She peered at the address. “Is that Bedfordshire I see? Yes. Hmm. No kin? What can have happened to the gel’s father and brothers?” Lady Cahill frowned over the letter for a short time, then tossed it decisively down on a side table.
“What do you mean to do, Grandmama?”
Lady Cahill rang for sherry and biscuits.
Amelia’s husband arrived and they all went in to dinner. Over cream of watercress soup, Lady Cahill announced her decision.
“But, Grandmama, are you sure about this?” Amelia looked distressed. “It’s a very long journey. What if Jack won’t receive you, either?”
Lady Cahill gave her granddaughter a look of magnificent scorn. “Don’t be ridiculous, Amelia!” she snorted. “I have never in my life been denied entrée to any establishment in the kingdom. I go where I choose. I was a Montford, gel, before my marriage to your grandfather, and no one, not even my favourite grandson, tells me what I may or may not do!”
She dabbed her mouth delicately on a damask napkin and poured her sherry into the soup. “Tasteless rubbish!”
Later, as she pushed cailles à la Turque around her plate, she said, “I’ll call upon Maria’s gel on my way to visit Jack. I cannot let her starve and I’ll not allow Maria Farleigh’s child to enter into service! Faugh! The very idea of it. Maria’s mother would turn in her grave. She was a fool to let her daughter marry a penniless parson.” Lady Cahill’s eyes narrowed as she considered the shocking mésalliance.
“The Farleighs were a fine old family,” she admitted grudgingly, “but he was the last of his line and poor as a church mouse to boot. Church mouse. Parson! Ha!” She cackled, noticing her unintended pun, then fell silent.
She heaved a sigh and straightened her thin old shoulders wearily. She pushed her plate away and called for more sherry.
“Yes, I’ll roust the boy out of his megrims and keep him busy.” Lady Cahill ignored the Scotch collops, the lumber pie, the buttered parsnips and the chine of salmon boiled with smelts. She helped herself to some lemon torte. “Can’t leave him brooding himself into a decline up there in the wilds of Leicestershire with no one but servants to talk to.” She shook her head in disgust. “Never did believe in servants anyhow!”
Amelia tried valiantly to repress a gasp of astonishment and met her husband’s amused twinkle across the table. For a woman who considered a butler, dresser, cook, undercook, housekeeper, several housemaids and footmen, a scullery-maid, coachman and two grooms the bare minimum of service needed to keep one elderly woman in comfort, it was a remarkable statement.
“No, indeed, Grandmama,” Amelia managed, bending her head low over her plate.
“Don’t hunch over your dinner like that, girl,” snapped the old woman. “Lord, I don’t know how this generation got to be so rag-mannered. It wouldn’t have been tolerated in my day.”
The knocker sounded peremptorily, echoing through the small empty cottage. This was it, then, the moment she had been waiting for and dreading equally. The moment when she stopped being Kate Farleigh, Vicar Farleigh’s hoydenish daughter, and became Farleigh, maidservant, invisible person.
Now that the moment had come, Kate was filled with the deepest trepidation. It was a point of no return. Her heart was pounding. It felt like she was about to jump off a cliff…The analogy was ridiculous, she told herself sternly. She wasn’t jumping, she had been pushed long ago, and there was no other choice…
Squaring her shoulders, Kate took a deep breath and opened the door. Before her stood an imperious little old lady clad in sumptuous furs, staring at her with unnervingly bright blue eyes. Behind her was a stylish travelling coach.
“Can I help you?” Kate said, politely hiding her surprise. Nothing in Mrs Midgely’s letter had led her to expect that her new employer would be so wealthy and aristocratic, or that she would collect Kate herself.
The old lady ignored her. With complete disregard for any of the usual social niceties, she surveyed Kate intently.
The girl was too thin to have any claim to beauty, Lady Cahill decided, but there was definitely something about the child that recalled her beautiful mother. Perhaps it was the bone structure and the almost translucent complexion. Certainly she had her mother’s eyes. As for the rest…Lady Cahill frowned disparagingly. Her hair was medium brown, with not a hint of gold or bronze or red to lift it from the ordinary. At present it was tied back in a plain knot, unadorned by ringlets or curls or ribands, as was the fashion. Indeed, nothing about her indicated the slightest acquaintance with fashion, her black clothes being drab and dowdy, though spotlessly clean. They hung loosely upon a slight frame.
Kate flushed slightly under the beady blue gaze and put her chin up proudly. Was the old lady deaf? “Can I help you?” she repeated more loudly, a slight edge to her husky, boyish voice.
“Ha! Boot’s on the other foot, more like!”
Kate stared at her in astonishment, trying to make sense of this peculiar greeting.
“Well, gel, don’t keep me waiting here on the step for rustics and village idiots to gawp at! I’m not a fairground attraction, you know. Invite me in. Tush! The manners of this generation. I don’t know what your mother would have said to it!”
Lady Cahill pushed past Kate and made her way into the front room. She looked around her, taking in the lack of furniture, the brighter patches on the wall where paintings had once hung, the shabby fittings and the lack of a fire which at this time of year should have been crackling in the grate.
Kate swallowed. It was going to be harder than she thought, learning humility in the face of such rudeness. But she could not afford to alienate her new employer, the only one who had seemed interested.
“I collect that I have the honour of addressing Mrs Midgely.”
The old lady snorted.
Kate, unsure of the exact meaning of the sound, decided it was an affirmative. “I assume, since you’ve come in person, that you find me suitable for the post, ma’am.”
“Humph! What experience do you have of such work?”
“A little, ma’am. I can dress hair and stitch a neat seam.” Neat? What a lie! Kate shrugged her conscience aside. Her stitchery was haphazard, true, but a good pressing with a hot flatiron soon hid most deficiencies. And she needed this job. She was sure she could be neat if she really, really tried.
“Your previous employer?”
“Until lately I kept house for my father and brothers. As you can see…” she gestured to her black clothes “…I am recently bereaved.”
“But what of the rest of your family?”
This old woman was so arrogant and intrusive, she would doubtless be an extremely demanding employer. Kate gritted her teeth. This was her only alternative. She must endure the prying.
“I have no other family, ma’am.”
“Hah! You seem an educated, genteel sort of girl. Why have you not applied for a post as companion or governess?”
“I am not correctly educated to be a governess.” I am barely educated at all.
The old lady snorted again, then echoed Kate’s thought uncannily. “Most governesses I have known could barely call themselves educated at all. A smattering of French or Italian, a little embroidery, the ability to dabble in watercolours and to tinkle a tune on a pianoforte or harp is all it takes. Don’t tell me you can’t manage that. Why, your father was a scholar!”
Yes, but I was just a girl and not worth educating in his eyes. In her efforts to control the anger at the cross-questioning