AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Onto the street?” Maddy said, horrified.
Mrs. Crozier looked at her with contempt. “Of course not. What were they thinking, sending me a useless git as a maid? I thought you had years in service.”
For a moment Maddy was affronted. She hardly looked her twenty-two years—how old did the woman think she was? And then she remembered some of the younger girls in service and she swallowed her outrage.
“I served in large households—removing animal carcasses was left to the footman.” Too late she realized she was casting aspersions on the current domestic arrangements and she struggled to find a way to lessen her implied criticism. “Really, those large households are so tedious. You just do the same thing over and over again. I expect I’ll be much happier in a smaller household with a greater variety of tasks.”
For a long time Mrs. Crozier said nothing, clearly not mollified. “Tedious, is it?” she said finally with awful majesty. “And your enjoyment is, of course, my main concern. Let me tell you, young miss, that I may not have hired you but I can most certainly fire you.”
All right, so far her impersonation of a maid was pathetically inept. She had no doubts that Mrs. Crozier could get rid of her quite easily, and she swallowed her irritation. “I’m a hard worker, I am,” she said, pleased with the added “I am.” “You won’t find any cause for complaint with me.”
“Hmmph,” Mrs. Crozier said derisively, pulling her voluminous black skirts aside as she started up the stairs. Maddy gathered her own skirts and followed suit.
The attics could have been worse, she supposed. At one point the household must have supported a larger complement of servants. There were two long, narrow rooms on each side with four beds each buried beneath boxes and broken furniture. She glanced nervously up at the ceiling, but there were no ominous figures hanging from the eaves.
At one end the attics were simply an open space, now crowded with the same castoffs that filled the bedrooms. At the other end was a closed door, and she felt a faint moment of hope.
“Is that the water closet?”
Mrs. Crozier’s laugh was downright cruel. “You think we have a water closet up here? You’ll use a slops jar, and carry your own bathing water up here like any decent Christian.”
Maddy had no idea what Christ had to do with slops and carrying water up three flights of stairs, unless Mrs. Crozier was thinking that cleanliness was next to godliness, but she doubted it. Not considering the state of the windows.
“Yes, Mrs. Crozier,” she muttered.
“That room is more storage, things of the captain’s. It’s locked, and we’re not to touch it. Even I don’t know what’s in there.”
Bluebeard’s nine wives, or however many he had? Maddy looked at the very solid padlock that had been set in place. She was
going to have to brush up on her lock-picking skills.
“Take whichever room you want. If you need help hauling things I can send my Wilf up to help you.” The offer was definitely grudging.
“I’ll be fine. Where can I find water and cleaning supplies?”
“I’ll have them ready when you’re finished up here.”
Maddy took a calming breath. “I’ll need them to clean my room. This place is covered with dust and what I presume are… are you sure there aren’t rats up here?”
Mrs. Crozier surveyed the obvious droppings littering the floor, the chewed up mattresses, then shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Rodents do what they want to do. In the meantime you’ve got duties downstairs. Pick a room, find a bed and a mattress that suits your highness, and put your clothes away. You can do your personal cleaning on your own time. Be downstairs in half an hour—I’ll need help with dinner and you need to dust and sweep the dining room and salon. You don’t have time to dawdle.”
“Yes, Mrs. Crozier.” She stuck her tongue out at the housekeeper’s ramrod-straight back as the woman departed. Well, no one said this was going to be easy.
She removed her hat and turned to look at the rooms on either side of her. The one on the left had broken furniture stacked to the ceiling and only a small window. The one on the right was less jumbled and it had a huge dormer, but it smelled very strongly of mouse and at least two of the four mattresses had been chewed.
She glanced back to her left, about to attack it when she noticed some ominous shapes in the eaves, the kind that belonged in dark caves. She slammed the door shut and turned back to the rat room. She could fight rodents with the help of an imported cat—she couldn’t fight bats.
The thin, mouse-shredded sheets on the beds ripped as she pulled them off, and she placed them at the head of the stairs very carefully, not wanting to drop any more mouse dung on the floors. She held back a piece of the fabric, and her first act was to descend the stairs and retrieve the dead bat. Flinging the rag over it to hide it from her view, she then gingerly scooped it up, trying not to breathe.
The dormer window looked out over the tangled garden behind the house, and she tried to toss the foul thing as far as she could, letting the rag go with it. The scrap of cloth floated down slowly and gracefully, and she suddenly noticed the figure of a big burly man watching her. He had grizzled gray hair but he was too far away for her to see his face. Obviously the captain, and he looked much as she’d imagined him to be. She resisted the impulse to wave at him, pulling back inside the room.
One bed held a mattress that seemed to have avoided the predatory mice, and she chose that one, dragging the other mattresses out of the room and dumping them in the open space as well as the rusted bed frames, broken chairs, and accumulated detritus of a once larger staff. When she was finished, the large room held a single bed with a mattress that didn’t sag too badly, a small dresser with a washbowl and pitcher, a three-legged table she propped in the corner, and a decent chair. Once she was able to give it a good scrubbing, it would do very well.
Maddy glanced out the window. She’d left her watch behind—no simple maid would possess anything so valuable—so she had no idea what time it was. If she had to guess by the waning light it was likely close to six o’clock, and Mrs. Crozier was probably on the verge of coming after her. Maddy’s feet hurt, her lower back had a crick in it, and she wanted more than anything to sit on that bed, even lie down for a few moments. She hadn’t even started her day’s work and already she was exhausted.
Tant pis, as Bryony would say. Too bad. She was the one who’d decided to do this, and she’d reap the consequences. A little hard work never killed anyone.
CHAPTER FIVE
