Love by the Morning Star (15 page)

Hannah looked at her quizzically. “I think, like me, you talk about a great many things at once, and you don't really expect other people to understand everything you say. That's all right, though. Talking helps the talker best.” She sighed. “It is another sacrifice of my current position. I am told I must not talk to myself, or speak so much at all. It is very difficult. Perhaps Coombe was right to get rid of me. Still, thank you for saving me. I have a particular reason for wanting to stay. Tell me, is this green-toothed fairy dragging at you now?”

The two girls looked at each other.
This is preposterous
, Anna thought.
I have every reason to fear her, and she has every reason to hate me, if only she knew. But I need help. I need . . . a friend. If only the secret holds!

Anna was perched so precariously, right at the very pinnacle of success. She might step off that mountaintop into Olympus, or she might tumble off it to her doom.

I could tell her
, Anna thought.
She seems kind. Unorthodox, slightly insane, but kind. Maybe if I explained that I just need to be in her place long enough for Teddy to propose, she would allow it
. But Anna could not confess. There was so much she didn't know. Why had Hannah accepted her lowly position? Who was Hannah to this family that a stranger could so easily slip into her place?

I can't do it
, Anna thought with despair.
I'll be found out, humiliated. Have I committed a crime?
It felt as though she had.
The risks are too great, particularly now, with Hannah here
.
I should confess right away
.

But two forces, one weak, one strong, still held her tongue. There was her unknown mission to ally England and Germany and keep them from going to war against each other, for which it was absolutely necessary to be in Starkers. That, though, was less important by the moment, overshadowed by Teddy. Darling Teddy, who would save her from a life of struggle and pretense. Anna knew she was false now, but he would make her true, a legitimate lady. He loved her, and love levels all ranks. She'd thought she would have weeks of work ahead of her—a good start is much, but far from a proposal—but this morning there had been the note slipped under her door.

 

My darling girl
,

Last night was the most incredible of my life. Incredible, quite literally, because I can hardly believe that I could feel so much for someone in such a brief time together, with so few words exchanged. But how deep those words were, deep and broad, and yet never solemn, but like a wide rippling river, merry on the surface, dropping down to unknown profundity
.

 

Love, Anna was beginning to believe, did strange things to people. She'd worked hard to educate herself, to know a little bit about many things, and where her learning failed, to have a few stock phrases that would make her sound passably intelligent and encourage other people to talk. But even she—who thought so highly of herself—could not describe herself as deep.

 

But there it is. You've stolen my heart like a silver cow creamer. And, I might add, have been remarkably helpful. I'll use what you taught me in the next few weeks, and when I return (one should really say if in this line of work, I suppose, so as not to tempt fate, but really it won't be dangerous this time out) I will claim your hand again
.

 

My hand!
she thought. Breach-of-promise suits had been won with less.

Fortune, she had heard, favors the bold. She would stay. She would keep flying her false colors, and by the time Teddy found out she wasn't who he thought she was, he'd love her so much, he wouldn't care if she were a pirate.

“I need a lady's maid,” Anna told Hannah. “Would you be willing to help me?”

“You kept them from forcing me to leave,” Hannah said simply, remembering the feel of manly fingers stroking the scar on her thumb. “I would do anything for you.”

“Why is it so important that you stay?” Anna asked.

Hannah blushed. “A slum disease, I'm afraid,” she confessed, though she knew Teddy would never care if she didn't have money or a title. And she was, after all, the daughter of an aristocrat. A disgraced, impoverished aristocrat who had fled her natal shore and taken up a disreputable profession, but still, the Curzons had been a great family once.

“You're in love? With someone here? Who?” Anna felt a frisson of dread. Not Teddy. Certainly not Teddy.

“Oh . . .” Hannah couldn't tell her. What would be worse, for Teddy to love a servant or the despised Unfortunate Fruit? The family could never know until it was too late.

“Is he here?” Anna pressed. “Have you been meeting him?”

“Yes,” Hannah admitted guardedly. “Out in the garden.”

Anna, fighting a sharp pang of jealousy, gave her a conspiratorial but slightly superior look. “I bet I know who it is!” She smirked. “It's that black-haired gardener, isn't it? Aha! I see from your blushes that I'm right!” His image rose again in her mind's eye, against her will. He was as fine a piece of manhood as one might find in a month of Sundays, but alas, not a lord who would one day be an earl. Still, good enough for someone else. She had seen him that second time while she took air in the more cultivated section of the garden (most of it was frankly too wild for her, an overtly picturesque mock wilderness). He'd looked at her, long and hard. Though of course she didn't return his look, she'd felt his admiration warm on her skin. She'd glanced sidelong at the play of sinew in his forearms, at the bulge of bicep below his rolled-up sleeve—and liked what she saw, very much.
No, you foolish girl
, she told herself, and pinched her arm where it would not show.

“You must tell me all about it,” she said to Hannah. “And you must tell me everything, absolutely everything, about yourself.”

If she was to act the part, she'd better study the character.

She ignored the prick of jealousy. She had Teddy. Why should she care if a gardener liked someone else? The fellow was nothing. There was no future in a gardener, any more than there would have been with a florist. A romantic might see a life full of flowers. Anna, who had taught herself to be ruthless and pragmatic about her prospects, saw a life full of dirt.

How funny
, she thought,
that the one who should be living with the family is content to slave in the kitchen and fall in love with a servant, while I, daughter of a grocer, bask in Liripip luxury and am a whisker away from being Lady Winkfield
.

There was a phrase that stuck in her head. Where she had heard it she could not remember, but it had resonated deeply—“the will to power.”
It is my will
, she thought,
that puts me here. I am a superior being, and so I rise, through sheer force of will and by the natural order of things, to my proper position
.

Why, then, was she deeply afraid of what might happen when her false colors were stripped from her? And why, when Hannah had gone back downstairs and Anna lay on her bed to daydream of future happiness, did her hero have dark hair and dirt under his fingernails?

Because
, she snapped to herself, hastily banishing his image,
I shouldn't be daydreaming about happiness. I should be planning for success
.

 

W
HEN
H
ANNAH RETURNED
to the kitchen and told Sally about her new orders, the cook put her foot down. This time she didn't even have to summon the shade of Trapp. She could muster enough fury in her own right.

“No. Not if Lady Liripip herself demands it. I can scarcely manage this kitchen as it is with such a paltry staff. Oh, I do well enough for family dinners, as the family has about three taste buds collectively among them, but what happens when there are guests? Important guests. Discerning guests. Guests who won't stand for slop dished out lukewarm and underspiced. You, Hannah, are the only thing standing between me and suicide. Coombe can't fire you, and the quality can't steal you. You can't do a thing, you poor waif, but you can learn. Better yet, you can free up Glenda and Judy to do real cooking. If you turn lady's maid with no replacement for me here, I quit.”

She made such a show of throwing her apron into the dustbin that Hannah swore she'd do both jobs, scrubbing and cleaning in the morning, leaving the cooks to the easier jobs of breakfast and lunch while she tended Anna, returning to help with dinner preparation, and then going back upstairs to see to Anna's evening toilette.

“I'll speak for you, child, and get you out of it. Ladies can always be cowed by their cooks. If you do both jobs you'll be run ragged, and wind up no good to anyone.”

“No, Sally. She kept me from being fired—”

“I told you, I can overrule Coombe. You wouldn't have been sacked.”

“All the same, she thought I was, and she saved me. Kindness must be repaid. And then she's . . . I don't quite know how to explain it. She's terribly on edge about something, and talks as if it's her debut in a drawing-room play. As if she's saying her words exactly right, because she's practiced so much, but she's always looking out of the corner of her eye to see if the audience is having the proper reaction. Who is she exactly? Do you know?”

“Anna Morgan is all I know. Some relative. Probably by marriage through one of the daughters. Well, suit yourself, and I only pray she won't stay long. You'll be worn fine as frogs' hair.”

H
ANNAH WORKED, AND WHEN SHE SLEPT
she hardly knew it. Determined to be better than the Liripips, who had forced her into drudgery, who never by word or look acknowledged her right to more than a roof, she still refused to complain.
Stay here, Mother said, so that they can find me. Stay here
, her heart sang,
for Teddy
. And so she stayed—and scrubbed, and chopped and plucked in the kitchen, and then, patting her pruned hands dry, she would run upstairs to attend Anna Morgan.

Her duties upstairs were certainly lighter, but no less tiring. Anna was serious when she said she wanted to know everything about Hannah. She was reluctant at first, but when after a few subtle questions of her own she discovered that Anna had no intimate connection to the Liripips, she decided it couldn't hurt. She would never have talked about her past with Lady Liripip, but this young woman, sympathetic and near her own age, was a different story.

Hannah never breathed a word about why she was at Starkers. She told Anna the same thing the staff all seemed to believe, that she was a Jewish refugee hired by Trapp, one of the thousands of German and Austrian girls who fled to England. But she hid nothing about her family, her life in the cabaret, or the gradual disintegration the Nazi Party had brought to her happiness and security.

Anna—whose father would take the strap to her if he knew she was talking civilly to a Jewish girl—asked her part-time maid a great many questions, including one her father had never been able to answer to her satisfaction.

“But why do they hate you? Hate the Jews, I mean.”

Hannah gave a shrug as she stood behind Anna, combing out her golden hair. “A little boy told me once that I killed God. I laughed and told him that if Jesus hadn't died, then he—the boy, that is—would still be Jewish. I remember he scrunched up his face, had a good hard think, and then spit on me.”

Anna gasped. She had been hearing anti-Semitic (and anti-many-other-things) rants from her father for years, but they had always been abstract to her. Like so many children she only half listened to her parents, absorbing a great deal of what they said accidentally, as it were, but for the most part ignoring them as something irrelevant to youth. Banish them, he had said. Tax them, segregate them, put them on leaky boats and launch them to their own fates. Once when a group of East End Jews had come to protest at one of his rallies, her father had spit on one of the demonstrators. Anna had been disgusted, but for the wrong reasons.
A gentleman does not spit
, she remembered thinking.

She had not spared a thought for the person whom he'd spat on.

Now, as she looked at Hannah's reflection in the vanity mirror, she felt a sudden shifting in her world, one of those tectonic upheavals that might raise a mountain or open a rift.
Who is who?
she wondered, staring at both of their images.
I am pretending to be her—I
am
her, for all practical purposes
. She felt as if that little boy had spit on her. As if her father had spit on her. And it hurt that someone would hate her, the make-believe her, in her fictitious past.

“What did you do?” she whispered.

Hannah gave an impish grin. “You cannot worry too much about what children do. They are always looking for someone to be unkind to, and believe whatever they are told. It only hit my shoes, so I did my best to be philosophical. I had shined my shoes with spit that very morning—they were black patent leather, and nothing makes them gleam more than spit, for some reason—so why worry about more spit? Of course, the problem is not children, it is their parents. Hate is like hunger, I think. When one person feels it and talks about it, suddenly everyone feels it, even if they didn't before.”

“And despite that, you stayed in Germany?” Anna asked.

“What, leave because of a foolish child?”

“But there was worse, wasn't there?”

“Ah, not for us. Not until the end. We were
special
Jews, you see,” Hannah said sardonically. “Secular Jews with a great many friends in high places. For years, we had entertained the most important people in Berlin within our walls. I had sung to Herr Hitler, back in the early days. It was a song about sheep, of course.” She chewed on her lip. “We were lulled by the sheep songs, my family and I.”