Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [47]
‘How deftly you work,’ she said to Lily, watching as the girl tried to scrape burned and blackened fat from the fire irons. ‘How beautiful and clean you are getting those . . . those things.’
‘Yes, miss,’ said Lily. She felt uneasy when Miss Charlotte came below stairs to speak to her, for she always looked very much out of place, with her lacy trimmings and macassared curls. Today her crinoline skirts were so wide that they barely fitted through the scullery door.
‘You have been with us some time now, have you not?’ Miss Charlotte said, trying to affect interest. The combined smell of ammonia and carbolic was making her feel rather faint, however, and she hoped she wouldn’t have to stay long.
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Some years . . .’
‘Years?’ Lily frowned and shook her head. Surely it couldn’t be years? ‘No, not years, miss. I think it’s just a couple of months.’
‘No, it’s years,’ Miss Charlotte insisted. ‘I told you before. Your own dear mother died about ten years ago when you were just a little girl and my mama and papa took you in, and you’ve been living with us ever since. We are a similar age and I remember playing with you when I was quite small.’
Lily frowned and rubbed a streak of grease across her cheek. ‘No, I don’t think that’s right,’ she said. Miss Charlotte was making up stories again, the way that Grace used to make up stories for them from things she’d read in the newspapers.
‘Yes, my mama and papa adopted you years ago,’ said Miss Charlotte, smiling rigidly.
‘Adopted . . .’ Lily repeated wonderingly. ‘I don’t think so, miss.’ She wasn’t even sure what the word meant. ‘I lived with Grace – she’s my sister. We were in Mrs . . .’ She frowned, trying to remember. ‘Mrs Macready’s house, and then one day it was covered in wood and we couldn’t get in.’
Miss Charlotte steadied herself (the gig would be painted a high-gloss red, she decided, with gold carriage lanterns at each side) and spoke again. ‘Well, we won’t worry about that now, Lily. Er, about your dear mother, didn’t you say that when you lived with her, it was somewhere in Wimbledon?’
‘That’s right,’ Lily said, then, ‘Ow!’ as she cut her thumb on a rough piece of iron.
‘And can you remember the name of the house you lived in?’
‘No, miss.’ Drops of blood fell into the greasy sink and Lily gulped back a sob and put her thumb in her mouth to try and stop the flow. ‘You’ve asked me that before. You keep asking me that.’
Miss Charlotte laughed gaily. ‘Do I really? It’s just that I do love hearing tales about your childhood in the country . . . although, of course, that was well before you came to live here some ten years ago.’
Lily thought for a moment – Miss Charlotte was doing it again. ‘Not ten years, miss,’ she said then. ‘Only about a month or two. And before that me and my sister were selling cresses in the streets. We used to go to Farringdon Market in the morning and buy up what we –’
‘Oh!’ A look of irritation crossed Miss Charlotte’s face that even the thought of having a pure white horse to pull the gig could not dispel. ‘This is hopeless!’
‘What is, miss?’
‘Nothing!’ she snapped. ‘And anyway, don’t just stand there bleeding all over those . . . those iron things. Go and get a piece of rag from the kitchen and clean yourself up.’
By the time Lily returned with her thumb circled round and round with rag so that it was as big as a turnip, Miss Charlotte had gone back upstairs.
‘It’s impossible!’ Charlotte said to her mother. ‘I talk to her, I tell her over and over again that she’s been living with us for years, but she won’t have it! It just doesn’t go in her head.’
‘Oh dear,’ frowned Mrs Unwin, fingering a swatch of curtain material recently sent from the new Marshall and Snelgrove store. ‘I really thought she was dull enough, simple enough, to believe anything she was told. I even promised