Christina Kline - The Exiles

Evangeline looked from one to the other. Mrs. Whitstone raised her chin. “Wait in your room. I’ll send someone for you presently.”

If there was any question in Evangeline’s mind about the gravity of her predicament, the answer made itself clear soon enough.

On her way down the stairs to the servants’ quarters, she encountered various members of the household staff, all of whom nodded soberly or looked away. The assistant butler gave her a wincing smile. As she was passing the room Agnes shared with another housemaid on the landing between two staircases, the door opened and Agnes stepped out. She blanched when she saw Evangeline and tried to duck past, but Evangeline grabbed her arm.

“What are ye doing?” Agnes hissed. “Let go of me.”

Evangeline glanced around the hallway and, seeing no one, pushed Agnes back into the room and closed the door. “You took that ring from my room. You had no right.”

“No right to retrieve stolen property? To the contrary, it was me duty.”

“It wasn’t stolen.” She twisted Agnes’s arm, making the maid wince. “You know that, Agnes.”

“I don’t know anything except what I saw.”

“It was a gift.”

“An heirloom, ye said. A lie.”

“It was a gift.”

Agnes shook her off. “‘It was a gift,’” she mimicked. “Ye dimwit. That’s only half the trouble. Yer pregnant .” She laughed at Evangeline’s befuddled expression. “Surprised, are ye? Too innocent to know it, but not too innocent to do the act.”

Pregnant . The moment the word was out of Agnes’s mouth, Evangeline knew she was right. The nausea, her recent inexplicable fatigue . . .

“I had a moral responsibility to inform the lady of the house,” Agnes said, smugly self-righteous.

Cecil’s velvet words. His insistent fingers and dazzling smile. Her own weakness, her gullibility. How pathetic, how foolish, she had been. How could she have allowed herself to be so compromised? Her good name was all she had. Now she had nothing.

“Ye think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t ye? Well, you’re not. And now you’ve had your comeuppance,” Agnes said, reaching for the doorknob and wrenching the door open. “Everyone knows. You’re the laughingstock of the household.” She pushed past Evangeline toward the stairs, knocking her back against the wall.

Desperation rose within Evangeline like a wave, filling her with such force and velocity that she was helpless against it. Without thinking, she followed Agnes out onto the landing and shoved her, hard. With a strange, high-pitched yelp, Agnes fell headlong down the stairs, crumpling in a heap at the bottom.

Peering down at Agnes as she staggered to her feet, Evangeline felt her fury crest and subside. In its wake was a faint tremor of regret.

The butler and head footman were on the scene within seconds.

“She—she tried to kill me!” Agnes cried, holding her head.

Standing at the top of the landing, Evangeline was eerily, strangely, calm. She smoothed her apron, tucked a wispy strand of hair behind an ear. As if watching a play, she noted the butler’s contemptuous grimace and Agnes’s theatrical sobs. Observed Mrs. Grimsby flutter over, squeaking and exclaiming.

This was the end of Blenheim Road, she knew, of primers and white chalk and slate tablets, of Ned and Beatrice babbling about sponge cake, of her small bedroom with its tiny window. Of Cecil’s hot breath on her neck. There would be no explaining, no redeeming. Maybe it was better this way—to be an active participant in her demise rather than a passive victim. At least now she deserved her fate.

In the servants’ hallway, lighted with oil lamps, two constables fastened Evangeline into handcuffs and leg chains while the constable with the droopy moustache made the rounds of the household staff with his notebook. “She were awful quiet,” the chambermaid was saying, as if Evangeline were already gone. Each of them, it seemed to her, overplayed the roles expected of them: the staff a little too indignant, the constables self-important, Agnes understandably giddy at the attention and apparent sympathy of her superiors.

Evangeline was still wearing her blue worsted wool uniform and white apron. She was allowed to bring nothing else with her. Her hands shackled in front of her, her legs shuffling in irons, she required two constables to guide her up the narrow back stairs to the ground-floor servants’ entrance. They had to practically lift her into the prison carriage.

It was a cold, rainy evening in March. The carriage was dank, and smelled, oddly, of wet sheep. The open windows had vertical iron bars but no glass. Evangeline sat on a rough wooden plank next to the constable with the droopy moustache and across from the other two, both of whom were staring at her. She wasn’t sure if they were leering or simply curious.

As the coachman readied the horses, Evangeline leaned forward to look at the house one last time. Mrs. Whitstone was standing at the front window, holding the lace curtain back with her hand. When Evangeline caught her eye, she dropped the curtain and retreated into the depths of the parlor.

The horses lurched forward. Evangeline braced herself against the seat, trying futilely to keep the leg irons from cutting into her ankles as the carriage swayed and rattled along the cobblestones.

The day she’d first arrived by hackney cab to St. John’s Wood had also been cold and drizzling. Standing on the front step of the creamy white terrace house on Blenheim Road—its number, 22, in black metal, its front door a shiny vermilion—she’d taken a deep breath. The leather valise she clasped in one hand held all she possessed in the world: three muslin dresses, a nightcap and two sleeping shifts, an assortment of undergarments, a horsehair brush and washing cloth, and a small collection of books—her father’s Bible with his handwritten notes; her Latin, Greek, and mathematics catechisms; and a dog-eared copy of The Tempest, the only play she’d ever seen performed, at an outdoor festival by a traveling troupe that passed through Tunbridge Wells one summer.

She adjusted her hat and rang the bell, listening to it trill inside the house.

No response.

She pushed the buzzer again. Just as she was wondering if she had the wrong day, the door opened and a young man appeared. His brown eyes were lively and curious. His brown hair, thick and slightly curly, draped over the collar of his untucked white shirt. He wore no cravat or tailcoat. Clearly this was not the butler.

“Yes?” he said with an air of impatience. “Can I help you?”

“Well, I—I’m . . .” Remembering herself, she curtsied. “Pardon, sir. Perhaps I should return later.”

He observed her, as if from a distance. “Are you expected?”

“I thought so, yes.”

“By whom?”

“The lady of the house. Sir. Mrs. Whitstone. I’m Evangeline Stokes, the new governess.”

“Really. Are you quite sure?”

“P-pardon?” she stammered.

“I had no idea governesses came in this shape,” he said, sweeping his hand toward her with a flourish. “Bloody unfair. Mine looked nothing like you.”

Evangeline felt conspicuously dumb, as if she were performing in a play and had forgotten her lines. In her role as vicar’s daughter, she used to stand a step behind her father, greeting parishioners before and after the service, accompanying him on visits to the sick and infirm. She met all sorts of people, from basket-makers to wheelwrights, carpenters to blacksmiths. But she’d had little contact with the wealthy, who tended to worship in their own chapels with their own kind. She had scant experience with the slippery humor of the upper classes and was unskilled at banter.