From her position in the doorway, Mary gasped and paled. Realizing she had just given herself away, she turned to leave, in an effort to pretend that she was just passing by.
“Stay where you are, Mary,” Lady Wickham snapped. “I am not going to blame you for your recent transgressions. I am fully aware that Miss Welles has put inappropriate notions of grandeur into your thick head—ideas which a girl like you is incapable of acquiring on her own. Therefore, I am willing to overlook yesterday morning’s disobedience, and give you another chance to reform your ways rather than turning you out on the spot, an act which, I confess, was my first inclination.”
Mary dropped a grateful curtsy to Lady Wickham.
C.J. was appalled. “Mary—,” she began, but the scullery maid shook her head and stifled her tears. “You don’t understand, Miss Welles,” she said shakily.
“Place your hands on the table and bend over, Miss Welles,” Lady Wickham commanded. C.J. obliged fearfully. “Come closer, Mary, and take your hands away from your eyes. You will watch what happens to rebellious serving girls who question their betters. Even a lady’s companion remains subject to punishment.” At the first crack of the ebony cane on her backside, C.J. cried out in pain. “This reprimand injures me more than it does you,” the old woman scolded, punctuating her words with heavy wallops that landed on C.J.’s back and thighs.
“You’ll break her spine, your ladyship!” Mary cried, as the blows rained harder down the middle of C.J.’s back.
“Regrettably, Miss Welles, your independent spirit and defiance will deprive me of your services, and I shall be unhappily required to sacrifice my reading and my correspondence until you have learned the error of your ways. You will go to the scullery and will not be permitted above stairs, except to sleep in your chamber, until further notice.”
Lady Wickham was visibly exhausted from exacting C.J.’s punishment. “Come forward, Mary.” The maidservant approached her employer with no small degree of trepidation, her cheeks stained with tears from witnessing her champion’s punishment. The crack of a slap rang out against her damp flesh.
“But Mary didn’t do anything, your ladyship,” C.J. protested through her own tears. Her temerity was rewarded with an equally sharp blow to her own cheek.
“I do not have to explain my actions to my servants!” Lady Wickham snapped. “But as I am a munificent woman, I will enlighten you, Miss Welles. Mary was chastised just now as a reminder to curb her attempts at independent thought. You were disciplined for daring to question the actions of your employer.” Lady Wickham waved her hand dismissively. “I expect this to be the end of the matter. You are both excused.”
C.J. WIPED THE GRIME from her brow with the back of a sticky hand. Flecks of soot flew into her face, stinging her eyes as she used a bellows to fan the flames of the small coal—the portion commonly used to start the coal fires before more lumps were added to the grate. It was miserably hot and her lungs burned from smoke inhalation. Had she been pressed into service on a chain gang, the labor could not have been more arduous than the exigencies of a Georgian kitchen.
Mary sat nearby, scrubbing rust from the bottom of a pot that Lady Wickham was too penurious to place on the rubbish heap.
“Why don’t we just bolt?” C.J. whispered. “We could sneak away in the dead of night. Anything would be better than this.” She nearly choked on another mouthful of smoke.
“Are you daft, Miss Welles? If they catch us—and they will, make no mistake—they’ll beat us for sure! Maybe worse.” Her eyes widened with fear. “They could hang us!”
Stretching her cramped arm muscles, C.J. nearly knocked over the rat shelf suspended above her head. Mary had explained that the shelf’s position rendered it impossible for the rats to get to any food placed upon it—hence the nickname. “For the life of me, I cannot make it past my third day down here,” C.J. bitterly replied, wiping her hands on her greasy apron. “I can’t imagine how you do it every day.”
Mary shrugged resignedly. “It’s my place, Miss Welles. One must accept their lot, and it’s no good tryin’ to change things.”
Mary was too ingenuous to indulge in exaggeration. If servants who went AWOL might really be subject to death by hanging, there appeared to be no alternative but spirit-crushing servitude. Admittedly, C.J. did not know enough to elude either her employer or the authorities; and Mary was equally ill equipped, for different reasons. It was both sobering and depressing for C.J. to acknowledge that Mary was probably right: to survive in this world, she, too, would have to adopt Mary’s resignation to her “lot.” C.J. began to regret having agreed to help Mary improve herself. Perhaps the poor girl had been better off in her previous state of defeated complacency. A little knowledge could indeed be a dangerous thing sometimes.
Lady Wickham was expecting a guest for afternoon tea, so Cook ordered the two young women to make the “new tea.” “Like the voice of a little bird, her ladyship is: cheap, cheap, cheap,” scoffed Cook. “She even makes her own new tea ’stead of buying it off the vendors.” She noticed C.J.’s uncomprehending expression. “You must have been quality once,” the thickset woman remarked, “not to know about new tea.” She showed C.J. how they took the used tea leaves and dried them over a heated plate. “For green tea, we add copper dye,” she told a horrified C.J., who wondered what the copper was doing to their systems when they drank the doctored beverage. “When her ladyship wants black tea, which she prefers, we add logwood dye to give it the right color. She
