‘Thank you, Your Grace,’ said Annie, and then turned towards Frankie and Abigail who were in the midst of a quiet altercation over whether a tiny chair from the doll’s house should, or should not, go into Frankie’s mouth. Annie took pity on the new gardener.
‘Do you want to read a book to Abigail?’ she asked Frankie. ‘She’s just started enjoying it and it does keep her quiet.’
‘No,’ said Frankie, standing quickly. ‘No, I don’t. I have to be getting on.’ She turned and fled out of the door. Annie’s eyebrow rose as Edward’s hands circled her leg.
‘I can help her with the ways of the house, Your Grace. Can’t have her disrespecting you like that.’
‘No issue,’ said Thea, waving away Frankie’s pre-dismissal retreat. ‘But your help with her would be appreciated.’ Annie nodded and Thea went on. ‘Could you bring them to the parlour a little earlier tonight, Annie, I wish to read them a story myself.’
Annie agreed, and Thea strode out to find her gardener.
She found her in the garden, rubbing at a silver birch trunk with a rag to shine up the white. Frankie turned towards her briefly, and then turned back.
‘Plants is what I’m good at, Your Grace.’ She was huffy. ‘Not kids.’
Thea sat on a bench close to her. ‘You can’t read.’
Frankie whipped round towards her. ‘How did you know? Could you see it on me? I knew I should have never gone into a room with books.’
Thea stifled a smile. ‘You were willing to have brown something smeared all over you and a chair shoved in your mouth, but not to read a book.’ Frankie continued to rub at the trunk, so Thea continued. ‘Is that why you were so reticent to join the household? That you thought I would be bothered?’
Frankie turned to face her and leaned against the tree. ‘I know your lot like your staff to be able to do it all.’
Thea smiled a little. ‘I like my staff to be able to do what I employ them to do, and I have employed you to do the garden. I taught James, our late footman to draw and to write because he wished it, but he was perfectly good at his job without it.’ This seemed to relax Frankie a little.
‘It’s not that I haven’t tried,’ said Frankie. ‘Countless times. It would have been easier to get out that way, but I can’t do it. They gave me the jobs where they thought it wasn’t needed but it ain’t half a hindrance sometimes with reading the names.’
‘But nevertheless, you are a brilliant gardener and achieve more than I have seen from a grower in some years. You create your own way of remembering, I assume?’
Frankie nodded in the affirmative and Thea stood, but then turned back. ’Get out of where?’ she asked.
‘Eh?’ asked Frankie.
‘You just said,it would have been easier to get out.’ said Thea. ‘To get out from where?’ She swallowed, hoping she hadn’t just made a grave mistake. She barely knew anything about Frankie or her past.
Frankie, for her part, looked like she had given too much away for comfort. ‘Not prison, Your Grace, if that’s what you were thinking?’
‘Then where?’ asked Thea. ‘The workhouse?’ A host of awful possibilities for Frankie’s past started to swell in her mind. ‘You weren’t in… in one of the places I found you in… when you were younger?’
‘Not as such,’ said Frankie, ‘although some of them thought they could do what they liked.’ She sighed when Thea looked at her firmly. ‘I was a foundling, Your Grace. From the Foundling Hospital. They told me my mother died when I was born and my father didn’t want me, then. So, I grew up with all the others. Lucky, really. Wouldn’t be here, otherwise.’
Thea stared at her for a minute. She knew this went on, of course, but she was cushioned here in her wealthy part of London. She didn’t have to see it if she didn’t want to. And she didn’t want to, as a rule. But maybe she should. ‘How did you get out?’ she asked.
Frankie shrugged. ‘They kick you out eventually, but they farm you out for work, first. If you’re lucky you get a good position. I was small and strong, so good at climbing and the like. Good job really. The ones that could read and that went to shops and all sorts. I did lots of fruit picking in the autumn like Speckle said. Also chimneys, water closets, roofs – that kind of thing. I had to work hard, or you don’t last long.’
‘How old were you?’ asked Thea. ‘When they sent you to work?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Frankie. ‘I never knew how old I was, but girls were usually apprenticed at about twelve. I was small so might have been thirteen. That was about seven years ago.’
‘And why did you stay with Herbert?’ asked Thea. ‘When he was such a bad employer?’
Frankie shrugged again. ‘Because I liked the work. I got to poking around the garden after the apples and liked what I saw. He grudgingly knew I was good at it, so I stayed.’
‘Until I lost you your job and you had to go to be a…’ She trailed off.
‘A prostitute,’ said Frankie matter of factly. Thea felt her face redden.
‘Well – yes.’
