Love by the Morning Star (7 page)

“Tongues are for tasting, not wagging,” Sally said with as sour a face as she could muster, though she secretly decided Jane would never do for this girl. “No jibber-jabber in my kitchen.”

“Oh.” Hannah sighed. “I'll just have to stay out of the kitchen, then. I'm afraid there's no chance that I'll ever stop talking, unless I'm singing, and that's just as bad, I'm sure, if you prefer silence. My father used to say I never heard of a full stop. Though I'm much better now. At least I take a breath now and then so other people have a hope of breaking in. What a shame! The kitchen is my favorite room. At home we'd always gather . . . Yes, I see your look and I remember now, no jibber-jabber. Shall I go up to see Lord and Lady Liripip?” She supposed she should call them Peregrine and . . . what was his wife's name? Enid? Edna? But it was probably better to err on the side of formality, since relations were historically strained. No doubt they'd want her to call them Aunt and Uncle, or something quintessentially English like Gaffer or Guv'nor.

The poor little foreigner
, Sally thought.
She has no idea what's in store for her
. Already the girl's cheerful patter was lightening the kitchen, making that day's vast and heavy labors seem slightly more possible than they had lately. But Sally knew from Trapp that where there was spirit it must be crushed, and where there was frivolity it must be bent and twisted into drudgery, else dinner would never be served.

“You will not be seen. You will never be seen by Lord Liripip. As for Herself, on most days she summons me to her morning room to discuss the menus, but occasionally she comes to the kitchen and talks with me here. She will not speak to you. She will not notice you. For her, you do not exist. Just consider yourself fortunate that you have a place at all, and don't trouble your betters.”

To think that only a few weeks ago Sally had been talking to Coombe of servants' unions and the equality of all people, servant or served! She did not believe for one moment that Enid Liripip (it was Enid after all) was her better, or this new lass's for that matter. Why, this girl had brought more nice things into the world in the last two minutes than Lady Liripip had in her whole life.

Very politely, very diplomatically, Hannah folded her hands and said, “I understand that she might not want to spend a great deal of time in my company. I do not wish to impose. But it is only civilized that I thank her in person for her kind hospitality in allowing me to live here during my time of trouble.” She had rehearsed the speech, and thought she carried it off well. “I . . . we . . . my family and of course I am . . . are . . . Oh my, I have it muddled now. Let me begin again.” Her accent was encroaching. “Ahem. I know: hush. I mean you want me to hush, not that you should hush. I'm rarely rude except accidentally, and that doesn't really count, but if I might just get through my speech to you I'll do a much better job when I see Enid.”

Enid! Trapp would have boxed her ears for that, though no one had had their ears boxed outside of stories for fifty years. Sally only just managed to suppress a smile and said sternly, “You will never dare to speak to Her Ladyship, or to any of the family. In fact, you will rarely be permitted to leave the kitchen.”

It began to dawn on Hannah that something was most emphatically not right.

“You mean . . . they won't see me? Not at all?”

I won't do it
, Sally told herself when she saw Hannah's large, luminous eyes begin to well.
I
can't
do it. I'll be a Trapp later, promise, but not right now
. “What did they tell you when they arranged for you to come? Did you think you would be part of the family?” Trapp would have said the same thing, but the sympathy in Sally's voice made one fat tear roll down Hannah's cheek.

“I didn't think they'd love me,” she said, her rich, low voice cracking. “But I thought they'd at least see me. How can they be so cruel?”

“They don't view it as cruelty. Come now, buck up. I put just the right amount of salt in all my dishes—I don't need your tears brining everything. You're German, are you, and a Jew?”

Hannah nodded.

“I've read about some of the unpleasantness going on in Germany, and I do think it's a shame. But you're safe here now. All you have to do is work hard, and maybe one day you'll be a cook like me. There's no better place to train than Starkers.” She forced herself to become Trappish again. “If you don't obey, you'll be out on the street. If you're here on a work permit, that means deportation back to Germany.”

“They would do that to me?” All her mother's warnings came rushing back to her. She hadn't believed it. People might be grumps, ignorant and selfish. They might not
want
to take in stray members of their family. She'd braced herself to be lectured and insulted and given a tiny room and relegated to the worst seat at the table. She was ready for all sorts of criticisms of cabaret life.
Don't expect kindness from them
, her mother had said.

Not kindness, no, but civility. Human decency. Hannah remembered that night of broken glass, and wondered if such a thing as human decency still existed. Had it withered away in the human spirit, victim of some insidious modern disease?

You must accept any treatment
. Her mother had said that, too.

Hannah smoothed the single fallen tear into her cheek until it disappeared. “To be sure I understand,” she began, her accent thick now as in her mingled fury and disappointment she reverted to her more natural pronunciations, “you mean that I am to work in the kitchen? To be permitted to live here but only to work?”

“To serve, yes.”

“Like a penitent,” Hannah said, settling her heavy-lashed dark brown eyes on Sally. She composed herself, making her small body somehow even more compact, folding in on herself to become an organism of profound self-sufficiency and inwardness.

Sally felt a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to fall on her knees before the girl and beg her forgiveness. But Trapp whispered in her ear:
So she thought her life would be easy and it is hard. Should you care? You scrubbed your share of grates and slate floors. Your knees still ache with it. So she's some European bluestocking with soft hands and too much to say. Peeling potatoes and plucking pheasants never killed anyone. Better than whatever is happening to her sort in Germany
.

“Shut up,” Sally muttered under her breath, too softly for Hannah to hear.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. One of the housemaids will show you to your room and fetch your uniforms. Two print, one blue, the other pink.” Horrid things they were, too. “Plus aprons and caps—cap to be worn at all times—and towels. Return here for lunch and you may begin your duties assisting at dinner. Fortunately it is only the family here tonight, and one houseguest, a distant relative of some sort. Tomorrow you will begin your official daily duties. Here is a list. Wait out there, and close the door behind you.”

When she was gone, Sally had a quick therapeutic weep, the second of the day and by no means the last. Then she splashed her face, dusted her nose with powder, and set about making other people cry, as Trapp would have wished.

H
ANNAH HAD JUST BEEN DECIDING
with what exact degree of stiff, formal politeness she would greet the designated housemaid when she heard more singing—throaty, abysmally untalented singing in ribald German. She took a swift, sharp breath. It could not be . . .

The door swung open, and in came Waltraud, the (mostly) female half of the Double Transvestite Tango.

“Traudl, could it be you? Oh no, it couldn't, really, never in that outfit.” Hannah's mobile face incandesced into joy. She took her friend by the arms. “What do they call this?” She rubbed the rough black fabric between her finger and thumb.

“Linsey-woolsey,” Waltraud said with an exaggerated English accent, then switched immediately back to German. “Isn't it a scream?”

“I hardly knew you without silk and sequins. How on earth did you get here?”

“Oh,
Liebchen
, it was terrible. I had to sell all my costume jewelry to that horrid Bavarian hen, and my only consolation is that she can't tell glass from diamonds. Still, they were all such pretty baubles, and now they adorn her fat neck. Do you know she took a Nazi lover? Perhaps he will strangle her with my faux sapphires one day. One must always look on the bright side, no? I got just enough for all the bribes and there I was, on a train at the border, absolutely penniless but with one very valuable piece of paper giving me permission to work here in England. Then—oh, Hannah, how it shames me to tell you!”

“As if anything could shame you, Traudl,” Hannah said with an impish grin. Waltraud had never shunned a dare, never followed a law if it did not please her, rarely bothered to determine the gender of a pretty lover before turning off the lights.

“Wait until you hear this, though. All my money was gone, and there, at the very border, a guard demanded one more bribe. ‘But I'm broke,' I protested. He claimed a woman always has a way to pay. My dear, do you think I clawed his eyes out? Do you think I ripped off his little counterfeit family jewels so those baubles could replace the ones I sold?”

If she had, Hannah knew she would never have made it to England. She'd be in Buchenwald. Still, she could not imagine her friend yielding to coercion what she loved to give so freely.

“I did not. I reminded him that I am Jewish and it would be a crime for he, an Aryan, to, ahem, collect that particular sort of bribe from me. However—and this is the shameful part,
Liebchen
—there was in my train car a horrid personage of about sixty, an aunt or governess in charge of a gaggle of children, who had spent the entire ride lecturing her brood about the unnatural vileness of the Semitic people. You know her sort. I'm afraid I told the guard that she was of our party, a full-blooded Aryan turncoat smuggling out Jewish children, and she would be more than happy to pay our bribe.”

“You never!” Hannah gasped.

Waltraud shrugged her shapely shoulders. “You would not believe a sixty-year-old woman could slap a strapping guard so hard he'd fall on his derrière. In the confusion I found another car with a kinder guard and went on my merry way. And la, here I am, cleaning fireplaces in blue in the morning, changing to black in the evening to fluff pillows and stalk those delicious young footmen in their dandified uniforms. There is a quite pretty chambermaid here too, with lava-colored hair and freckles like little red ants crawling all over her face, but it seems English girls have never heard of Sappho. Pity. But what are you doing here in the kitchen? I'm to find the new kitchen drudge and show her to her room. Have you seen her?”

Hannah gave a hysterical hiccup of a laugh. “It is I!”

“You? But I thought you were the prodigal third cousin once removed, come home for the fatted calf? Was that just a story you cooked up for customs?”

“It's true enough, for all the good it has done me. Perhaps if I'd cooked up a better story, I wouldn't be here in the kitchen. Could you show me to my room, please? I'm very, very tired.”

“Tell me
everything
,” Waltraud said.

“No, please, just let me endure. I'll be fine if I don't have to talk about it. Talking makes me think, and thinking makes me talk more, and if I'm not careful I'll storm up to Lord Liripip's bedroom and kick him in his gouty leg. And I
promised
Mother and Father that I would come here and be safe, and surely they would send me away if I kicked Lord Liripip, so I must not even let a
thought
of the vast unfairness of it all creep into my mind.”

But of course she told Waltraud everything.

“I shall put sticks of strychnine trees in their fireplaces!” Waltraud swore, pounding her thigh with her fist. “I shall put pins in their pillows!”

“No, you mustn't, or we'll both be banished from Starkers.”

“Let them banish us! We will form our own act, the angel and the devil, the lamb and the serpent. We would have all the laureled heads of England eating from our hands. Come, doesn't the stage call you?” She grabbed Hannah in her strong arms and dipped her, as she had once dipped Otto.

“England is our sanctuary,” Hannah said between giggles as she regained her balance, “and Starkers is where we must stay until it is safe to go home. You know you won't be allowed to stay in the country without a job.”

“I don't know why you are putting up with it so calmly,
Liebchen
. You have an iron core of pride in you. All of you opera singers do, I think. It helps a little thing like you resonate up onstage.” She kissed her friend's cheek. “But don't let pride and stubbornness keep you from happiness. Seek out Lord Liripip. His wife is a fright, but he can't be as bad as all that. Kneel at his feet, put your head in his lap, sigh prettily . . . believe me, it is a strategy women have been using with men for centuries, whatever their relation. Ah,
scheise
! I am to lay the napkins out for lunch. After the masters eat, we underlings get our nibble, so I will see you soon downstairs. Your frocks are over there, you poor thing. They're worse than mine.”

She clicked her heels, gave a martial bow, and marched down the narrow staircase.

Alone, Hannah sat down gingerly on the dirt-colored blanket that served as a bedspread, half expecting dust to puff up around her. But no, it was perfectly clean, only so, so ugly. “It was
dyed
this color,” she murmured, patting the blanket as she would a pug puppy who couldn't help being born unattractive. “If they were going to go to the trouble of dyeing it, why wouldn't they make it scarlet, or plum, or anything other than dirt-colored?”