England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [13]
Masters saw their young servants as easy prey. Since most, like Emma, spent much of their day cleaning isolated rooms alone, they were easy to trap and grope. At night, there was even more opportunity, for they slept in unlocked rooms or on the floor. The master usually beat the servants (women were not legally permitted to punish them) and often backed up his physical violence with harassment—thinking it a good way to keep the girls in check. One man, Arthur Munby, even forced his maid, Hannah Cullwick, to wash his feet, lick his boots, and wear a collar with a padlock to which only he had the key (he later married her). Despite the harsh treatment meted out to them, girls often fell in love with their masters. The bestselling novel of the age was Samuel Richardson's Pamela, in which a pretty, clever servant resisted her master's advances and then charmed him into marrying her. Bored and overworked, servants longed to be the fine lady wife, or even the kept mistress living in luxury. However, it tended to be only elderly widowers who married their staff. The typical eighteenth-century man simply seduced his servants and fired them when he was bored of them.
Emma had been working for the Thomas family for only a few months before she found herself unemployed again. Mrs. Thomas probably dismissed her, no doubt weary of the inefficient, untidy, party-mad twelve-year-old she had taken on as a favor.3 Although Emma was aggrieved to lose her position, her head was stuffed with romantic dreams and she was, as she later said, "wild and thoughtless when a little girl." Emma needed to move to a place where she could be a new person: free from the stigma of the scandal of her parents' marriage, her father's strange death, and the disgrace of being a Kidd. She joined the hundreds of girls from across the country heading to London each year to seek money and sensation. As the Carlton House Magazine noted, "What lass, in the rural village, that hears the name of London, but wishes to be there?"4
CHAPTER 5
Traveling to London
Emma's journey to London by coach would have been the most daunting experience of her young life. She left no record of her feelings about it, so we can only piece together her experiences from the reports of other coach travelers of the time. Wearing her best dress to save it from thieves, carrying a few belongings and some cheese and bread, she set off early in the morning for an inn on the outskirts of Chester. Unable to afford the stagecoach, she probably took the stage wagon, a goods vehicle that took poorer passengers. Parked at the back of the yard, behind the crowds of hawkers, passengers, and beggars, the stage wagon was a twelve-foot-long frame over four thick wooden wheels, covered only by a torn, dirty sheet. It would be pulled along the 180-mile journey south to London by six or eight horses in pairs. Old and worn out from years of dragging other carriages, they were less than half a year away from the slaughterhouse.
Twenty or so women, children, and elderly men (younger men traveled on horseback) bundled themselves into the wagon around bags of vegetables and crates of chickens. Children took the most uncomfortable spots over the wheels or at the very back. Then they had to hold tight to their money. A passenger couldn't pay until he or she left the wagon, and anyone who failed to cough up would be arrested. Emma's journey cost around six shillings, with extra money needed for food and lodging along the way—over two months of Sarah's wages. If Mary had not been mistress to a man of means, Emma would have been unable to afford the fare.
The journey from Chester to London usually