chapter 9

The next day Lucy sits at the piano, listlessly her fingers creep across the keys but I'm not quite sure of the song. Is it Clair de Lun? It doesn't really matter and my memories of such trivialities seem so distant now anyway.

She notices Louisa passing the doorway and calls to her.

"Louisa, sit with me a while," Lucy says, gesturing to an empty parlour chair and rising to pour her a cup of sweet tea. "The day is so dull. Let's play a game of quadrille together."

"Yes, miss," Louisa says, her face knotted with a mixture of confusion and delight at the invitation.

They play a few hands and when I peak over Lucy's shoulder I notice that she has thrown every game that she has lost to flatter Louisa.

Dear, simple Louisa. She does not know much but she knows discretion at least. She was once my maid after all. I still feel a sort of affection for her I suppose. The way for one might for one of those silly little lap dogs with their pea-sized brains. She lets out Lucy's dresses whenever she notices that they are a little too tight without having to be asked. She thinks she is sparing her mistress' blushes as a good maid must but inch by inch, stitch by stitch she is unwittingly deceiving Lucy and allowing her to deny just how much weight she has gained.

"I wish to ask you a question," Lucy says carefully. "And when you answer you must pretend that you are only addressing Frances or someone else... anyone but me."

"But Frances scares me!" Louisa cries. "She says that if I make one more mistake she will see that I end up in the workhouse."

Lucy sighs, even she is impatient with Louisa's denseness. She tries again, slowly. "What I mean is, I wish for you to speak plainly to me. As if I was only Nicholas or one of your friends, not the mistress of the house. Do you understand?"

Louisa nods uncertainly.

"Tell me about Rebecca," she says. "What was she like? Do you think she and William were happy together?"

Is there to be no end to the constant mortifications even in death? Surely I have endured enough for one afterlife. Must I now stand here with gritted teeth, unable to defend myself while a dim-witted girl like Louisa is entitled to appraise my life, my marriage, my character? And why is Lucy suddenly so curious to learn about me? She has arrogantly invaded my home without a single thought for me before.

Louisa seems to search the question for a moment for tricks. It is not often that anyone asks her opinion about anything. "I suppose she was a nice lady, very respectable but... she didn't seem very happy and neither did Mr Sitwell."

Lucy looks thoughtful for a moment. "Thank you, Louisa"

"Will there be anything else, miss?" Louisa asks, getting up a little too hurriedly to leave.

Lucy hesitates, her hand unconsciously rubs the curve of her empty belly. Try as she might to be a good girl, to obey William and deny herself, I will not let her.

"Perhaps you could bring me something from the kitchen. The lunch Cook served was very small." Lucy says.

"I'm sorry, miss, but it's the master's orders. Frances says I'm not to bring you anything between meals."

Lucy blushes but I am determined not to let William win. I have put far too much effort into fattening her up and she is nowhere near done growing yet. There must be some other way to make sure she keeps eating.

"Then go out to a shop if Cook will not give you anything," Lucy says rather sharply and then looks surprised, as if does not know where the suggestion came from.

So, you have heard Louisa's scant appraisal of my marriage. Would you like to know more? Shall I, dear reader, tell you what it was really like? You might find it hard to believe that a man who made me feel so woefully inadequate was actually considered beneath me before we married.

William came from a family of merchants and businessmen. His father had built up what had been little more than a back alley apothecary that he inherited into a successful soap and perfume manufacturer. But William had even grander schemes when he took over the business.

My mother was a snob and under normal circumstances would not have approved the match. She believed that gentlemen made their money from land and investments and she did not trust the troublesome middle classes who were betwixt and between, constantly attempting to shift the rigid social hierarchies and grasping for more. She would have found it embarrassing to see her eldest daughter married off to a mere factory owner but she was already certain that only spinsterhood beckoned for poor plain Mary and she had seen with her famously withering eye that I would not be pretty and pleasing for long. She knew me for the irredeemable greedy guts that I truly was. She knew that I must be married off without delay for the longer I sat on the shelf, the fatter I would become until I was just another of the surplus of unmarriable women burdening Victorian society.

I was a foolish girl and felt only flattered that someone as handsome as William should wish to marry me. I always had my nose buried in some silly book or another. I had read all those novels about love transcending social barriers and I thought it was all terribly romantic. I knew nothing of life, nothing of men and nothing of love. Perhaps if I had listened to any author on the subject of marriage I should have listened to Thomas Hardy who described it as "buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort." But Jude The Obscure was so depressing, I don't think I could even bring myself to finish it.

William used my dowry to help grow his business but when that wasn't enough he began turning to my father for loans. Gradually I began to fear that he was taking advantage of father's generous nature and lack of business sense but when I challenged William the charming man I thought I had married showed his ugly face.

"He's richer than Croesus and doesn't know a damned thing about money!" William had snapped. "Do you think your lazy and spoiled lifestyle comes for free? Do you think I can afford to be idle when I have a wife who bursts out of expensive dresses faster they can go out of fashion and eats more than enough for two reasonable women?"

I felt more stunned than if he had slapped me. He had never spoken to me that way before.

I remember how his face had softened. "I'm sorry, my love. You know I do not care for money myself, it's only that I am under so much pressure to prove to your family that I am worthy of you and provide the life that you deserve. I promise that I will repay your father all the money I have borrowed down to the halfpenny. I need only a little time."

I didn't want to explore the dark hinterlands inside of him so it seemed easier to believe him. I know now that it was all a lie and I wonder if he ever had any true affection for me or if he always saw me as little more than an overindulged swine. A living symbol of the bloated, undeserving and idle upper classes that he both despised and strived to be a part of, only making him despise us all the more.