It weren’t snowing. But in my mind, it feels like it was snowing. That’s the thing about getting old—memory plays tricks on you. How it was gets all tangled up with how you wish it was, how it should have been.
We stood there watching as the villagers and the house staff was getting ready and I got this, like this ball of sort of wanting inside me. Because down in the grounds, that was a community coming together. And though the house was a community of a sort, being where I was and how I was and what with the way things were between me and Emily, I was apart from it. Hard to gossip with the other maids when they think you only got your place because you let the mistress put her hands up your skirt.
Back home, though—and I mean home as it was when I were young, before I went to Patchley the first time or the second—I’d had family and I’d had neighbours, and this was when neighbours knew each other and did things with each other. In forty-seven a bunch of us from all over Stepney had a Christmas fair on an old bomb site and a right old time of it we got to having. For all I loved my life at Patchley, I missed things like that.
As we stood there watching, I remember my hand come to rest, natural-like, on the small of Emily’s back, like we was the regular sort of lovers, and when she noticed she shook me away almost violent.
“What are youdoing, nymph?” she asked, and her voice was cold and cautious.
“Sorry ma’am.” I looked down. Whatever else we was to each other, I was in service.
Emily was still staring out the window. “God, look at them.”
I was looking. But I don’t think we was seeing the same things.
“Can you imagine anything more dreary?” she asked. I don’tthink she was asking me exactly—Emily was like that, she’d ask questions but she wouldn’t expect answers.
But this time I answered anyway. “I think it’s nice,” I told her.
“You would.”
I didn’t ask her to explain what that meant because I knew.
But she told me anyway. She turned to face me, tilting my chin up with two fingers and looking into my eyes. “You’re such a romantic, aren’t you? It’s one of the things I—” She cut herself off there. And I’ve never quite had it in me to believe she was going to say what I wanted her to say. “It’s one of the reasons I keep you around.”
She was a fickle thing, was my mistress. So often I’d seen the worst thing she could imagine turn on a sixpence into the only thing she wanted. And now a smile was on her lips, wicked and scheming and enticing.
“Very well,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I shall take you to the fair. We can rub shoulders with the hoi polloi and I can—oh, I don’t know—win you a fruitcake or something.”
“Not sure that would be proper, miss,” I told her.
And then she put her hands on my shoulders, all stern like. “My dear sweet nymph, you’ve just had your—” Actually there she said some things I’d probably best not repeat in company. Point was she made a strong case as how I were in no position to worry about things being proper.
So I didn’t. Not for then, at least.
The fete was a three-day thing, and Sir Arthur was kind enough to give each of the staff a half day while it was running so we could go visit if we liked. Standoffish he might have been, but a proper gent of the old school was Sir Arthur and sore missed.
The first day and the start of the second I was working, andsince about a third of the staff was off on account of the reasons we’ve established, I was working double hard to cover for them as was enjoying themselves. After tending to my mistress in the morning I was called down to help in the kitchen, because while most of the food at the fete come from the village, Sir Arthur were always keen to send something down from the house to show that the family was still part of it. And over the years, that had settled into a tradition of making gingerbread. And so we made a lot. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds over days.
It were beneath me, technically, not work for a lady’s maid, but the house was short and I didn’t want to give myself airs. Besides, as far as Mrs. Loris and Cook was concerned, I weren’t a proper lady’s maid anyway.
So I made gingerbread. It was an old recipe. Victorian, Cook said, and the house had been serving it at Christmastime for nigh on a hundred years. It was more a cake than a biscuit in some ways, soft and sticky and still a little wonderful. When I come off-shift at last my hands smelled of ginger and my hair smelled of rum and my fingers were sore from stirring. But I was happy, because I’d been part of something, and because I’d arranged with Miss Emily to meet her in the grounds and play, just for a little while, at being regular folk.
I didn’t have Sunday best to get into, not exactly. But I had my own clothes as well as the uniform, so I did myself up in this knee-length dress in navy blue under a little jacket with sharp shoulders and a fitted waist. Fashions was simple in them days what with rationing, but I thought the cut worked well on me and with my barnet set and a touch of makeup I thought I looked nice enough.
Emily and me wouldn’t be going down together, of course. That would have raised eyebrows even on a day off. Especially ona day off, when I’d no call to be attending on her. So I went down with some of the girls and a couple of the lads. We was a gaggle, mostly, but there was pairs among us. Tall quiet Sam had been sweet on young Vera for months and now they was holding hands shyly as they weaved in between stalls.
It didn’t take long for me to shake the crowd. Since I’d moved half upstairs the other girls hadn’t had much time for me, and if any of the young men were paying attention I’d not noticed. I remember walking on my own for a long time, watching little kids dashing about playing in the—not in the snow, I keep thinking there was snow but there weren’t.
But I remember the kids still. And I remember thinking even back then that if there was any way that me and Emily, that me and the mistress…well there’d be choices to make. If I’d ever get to make them.
Not that I would.
I made sure to keep in sight of the steps—right round where we do the interviews now—and so I saw Emily coming down at last with her brother, Master James that is, the one as took the place over in sixty-two and sold it in eighty-nine.
She looked impossible, like always. A long black coat that went to her knees with light-grey piping around the lapels. A hat in a matching colour, warm enough to fit the season but set for fashion more than comfort.
They were talking to each other in low voices, and I only got snatches of what they were saying. But snatches were enough.
