Love by the Morning Star (8 page)

Besides the bed there was a three-drawered dresser, a tipsy chair with an enamel coating that had worn off in places to reveal rusting wrought iron, a rag rug, a mirror just big enough to reflect one cheek, and for decoration, a mockery of a painting: a garish pink-cheeked servant in a crisp white apron and cap skipping through a pastoral landscape as if she'd never done a day's work in her life.

Two dresses hung from hooks on the wall.

“They're not hideous at all,” she told herself gamely. Perhaps they had even been pretty, once. The blue floral one might have looked like Delft china . . . three or four owners ago. The pink floral gave a vague impression of spattered blood that had been scrubbed and scrubbed but had never quite come out.

She stood and crossed the room—it took only a step—and opened the dresser. The top two drawers were empty. The bottom drawer had mouse droppings in it.

“No underthings,” she said to herself.

Then she covered her face in her hands and, just for a moment, blotted out the whole horrid world.

“I don't care!” she insisted, throwing out her arms and baring herself to the truth again. “Let them hate me. Let them punish me. Here I was sent and here I stay until my parents come to England.” She looked again at the shoddy ugliness around her. “I wouldn't care if they were poor. If this were all they had and they took me in with love, I swear I would never make a single squeak of complaint. But to live in a castle, and treat me like this . . .”

She swallowed hard and knitted her dark brows. “There. That was my last bit of whining. I won't complain. Not to the Liripips, not to the cook, not even to myself. And I'll die before I ask them for new underthings. Why was I so stupid at the station? No, never mind, that's only complaining about myself, and I'm not to complain anymore. Or talk to myself.”

She made a motion of locking her mouth and throwing away the key. Then, since no one was watching and she could be as silly as she chose, she scrambled on the floor to pick up the imaginary key and slipped it into her pocket, just in case she changed her mind.

Resolutely, she slipped into the blue print dress. It was miles too long, but she managed to hook it up under her apron so it hung higher, though unevenly. The cap was trickier. No matter how she placed it, it either tipped forward over her eyes or tumbled backward off her head entirely. Finally she spied an old hairpin wedged into a corner on the floor, relic of a kitchen maid past. With that she contrived to secure the cap at a rakish angle so it dipped down over one eye. It was the best she could do.

Then she carefully stowed the few mementos of her past life. She hung her light coat neatly on one of the hooks, and folded her jacket, and the matching skirt weighted down with strands of pearls sewn into the seams. Beneath them in the top drawer she tucked her mother's letter from Lady Liripip, and a picture of her parents linked arm in arm on the stage, taking a curtain call. Finally she settled her passport and visa in her lap and looked at the little
J
stamped on them.

She had never been religious, and her parents' only faith was in the stage. Aaron Morgenstern was a member of the local synagogue because his parents had been, because his friends were, because it took his donations and put them toward good deeds. His was a Jewishness of history and culture and sociability, not of faith. Spiritually, he was an atheist. That did not matter to the state.

“From now on, for the sake of my fellow Jews who are suffering, I will be as Jewish as I can.” Hannah did not speak Hebrew, knew few of the rites, but what she knew, she would practice. “It will be a lie of a sort,” she admitted to herself. “But a good one. A lie of homage. A lie of solidarity.”

She shoved her cap more firmly on her head and hiked up her trailing hem, determined to do whatever she had to until she could be with her parents again.

“Though I hope it won't be
too
long,” she said as she closed her door behind her. “I don't know how many washings my one pair of underwear can survive.”

The family's lunch was over by the time she descended, and the servants were just sitting down to their own repast. Dozens of pairs of eyes whipped around at her entrance.

No need to be afraid of them. It's only a stage
, she thought to herself (fortunately remembering not to say it out loud, for once).
I am just acting a part. An Aschenputtel part—no, in English it is Cinderella. Only my father will be my prince when he makes it safely to England, and I have a beloved mother instead of an evil stepmother, and
. . .

“Ahem,” she said after a long and uncomfortable silence. “My name is Hannah and I suppose I am . . . no, I
am
the new kitchen maid. I am also Jewish, and I'm sorry, but I won't work on a Saturday because it is a holy day. Also, sausages and other pig things are not to have.” In her confusion she was thinking in German and translating to English. Her accent was creeping up on her and she fought it back, her face scrunching with determination. “I am very happy to be here and hope to be your good friend. Oh, and shrimp. I must not eat shrimp. Or camels. Or insects.” She was very hazy on dietary laws, having spent her toddler years wandering among the tables at Der Teufel, sneaking diners' shrimp cocktails. But it would have to do. She had made her point.

She bobbed a curtsy because she had seen it in a movie about English servants once. “Thank you.”

One of the parlor maids tittered, and this started a chain reaction of giggles and guffaws until Sally barked, “Silence!” and told Hannah to sit at the end of the table.

“You work on Saturday like everyone else. Do your praying Sunday when the rest of us are at church. As for shrimp,
my lady
,” she added with an echo of Trapp's withering scorn, “you shan't be offered them. Eat as many bugs as you like, though. Sup now, and you'll set out the kitchen table in preparation for dinner afterward. Tomorrow your work begins in earnest.”

Feeling like a cad, Sally immediately turned to chat with the housekeeper, who usually deigned to eat with them. When one of the kitchen maids served them and Sally saw the chubby, still-sizzling pork sausages she had prepared not ten minutes earlier, she felt a terrible urge to leap up and make Hannah a special omelet all for herself, but she manfully controlled that impulse.
Best the girl get used to it now
, she thought.

Hannah, who had dined lightly the night before and breakfasted not at all, almost drooled at the fragrant, fatty smell of sausages.
No
, she told her salivary glands sternly.
People are being persecuted for having Jewish blood. I have never been particularly Jewish, but I will do my best. It is the least I can do
.

She reached for the potatoes and ate them in silence under heavy stares.

“I
INTEND TO MAKE MYSELF
as helpful as possible,” Hannah said after the servants had dispersed to their varied duties and the lunch table was cleared. “I know very little of cookery but I can make a few things.
Pfannkuchen
, of course. Crepes. No, that is French. I'm sorry, my English sometimes runs away from me here and there. Pancakes!” She laughed. “The word might run but I always catch it. My legs are short, but fast. I do not care for the sweet
pfannkuchen
so much but rather the ones you eat for a meal, with bits of bacon and cheese and scallions. And when they are in season the plump white asparaguses. Asparageese? No, one asparagus, many asparagus. They are like fish and sheep.”

Sally could not see at all how asparagus were like fish or sheep, so she only said, “Can you lay out a table for dinner preparation?”

“I have laid out many tables,” Hannah said, thinking of the napkins she'd coaxed into the shape of swans or crabs or Viking longboats every night at Der Teufel.

“I'm going to run to the village to get a few ducks. Herself changed her mind and needs roasted mallard tonight, and if I let one of the girls pick them out they'll take whatever they're given and never ask how long they've hung. Himself won't eat a duck that's hung less than a week.” Sally stopped short in her bustling, amazed at her own jibber-jabber. The foreign girl was getting to her. Could it be that Trapp was wrong? Maybe talking didn't get in the way of an efficiently run kitchen. It felt rather nice.

“You have the cook's table set out for me,” Sally went on, “and while the girls and I make dinner you can watch and learn. The most important things are to do what you're told and stay out of the way. And see Judy or Glenda about a few more hairpins.”

Sally reached for Hannah, and for one tender instant the girl felt loved as the older woman adjusted the unsightly white construct perched on her head. She caught Sally's hand. “They won't say anything, will they? I can bear it. I
have
to bear it. But they won't be so unkind as to tease me about it, will they?”

“What, about where you come from? Who you are? Oh, they'll tease you without mercy. You just give as good as you get.” As she looked down at the dark-eyed little morsel of a girl, she felt more of Trapp slip away.
This is my kitchen now
, she thought.
I can be kind if I want
.

But when Sally came home with a basketful of perfectly hung ducks she was not inclined to kindness. Hannah, her cap askew again, was standing beside the vast cook's table with a pleased expression, while Judy and Glenda smirked in the background. “I told you to have my table set up!” Sally thundered. “I have to start dinner now. Not in five minutes,
now
, for if it's not ready the instant Lord Liripip sits down, the entire lot of us will be sacked.”

The table looked very pretty, with its single knife and fork, its slotted spoon and its ladle, its large mixing bowl and its tea towel cleverly rolled into the shape of twins sleeping in a hammock. Dead center, in an empty Bovril bottle, was a cluster of late, bedraggled wild asters cheerfully shedding pollen all over her pristine work surface.

She rounded on Hannah. “You
said
you could set a cook's table. Have you never seen a cook's table?”

“I . . . I thought I had. There was a chef, and he . . . well, he drank quite a bit and things were a mess afterward but he did wonders with one knife and a towel.” Then she added, quite unhelpfully but very hopefully, “I can make cocktails.”

“Get those things out of my kitchen!” Sally shouted, hurling the flowers toward the scullery. The dinner frenzy was upon her, and like a berserker she snatched up a cleaver and jabbed it in Hannah's direction. Trapp had rarely been without a weapon. “You, back against the wall and don't dare make a move unless I tell you to. Glenda, you get my table ready. Judy, get those ducks plucked and scalded. Herself demanded
pommes soufflées
tonight, and you know what that means.”

As Hannah was to discover, it meant volcanic eruptions of blistering oil, copious cursing, and in the end, ballooned golden potato fingerlings that were worth the burn wounds they inflicted. Not, Hannah mused from her corner, that the people who suffered to make them got to so much as taste them. Sally tore one potato in half to make sure its innards were properly puffed, then served them. The ducks likewise were prodded for doneness, but not one morsel of crispy fat-backed skin passed the lips of any of the servants. Sally did taste the mushroom consommé, adding a smidge of salt, and nibbled a bit of the warm pear and onion salad, but for the most part, one half of the house cooked and the other half ate.

Sally had turned into another creature entirely, a focused general doing battle against ingredients and time. Feathers flew, steam made everyone look like damp beets, and no one stopped moving for even an instant. Only Hannah was still, holding up the wall and watching, spellbound, the frenetic activity that, under Sally's supervision, produced perfection from chaos.

They'll chop their fingers off
, she thought as she watched the shining blades rise and fall. Judy almost got gutted when Glenda, knife in hand, dashed off for one more pear, and a tall and comely footman in archaic breeches and hose only just managed to avoid being doused with scalding water.

Somehow it all worked. The table, properly laid out now, had a dozen knives, twenty bowls, spoons of every shape and size, but Sally grabbed what she needed almost without looking. At the precisely right moment, after just the right amount of shouting and tears, threats of firing and vows of quitting, each dish was ready and handed to a footman, who carried it off to that rarefied ether in which the aristocracy dwell. The soup, a delicate sole in tarragon butter, the ducks and their supporting cast of vegetable matter, all left their humble origins to nurture the masters.

Finally, a moment of calm. Only dessert remained, a chocolate timbale, and Sally had that well in hand. The spare footmen were chatting up Judy and Glenda; the butler Coombe, who was overseeing the wines, was beginning to think of the pipe and mystery novel waiting for him on his bedside table. Sally took what felt like her first breath in the last two hours. The terrible ghost of Trapp began to retreat. Sally wiped her sweating brow and spared a glance at Hannah, still gazing wide-eyed at everything. “See,” she said, diminishing to mere Sally again, “it's not so hard once you learn. Tomorrow you'll—”

Late that night, sitting like a trim little lotus on the floor while Waltraud sprawled on her bed, Hannah recalled how at that moment everything had gone to hell. All at once the battle of dinner, so near to being won, was a rout. The asters, wilted and forgotten in the scullery doorway, started it all.

“It wasn't really my fault. Flowers, in themselves, are innocent, and if their yellow eyes looked particularly baleful that didn't mean they had tripped that gangly footman
deliberately
. Who would be such a goose as to trip on a flower? But oh, Traudl, he simply went flying. I never knew one human being could have so many arms and legs. Dozens, at least, like a squid.”