Lady Wickham’s town house was surprisingly spartan for so fashionable an address. As C.J. passed through a narrow hallway papered in a rather depressing shade of ocher, a pockmarked young man in plain brown livery elbowed a mousy housemaid. “Lookee, Mary, we’ve got a new one,” he snickered.
Chapter Four
Concerning life among the servant class, where our heroine finds a most unlikely friend and ally.
YOU WILL RECEIVE eight pounds a year and an allowance for sugar and tea,” Lady Wickham explained as she gave C.J. a tour of the town house. “You will not receive the customary allowance for beer. I do not believe women should consume spirits.” Everything was in good taste—though a bit on the ascetic side—and the house was spotless, but C.J. was unprepared for the shabby appearance of Lady Wickham’s furnishings.
“Under ordinary circumstances, Miss Welles, the annual wages for a lady’s companion fall within the range of twelve to fifteen pounds per annum—depending upon qualifications and references, of course—as well as an allowance. However, all of my servants consider themselves highly fortunate to have employment at all, given their unsavory histories and the manner in which they came to my attention. I expect that you’ll agree that eight pounds is vastly preferable to a penal colony in Queensland.”
With great difficulty, Lady Wickham mounted the stairs, her club foot landing with an embarrassing thump as she negotiated each riser. She showed C.J. to her room at the very top of the building, just under the eaves. The sloping roof took up a good third of the cramped, dark quarters and the hearth was considerably smaller than those in the rooms below. Still in all, compared to the prison, it was paradise.
In the airless chamber, C.J.’s nostrils were assailed with an unpleasant aroma, and she realized with tremendous mortification that it was her own person that smelled so vile. Sleeping on the street—followed by the overnight incarceration in the cellar of the Guildhall—had compounded the fact that she had been unable to bathe since her arrival. Anyone with whom she had recently been in contact either must have smelled almost as bad or else was exceedingly polite or particularly felicitous of temperament, for she seemed to leave the stink of a cesspool in her wake.
“Wait here, Miss Welles,” Lady Wickham commanded. “Mary will be up momentarily with a hip bath and a bucket of water so that you may wash yourself. I shall see about procuring you some appropriate attire.” She departed the garret and clumped back down the narrow staircase.
C.J. was afraid to sit on the only bed in the room, a narrow cast iron affair with a thin and lumpy mattress, not to avoid discomfort, but to refrain from infecting it with her stench. There was nothing else in the room but a wooden chest of drawers, moderate in size; a shabby folding dressing screen about five and a half feet high; and a metal trunk at the foot of the bed. Curious, she pried open the trunk, which contained two or three coarse woolen blankets. No personal effects were anywhere to be seen. The walls were bare.
She debated whether or not to remove her dress then and there. When she laid aside her shawl and reached to scratch an itch in the middle of her back, she was suddenly reminded that there was a very twenty-first-century fourteen-inch zipper stitched into the back of the garment. She removed all of her clothes, leaving them in a heap shielded by the screen from the rest of the room, then lifted one of the coarse green blankets out of the trunk, enveloping herself as though it were a Turkish towel.
There was a terrible clatter outside the chamber, and the mousy maid with the dull expression in her eyes appeared in the doorway carrying a large oaken bucket. “God in heaven, you gave me a fright!” she exclaimed, water sloshing onto the floor. “I thought you was an apparition. Bein’ wrapped up like that and all.” Her jaw slack with wonder and fear, the girl was actually trembling, although her twitching may have owed more to the weight she had somehow managed to transport up four narrow flights of stairs.
C.J. suddenly realized that women of the era bathed in their shifts, and quickly sought a way of disclaiming her social gaffe. “I admit that my appearance is a bit . . . unconventional . . . but my dress and linen gave off such an objectionable odor that I could not stand wearing them a moment longer than absolutely necessary.” C.J. wondered if the little maid was cognizant of how she came to be in Lady Wickham’s employ. She did not wish to divulge any intelligence the maidservant might not otherwise possess. “My name is Cassandra,” she said, extending her hand to the maid.
“Mary. Mary Sykes,” the girl replied, realizing that she could not reciprocate the courtesy.
“Good God, Mary, put that bucket down! It must weigh a ton!”
The maid obeyed immediately, then bent and unbent her forearms to relax her aching muscles. The girl’s palms were red from rope burn. Then, red-faced, she excused herself with a series of mortified curtsies and went back downstairs to fetch the hip bath. Minutes later, Mary dragged the hip bath into the center of the room and emptied the bucket into it, apologizing for being such a ninny not to have brought the tub before the water, then produced a ball of soap from a pocket in her muslin apron and handed it to C.J., who brought it to her face, inhaling deeply of the delicate lavender fragrance.
C.J. shed the blanket and stepped into the shallow hip bath, settling into it. With her bent legs pulled close to her chest and the water just reaching her hip, she felt like a fairy nestling into a nutshell. Now, in the process of experiencing such a contraption, C.J. understood why the enameled metal tub was called a
