chapter 3

When William leaves the next day I look forward to sneering at her. I expect her to be like a little girl playing dress up as the mistress of the house. I want the servants to be running riot within the week and William to be furious at the chaos in the household.

Her day gets off to a poor start when Louisa's attempts to bathe and dress her quickly descend into farce. Louisa is a girl who has never been out of the Smoke a day in her life and anyone who isn't a Londoner might as well be a three headed mystical beast for all she knows of the world. Lucy is embarrassed when Louisa struggles to understand her accent and keeps bringing her the wrong dress or ribbon.

"I suppose one dress is as good as another," she says eventually but Louisa still looks as bewildered as if she was being addressed in Double Dutch.

She has no confidence or authority when she addresses the servants. Her brow furrows with confusion when Frances the housekeeper presents her with a stack of household bills and she is at a total loss when Cook attempts to consult her on the week's menu.

"Game pie! Devilled kidneys! Kedgeree! Mock turtle soup! Treacle tart! Bread and butter pudding! Ice cream!" I am almost shouting it in her ear and she doesn't even flinch.

"Ice cream!" She blurts out and then blushes.

Cook says nothing, only looks at her disapprovingly like the silly little girl that she is.

"I mean, I noticed that there was an ice house on the grounds and I wondered if you made ice cream," she says quickly, nervously stumbling over her words. "My sister and I used to love the penny licks from the Italian street vendors in Glasgow. Father warned us away from them because he said they were dirty and spread Cholera but Hannah and I were sure that couldn't be true. Nothing so sweet and yummy could harm you, could it?"

The girl was babbling on with a dreamy look in her eyes but her words barely seemed to register with Cook, her broad face as dull and immovable as a marble slab. "Very well, miss. Ice cream it is. And what about the starter and main course?"

"Oh, anything!" She says then thinks better of it. "What does William like?"

"Mr Sitwell is very fond of cold ox tongue and he never refuses a nice bit of steak and kidney pie."

"Well, that's exactly what we will have then."

I groan. I had hoped to fatten her up while indulging myself in gastronomic delights, not my husband's inexplicable taste for revoltingly gelatinous slices of tongue and stodgy suet filled with the disgusting ammonia tang of over cooked kidneys. Whatever next? Jellied eels? I must learn to control her better or I will suffer for my art.

At midday she is served lunch and as she sits all alone in the empty parlour I feel a pang of sympathy for her. She is friendless, an alien in a foreign land. I think how big, chaotic and strange London must seem to her compared to her little city. But I must steel myself to such tender hearted foolishness. After all, does the hangman's noose feel pity as it breaks the murderer's neck? Does the bullet feel regret as it tears through the soldier's heart?

After lunch she abandons all pretence of attending to the household affairs. She goes to the piano in the drawing room that I used so seldom that it would be covered in a thick layer of dust if the servants were not so scrupulous. I almost admire how clever her slender fingers are as they flutter over the keys with ease, picking out the delicate, dreamy notes of one of Erik Satie's Gnoissenes.

I must admit that it is a more pleasing soundtrack to my day than the sighs and groans of the servants as they go about their daily drudgery or the dust bin men and delivery boys singing popular songs in their thick Cockney accents. If I hear Daisy Bell or Burlington Bertie one more time I think I might scream.

Louisa comes in just to change the candles and clean the room but she lingers a little too long to hear the girl play. When she becomes aware of Louisa's presence, Lucy gives a start that causes her fingers to crash against the keys in ugly discord.

"Oh! Miss, I am sorry!" Louisa says with a blush. "It was just too lovely not to stay and listen a while."

Lucy shows Louisa how to play Frere Jacques. She gently guides the maid's clumsy fingers, more accustomed to sewing on buttons and darning socks than playing the piano, along the keys and rewards her with a pastel pink sugar almond when she gets it right, occasionally sneaking one for herself. Such overtures of friendship between the mistress of the house and a mere maid are entirely inappropriate but Louisa's plain face shines with such delight and pride as she plays her own halting version of the simple song that I feel a little guilty. How often did I treat Louisa like a person of flesh and blood rather than some unfeeling automaton to do my bidding?

When Louisa must finally return to her duties, Lucy wanders in and out of the empty rooms before settling in my library. She sits on the carpet of the library with her skirts pooling out around her, emphasising her diminutive size. While she reads she takes the paper bag of sugar almonds from her skirts. She eats them in a very specific way: holding them between the pretty pink bows of her full lips and sucking the sugar coating off each one to prolong the pleasure before crunching the exposed almond within with an almost savage delight.

She picks up my worn volume of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management that was passed down to me from my mother but after a few pages she puts her hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn. I find myself smiling as she casts the dull and preachy tome aside, I always found Mrs Beeton to be a crashing bore too but mother insisted that I read the whole thing from cover to cover.

She pulls books of poetry from the shelves: Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Rossetti. As she reads she whispers to herself the lines that she likes best. She picks up the book of Tennyson poems that was my favourite. It is creased and dog eared, well worn with love. I feel outrage at her handling my possessions as if they are her own and want to slap the stupid smile from her face when she notices that I have underlined particular lines and written little notes in the margins. She begins to search through the book for passages that I have highlighted and then reads aloud from Ulysses:

"I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, not with those
That Loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known"

It seems an ironic verse for a girl who asks for little and takes even less from life to pick out. I have another, more fitting, quote for the little fool from her fellow countryman Sir Walter Scott: "Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell."