‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I will come back,’ he said, ‘when your father is at home.’ He bowed and went to leave.
‘Who shall I say called, sir?’
He didn’t reply. And then to my amazement he came back into the room and lifted my face to his and kissed me. Having never been kissed before I was uncertain as to what I was supposed to do. He wasn’t, and before I knew what had happened my mouth was full of his tongue and a part of me that had never ached before felt as if it might die if something wasn’t done to soothe the yearning.
He pulled away from me so suddenly that I felt bereft and without a thought to modesty I put my arms round his neck. Laughing, he untangled himself from me and undid the ribbons on my shift so that it fell once more to the floor. He stroked my face. His fingers were long and elegant, and slowly they went down my neck, over my breast, and circled my nipples, which had the effect of making them hard. His hand caressed my stomach and wherever his fingers went they seemed to waken the flesh of me that before had been fast asleep. He touched the inside of my thigh and then up into the soft purse of my Venus mound.
I should have been outraged and I was not, just ablaze with longing – for what, I didn’t know. I felt certain that I was about to find out, but he took his hand away.
‘Don’t give that sweet, white rose of yours to any stranger,’ he said. ‘Wait for your husband to come and claim it, and more besides.’
‘I don’t think he ever will,’ I said.
He smiled and kissed me once more. ‘Oh, he will. Believe me, he will.’
And with that he was gone.
I tried to compose myself but the ache in me was so terrible and all of it stemmed from between my legs. I wondered if I was ill with a fever but could not think of any remedy. How long I sat there in that bemused state I could not say. At length I was startled into action by the sound of a carriage pulling up outside our house and the noise of people arriving. Hurriedly, I dressed, my cheeks still on fire.
I went down the stairs and stopped on the first floor landing from where I could see all the people in the hall without being seen.
Quite a party had arrived and I could not fathom which of three elegantly dressed ladies was my stepmother for all were so beautifully turned out. But it was not the sight of the exotic plumage that unsettled me: it was the tall, thin man with a wooden leg coming in with my father. His face was bleached of colour as I remembered it and behind him came the little white dog. I held tight to the banister for there was a whooshing sound in my head and the taste of iron in my mouth. The little dog discovered my hiding place, ran up the stairs and jumped up, asking to be lifted from the ground.
My father, upon entering the hall and seeing me, gave me a look and, if looks could be fired from pistols, that look would have killed me.
‘This way, madam,’ he said, and guided one of the ladies into the parlour where Cook had laid the wedding breakfast.
It was then that I was overtaken by a most strange occurrence that I put down to the unusual excitement of seeing the one-legged man again. He whistled to call the little dog back and winked at me, showing his painted eye. The whooshing sound in my head said he had seen right through me, that he knew about the gentleman. I was standing on the Coffin-Maker’s step and in my hurry to move on I must have tripped, and it felt to me as if my clothes were wings, unravelling from me, and I had taken flight. The one-legged gentleman’s face appeared to become detached from his body and floated nearer to me and at that moment I saw the stairs rise, felt myself falling into them, and fortunately remembered no more.
The general view of stepmothers is that they are cruel, with only one intention: to promote their children over and above their husbands’ hated offspring. This turned out to be far from true in my case. If it wasn’t for the arrival of my stepmother I dread to think what would have become of me.
When on the day of the marriage I fell down the stairs and passed out, it seemed to be for only a matter of moments.
I couldn’t have been more mistaken, for I woke to find myself neatly tucked up in bed on soft pillows that I never knew we owned, in a room with furniture I had never seen before. I couldn’t think how I came to be there in a fine cotton nightgown with lace at its edges. Such wanton luxury made me wonder if I had died and was in heaven, for there seemed no other rational explanation for these radical changes. Alas, that lofty thought lasted less than a minute. There was a clatter outside, the door flew open and there was Cook, carrying a tray.
‘So your ladyship is awake at last,’ she said, coming in with all the grace of an overfed turkey.
‘Where am I?’ I asked.
‘Where you have been since the day you were born – in your father’s house in Milk Street.’
Unless my eyes were playing tricks with me, I would swear that Cook looked cleaner. She was wearing a white linen apron and there wasn’t the usual smell of rancid fat about her.
I was muddled and was on the point of questioning her when the strikingly elegant woman who I remembered seeing in the hall came into the room.
‘That will be all, Martha,’ she said, dismissing Cook.
Martha. It was shocking to learn that Cook had a name, for as long as I had known her, she had been just plain Cook.
Cook dropped a curtsey, which my father had never had the luxury of receiving, and left as a gentleman in a purple velvet coat with a sprig of lavender in his lapel entered the chamber.
‘This is Doctor Ross, Miss Truegood,’ said the elegant lady. ‘It is due to his good care that you are still with us.’
Doctor Ross had a face that could reassure the dying that they had a lifetime to live. He smiled, gently took hold of my wrist and leaned towards me, his breath smelled vaguely of mint. He looked into my eyes, felt my forehead and pronounced that the fever had passed and I would live.
Had the world fallen on its head and got up the wrong way? This was all a fuss about nothing. Before I could be stopped I climbed out of bed only to realise my mistake for my legs were not quite as determined as my will to stand upright.
The doctor smiled again, caught hold of me and helped me back into bed.
‘You are lucky that nothing was broken,’ said the elegant lady, who I assumed must be the new Mrs Truegood.
‘Why should anything be broken?’ I asked.
‘Because you fell down the stairs and had a fit.’
‘Then I must have ruined your wedding breakfast. I am so sorry, madam. It has never happened before and it will never happen again.’
She laughed. ‘We all hope it will never happen again, my dear. But far from ruining the wedding feast you saved us from eating a rotten fowl that no amount of butter in the world could disguise as being edible. If you had to choose a day to have a fit, why, you couldn’t have chosen a better.’
None of this made any sense at all.
‘How long have I been here?’ I asked.
‘Ten very worrisome days.’
‘What was my ailment?’
‘A brain fever,’ replied Dr Ross.
Mrs Truegood propped me up on the pillows and, as foolish as it was, I burst into tears, for never could I remember such care being taken of me, even if anyone had thought I might need it.
She leaned forward and said softly, ‘Things will change for the better, Tully. I may call you Tully?’
Muddled