Wildwing (2 page)

I Become a Maid

M
um gives me a quick once-over, twirls her finger to make me turn around so she can check my braid, the back of my dress. Opens the door without a word. Steps out into the street.

I’m starched and ironed within an inch of my life. My shoes are polished bright. My cuffs and collar are scratchy new. Any specks of dust that come near take one look at my brilliant white apron, then turn and run shrieking in fear.

Which is what I want to do.

Instead of walking down Market Street on my way to meet Mr. Greenwood, with everyone watching me, knowing where I’m going, and why. I hear them in my head, the women in Mrs. Miller’s shop, buying their bits of folderol, chirping to one another in their high little voices. “Order! Obedience! Organization! That’s what service will teachher. High time she learned her place.” And then they’ll waddle off to lunch, delighted their world is safe and no little upstart of a fatherless girl will steal the role of queen away from their

well-bred daughters… .

I realize everything is quiet. I come back to myself. I’m still in the doorway. Mum has stopped a few doors down and is turning back to look at me. I expect her to give me a tongue-lashing, but instead she sighs, “Coming, then?”

I pull the door shut behind me. The click of finality. As if I’m leaving this life forever.

Which is silly, I think, as I walk through the crisp morning air. It’s not like I’m leaving home. I’m only going to be a daily.
If
I get the position.

“It’s a good place,” says Mum again. “You’ll stay busy doing it all yourself, cooking and cleaning. But at least there’s no strutting pigeon of a housekeeper finding fault with all you do, like in the big houses. No screaming children grabbing at your apron strings, adding to your work.”

She talks us down the street, the words a lifeline to keep me from drowning under what everyone must be saying. Like the girls at school, and the new teacher. I see Caroline leaning over to whisper to Mary, laughing, and my desk so empty, it’s like I never belonged there in the first place. Like I never even existed… .

“Are you listening to me?” asks Mum again, and I see I’ve stopped and she’s stopped, too, and she’s shaking her head. We start walking again, more briskly now, as the road twists away from the shops and climbs uphill toward the edge of the village.

“You’re lucky to be coming home every night”—the church bells start to strike:
bong!
?”and not sleeping in some closet in an attic with”—
bong!
—”scullery work your only task all day, turning your skin raw up to the”—
bong!
—”elbows, and ladies’ maids and valets and cooks”—
bong!
—”lording it over you. No, as I said, it’s lucky I ran into Mrs. Beale”?
bong!
?”when I did, before Mr. Greenwood could even post”?
bong!
?”the position, or believe me it wouldn’t have lasted, so you be”?
bong!
?”sure to work hard and be respectful and quiet and obedient because”—
bong!
?”you don’t want to mess
this
up.”

As the last reverberations fade, I hear her sigh again. Reminding me how much I’ve messed up so far.

“Patience,” she says for the thousandth time, “is a
virtue”

All those
bong
s have carried us up the hill, across the bridge, along an isolated road to a house nestled at the edge of the woods.

Mum sighs again, but for once it isn’t about me. “The poor dear man,” she says, shaking her head slow and sad. “How he can stand to live here after what happened, so close to these woods and the cliffs down to the sea. Knowing those little bones are out there.”

She opens the gate and waits for me to step through. “Well, come along then,” she says, all brisk again. And she’s knocking at the door.

There’s a long wait.

Nothing.

Maybe she heard wrong. Maybe he isn’t expecting us. Maybe he doesn’t want me after all. Maybe he died in his sleep. Maybe—

There’s a slow rattling as the door unlocks and swings inward. Mr. Greenwood is all bent over, looking far older than his sixty years or so. He’d be tall if he stood up straight. That’s what Mum said: how tall and handsome and proud he was when his wife was alive and the boy was born. How his gaze was bright and sharp, how those brows—now a tangled gray thicket—were as bold as an eagle’s brow, and his hands were the cleverest hands you ever did see, with long fingers as nimble as his mind, always coming up with new inventions. Before the tragedy. Before he gave up and stopped doing anything but wandering the woods. Still looking.

A shiver runs through me.

But Mum is standing right next to me, and she gives me a quick whack on the backside, and I remember. I curtsey all polite, bob my head, and say, “Addy Morrow, at your service, sir.”

He nods, opening the door wider. Then without a word,he turns and creaks down the hallway. We follow, Mum shutting the door firmly behind us. With the door goes the sunlight. The hall is paneled top to bottom with wood so dark, it’s like walking into a cavern. Thick carpeting swallows our footsteps. We pass several closed doors before Mr. Greenwood leads us into a sitting room with a great padded chair in front of a meager fire, and windows with curtains so heavy, the velvet obscures all but a sliver of light. Everything feels obscured, the walls behind jumbled bookcases, the floor beneath a dense oriental carpet. But over the mantel there’s one spot of brightness: a painting of a beautiful young woman with that swooped-up hair they used to have, and one of those high lace collars. She gazes out warmly from eyes that are the most remarkable bright blue.

“Won’t you have a seat?” His voice is rough, as if he’s not accustomed to talking much. Then he’s looking around, and we’re all realizing there aren’t any more chairs.

One chair. For one old man.

“No, thank you, Mr. Greenwood, sir. We prefer to stand,” says Mum.

She waits for him to speak, but there’s only an awkward pause, stretching out longer and longer. Finally, she says, “With your permission, sir, I was wondering if we might discuss Addy’s hours.”

He nods.

“I understand Mrs. Beale comes in at eight, but Addy would prefer to start earlier, if it please you.”

Again, only a nod.

“As for cooking, Addy can’t do anything fancy, but she’s fine at the basics, and she’s a quick learner. A simple breakfast, lunch, tea, and she’ll leave you your dinner. Is that right? Now, when you entertain—”

“I don’t entertain,” he rasps. “And no lunch. I am out much of the day.”

I almost sigh in relief.

Now the two of them are talking wages and uniform and days off, and before long it’s all passing over me in a wash. There’s a sadness in this house, no matter how thick the carpet or crowded the shelves, a sadness so deep, it could swallow you whole.

In my head I hear Mum’s voice again from last night, and I’m seeing not the drawing room but woods, and wild, wind-tossed branches.

“They searched everywhere for that boy,” she’d said. “Mr. Greenwood, he looked like a madman, eyes wild and darting, hair practically standing on end. Kept saying how the boy was all he had left in the world, with his wife dead and gone, and how he’d never forgive himself for giving the nurse the day off. The maid was busy in the kitchen, yousee, and the boy was supposed to be napping, but they discovered the back door wide open, and the boy nowhere to be found. Barely two years old, he was. You were but a few months yourself, and everything to me, and it cut me to the core knowing how Mr. Greenwood must be feeling. Then, on the third day, when they’d mostly given up hope, they come across Mr. Greenwood atop the cliffs not far from those old castle ruins, staring down at the sea where it crashes onto the rocks like doom itself. A good place to jump and end your anguish. They talked him back from the edge, with gentle voices and soft moves, and him still calling, ‘James! James,’ as if the child could hear. Oh, it was enough to break your heart. The doctor sedated him, kept him sleeping for almost a week, and he’s never been the same since… .”

Silence pulls me back to the room. Mum and Mr. Greenwood are both looking at me, waiting. I have no idea what they just asked, so I bob another curtsey and say, “Yes, sir.”

That seems to do it. Mr. Greenwood shuffles up the hall and opens the heavy door.

“Tomorrow morning,” he says, his voice like rust. “Good day.”

The fresh air hits me with a wallop. What just happened?

Where have I been?

The Back Door

M
um walks through the gate. “We’ll make one more stop before we go home,” she says. “Where?”

“The Whittingtons’. They’re expecting us so you can apologize to Caroline.”

“What?”
I stop dead. My feet have forgotten how to move. Leaving school and losing my part in the play: I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. I was wrong.

“But I told you,” I say, with a growing sense of desperation. “I didn’t even start that fight!”

“It doesn’t matter who started it. You took part in it. And if Mrs. Whittington stops asking me to make her dresses…” She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. I know what she means. We can’t spare a single coin. And yet I try one last time. “She’ll be at school, you know.”

“Her mother said she’d be home for this.”

I drag one foot forward, then the other. Mum nods and starts walking again.

So here I am, lagging four steps behind her as we turn down River Road and cross the bridge to the good part of town, where the bigger houses shout out their importance to the world, trying to pretend they’re as grand as country estates. Their trim front gardens boast, “We have a gardener!” and their large front windows demand you look in so they can proclaim, “We have fancy furniture!” My face feels hotter and hotter. My footsteps slow.

Mum stops in front of a house.
Her
house.

“Are you coming?” she says. So I open the little gate and start down the path to the door.

“Not there!” cries Mum, aghast. “What
has
that school been teaching you?” She leads me around the side of the house—every window staring at me with dark, accusing eyes—to the servants’ entrance. She knocks.

A grim gray-haired woman opens the door, plump and pasty-faced in her ruffled apron, her snow-white cuffs, her frilly fluff of a maid’s cap.

“They’re expecting you,” she says.

I take a step forward, but she stops me with a look.

“Wait here,” she says sharply, closing the door in our faces.

I can hear my breath heavy in the still air. Everything inside me is screaming to run and keep running forever. I struggle to keep my feet in place.

I look at Mum. She’s staring straight ahead, unreadable, impenetrable.

Steps approach from inside, and the knob turns. The maid pulls the door open and then stands aside as
they
fill the frame: a vast battleship of a woman awash in gray silk, and Caroline in a purple dress, a new one she’s never worn to school before. I recognize it anyway; Mum was finishing the hand stitching just last week. I know without a doubt Caroline put it on specially to meet me at the door. The back door.

“Well?” demands the battleship.

“Thank you for seeing us,” says my mother in a little, disappearing voice. “Adelaide has something she would like to say.”

She looks at me. I take a breath, trying to steady myself. Trying to ignore the anger and humiliation building in me like trapped steam.

As I lift my eyes to speak, a victorious smile slashes across Caroline’s face. I can’t look at her; I look at the battleship, forcing the words out through my teeth.

“I’m sorry for the trouble I caused.”

There’s a pause. “Well?” she demands.

I haven’t said enough.

“It won’t happen again, Mrs. Whittington.” “Don’t tell
me
. Tell
Caroline.”
She turns to her smirking daughter.

I’m gritting my teeth so hard, they feel ready to crack. Each word comes out tighter than the last as I look up at Caroline and say, “It won’t happen again.”

“That’s better,” says Mrs. Whittington, taking an imposing step forward. “A girl like you should know her place.”

Before I can answer, Mum jumps in. “Beg pardon, ma’am, but Adelaide is leaving school to go into service.”

“Oh!” exclaims Caroline with relish. “That means she can’t be in the play!
Too bad.”

I can’t even look up anymore. All I see are the stone pavers beneath my feet, my clenched hands. The air reeks of Caroline’s exultation.

“And the green gown,” says her mother, taking a step back again. “Will it be ready next week?”

“I’ll bring it for a fitting in a few days, if it please you,” says Mum.

“Fine,” says Mrs. Whittington, as crisp as a new-ironed pleat. She turns and walks away.

Caroline lingers for a moment. “Yes, fine,” she echoes, a perfect imitation of her mother.

The maid steps forward and shuts the door.