Chapter One
A village in Oxfordshire, 1816
The old bagwas really dead.
Katherine Fivepence had spent the last few days expecting Lady Miller to sit up, grab her favorite cane, and start laying about her while berating them all for actual and imagined deficiencies.
Even after the coffin lid went on. Even during the funeral service in the little church. It was just hard to believe that the menace who had overshadowed Kat’s life for so many years had finally gone the way of all humankind.
Now Kat stood in the graveyard, ignoring the drizzle and the small cluster of menservants and villagers, watching the first clods of earth going into the grave on top of the coffin. None of the other maids were present. Miss Miller had decreed that females did not attend funerals. She and her sisters were seated in the ladies’ parlor at home saying prayers, and the female servants had all been sent to the servants’ hall or their rooms to also pray for the soul of their dead mistress.
Kat wasn’t with the other maids because they scorned and envied Kat in equal measures. Envied, for Miss Ellen had taken her as her personal attendant. Scorned for several reasons, not least because shewas an indentured orphan and because Miss Ellen was the unwanted daughter and sister of the house.
As for praying for Lady Miller’s soul, Kat figured her prayers would not make a blind scrap of difference to Lady Miller’s destination. In fact, if God was a just god, like the vicar always said, then Lady Miller was even now roasting away in the hottest pit of hell.
Anyway, Kat hadn’t wanted to miss the funeral and burial. To her, it was a celebration, and if English maids were permitted to dance on graves, she would have done so, as soon as the grave was filled, a mound of raw earth in the center of a neat row of cemetery plots, each with a carefully tended garden, rails, or neat hedges to demarcate its borders, and a tombstone of praises for the dead, or pious wishes for their eternity, or both.
These were the former dignitaries of the village, whose descendants had made it a point of pride to ensure their ancestors could compete with their neighbors in death, as they had in life. Elsewhere in the graveyard, other plots were also devotedly tended, but with less attention to impressing others, living and dead. And the entire graveyard was neat. The sexton made sure that even the graves of those whose descendants had long moved away from the village were regularly scythed, the tombstones weeded.
Kat had a favorite corner, where she lingered after church on Sunday, slipping away from under the housekeeper’s eye while the other maids chattered and flirted. A willow tree hung over a family grave, where six generations of Simpsons had been committed to their final rest—the last more than two centuries ago.
Having never had a family, Kat enjoyed reading the tombstones and imagining their lives. Simpsons no longer lived in the village, and Kat sometimes indulged herself in speculations about where they might have gone.
But wait. The committal was over. The vicar was strolling off toward the vicarage, and the sexton was ordering the grave filled in.She had better hustle to return to the manor and join the other servants in the parlor. The solicitor, who was strolling alongside the vicar all dressed in black, was heading to the same destination, and when he arrived, he would be reading Lady Miller’s last will and testament.
Miss Miller had ordered the whole household to be present for that solemn event. Miss Clara Miller was cut from the same cloth as Lady Miller, though she had had limited scope as a dictator while that tyrant was alive. Even so, everyone in the household knew that crossing her was almost as stupid as angering her mother.
If Lady Miller had been an old bag, Miss Miller was a young one, and the young bag would have free rein now. That is, if Lady Miller had left her assets the way everyone expected. Everything to the eldest daughter, except for the stables that had been the pride and joy of Lord Miller, the fifth and last Baron Miller of Earnside.
Where the first daughter was her mother’s deputy and echo, the second was her deceased father’s child—mad about horses and aware of nothing else. Miss Francine Miller lived for, and very nearly in, the stables that had been the only fight that Lady Miller had lost in all the time Kat had been in the house. It had happened when Lord Miller died and Lady Miller expressed her intention of selling his string of thoroughbreds. Lord Miller had written into his will that they were left to his wife for her lifetime and after that to Miss Francine, but Lady Miller said she would sell them and leave Miss Francine some money in reparation.
Miss Francine was biddable in everything that did not have to do with horses. Since Lady Miller mostly ignored her, she had not before realized that her second child had the same dogged determination as Lord Miller.
The argument raged over days. Or, at least, Lady Miller raged. Miss Francine simply repeated the same two sentences: “You will not sell the stables. If you do, I shall make certainyou regret it.”
And in those two days, various things happened.
The wheel fell off the little open carriage that only Lady Miller used. Not when anyone was in it. The groom was leading it to the front door where Lady Miller waited. But nonetheless, it was unsettling.
So was the grass snake in Lady Miller’s bed. Not a dangerous snake, and no doubt Miss Francine was speaking the truth when she said the poor little reptile was more frightened than Lady Miller. Still, it gave one pause, as Miss Ellen Miller said to Kat.
The fire that started in Lady Miller’s study was the most dangerous of what Kat and everyone else assumed to be Miss Francine’s statements of intent. It was certainly the one that cracked Lady Miller’s armor. Perhaps it grew larger than Miss Francine intended, for had a house maid not smelled the smoke, it might have taken firm hold and consumed the entire house.
As it was, when the house maid screamed “Fire!”, Miss Francine was first on the spot with a large bucket of water. Though people muttered she knew just where to throw it, Lady Miller declared she was the savior of the house, and that she should be rewarded by being permitted to keep Lord Miller’s stables.
Everyone in the house knew it was a face-saving measure to explain what would otherwise be seen as giving in.
In the past five years, Miss Francine had done what her father had never managed. She had made the stables a financial success, dutifully presenting her mother with the profits. Everyone expected that, after today, she would be the new owner.
As for Miss Ellen, the third daughter, the generally held opinion was that Lady Miller would no more notice her in the will than she had during her lifetime.
Miss Ellen had been the one consistent good thing in Kat’s life since the orphanage signed an indenture on Kat’s behalf and handed her over to slave for Lady Miller. That had been thirteen years ago,when Kat was nine.
Thanks to Miss Ellen, Kat got enough to eat. She learned to read. She survived, in fact. Furthermore, Miss Ellen liked Kat and was kind to her, even when everyone else in the house saw Kat as a dirty orphan, little more than an animal, worthy only of the dirtiest jobs in the house and a good kick in passing.
She was kicked no longer. She had grown larger than most of her tormenters and she’d learned from Miss Francine’s example how to take revenge without being caught. And, too, there had been Jacob.
Jacob became the boot boy a year after Kat was indentured to the Millers, and for four years, the two of them were the youngest servants in the house. Jacob had grown up in the slums, and knew how to defend himself.
