and uncle to take her in: she could not begin by shouting at them. She forced her eyes down and made herself flatten her hands again. ‘I beg your pardon.'

Her voice came out wooden and insincere, and Agnes scowled.

‘It's a weary journey,' said Uncle Thomas with false heartiness. ‘Agnes, Geoffrey's off stabling his beasts at Fleur-de-Lis; I'll go and help him. Take Lucy upstairs and make her welcome.'

Agnes sniffed again but turned and beckoned for Lucy to follow her.

The next room was a parlour, and the stairs led up from it, wooden and nearly as steep as a ladder. Agnes climbed them slowly and stopped at the top, wheezing a little and pressing a hand to her side. Lucy perforce stopped behind her, halfway up. She found that she was taking shallow breaths: the scent of the house was strange and unpleasant. It was because there were no animals, she decided. She was accustomed to the farmyard smells that constantly tracked into her father's house, so that the scents of dung and dairy were mingled with the human ones. Here the mingling was with the London reek.

‘You'll bed down with our Susan,' Agnes said abruptly, glancing back over her shoulder.

For a moment Lucy's mind spun, trying to remember who Susan was. Her cousins – her aunt and uncle's children, the two who'd survived infancy – were named Mark and Hannah. Mark, though, was dead, killed in the war, and Hannah had married and left home just a few months before. Lucy had never heard of any Susan in the family.

‘Geoffrey will lie in Mark's room,' said Agnes, and there was something defensive in her tone, ‘and we mean to find a lodger for Hannah's. Susan sleeps in the loft.' She started moving again.

Lucy suddenly understood that Susan was the maid. She froze where she was, halfway up the stairs. Agnes looked back at her impatiently. ‘Come along!'

‘I might lie in Hannah's room,' Lucy said tightly, ‘until you do find a lodger.'

Her aunt turned back and stood at the top of the stairs, scowling down at her ferociously. ‘Nay. Tom, fool that he is, agreed to take you on, though we've scarce enough to keep ourselves. Well, I must obey my husband – but you're not lying in my child's bed! Understand this, miss: you're no heiress. Your place is with Susan.'

Lucy clutched the step above her. It was hard to breathe: all the air seemed full of needles, and her throat was clenched shut on them. Her aunt's face above her was unnaturally clear: the loose skin folded where the chin was tucked in, the spots of colour in the cheeks, the resentment in the eyes. Lucy imagined that prim mouth shrieking, spewing teeth and blood. She shut her eyes hurriedly: God forgive her this sinful anger!

‘Keep your surly look to yourself!' commanded Agnes. ‘What, did you think you could step into our daughter's place? There's no undoing what's done, girl: you must make the best of things, not puff yourself up with sinful pride, as though you were still a wealthy maiden! If we're to keep you, we need to get some profit from it.
Charity
's fine for them that have money.'

So she was to become her uncle's
maidservant
? She clenched her teeth and stared down at her feet, motionless on the stairs. Her old shoes poked out from under her petticoat; the hem of the petticoat was splashed with mud from the street. She made herself concentrate on that stain: imagined scrubbing it off and throwing out the wash-water. Her soul was stained, too, with rage: she begged God to cleanse her. A woman should be humble, modest and obedient, and if she wasn't, she should at least pretend to be. If she offended Thomas and Agnes, she had nowhere to go but home again, and no one there would be happy to see her.

Agnes waited a while, but Lucy said nothing and did not look up. At last there was a creak of floorboards, and Lucy, glancing up quickly, saw that her aunt had moved off. Lucy followed, moving stiffly, afraid that the fury inside her would burst out and break anything she touched.

To get to the loft they had to climb a ladder fixed to the stairwell above. Half of the loft held bales of fabric for Thomas's customers; the rest was bare under the roof-beams. A window above the stairwell provided reasonable light. The chimney, brick and solid, ran up the right wall, and the maid's bed stood next to it. A shift and some petticoats hung from a nail in the wall beside the bed, and there was a small chest at the bedfoot with a washbasin and pitcher. Lucy told herself that it was no worse than her bed at home, and she was used to sharing that, with her cousin, with the occasional visiting relative or friend.

But not with the
maid
!

‘There you are!' said Agnes. ‘Space aplenty!'

Lucy clenched her hands together to keep them still and kept the angry words tight-locked behind her teeth.

‘Susan is at the market,' said Agnes. ‘She knows to expect you. Your things are on the mule? Then you can bear them up later. I'll leave you to refresh yourself from your journey.'

Lucy stood where she was and listened as her aunt descended the ladder. When the footsteps and the huff of breath had gone, she went over to the window. It was unglazed, the panes covered with waxed paper in place of glass, but it was hinged. Lucy flung it wide and leaned out. The scream of rage was still caught in her throat, and she took deep breaths of the smoky air, trying to dislodge it.

From the window she looked out on to a jumble of tiled roofs, with, further away – across the river? – the stone bulk of a church. As far as her eyes could see, there were houses. So many people!

London. She had wanted to come here to start a new life – not to take Cousin Hannah's place but to regain her own. Before the war, she'd been (
a wealthy maiden, yes!)
a prosperous freeholder's only daughter, able to look forward to a house and husband and children. She'd lost all that through no fault of her own and she'd hoped that in London she might be able to make a fresh start. It seemed, though, that she'd been naive.
There's no undoing what's done.

The hurt and rage grew as the full measure of the blow made itself felt. She'd expected to help Uncle Thomas and Aunt Agnes, in the house and in the shop. She'd hoped to make herself useful, even valuable. She'd never in her life been idle and she was perfectly willing to work hard – but this, this was a
humiliation
! She was Thomas's
niece
. She'd expected to be treated as
family
. Instead, it seemed that she was expected to work as a servant, unpaid, and to be grateful that she had a place at all!

When she last saw Uncle Thomas, at home in Leicestershire, he had teased her, saying that a girl as pretty as her would certainly marry a fine gentleman, and then she would have to be kind to her poor old uncle. Six years ago; before the war, before . . .

Your place is with Susan.
Would Agnes have said that two years ago, before . . .

She'd known that the rage would bring the memories down. She held on to the window frame, seeing the soldiers' faces, feeling their hands on her, hearing . . .

She swallowed the scream, though it churned in her stomach. She swallowed several times more to try to settle it. Then she went over to the washbasin, poured in some water from the pitcher and washed the cold sweat off her face. By the time she dried her hands she'd almost stopped shaking. She sat down on the bed and inspected the mud on her petticoat, then glanced about for something to brush off the worst of it.

There was nothing suitable in the loft. She would have to go back downstairs, but she wasn't ready for that yet. If Agnes said anything more to her, she would
hit
the woman, and she knew that if she did, she'd have to go straight back home. London might not be what she'd hoped, but going home would be worse.

It suddenly struck her that perhaps this was nothing to do with what had happened two years before. Agnes had lost her son; her daughter had married and moved out. Now her husband had proposed putting a stranger into the place that had been occupied by their children. Agnes might very well dread that, without any sense that Lucy was defiled and dirty, unworthy of Hannah's maiden bed.

Lucy drew another deep breath, this time in relief. She didn't have to hate her aunt, and she might yet find a way to make a new life for herself. She made a fierce vow that she would
not
settle for a servile dependency: she would find a way – somehow! – to be mistress of her own life. She checked that her hair wasn't coming loose and repinned the white coif that kept it decently covered, then went downstairs.

Uncle Thomas and Cousin Geoffrey and his man had returned from the stable and were sitting in the parlour with mugs of beer. Thomas waved a hand at Lucy as she descended. ‘There you are, my girl! All well?'

He sounded nervous and embarrassed. Lucy hadn't been sure whether he'd approved the decision to send her to sleep with the maid: now she was. She curtsied. ‘Aunt Agnes says that your maid Susan is at the market, sir, but has been told to expect me.'

Thomas nodded, relieved. ‘I'm sorry you can't have Hannah's room, sweet, but your aunt wants to let it.'

‘Oh?' asked Geoffrey, surprised.

‘We could use the rent,' admitted Thomas. ‘Trade in this town has gone to ruin, Geoff, to ruin! If I make enough in a week to pay my costs, I bless God for my good fortune!'

‘Lodgings are dear,' said Geoffrey thoughtfully. ‘I was told by one I met on the road that he'd paid ten shillings and sixpence a week for two rooms, and he had to supply his own coal and candles.'