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By Root 1400 0

about showing his face and volunteering for committees. He was surely, however, flirting with the governess, not Mary. Notions that Mary was a mistress to Glynne betray a misunderstanding of rural life: the squire and his sons spent summers hosting hunting parties and passed their winters in town. They ignored their tenants, and Mary could not have met Sir John unless she worked as an upper servant for him (and she was never a lady's maid). As we may see from Sir John's letters and diaries now in the Hawarden record office and the National Library of Wales, he paid scant attention to the dull minutiae of land rents, yields, and the wages of footmen.1 In Hawarden, the real controllers of patronage, favor, and money were the squire's steward or land agent, who managed Glynne's estate, his workers, and also the servants at the hall. If Mary was having an affair with a wealthy man, it was most likely with a senior servant at Broad Lane Hall or assistant steward of Glynne's estate, who would be able to slip her extra food and money.

Mary was surely lover to a man with money for a sustained period of time, perhaps throughout Emma's childhood. It is unlikely that Emma survived on the potatoes and old cheese that made up the diet of her neighbors. Like all country people, Hawarden villagers were stunted and sunken-eyed through malnutrition. They suffered from rickets, and their hair, teeth, and skin betrayed their lack of protein. Emma grew tall, strong, and beautiful, with a thick mane of hair and strong white teeth. She had sparkling eyes, clear skin, voluptuous good health, and bounding energy. In the late 1760s and 1770s, England was racked with famines, a smallpox epidemic, and sweeping influenza, but Emma appears to have suffered no severe childhood illnesses. Thomas Pettigrew, one of Lord Nelson's early biographers, who knew Emma's London employer, Dr. Budd, noted that when she worked as a servant she had no "means to cultivate her intellectual faculties," so she must have learned to read, write, and do simple addition as a child. Somehow, Mary found money that protected Emma from the worst of village hardship and helped her grow into a beauty.

It seems likely that Mary's lover was connected to Broad Lane Hall. Emma's fortunes appear to be in some degree dependent on Glynne's. Soon after Sir John's death on June 1,1777, Emma's childhood came to an abrupt end. Mary traveled to London, maybe to follow her lover, and Sarah, at nearly sixty, decided to rid herself of her hungry granddaughter. Emma began work for Dr. Honoratus Leigh Thomas, a Chester surgeon. He lived in Hawarden because his much younger wife, Marie, was sister to Glynne's land agent, Boydell. Emma's choice of employers is a clue that Mary's protector may have been an assistant to Boydell who perhaps lost his position on his master's death. However she came by the position, Emma was now on her own. She was, after all, twelve, the average age for girls to begin in service.

Emma's poverty-stricken youth left her desperate for love, dogged by terrible insecurity, and determined to steal the limelight. Resentful of her treatment and dissatisfied with Hawarden, she so dreaded the future of a laborer's wife that she would do anything to escape. Emma was ambitious, and she craved sensation. She was not the type of girl to become a meek and deferential domestic servant.

CHAPTER 4

Scrubbing the Stairs

Twelve years old and already beautiful, Emma began work for Dr. and Mrs. Thomas. With her mother in London and her grandmother's interest in her at an end, Emma might have felt sufficiently worried to devote herself to work. Instead, she hated her newjob and tried her hardest to fail.

As a maid of all work, Emma was at the very bottom of a household of seven or so servants. Forty-eight-year-old Dr. Thomas was an important man: he had had the honor of witnessing Glynne's marriage to his children's governess, Augusta, in 1772.1 Emma's contact with such a distinguished family would have been minimal: her orders came from the cook and the housemaids. As an adult,