Mrs. Lundy showed them to their living quarters—narrow rooms in the attic painted pale green, smelling strongly of rancid oil, each with a cot and small washstand—and were immediately put to work. Claudette was placed in the kitchen as a serving maid, and Béatrice requested assignment in the laundry. By serving in the laundry, Béatrice could keep out of sight and have Marguerite close to her. But Béatrice’s work was hot and grimy, and utterly ill-suited to her stamina. Her hands quickly became chapped, then swollen, and even sometimes bled from the breaking of her dry skin. She cried often in private, clenching and rubbing together her painful fingers. How did one family create so much dirty linen?
The Ashby family was comprised of James Ashby, his wife Maude, and two twin children, Nathaniel and Nicholas, age twelve. Mr. Ashby was abnormally pot-bellied, with a receding hairline that seemed to belong to a man much older. Years of iron-fisted rule by his wife had resulted in a small stoop, and with his extended abdomen, gave him the appearance of a wispy-haired, hard-boiled egg.
Maude Ashby had come from a modest family whose star had begun to ascend when one of her aunts became the mistress of George II earlier in the century. Maude’s aunt was one in a series of mistresses the king enjoyed following the death of his stoic wife, Queen Caroline. George had presented his lovely mistress with fine gifts of jewels, wine, and silken fabrics, and she in turn presented him with an illegitimate son. At that moment, the king decided he was through with the lovely Matilda Carter, and settled upon her a Yorkshire estate and £500 a year from the privy purse, considering himself especially generous since he had not yet decided to publicly claim the child as his own.
Maude’s mother had drilled into her repeatedly that it was her duty to learn from her aunt Matilda and reject a mistress situation: marry well, and bring prestige—but more importantly, additional wealth—into the Carter family. James Ashby had seemed a good match: a £20,000 inheritance from a recently deceased distant relative, shares in a new shipping company trading with the American colonies, and a family with a spotless reputation. But the colonists had gone to war against Britain, and the shipping company was dissolved. James had spent most of his inheritance—what was left after the purchase of their large town house in St. Marylebone—trying to keep the company buoyed, but when two ships were captured and stripped of all their goods by the rebellious British subjects in New York harbor, the last of James’s fortune was washed away.
Maude, who now had two boys for whom she also wanted to make advantageous marriages, did not meet his unfortunate run of luck with sympathy. Who wanted to marry a man whose father had lost his money in a failed business venture? Maude would periodically snort to herself and wonder how she could have married such a dolt. And now it was up to her to maintain the illusion of a family fortune, while scrimping and saving behind the scenes, going through her own inheritance from her aunt, until one day a suitable investment could be found that would once again raise her to her deserved social status. At least she had her boys—dear Nathaniel!—to comfort her.
Nathaniel Ashby resembled his father in shape, but was his mother in temperament. And as he desired nothing more than the top position in his mother’s affections, his own vitriolic disposition was most frequently turned onto his twin, Nicholas. Nathaniel would devise plots to get Nicholas, a quiet and pensive boy, into trouble and undeserved beatings by his mother and schoolmaster. His latest scheme involved the capture and hiding of a snake and his brother’s schoolbooks in a stack of folded bed linens. That stupid ass of a new maid, Béatrice, found them, and the shrieking and braying that commenced would have been enough to waken the entire block. Nathaniel was able to truthfully report to his mother that the books were clearly Nicholas’s, and Nicholas did obviously spend quite a bit of time wandering down to the laundry. And so once again Nicholas received a beating and was sent to bed without supper, no questions asked. Sometimes Nathaniel felt a twinge of guilt, particularly when Nicholas would turn his large, quiet eyes toward him, unblinking yet knowing in his thin pale face; but he was always able to push the feeling aside as soon as his mother popped a sweetmeat in his mouth.
Nicholas should have been his mother’s favorite, since he was most likely of the Ashby males to eventually recover the family fortune, but instead he was largely ignored. He realized his brother’s intent toward him, and even at some level understood it, but the continual torment forced him to recede into himself, to walk hallways quietly and unnoticed, to speak only when spoken to directly. Nicholas would spend hours alone with books, or sitting outside under the trees, contemplating leaves and earth and sky. A passerby would say to himself, “Now there’s a fine and serious boy!”
The arrival of Claudette and Béatrice was of interest to Nicholas. Their French accents and mannerisms were unlike anything he had seen before in his quiet existence. They carried themselves in a way that the other servants did not, and they even seemed to take some small notice of him. He took to following them around, quietly of course, sometimes creeping up to doorways without announcing himself and watching them work. He had to be careful, though, that Nathaniel did not catch him.
Of the two servants—or ladies, as Nicholas thought of them—Béatrice was evolving as his favorite. She exuded a fragile nature, and was in such contrast to his mother that he was inescapably drawn to her, like the hummingbird to the flower, beating his wings with a childish desperation. Of Marguerite he paid no mind. She was just a little girl, immaterial and unworthy of his adoration.
Béatrice, instinctively recognizing the boy’s awkwardness, would invite him to talk with her sometimes while she was washing, or folding, or mending.
“What subjects do you learn in school, Monsieur Nicholas?” she asked once in her improving English, on her knees shaking her dripping, reddened hands over the wash bucket.
Blushing furiously he replied, “Oh, just grammar and sums. And history.”
“And just what history did you learn today?”
“We are memorizing the names of all the English kings and queens, the greatest monarchs ever to rule in the world.”
“Ah, yes, I suppose that may be construed to be so. Did you know that your Queen Elizabeth once made sport of France’s Duc d’Anjou, pretending she would marry him, but never doing so? All to maintain friendly relations between England and France.”
“She did? We have not learned that. At least, not yet.”
Béatrice picked up another bundle of clothing and began sorting it. “So I suppose that if the greatest queen of England thought she should be friendly with the French, then we must be friends as well, oui?” With a wink, she turned around to find the soap, massaging her raw hands together discreetly out of his sight.
Claudette, meanwhile, was trying to survive the battlefield of the kitchen. In this part of the house, the servants jockeyed for position and recognition under Mrs. Lundy. The staff members were perpetually spying on each other, in order to have an opportunity to report a fellow employee’s bad behavior. In this way, the competitor might be unceremoniously fired, opening up a new position for the spy. Or at the very least one might be rewarded for informing Mrs. Lundy about goings-on in the house, and proving loyalty to the Ashby family.
Quickly Claudette learned to stay out of everyone’s way, associating with no one but Béatrice, and concentrating solely on carrying out her daily orders from Mrs. Lundy, which usually consisted of the worst of kitchen duties, in addition to whatever else the other servants did not want to do. Her long days, which turned into long months, were frequently spent cleaning pots and pans or scurrying up and down the stairs on spiteful missions initiated by the housekeeper. Unfortunately, the other servants decided they did not