Instinct cautioned her to say nothing to anyone about it as she secreted it in between the flat springs of her bed and the thin, hard mattress. No one would find it there; the mattress was seldom turned.
Though she sought to thank her employer, she’d only set eyes on him while waiting at table and then he had not once looked in her direction. Her attention had been more taken up with his wife, who also hadn’t looked her way – it might have been a phantom serving her, there being not the smallest response to the food laid before her.
Doctor Lowe would give an almost imperceptible nod of the head as she carefully ladled soup, held the meat or vegetable dishes for him to help himself or replenished his wine glass. He hardly took his eyes off his wife when not concentrating on his meals. She, on the other hand, did not once glance up from her plate to look his way. It was indeed an atmosphere one could have cut with a knife. For Ellie, meal times were proving to be far from the privilege she’d imagined.
It wasn’t only this that dulled the elation she’d first felt; it was a dawning awareness of something about her body not being quite as right it should be. The next morning, as she rose at six – in daylight now, which would normally have been heartening – she threw herself out of bed to grab the chamber pot underneath, just in time before bringing up last night’s supper.
Florrie, already out of her bed, was staring as Ellie looked up from the receptacle. ‘You orright?’
‘I’m orright now,’ she answered. ‘I think,’ she added, as another convulsion threatened, one that she managed to contain as she pushed the pot out of Florrie’s sight. ‘Something I must’ve eaten.’
It could only be that. She could think of nothing else that would have made her so violently sick completely out of the blue. Usually, when one is going to be sick, it takes some while, the sufferer tossing and turning and heaving before the offending food finally decides to vacate the stomach.
‘I ’ad the same as you,’ Florrie said. ‘I feel orright.’
‘Well, I’m orright now,’ Ellie said sharply. ‘We’d best get downstairs. We can’t be late.’
She’d hardly got to the kitchen when a second attack, though not so fierce, had her running outside to the yard. She returned to find Cook gazing at her.
‘What’s the matter with you, girl?’
‘I think it might be something I might’ve eaten.’
There came a deep, accusing frown. ‘Are you saying I’ve given you something that’s gone off?’
‘No, Cook, supper was lovely and no one else is ill. It’s only me.’
‘That’s true.’ She jerked her head. ‘Come over here a minute.’ Ellie came and had Mrs Jenkins look into her eyes. She saw her frown as she straightened up. ‘When did you see your last monthlies, girl?’
‘It was… I’m… not sure.’
It was rather late in her fourteenth year when she’d first realized she’d become a woman. But it had never been much of an inconvenience, arriving only spasmodically, just four or five times over that year.
When she’d spoken to her mother about it, the awkward, off-handed reply was that it sometimes happened that way when young girls first started, but people didn’t talk about such things. She had continued to be irregular and thought no more of it, supposing it would always be this way with her.
‘I can’t remember either,’ Mrs Jenkins was saying. It was she who took charge of the pail of salt water in which the soiled towelling squares were left soaking in salt water to lift the dried-in bloodstains. They’d then be boiled with the rest of the laundry, the skivvy’s job to stand over the boiling suds and push the linen with the copper stick.
‘I ain’t got time to count months and days, but you should know,’ Mrs Jenkins said in a distracted sort of way as she continued to study Ellie’s face. ‘But surely you must know.’ Ellie shook her head, trying to think back. It had been some time – maybe three months – but she’d been too busy to bother counting when and how long she was last on and even then she hadn’t thought much about it.
‘And now you’ve been sick,’ Mrs Jenkins said in a low voice. ‘Is there anything else that seems queer about you? Not quite right, I mean. Not ill, but not quite right.’
Yes, there had been something – something strange she wasn’t sure of. Like an odd tenderness lately when she brushed her breasts with a careless arm when working. Small though her breasts were, they seemed to her to have somehow got bigger in the last couple of weeks and that didn’t feel right either. She was sure she must be sickening for something. But what? She felt well enough in herself.
‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me, Cook?’ she asked after answering Mrs Jenkins’s question.
The woman was still looking at her, even more keenly now. ‘Have you been seeing someone?’
‘Seeing someone?’
‘On your last day off. Someone you met or’ve been meeting behind our backs. Servants your age aren’t encouraged to entertain young men. Have you been playing around with someone or other?’
‘No, I ain’t!’ Ellie had begun to feel annoyed. It was her business if she did have a young man, which she didn’t. What chance on one day off every month? ‘All I done on me last day off was go and see an old neighbour where I used to live.’
She’d gone there to see if they’d had any news of her father. They hadn’t. Not a peep. But Mrs Sharp had been pleased to see her and had her stay for dinner and tea. The woman had talked almost non-stop about this and that: the state of the area, the lack of policemen to patrol it, the crime, her noisy new neighbours,
