The hack eventually dropped her at a thin, narrow brick house in Camden Town. Miss Jubbles lived with her widowed mother. She unlocked the front door and called, ‘Mother!’
‘In the sitting-room, dear’ came a cry from upstairs.
Miss Jubbles mounted the narrow stairs to the first-floor sitting-room. Mrs Jubbles was sitting before a small coal fire which smouldered in the grate. She was a tiny woman dressed entirely in black. Her black lace cap hung over her withered features. Her black gown was trimmed with jet and her black-lace-mittened hands clutched a teacup.
When Miss Jubbles entered, she said in a surprisingly robust voice, ‘Ring the bell for more tea, Dora.’
Miss Dora Jubbles pressed down the bell-push, and after a few minutes a small maid, breathless and with her cap askew, answered its summons. ‘More tea, Elsie,’ ordered Mrs Jubbles. ‘And straighten your cap, girl.’
Mother and daughter exchanged sympathetic smiles after the girl had left. ‘Servants,’ sighed Mrs Jubbles as if used to a household of them rather than the overworked Elsie and a cross gin-soaked woman who came in the mornings to do the ‘heavy work’.
‘How did it go?’ asked Mrs Jubbles eagerly.
Dora took off her coat and unpinned her large felt hat and stripped off her gloves. ‘Wait until Elsie brings the tea-things. I’ve ever so much to tell you.’
From her daughter’s tales, Mrs Jubbles had gathered that Captain Cathcart, younger son of a baron, who had chosen to sink to trade, was enamoured of her daughter. Both dreamt rosy dreams of being finally ensconced in some country mansion with a whole army of servants at their beck and call.
Elsie panted in with a tray with the tea-things and a plate containing two small Eccles cakes. Mother and daughter lived thriftily. Mrs Jubbles’s husband had owned a butcher’s shop in Camden Town and two houses other than the one the widow now lived in. She had sold all for a comfortable sum, but was keeping aside a substantial amount for her daughter’s wedding. The fact that Dora was now thirty-eight years old had not dimmed her hopes. She saw Dora as elegant and distinguished.
Dora told her mother all about Lady Rose, ending with, ‘She is very beautiful.’
Mrs Jubbles sniffed. ‘You should tell the newspapers what this Lady Rose has been up to. They’d pay you and she’d be so socially ruined that he couldn’t possibly want to marry her.’
Dora was shocked. ‘I would be betraying the captain’s trust. Oh, if you could have seen the way he smiled at me. There is an intimacy there, Mother, a warmth. And to confide in me the way he did? No, he seemed impatient with the adventures of this Lady Rose. He is never impatient with me.’
A little doubt crept into Mrs Jubbles mind. ‘This Lady Rose is young?’
‘Yes, very. Barely twenty, I would say.’
‘And the captain is . . .?’
‘Nearly thirty. Yes, he is younger than I am, but I think I am young-looking for my age.’
‘Oh, yes, dear. Only the other day, the baker, Mr Jones said, “Where is your lovely daughter?” That’s just what he said. So you do not think it would be a good idea to apprise the newspapers of what this Lady Rose is doing?’
‘No, Mother. I would not breathe a word to anyone apart from you. And you must swear you must not tell anyone either.’
‘There, there, girl. I swear,’ said Mrs Jubbles and crossed her fingers behind her back.
Harry had forgotten to tell Mr Drevey about Daisy’s prowess, the sick secretary had come back, and so Rose and Daisy were once more closeted together, typing out from the entries in the ledgers.
Rose was becoming weary of her new life. All her initial enthusiasm had gone, bit by bit. She longed to have a bed of her own again and decent meals. Her pin-money had gone quickly on items which Daisy had considered frivolous, such as an expensive vase for flowers and even more expensive flowers to put in it. Their wages had melted away on meals at Lyons, cosmetics, perfume that Rose felt she must have and new gloves and various other little luxuries. The winter weather was horrible.
The pin-money she had brought to her new life had run out and their combined wages did not allow them any luxuries. She was tired of cooking cheap meals on the gas ring in their room, tired of saving pennies for the gas meters, weary of the biting cold in this seemingly endless winter. She found that although Daisy did not like to read, she loved being read to, and so that was the way they passed most of their evenings.
Her clothes were beginning to smell of cooking, and regular sponging down with benzene did not seem to help much. Their underclothes had to be washed out in the bathroom and then hung on a rack before the gas fire. The sweat-pads from their blouses and dresses took ages to dry.
One morning Rose discovered a spot on her forehead. She could never remember having any spots on her face before.
She could only admire Daisy’s fortitude. Daisy never complained. Rose did not know that Daisy, after her initial rush of gratitude after their escape, was as miserable as she was.
Daisy was every bit as conscious of the rigid English class distinctions as Rose and was afraid that any complaint from her would be treated as the typical whining of the lower classes.
One morning, as they arrived for work, it began to snow. Small little flakes at first and then great feathery ones already speckled with the dirty soot of London.
By lunchtime, it was a raging blizzard.
‘We won’t even be able to get along to Lyons for lunch,’ mourned Rose, ‘and my back hurts with all this useless work.’
‘There’s a pie shop round the corner,’ said Daisy.
‘Oh, would you be a dear and get us something?’ said Rose. ‘I’ll see if there is anywhere here I can make tea. I think there is a kitchen upstairs next to the executive offices. Take my umbrella.’
Daisy struggled out into the whirling snow. She bought two mutton pies and hurried back towards the office. A news-vendor was shouting, ‘Society murder. Read all about it!’
Daisy bought a paper and breathed a sigh of relief when she entered the bank and shut the door on the white hell outside.
‘I’ve got tea,’ said Rose when she entered the room. ‘There was no one upstairs. I’ll wait until they have gone this evening and smuggle the tea things back. Mrs Danby won’t see me. She never even comes near us any more, and Captain Cathcart must have forgotten that we wanted real work.’
‘I’ve got the pies. Look at me coat,’ said Daisy. ‘Soaked already. We’ll never get home in this.’
‘Home,’ echoed Rose bleakly, thinking of that awful room.
‘Look, I bought the
Rose took a bite of the pie. ‘This is really good. We should buy another two to take home.’
‘I say!’ exclaimed Daisy. ‘You’ll never believe who’s gone and got himself murdered.’
‘Who?’
‘That Freddy Pomfret. Remember him? We met him at Telby Castle last year.’
‘So we did,’ said Rose.
‘It says here, “Man-about-town, the Honourable Mr Frederick Pomfret, was found shot dead in his town flat in St James.”’
As Daisy read on, Rose furrowed her brow. She remembered Freddy as vacuous and silly with his white face and patent leather hair. Hardly the man to incite anyone to murder him. But there was something else, something about Freddy nagging at the back of her mind.
At the end of the working day, they went out into a white world. London had gone to sleep under a thick blanket of snow.
‘Let’s see if the underground is working,’ said Daisy. ‘The Central London Railway goes to Holborn and then we can walk home.’
They stumbled through white drifts to King William Street Station and took the hydraulic lift down to the platforms. Trains consisted of three carriages hauled by electric locomotives. These were powered by the largest power-generating station in the country. The coaches were known as padded cells and they were long and narrow with high-backed cushioned seats and no windows. Gatemen stood on platforms at the end of each carriage to call out the names of the stations.
They paid the two pennies each fare and waited in the crush until they managed to get on ‘the tube’, as it
