Secrets and Lords. Justine Elyot

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СКАЧАТЬ aloud. ‘Should he not have tidied these things?’ She was proud of herself for remembering that aristocratic men all had valets. Although the social circles she moved in at home were mixed, they rarely involved lords and ladies.

      ‘He is between valets at the moment,’ said Jenny. ‘His last one resigned a few days ago. He is sharing with Sir Thomas until they can hire a replacement.’

      ‘Why did the last one resign?’

      Jenny pinched her lips and shook her head.

      ‘I don’t know.’

      But Edie thought that Jenny was concealing some further knowledge.

      Moving towards the other side of the room, Edie saw a book on Sir Charles’s bedside table and was consumed with curiosity to know what kind of thing this man enjoyed reading.

      ‘Oh!’ she said, picking it up. ‘The Moon and Sixpence. I have read this.’

      ‘Put that down,’ exclaimed Jenny, rushing over. ‘Don’t touch a thing.’

      ‘We shouldn’t be in here, should we?’

      ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Come on.’

      She dragged Edie out by her elbow, but Edie was already wondering to what extent Sir Charles might identify with the book’s hero, his namesake, a man who abandons his established life to pursue an impossible dream.

      ‘His Lordship,’ she said, flapping her hand at another door without opening it, following up a moment later with ‘Her Ladyship’.

      ‘Oh, can we not go in?’

      ‘Her Ladyship is in. No, we cannot.’

      ‘I would so like to see her rooms.’

      ‘Well, you can’t. So there. Come on, let’s go to the ground floor. Like reading, do you?’

      She opened a smaller door at the end of the corridor. It led on to a large gallery, looking down into a treasure trove of bookcases.

      ‘Oh, a library! Oh, this is huge. How wonderful.’

      It occurred to Edie that perhaps she should not be displaying such raptures in her role as a housemaid. But surely housemaids might like to look at a book or two now and again?

      ‘Do a lot of reading, do you?’ asked Jenny, leading her down the steps to the main room. ‘You can’t have been very busy in your last place.’

      ‘Oh, I was, but I read on my days off, you know.’

      ‘Must have been nice for your family.’

      ‘They didn’t mind.’

      Edie barely registered Jenny’s disparaging tone, too engrossed in the endless spines of gold-embossed leather that lay behind the glass doors of each cabinet.

      ‘At least they had the shelves turned into cupboards,’ said Jenny with a sniff. ‘I hated dusting all those perishing things. Lord Deverell thought we were going to ruin them just by touching them so he locks them away now.’

      ‘He is a keen scholar?’

      ‘No, not really. I suppose they’re worth a few bob, that’s all.’

      Edie shook her head. The idea of valuing books for their monetary worth was quite beyond her. At home, in her room, her books lay in piles, higgledy-piggledy, with dog-eared pages and dusty jackets, but they were the landscape of her life, to be kept round about her, not shut away in cages.

      She was reluctant to leave this wonderland, but they had to move on regardless, to a breakfast room in modern pinks and pale greens, then a comfortable sitting room and a brace of cold gilt state rooms, until they were at the central part of the house.

      The splendour of these rooms left even Edie open-mouthed – as huge as the British Museum galleries and several times more ornate. She craned her neck up at pricelessly painted ceilings and then let her eye move downwards to works of Tudor and Stuart art, interspersed with gold leaf twining all over everything. The impression was sometimes sumptuous, sometimes intimidating. It was nothing like a home. How did people conduct their daily business in rooms like these? Reception rooms opened on to more reception rooms; then there were morning, drawing, breakfast and dining rooms, each with a different colour scheme and each groaning with antiques that would need careful dusting and cleaning, over and over again.

      Seeing everything with a maid’s eye, Edie came to resent all the magnificence, much as her artistic senses were impressed. But really, who needed all this?

      Out of the wings, Edie and Jenny now ran across several of their colleagues, all working hard to get the grandest rooms of the house into a fit condition to receive guests. Flowers were being arranged, feather dusters wielded and, in the dining room, a French polisher attended to a scratch on the table.

      ‘They’ll cover it with a cloth,’ whispered Jenny, whisking Edie past. ‘But Tilly Gresham got in terrible trouble for it all the same.’

      A tall, thin, fastidious-looking man in a dark suit and white gloves appeared to be directing the carrying up- and down-stairs of a number of ornamental urns.

      ‘Jenny,’ he said. ‘Is this the new girl?’

      ‘Yes, Mr Stanhope, Edie Prior.’

      ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss Prior.’

      ‘Likewise,’ said Edie, unsure whether or not to curtsey. She decided against it.

      ‘Well, I’m sure you have work to do,’ said Stanhope after an awkward pause. ‘On such a day as this. And if not, I’ll be asking Mrs Munn why not.’

      ‘Don’t mind him,’ muttered Jenny, leading them to the back stairs. ‘He gets himself a bit worked up when there’s a big do. He’s the butler, if you didn’t know.’

      They descended to the depths of the house once more, where Jenny collected a trug of cleaning materials before showing Edie to the room where Mrs Munn had ordered them to work.

      They passed along endless yards of corridor, under the baleful eyes of the Deverell ancestry, up and down the back stairs and through that busy, bustling series of reception rooms before arriving at the well-named Green Drawing Room.

      It was very green, and very golden, and very velvety and very cold – in style rather than temperature. Everything in it was heavy and sharp-cornered. When Edie considered her family drawing room in Bloomsbury, with its cheerful patterns and fringed shawls all over the place, it could not have been more remote.

      ‘Do people come in here to relax?’ she asked, looking over a two-hundred-year-old spinet in the corner of the room.

      ‘People hardly come in here at all,’ said Jenny vaguely, sorting through rags and polishes. ‘It’s not much used. Here, I’ll wax the wooden furniture and you can polish the mirror there.’

      Edie accepted a rag and a tub of metal polish and made a start on the heavy ormolu-framed square mirror that stood over an unused fireplace.

      They СКАЧАТЬ