“Though Maddy will do nicely, my lady, if you prefer, since Madeline sounds a bit uppity for a maid, doesn’t it?” she said. “My dad give us all big names. If there couldn’t be nothing else grand in our lives, he always said, God rest his soul, at least we had our names.”
“What a lovely thought, Madeline,” Agnes said.
The girl did not wait to be interviewed. She launched into speech.
“They said you was going to have your hair cut tomorrow,” she said.They, Agnes guessed, was the housekeeper. “I can see it must be very long, my lady, and it would be a good idea to have it neatened up if you haven’t done so for a while. But don’t let them chop off too much. Some ladies look fine enough all crimped and curled, but you can do better than that, if you’ll pardon me for telling you so when you haven’t asked. You can lookelegantand turn heads wherever you go.”
“And you can style it elegantly, can you, Madeline?” Agnes asked, beginning to relax despite her sore feet.
“Oh, I can, my lady,” the girl assured her, “even though I don’t look as hoity-toity asherdown below, who thinks herself good enough to dress a duchess.” Ah, Finchley, her mother-in-law’s dresser, must have shown herself in the housekeeper’s room too, Agnes thought. “I got six sisters as well as my mum, and I love nothing in the world more than doing their hair. And they are all different. That’s the whole secret, really, isn’t it? To do someone’s hair to suit their faces and figures and ages and hair type, not just to make them look like everyone else, whether they ought to or not.”
“If I were to employ you, Madeline,” Agnes said, “there would be more for you to do than just style my hair.”
“You were out at the dressmaker’s all of yesterday,” Madeline said, “and other places today for all the things to go with the dresses. They told us so when we got here.”
“Oh, dear,” Agnes said. “Were you kept waiting long, Madeline? I am so sorry.”
The girl looked shocked and then laughed merrily.
“You are a right one,” she said. “I can see that. No wonder they was sniffing downstairs—well,her,anyway—and saying as how you come from the country and don’t know nothing about nothing. I hope you didn’t let no one talk you into having lots of frills and flounces.”
Agnes feared she had probably done just that, though in truth she could scarcely recall what she had ended up agreeing to.
“I ought to avoid them?” she asked. “I must confess, Madeline, that I have never thought of myself as a frilly sort of person.”
“Nor you aren’t,” the girl said.
“But dullness is not permitted by theton, it would seem.” Agnes smiled ruefully.
Madeline looked shocked again.
“Dull?” she said. “You? You could knock them all into a tall hat, my lady, with the right clothes and the right hair. But not by outcrimping and outfrilling them. You ought to lookelegant. Not in an old-lady sort of way, I don’t mean. How oldareyou?”
Agnes was hard put not to laugh out loud.
“Twenty-six,” she said.
“Just what I thought,” Madeline said. “Ten years older than me. But notoldeven so. Not a girl either, though, and I bet they have all been trying to get you to look like all those young things that will be flocking here soon to look for rich nobs to marry. If I had the dressing of you, my lady, I would tell you what to wear, and I wouldn’t let you wear the wrong things. Not that I ought to speak so freely when everyone tells me I’m wasting my time coming here and ought to think myself lucky if I can get a scullery maid’s job. I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I do that when I want something terrible bad.”
“And you want to dress me terribly badly,” Agnes said, smiling at her, “and my hair.”
“Yes, my lady, I do,” Madeline said, suddenly looking all big eyed and anxious. “Especially after seeing you. You are lovely. Oh, not in that pretty-pretty way of some, but you gotpotential. Don’t you love that word? I learned it new a few weeks ago, and I been looking for a suitable chance to use it.”
“I think, Madeline,” Agnes said, “you had better move your things here tomorrow and get yourself properly outfitted for the position of personal dresser to Viscountess Ponsonby. No scullery maid’s job for you. Your talents would be wasted on a scrubbed floor, I suspect. I will give instructions. And the day after tomorrow you will accompany me to Madame Martin’s shop on Bond Street. I will need to make some minor changes to the instructions I left for the clothes she is making for me. There is no point in having them made and delivered if you will not allow me to wear them, is there?”
“I got the job?” Madeline looked afraid to believe the evidence of her own ears.
“You have the job,” Agnes said and smiled. “I hope I will not disappoint you.”
Madeline jumped to her feet, and for one startled moment Agnes thought the girl was going to hug her. Instead she clasped her hands very tightly to her bosom and bobbed a curtsy.
“You won’t be sorry, my lady,” she said. “Oh, you won’t, honest. You’ll see. I’ll make you all the rage. Oh,waittill I tell Mum and the girls. They won’tbelieveme.”
Agnes had two inches taken off her hair the following day, just enough to tidy the ends. Mr. Johnston, the hairdresser to whom she was taken, was not happy with her. Neither was her mother-in-law. But Flavian approved and said so when he came to her that night and saw her hair down.
“I expected to f-find a shorn lamb at the d-dinner table earlier,” he told her. “But instead I found Agnes with shining, elegant t-tresses. Is that what the hairdresser d-did for you?”
“He merely trimmed it,” she told him. “Madeline dressed it—my new maid.”
