Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Stillroom Maid

“And it is in the nature of sacrifice to be misjudged, and ill-regarded,” she returned bitterly. “I am sure I should be quite lost without such good friends as you and Lady Bessborough. The young people positively blame me for their mother’s death!”

“Surely not.”

“Lord Hartington most certainly does! As though I, who nursed Her Grace to the last — through those horrible final hours, when she neither spoke nor knew anyone, and suffered the most fearful agony — as though I could have wished Georgiana ill! I cannot tell you, Harry, how the cloud of suspicion and neglect has deepened my grief! It is a wonder I have not already found my own grave!” Lady Elizabeth blew her nose rather noisily into a handkerchief. “But for the thought of dear Canis, and his helplessness — I believe I should have been carried off!”

“Lord Hartington must be very foolish,” Lord Harold observed. “There can be no possible cause for accusation. Indeed, I cannot believe it even of him . Though I know the young fellow to be yet in the grip of grief, surely his reason must urge restraint.”

“It is all on account of that wretched maid.” Lady Elizabeth sighed. “I wish that she had never been born, with her schemes and her remedies and her incantations!”

“Of whom are you speaking?”

I knew that note in Lord Harold’s voice; he was instantly alive to every possibility, and determined never to betray it. Lady Elizabeth was the merest trout — a slippery fish that had taken the Rogue’s lure. I waited, my breath suspended, for my lord to play the line.

“The stillroom maid, from Penfolds Hall,” Lady Elizabeth retorted peevishly. “The great healer you all cannot be done talking of — the girl so viciously murdered. Young Hart made quite a pet of her, you know.”

“Did he, indeed?” Lord Harold managed to suggest the faintest air of distaste, as though schoolboys who dallied with maidservants were decidedly not the thing.

“It is vastly shocking, I am sure — Hart is rather young, and so awkward in his ways — but I assure you, Harry, that we knew nothing of the matter until last month! Canis had occasion to run across the boy on horseback, and observed him parting from the maid. It seems that Hart had been riding over to Tideswell to see the girl ever since his dear mother died.”

No word to Lord Harold, of her own use for the stillroom witch. Lady Bess, I thought, was a subtle character, and vicious in her manipulation.

“Did Hart offer an explanation for such attentions?”

“Not at all. Canis and I both demanded the entire history of the affair, in separate applications; we threatened and cajoled him by turns; and it ended in Hart’s being forbidden to ride in the direction of Tideswell. I persuaded Canis to forbid the boy the use of his horses, indeed, did he contrive to disobey his father. And the sum of it is, that Hart has taken me in severe dislike!”

“I do understand. It is a most prickly age. At fifteen a boy may be wounded by every trifle, and harbour unreasonable resentments.”

Lord Harold’s mind was revolving the intelligence as thoroughly as my own; but he had not yet read the stillroom book. He knew nothing of Lord Harrington’s attempts to cure his deafness, and must assume the visits to Tess Arnold — which I knew to have long predated his mother’s death — were nothing more than infatuation.

Had there been such a calf love, indeed? Had the Marquess fallen in love with a woman ten years his senior, and followed her about with silent devotion? Until he discovered her one day, as Mrs. Haskell had done, in a state of undress or another man’s arms?

I’d hoped the witch had died in agony .

What would such a boy have done, at the prickly age of fifteen? I saw again in memory the hideous gouts of blood at the rock’s base. Did the delivery of owe wound demand the blow of another?

And what kind of shot had the Duke taught his heir to be?

“Not a kind word have I heard from Hartington’s lips since April,” Lady Elizabeth cried fretfully, “when we buried Georgiana in the Devonshire crypt! He, who has been almost a son —”

Here she broke off, with the faintest suggestion of having been caught out in an indelicacy. Whatever the true nature of the Marquess’s parentage, it would not be Lady Elizabeth who dispelled the mystery. It should be in her interest, I surmised, to foster doubt; and she was never the lady to disregard her own interest.

“Perhaps when all your friends have left you,” Lord Harold said comfortingly, “you may be quiet for a little, Bess, and recover your spirits.”

“Yes,” she gasped. “Solitude is all I require. It is a great thing, Hary-O’s going with her aunt.”

“You will not be lonely?”

“Lonely! With Canis for company!”

I could imagine the scene: Lady Elizabeth’s eyes wide with shock at her friend Harry’s suggestion, one hand pressed against her palpitating heart.

“His Grace will be often in the fields, at sport, over the next few months.”

“To be sure — but it is not as though we shall remain in Derbyshire indefinitely. We shall be often coming and going to London. And it is not as though Hary-O were a considerable comfort , you know — she may look the angel, Harry, but she is a most selfish and cold-hearted little—” Here, the last word was cut off by a bout of coughing. Lord Harold, I noticed, did not leap to his beloved’s defence; but neither did he join in Lady Elizabeth’s condemnation.

“Grief is a capricious mistress, Bess.”

“Oh, yes — I do not deny that she is excessively grieved — but I should think that her heightened sense of what is due to her mother’s memory, would make her ever more eager to show kindness to her mother’s oldest friend! And yet she will not do the civil, and appear in public with Canis and me — which might quell the hideous nonsense everybody speaks behind our backs, you know; that the family is all in disorder, and entirely on my account.”

“It is possible that any appearance in public is distasteful to Hary-O at present.”

“Oh — as to that — I do not derive any pleasure from it myself, I assure you! But one must consider the obligations of a ducal house! It is vastly unpleasant to parade before the eyes of the ton , and know the vicious things that must be said of one; to feel that the purest conduct in the world — the devotion of an old family friend at such a melancholy time — must be trammelled in the mud of vulgar opinion!”

“I am sure you have suffered a good deal.”

“And so tenacious as Hary-O must be on the subject of place! Canis and I have never paid much heed to those things; everything with us is easy — but Lady Harriot must have the proper deference paid to rank and authority. She, who is the merest child —! It should do her a world of good, I daresay, to throw herself away on a nobody like Andrew Danforth, and then see what place the world afforded her! She should not be so nice in her distinctions then , once the protection of her father’s house was lost to her!”

This sudden access of spite — and Lord Harold’s ominous silence — must have warned even one so insensible as Lady Elizabeth; she broke out once more in a fit of coughing.

“Bess, I fear the night air does not agree with you,” Lord Harold observed, and led her gently away.

I tarried another moment or two, alone under the stars — thinking of all that had passed, and wishing foolishly that the Gentleman Rogue might return. My cheeks had lost their heat, and the tumult in my brain receded; a buzz of determined conversation told me that all the gentlemen had now joined the ladies. It would be as well, I thought, to discover what I could of Lord Harrington’s movements on the night of the murder; I should never have such an opportunity again.