ONE
"Can we go look, can we go look, can we go look?" Eight-year-old Amelie tugged at Rachel's hand, pulling her toward the stairs.
"I don't see what the point is of looking at a party you can't go to," said thirteen-year-old Albertine crossly.
"English, please," said Rachel automatically.
The girls were meant to speak English when they were with her; the countess had been very clear about that. If it was a rule Rachel enforced somewhat selectively, that, she decided, was a matter for her own conscience.
Besides, she told herself virtuously, Albertine was meant to be speaking in English. If she refused to do so, then she would just have to be silent.
And thank heavens for that.
"The dresses are so jolie," said ten-year-old Anne-Marie wistfully.
"English, please," mimicked Albertine, in heavily accented English.
Anne-Marie's spectacles wobbled on the tip of her nose.
Rachel pushed them up for her. "You're right, Ammie. The dresses are jolly. And I don't see the harm in looking so long as we stay out of sight."
It was the annual Easter Ball at the Château de Brillac, home of the Comtes de Brillac from time immemorial, or, at least, as long as anyone had stopped to think about it. The Brillacs generally didn't. They preferred to spend their time in Paris, where the count could concentrate on his amours and the countess on her close, personal relationship with several expensive couturiers, all of whom vied for the honor of upholstering her angular frame.
When the comte and comtesse did return to Brillac, it was on a wave of strong scent, accompanied, invariably, by a party of persons from that alien and sophisticated world. Rooms would be aired and dust sheets thrown off, and Amelie, Anne-Marie, and Albertine would creep down to their favorite viewing post, five balusters to the left at the top of the gallery.
A more superior sort of governess might have told them no, might have shooed them away back to the nursery. But Rachel had never seen the point in crushing all the joy out of her charges' lives. And if looking down upon a sea of perfectly coiffed heads made them happy, what was the harm? If they showed any signs of mischief, she would sweep them away, back to the nursery.
Rachel doubted it would be necessary. Neither Anne-Marie nor Amelie was the water-balloon-dropping sort, and Albertine's own particular brand of malice took less physical forms. After seven years of nursery governessing, Rachel counted herself something of an expert.
Anne-Marie and Amelie were pressed close together by the balusters, Albertine lurking behind, trying to pretend haughty indifference, although her eyes were as wide as the others'. Rachel joined them at the rail, spying shamelessly.
What was the point, after all, of living in the houses of one's betters if one couldn't enjoy a little vicarious glamour?
Below, the great marble stairs had been banked with flowers. The count and countess, the latter decked out en grande tenue, diamonds glittering everywhere diamonds could possibly glitter, stood receiving their guests. The hall where Amelie liked to go sliding in her stockings on rainy days was busy with the high chirp of voices, the clatter of beads on silk, the flash of military orders.
Somewhere, Rachel knew, beyond the gallery, there were musicians in the ballroom. There was a supper laid out in the dining room, and other rooms devoted to cards, or repairing one's gown, and heaven only knew what else. But all that lay beyond, out of view of the balusters.
"When I am grown," said Amelie complacently, "I shall go to a ball every night."
Rachel stifled a grin. "Yes, I expect you shall. But only if you remember to wash behind your ears. Clean ears are crucial for countesses."
Amelie's spine straightened a little. "But of course," she said grandly, as though she hadn't raised holy hell in the bathtub yesterday when confronted with the dreaded washcloth. "And many jewels."
"Rubies or emeralds?" queried Rachel.
Her own jewelry consisted solely of a small gold watch, pinned to her bodice, which her mother had given her as a gift when she graduated from school. Rachel didn't like to think of how many extra piano lessons her mother must have taught to purchase it, how many days without sugar in her tea. But it had proved useful for regulating lessons. There was nothing like frowning ferociously at one's watch for making restless schoolgirls settle in their seats.
"The blue ones," said Amelie firmly. "Because they match Sophie's sash."
Sophie was Amelie's favorite doll, dressed in Paris best, rather battered from being placed in situations no Paris couturier had ever imagined. Sophie led a rather rough life.
"Why not?" said Rachel.
Goodness only knew, the rich tossed away money on lesser whims, and Amelie, someday, would be expected to marry a grand hotel in Paris, a château in the country, and a suitable accumulation of porcelain and gilt-work. And, presumably, the man that came with it all, although that appeared, from what Rachel had seen over the past seven years, to be a lesser consideration.
Sometimes Rachel felt like an explorer, surveying the customs of an exotic and isolated tribe. Sometimes. Most of the time, she simply accepted her salary and concentrated on clean ears and the past perfect tense.
Rachel had always known she would have to work. She and her mother weren't poor-not in the way the Trotters down by the river were poor, with their slatternly kitchen and clutch of half-naked children-but having butter on their bread and a roof over their heads meant there wasn't a great deal for extras. Her mother eked out a living giving piano lessons to the village children, which everyone agreed was a suitably genteel occupation for a widowed lady in straitened circumstances, and one not incompatible with Friday sherry with the vicar and running the bazaar at the annual spring fete.
Had she had her own way, Rachel would have taken a typing course and sallied out into the brave new world of office work. But there were times when her mother's Victorian upbringing showed. Faced with the prospect of the typing course, she had dug in her sensible heels. Rachel to work outside the home? To expose herself to the attentions of men?
Useless to protest that everyone was doing it now, or, if not everyone, a sizable portion of the female population.
A job in a nice household, her mother insisted. That was the proper occupation for a young lady of limited means, the emphasis being on the word lady.
When Rachel pointed out that the world had moved on a bit since Jane Eyre, her mother had only said mildly, "It's not all Thornfield Hall. Wouldn't you like to see a bit of the world? You could travel. You could work abroad. Better, surely, than a smoky office?"
That was the problem with Rachel's mother. Just when one wanted to be usefully indignant, she would disarm by being so terribly reasonable.
It was a trick that Rachel now applied with good effect to her own charges, with some silent amusement at the thought of being on the other side of it.
Rachel might have argued, she might-as she had in other matters-have put her own not insubstantial foot down, but it had occurred to her that the real problem might not be her virtue, the protection thereof, but the cost of the typing course. It wasn't terribly dear, but it was enough to strain their slender resources.
Rachel might have sold the watch, but that would have hurt her mother terribly. She clung, Rachel's mother, to these small gestures of gentility. To have sold the watch would have been worse than a slap in the face. It would have been a reminder of everything they didn't have, couldn't afford, a reproach to her mother who had worked so hard and so long, keeping a roof over their heads all alone, ever since Rachel's father had died.
And so Rachel had swallowed her objections and gone to France. There was something, after all, to be said for France. She had gawked, that first year, as any girl fresh from the country would gawk. It had all been so new and strange, and France, even with the scars of war, was still France, glamorous and different.
She wouldn't say that seven years had entirely inured her to that glamour, but she took it, now, as a matter of course. Louis Quinze chairs and grand portraits by old masters were as much backdrop as her mother's piano and her father's battered old chess set. The reality of it all was the children, struggling through their letters, fighting their own small battles, needing to be entertained on rainy days.
Skating along marble floors was a brilliant way to beguile a rainy day. But not when the countess was in residence.
"Mees?"
Rachel rose from her perch, shaking out her plain serge skirt, as someone called her name. She might be Rachel at home, or Miss Woodley as circumstances commanded, but at the Château de Brillac, she was invariably and simply "Mees," a sign of her status betwixt and between, neither servants' hall nor front table.
"Yes?" Rachel saw Manon, the nursery maid, edging her cautious way along the gallery, a worried look on her face. "Oh, dear. Not the baths again?"
The plumbing at Brillac tended to be rather temperamental, the château having been designed in an age when baths were something that happened when one unexpectedly plunged into the river and perfume was designed to cover a multitude of odors. There was generally enough hot water for the nursery baths, but when the Paris parties descended, the backs of Amelie's ears tended to be the grimier for it.
"No, mees." Almost furtively, Manon thrust a crumpled piece of paper at Rachel. "A telegram, mees. From Paris."
"Tonight?" Rachel's fingers closed around it. Bother. If it was something important, no wonder Manon wanted to pass the responsibility on. The countess did not approve of interruptions to her festivities. "Well, let's hope it's not bad news. I'll take this straight to-"
Rachel's voice trailed off as she glanced down at the paper. Not from Paris. To Paris. And not addressed to the countess, but to her.
R. Woodley. Hotel de Brillac, Paris.
The message below was in English, not French, transcribed exactly as it had been transmitted.
Mrs. Woodley ill. Influenza. Immediate return advised. J.S.
Influenza! The dreaded word blazed out from the creased page. Influenza had come through Netherwell before, just after the war. Rachel could hear, like an echo, the tolling of the church bell, again and again and again, the endless knell of it, until the bell ringer himself was taken ill, the sudden silence worse than the constant clamor.
But that had been eight years ago. Surely, by now ... And Jim Seddon was a good doctor, a modern doctor, a much better doctor than old Dr. Potter, whose general view on medicine appeared to be that if it had been good enough for Hippocrates, it was good enough for him.
Rachel forced the air back into her lungs. Jim Seddon was not only a good doctor but he was also the husband of Rachel's oldest friend. And her mother-her mother was made of steel, lightly covered with a lace collar. The influenza might have killed countless others, but it hadn't reckoned on Katherine Woodley.
But Jim wouldn't be asking for her unless there was reason for her to go.
A train to Calais. If she could get a car to take her to the train, she could take the train to Paris, then from Paris to Calais. A boat from Calais to Dover, then the grim process in reverse, a train from Calais to London, another from London to King's Lynn, then the change to the small local line that ran through Netherwell.
It was Monday night. With luck, and presuming the train workers didn't go on strike between here and Calais, she might be home by this time tomorrow.
Which meant ... Rachel glanced down at the telegram, at the date on it. She looked and then looked again, sure that she must have misread the smudged numbers, that the Continental handwriting-that silly habit of crossing their sevens-must have misled her.
But there was no mistake.
The date on the telegram was Wednesday, five days before.
Rachel looked up at Manon in disbelief. "This is five days old!"
Manon's eyes dropped. "Hector brought it with him when he came up with Monsieur le Comte."
Hector was the count's man, a barrel-chested, swaggering soul whose primary qualification for his present post appeared to be having served as the count's batman during the war. He also fancied himself a ladies' man.
Rachel hadn't fancied Hector, and had made that quite plain, or as plain as a sharp heel to the instep could convey.
Which meant that if a telegram had arrived in Paris for Rachel, Hector would have taken delighted spite in making sure the message took as long as possible to reach her.
Manon twisted her hands in her apron. "He-he said he had other things to do than be a telephone exchange."
"Oh, does he?" Fantasizing about where she would like to apply a telephone wasn't doing anything to get her home to her mother. And the girls were beginning to turn; Anne-Marie already had that worried look between her eyes. Rachel lowered her voice. "Thank you, Manon. You did well to bring this to me."
Hector didn't speak English. Neither, as far as she knew, did any of the staff of the Paris house. That didn't stop her from wanting to take the back of a hairbrush to all of them. Surely, a telegram conveyed its own urgency, even if one couldn't understand the words.
Time to plot revenge later. Right now, the important thing was getting herself onto that train, with all haste. Five days' worth of haste.
With painstaking self-control, Rachel said, "Would you take Amelie, Anne-Marie, and Albertine back to the nursery for their baths? I need to speak to madame."
"You're not meant to interrupt Maman while she's receiving," said Albertine with a sniff.
Amelie rounded on her sister. "You're not meant to be speaking in French."
"Hush, petite." Rachel dropped a kiss on the top of Amelie's head. "I'll be back to check your ears. Anne-Marie, you will look after Amelie for me, and make sure she gets her chocolate?"
Anne-Marie was a weather vane for any worry, quick to pick up on trouble, but she straightened her shoulders at Rachel's words and nodded, just a little.
"Good." Rachel was already moving, down the corridor, toward the back stairs, her brain already occupied with half a dozen details. "Merci, Manon."
She caught one of the footmen as he came out from the hall with a tray of champagne, whispered a few words in his ear. She didn't know the staff terribly well; most of them were from the Paris house, brought up for the occasion. But everyone knew who she was: the girls' English governess. She had grown accustomed to being a curiosity, like a zebra. Only rather more prosaic and with fewer stripes.
The footman went off in search of madame, his tray growing lighter along the way, and Rachel stood in the shadows, out of sight, trying not to jiggle with impatience.
Wednesday. Her mother had been ill since Wednesday, and the telegram had just sat there, crumpled at the bottom of Hector's pocket. And Jim Seddon! Why hadn't he tried again? He might have sent another telegram, or tried to telephone-
The footman returned. If Mees would follow? Madame could spare a moment in the small salon.
The name was a misnomer. The small salon was twice the size of the cottage in Netherwell, decked with gilding and mirrors designed to intimidate and overawe. No surface had been left ungilded, including madame herself, who stood by the mantelpiece, jeweled slipper tapping with impatience.
"What is it, mademoiselle, that could not wait?" she said, looking pointedly at the clock. "If one of my daughters is ill-"
She sounded more annoyed than distressed by the prospect.
"The girls are all well," said Rachel hastily. Just because madame was away for nine-tenths of the year didn't mean she didn't have maternal feelings. Theoretically. Rachel took a deep breath and pushed on. "It's my mother, madame. She is ... very ill." Saying it somehow made it more real, more frightening. "I must return to England at once. I can-I can be back in a week. Manon will mind the nursery while I am gone."
Madame de Brillac's gray eyes, flat as uncut diamonds, swept her up and down. "No," said Madame de Brillac, and turned to go.
The word echoed oddly in Rachel's ears. Or perhaps that was her own voice, repeating, "No?"
Madame de Brillac paused. With great condescension, she explained, "It is not convenient for you to leave at this time."
And that was all.
Only it wasn't. It couldn't be. Rachel hurried after her. "My mother needs me, madame." Her mother had needed her days ago. Urgency loosened Rachel's tongue. "There are only the two of us, you see. I am the only one she has in the world. My father-"
The countess didn't care about Rachel's father. "Good night, Miss Woodley."
Good night? She wasn't paid nearly enough for this, Rachel thought furiously. The countess left her daughters for weeks at a time. She'd scarcely taken the time to interview Rachel, just a glance at her references, a look up and down, and an instruction to try to keep Anne-Marie from squinting so.
But when Rachel needed to go home-for a week! All of a week!-suddenly the countess rediscovered her maternal feelings.
The woman had the maternal feeling of a weasel.
"I am sorry, madame," Rachel heard herself saying, in cold, elegant French. If she had been teaching, she had also been learning, and her French, by now, was as aristocratic as madame's own. "But that will not do. If you will not give me leave, I will be forced to tender my resignation. At once."
The countess paused in the doorway, her diamonds glinting coldly in the light of the great chandelier. "You may collect your wages from Gaston." As an afterthought, she added, "Leave the keys with him when you go."
Rachel gaped after her. "But-"
Surely it was less trouble to lose one's governess for a week than to hire a new one?
Apparently not. "Good-bye, Mademoiselle Woodley," said Madame de Brillac, with precisely the degree of condescension due from countess to wayward employee. Another look from those cold, flat eyes. "I trust you will not bother me for a reference."
A reference? Fury gripped Rachel. What did it matter about the reference? Anne-Marie-Amelie-How was she to tell them?
She could run after the countess; she could beg her to reconsider. And what? And stay at Brillac? Let her mother suffer alone?
The image tormented Rachel: her mother, lying helpless, too wracked with chills to move. There was no phone in the cottage; there wasn't even electricity. The cottage sat at the very end of the village, isolated from the other houses, its nearest neighbor the vicarage. It might have been days before anyone realized her mother was ill, days in which her mother, sweat-damp and miserable, battled the disease alone, too weak even to boil water.
The hall was heady with the scent of hothouse flowers and a cacophony of competing perfumes. Rachel's head swam with the horrible sweetness of it. No time to waste on ifs and might have beens; the train wouldn't wait for her.
There wasn't much to pack in her own little room, only a few skirts and shirtwaists, a handful of books, a hat that had the claim of being a "Paris hat" only by its origin, but not any pretense to style. It all fit in the one carpetbag, a hand-me-down from the vicar.
And then, good-byes.
Anne-Marie, all big brown eyes. "Why are you leaving us?" In French, but it was no time to enforce English, just time to enfold her in a quick hug.
"Because she doesn't like you." Albertine jeered very effectively, but there was something in her voice, so young beneath the scorn, that made Rachel wish she had tried harder with her, had had more time. It wasn't Albertine's fault that she was so very like her mother.
Rachel tried to put it as simply as she could. "My mother is very ill. She needs me at home."
"But we need you," said Amelie. She thought a moment. "Sophie will miss you."
Oh, Sophie. Sophie was full of pronouncements. Rachel would miss Sophie. She would miss all of them.
Perhaps, once her mother was on the road to recovery-
Rachel squelched that thought. The countess wouldn't take her back. And, even if she did, Rachel had learned, two families ago, that it didn't do to get too attached. Amelie might nestle close to her now, but in another few years, she would be ready to put up her hair and let down her skirts, and Rachel would be on her way to another family, carpetbag in hand.
She might live with them, teach them, even come to care for them, but they weren't her family.
The only family she had was her mother.
By dint of shamelessly lying to the chauffeur, telling him madame had authorized her use of the car, Rachel made it to the station in time for an eleven fifteen train to Paris. The train lurched and swayed; it was deathly cold in the car, the windows so fogged with her breath that she couldn't see out. Outside, she knew, the trees were starting to sprout their first green buds, but she could see none of that, only the ghostly reflection of her own face, her unfashionable hat drawn low around her ears to keep out the chill, her cheekbones too high, her mouth too wide, her hair dark against her pale face.
There was nothing remarkable in that face, just another nursery governess, another woman in a shabby skirt, clutching a carpetbag on her lap. Nothing remarkable except to her mother, who loved her.
On and on through the darkness the train went, the rhythm of the wheels, the puff of the engines, a steady backdrop to her anxiety. Slow, slow, so painfully, horribly slow.
Once, once upon a time, so very long ago, there had been three of them. Rachel could just remember those halcyon days. It couldn't have been summer always, but that was how she remembered it. They had lived in a little house with a garden, and if her father was frequently away, he always came back again, sweeping her up into his arms and spinning her about while Rachel squealed and clutched at his coat.
Until that last time, when he hadn't come back at all.
He had died somewhere, far, far away. He had been a botanist, her father. Something to do with rare plants, or at least that was what her mother had told her. He had fallen ill on one of his collecting trips, in a far-flung country that was just a little spot on the globe, dead of tropical fever.
Sometimes, when she was young, Rachel used to look at those specks in the vast blue of the atlas, specks with names like Martinique and St. Lucia, St. Croix and Mustique, and would wonder on which of them her father was buried. She had, as girls did, spun fancies for herself. Her father wasn't dead at all, just missing. He hadn't been a botanist, but a secret agent, off on a deadly mission. Or the heir to a lost kingdom, one of the smaller European sort, forced to go underground to evade the forces of the rebels who had taken over his homeland.
Her father was a daydream, but her mother was real. She was a cool hand on Rachel's brow when she was ill; a voice reading Peter Rabbit; a firm hand bundling her into her coat and off to school. More recently, she was an English postmark on a letter, a package in the post: a pair of warm gloves, a piece of the Christmas pudding for luck. Little things that made Rachel feel less far from home.
Her mother was very good about the little things.
Rachel hunched forward in her seat, urging the sleepy train to move faster. Good heavens, did they have horses towing the blasted thing? What was the point of a train at all if it didn't go any faster than that?
It was past two in the morning when the train decanted Rachel into the chill of the Gare du Nord. The ticket windows were shut, the bookstalls closed. Only a handful of stranded travelers were scattered around the echoing room, sitting on their trunks, sunk into the collars of their coats, their bundles clutched to them.
The train to Calais, according to the board, was due to depart at three.
Rachel could feel the hours stretching ahead of her. Maddening that they could zap a message across wires in a matter of minutes, but human travel was little faster than it had been a century ago. She had always enjoyed the novels of H. G. Wells. Now she found herself wishing for one of his time machines, something to whisk her back to five days ago. No, earlier, before that, twenty-three years ago, when they were all three together. She could stop her father going away, stop her mother getting sick....
And what then? History did strange things when one played with it. They would never have lived at Netherwell; her entire upbringing would be different. Useless speculation to beguile the extra hour. Rachel shivered and hugged her carpetbag closer.
She didn't need to fight for a seat on the train to Calais; at that hour, it was all but empty. Only another twelve hours-how long those twelve hours seemed-and she would be back in Netherwell, back at the cottage in which she had grown up.
And her mother ... her mother would be sitting up by now, demanding to be let out of bed, to be allowed to do something, for goodness' sake. Like all healthy people, her mother made a dreadful patient.
Apples didn't fall far from the tree, Mrs. Spicer, who "did" at the vicarage, always liked to say. If Rachel was impatient, she came by it honestly. She couldn't picture her mother sitting still; she was always moving, doing, working.
Well, she had had to, hadn't she? Just as Rachel had to work now. Botanists, it seemed, weren't too plump in the pocket. Whatever legacy her father had left, it had been enough to cover the essentials of rent and food, no more.
Even now, as a nightmare, Rachel could remember those dark days after her father died, her own childish voice, bleating, "Where is Papa? Where is Papa?" Her mother's face, still and set, her eyes red-rimmed, but her mouth firm. The hurried departure from their home, taking only those things that were most precious: her mother's piano, her father's chess set, the pawns bearing the marks of small teeth, where Rachel had used them, as a baby, to ease her aching gums. The gold brooch at her mother's breast, with its intertwined E and K.
Through it all, her mother had never broken, never wavered. She had comforted Rachel's tears, packed their few belongings, saw them settled in a new home, set about finding a way to make their meager ends meet. She'd gone on.
Dawn. The sun was rising just as the train chugged into Calais, tinting the water of the Channel rose and gold. Rachel stumbled off the train, her legs stiff, her hands cold in her leather gloves. There was something about dawn, about the right sort of dawn, that made all the frights of the night seem so much nonsense. If her mother had grown worse, Jim would have let her know, surely? There would have been more than just the one telegram.
On board the Channel packet, she lifted her face to the salt sea air, relishing the slap of the wind against her face. It was an ill wind ... But this wasn't an ill wind. It smelled of England and visits to the seaside.
A change in London, and then another in King's Lynn. With each stop closer to home, Rachel felt her anxiety subside. The air still had the bite of winter to it, but the sun poured down like a blessing, and Rachel felt her feelings lift at the sight of it, despite the itch of clothes worn too long. If her mother had been that ill, Jim would have sent another telegram, found some way to find her.
The local train dawdled its way along, decanting housewives with piles of shopping and chattering girls from the school. Rachel had been one of those girls once. Swinging off the train at Netherwell station, barely a pause before the train was off again, she could imagine herself that schoolgirl again, satchel in hand, a straw boater on her head. Her boots crunched on the well-worn path, rich with the scent of mulch and loam, just a hint of coal smoke in the air.
There was a shortcut through a copse of trees, a place where the leaves twined overhead, forming a natural arch. Rather than leading into the village proper, it deposited Rachel only yards from the cottage, close enough that she could see the familiar gray stone, softened with its fall of ivy, the smoke rising from the chimney.
A sense of indescribable relief flooded Rachel at the sight of that smoke. There was light in the old, leaded windows, a warm glow that made her quicken her step, the carpetbag light in her hand.
The stones in the walk were cracked and old. With the ease of long practice, Rachel wove her way around the wobbly bits. No need to knock; the door was never locked.
"Mother?" She flung open the door. There was no hall. The front door led directly into the sitting room, that wonderfully familiar sitting room, with the hideous red plush furniture they had let with the house, and the fire that always smoked.
Someone was bent over the fire now, wielding the poker with a tentative hand.
But it wasn't Rachel's mother. Rachel's mother wouldn't have been so gingerly with the fire; she would have thwacked it smartly into submission. This woman was too short, too slight, her hair a strawberry blond instead of brown streaked with gray.
Rachel let her carpetbag drop. "Alice?"
Alice started, the poker catching on the edge of a coal. "Rachel!" Rachel's best friend thrust the poker back into its rest. "Thank heavens. I'd begun to think something had happened to you."
No time to explain now. Rachel started for the stairs. "My mother. Is she-"
Rubbing her sooty hands on her skirt, Alice scurried between Rachel and the stairs. She held up a grimed hand. "Rachel. I'm so sorry."
Copyright © 2015 by Lauren Willig
