Klaus stumbled into a cubicle and locked the door. Slamming the toilet lid down, he sat on it and buried his face in his hands, great silent sobs racking his whole frame. His mobile phone, tucked in his jacket pocket, began to ring. Ignoring it, he held himself tighter.
14
Mayfair, 1861
THE SMELL OF HOT LEMON tea and porridge laced with whisky drifted up from the silver tray the maid had placed over Lavinia’s lap. She sat in the four-poster bed, yawning, as the maid pulled open the curtains. Outside, the chestnut trees and windows of the Georgian houses were a wash of black, green and pale grey. The winter light barely managed to tinge the park and the square.
‘Would you like the Queen, madam? It is expected that you follow the events of the day.’
Not much older than Lavinia, the maid had been hired specifically to address the shortcomings of the young wife’s etiquette. Expecting a rebuff, she bravely held out a copy of the leading social broadsheet James had insisted his wife subscribe to.
‘Why not, Daisy? Let’s examine the glorious adventures of the Upper Ten Thousand At Home and Abroad, a group to which, evidently, we do not belong.’
The Upper Ten Thousand was a listing of the elite members of English society—a fiction invented by the broadsheet to fuel the ambitions of the middle-class matron, a recent social phenomenon desperate to mimic her aristocratic counterparts.
Lavinia began reading sarcastically.
‘The Prince Consort attended a hunt at Finchley; surrounded by his attendants and several of the Royal children he was a fine and invigorating sight. Meanwhile, in the city, Lady Waldegrave held a late supper for many of the parliamentarian figures. It was said that Disraeli was in attendance. Hugh Lupus Grosvenor was seen at St James’s Park last week for the Changing of the Guard. The Queen will today receive the Viceroy of India in a reception to be held at Buckingham Palace…’
Lavinia faltered, wondering at her own lack of social credentials. James is right—I need to win Lady Morgan’s patronage if I am to have any life outside these four walls, she chastised herself, then took comfort in remembering that Lady Morgan’s lineage was as insubstantial as her own.
The rustlings of the staff, already on their rounds of carpet sweeping, polishing and general maintenance, floated in under the door. Lavinia’s aching breasts suddenly reminded her of her son.
‘Daisy, have I slept late?’
‘It is past nine, madam.’
‘Past nine! Why wasn’t I woken earlier? Does Aidan not need feeding?’
‘The nursemaid has the child. The Colonel insists that Master Aidan must be completely weaned, or take a wet nurse,’ the maid added, sensing Lavinia’s chagrin.
‘I must speak to my husband at once!’
‘Colonel Huntington is not in the house, madam, he is already off to a lecture then to the Carlton. He left instructions that you are to expect him back late tonight and should not wait up.’
‘Then I must be dressed and to my child as quickly as possible.’
The kitchen was situated in the basement. A huge room equipped with a large fireplace and vast stove, it was the domain of the cook, Mrs Jobling, and the other servants: Mrs Beetle, the housekeeper; Mr Poole, the butler; four manservants and six maids. A small room adjacent to the kitchen served as the laundry, and on the other side was the chute that delivered coal directly to the cellar. There was also a cool room, lined with thick stone, that had once served as a dairy. Now it held the icebox, within which the ice man dropped his weekly delivery.
The water for the household came from the well at the back of Chesterfield house, a nearby mansion. The spring was famous for the purity of its water, which was brought in daily by the lowest-ranking footman.
The laundry looked out onto a landscaped courtyard that boasted a struggling lilac tree in its centre. An old marble horse trough delineated the stables from the garden. There was a cobbled area in front of the coach house and stables, which fronted onto a mews lane, enabling easy access to the main street and square. These were also the living quarters of the head coachman, two grooms and four young stablehands who slept in a loft above the stables.
Next to the laundry was the butler’s pantry, the command post of Mr Poole, a sanctimonious Scottish misanthrope in his fifties, who had served James during his army years. The chamber was furnished with a plain wooden table, an armchair and a watercolour of Loch Fyne hanging on the wall. It also contained a large Dutch display cabinet in which the silver plate and fine china were kept locked when not in use. There was also a safe built into the wall for the very expensive pieces, which Mr Poole guarded jealously.
The kitchen was a terrain separate from the rest of the house. Since the recent installation of a dumbwaiter—of which James was fiercely proud of—there was hardly an occasion to bring Lavinia down into this nether world of steam, meaty cooking smells and raucous robustness.
The hiss from the clothes press and the rattle of the immense boiler that dominated one corner of the laundry fractured the murmuring that drifted through the half-open kitchen door—a flurry of whispers that finished in a staccato of female laughter.
Pausing, Lavinia wondered whether to enter or not. Back in Ireland, she had never been excluded from life below the stairs. The minister kept only one housekeeper and a young scullery maid, who lived in the village, and Lavinia had helped with both the laundry and the cooking. Here, in this huge house with its hidden service stairs and quarters, the two worlds were carefully divided. Lavinia missed the earthy humour of the women she had grown up around, their easy direct speech and, most of all, the magic of their superstitions. The village mysteries had included the ghost of a young woman who had killed herself over a philandering sheep farmer some seventy years earlier, a forty-eight-year-old woman who had fallen miraculously pregnant after the Virgin Mary had appeared to her youngest in a cabbage patch, and the sinister possession of a chimney sweep in his death throes—a circumstance that had terrified even the priest as he leaned over him to administer the last rites.
This parallel world had fascinated the imaginative young girl, but there was one mystery that was never mentioned in the household, upstairs or down. When she was five, Lavinia asked why she could not remember her mother’s funeral. The old housekeeper had pulled the child onto her lap and, letting her play with the rosary beads she kept in the pocket of her kitchen apron, explained that she herself had looked after her because at the age of one she had been too young to attend.
‘But oh how your father wept. I have never seen a man more distressed, not since the first Famine. Whatever they tell you, Miss Lavinia, she was a loved woman, your mother.’
Now, encouraged by the memory of the housekeeper’s flour-dusted affection, Lavinia entered the kitchen.
Her son was strapped into a high chair as the nursemaid, a stoic young woman from Leeds, bent over him, spooning a thin stew into his mouth.