Mourning Doves. Helen Forrester

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       Chapter Five

      They were exhausted by the time they returned home, and were further alarmed by the notice hooked on to their front gate. It announced that This Desirable Property was For Sale. The estate agent, in response to Cousin Albert’s instructions that he wanted a quick sale, had not wasted any time.

      Louise immediately broke into loud cries of distress, and it was with difficulty that Celia and Dorothy, the house-parlourmaid, got her into the sitting room. The pretty, formal room, ordinarily used for teas and at homes, still smelled faintly of hyacinths and lilies, despite having been carefully aired after the funeral, and Celia felt slightly sick from it.

      While Dorothy fled upstairs to her mistress’s bedroom to get a fresh container of smelling salts, Celia laid Louise on the settee. She carefully removed her bonnet and put cushions under her head.

      Then she kneeled down by her and curved her arm round her. ‘Try not to cry, Mother. Everything will be all right in the end. Please, Mother.’

      Louise shrieked at her, ‘Nothing’s going to bring your father back – or my boys! Nothing! Nothing!’ She turned her back on Celia, and continued to wail loudly. ‘My boys! My boys!’

      ‘She’d be better in bed, Miss.’

      Startled, Celia looked up. Winnie, the cook, had heard the impassioned cries, and had run up from her basement kitchen to see what was happening. Now, she leaned over the two women, her pasty face full of compassion.

      ‘This isn’t the right room to have her in, Miss. What with the Master having been laid out here, like.’

      Celia herself, frightened by the faint odour of death, would have been thankful to run upstairs to her own bedroom, shut herself in and have a good cry. Instead, she rose heavily to her feet.

      ‘You’re quite right, Winnie. Will you help me get her upstairs?’

      ‘For sure, Miss.’ She turned towards a breathless Dorothy, who dumbly held out the smelling salts to her.

      Winnie took the salts and said above the sound of Louise’s cries, ‘Now, our Dorothy, you go and fill a hot water bottle and put it in the Mistress’s bed. And put her nightgown on top of it to warm.’

      Dorothy’s face looked almost rabbitlike as her nose quivered with apprehension. She turned to obey the instructions, but paused when the cook said sharply, ‘And you’d better put a fire up there. It’s chilly. You can take a shovelful of hot coals from me kitchen fire to get it started quick.’

      The maid nodded, took a big breath as if she were about to run a marathon, and shot away down the stairs to fetch the hot water bottle and the coals.

      As Celia and Winnie half carried Louise up the wide staircase with its newel post crowned by a finely carved hawk, the widow’s cries became heavy, heart-rending sobs.

      ‘She’ll feel better after this,’ Winnie assured Celia. ‘A good cry gets it out of you.’

      Dorothy stood at the bottom of the staircase, hot water bottle under one arm, in her hands a big shovel full of glowing coals, and waited for the other women to reach the top. The shovel was heavy and she dreaded setting the stair carpet alight by dropping a burning coal on it.

      Have a good cry? And what had she in her fancy house to cry about? Her old man had probably left her thousands, and not much love lost between them. And here she was howling her head off and the house up for sale, and never a word to her maids as to what was happening. Proper cruel, she was.

      Would she turn Winnie and Ethel and herself off as soon as the house was sold? And, if not, where would they be going to live?

      As her coals cooled, Dorothy’s temper grew. She plodded up the stairs after the other women, handed the hot water bottle to Winnie, and then skilfully built the bedroom fire, while Winnie and Celia partially undressed the sobbing Louise, removed her corsets and eased her huge Victorian nightgown over her head.

      Behind the blank expression on Dorothy’s pinched, thin face, anger seethed. Winnie must ask the Mistress what was to happen to them. She must! If they had to find new situations, they should start now. Although there was a demand for good domestic help, the big mansions in the country were being closed down in favour of London apartments, and their domestic staffs dismissed; in consequence, a lot of competition faced a middle-aged house-parlourmaid like herself. And it was always difficult to find a considerate employer. She sighed. She had not felt that Timothy and Louise were particularly considerate, but she had become accustomed to them. Ethel, the maid-of-all-work, was young enough to try for a factory job, but she herself was in her forties – getting really old – and Winnie must be nearing fifty – it would be hard for her to get another job of any kind.

      She took fresh lumps of coal from the fireside coal hod and laid them on top of those she had brought up. She ensured that they had caught and that the fire was beginning to blaze and then swept the hearth. Then she got slowly to her feet, and picked up the shovel.

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