Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [80]
She turned from the window and sat down on a sofa. Before her, on a low table, stood a frosted-glass bowl full of fruit: apples, oranges, peaches and grapes. A whole bowl of fruit, just for her. She didn’t feel she could eat it right then, but she must certainly take some away, she thought, and she picked up two apples and put them in the pockets of the petticoat she’d slept in, then topped this with two oranges and stood up to look at herself sideways in the long mirror. She smiled – she looked ridiculous, as if she were wearing a donkey’s panniers! She took the fruit out again – just in time, it seemed, for there was a tap at the door which made her start in panic. She knew she shouldn’t have been allowed in such a place; they’d come to throw her out! Worse, the Unwins had discovered what she’d done. Another tap came, and Grace quickly climbed back into the bed and pulled the bedclothes up to her chin.
‘Come in,’ she said in a voice so tiny that no one could have heard it, then cleared her throat and said more loudly, ‘Come in, please!’
A maid entered the room carrying a bucket of coal to make up the fire, followed by another ready to open the curtains and tidy the room, and a third with a large jug of hot water, which she carried into the bathroom. Their duties accomplished, all three surveyed Grace with as much interest as she surveyed them, for the news that they had someone important staying – an heiress, no less – had circulated below stairs in an instant.
‘Will you be wanting your breakfast now, madam?’ one asked, and it was all Grace could do not to look behind her to see who was being addressed, for she’d never before been called madam.
‘Yes, I would, please,’ Grace answered. ‘Where should I go to collect it?’
‘We’ll bring it to you, madam,’ came the startled reply. ‘And what would you be wanting to eat?’
‘What is there?’
‘There’s sausages, rissoles, bacon, black pudding and devilled kidneys,’ said the first girl, counting them off on her fingers. ‘With eggs done anyways you wish.’
Grace’s mouth began to water. She nodded. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Which, madam?’
‘I have to choose?’ she asked in confusion.
‘Well, I suppose not,’ said the maid, her eyes widening. ‘Not if you don’t want to, madam.’
‘Then I’ll have everything,’ Grace replied recklessly, thinking how Lily would have loved to sit in bed eating sausages with her.
Of course, when the food arrived on white china plates covered with silver domes and accompanied by toasted bread in a little wicker basket, Grace was too overawed to eat very much at all. She managed a small amount of scrambled egg and a quarter piece of toast, thickly buttered, but could not manage any of the meat stuffs. Feeling guilty about what she’d wasted, she threw the sausages into the fire, left the rest of her breakfast under the silver domes and was pleased to be in the bathroom (a gleaming white-tiled room which – incredibly – was just for her) when a maid arrived to collect the trays.
Her washing water was almost cold by this time, but she was used to this and it didn’t stop her making full use of the washbasins and large, soft towels provided. She washed herself, and then her hair, with a pink soap which smelt wonderfully of roses, and rinsed it with copious amounts of water from the taps. These only gave out cold water, alas (for the hotel’s hot-water system had not quite been perfected), but it seemed miracle enough to have as much washing water as one wanted merely at the twist of a tap. Kneeling in front of the fire to dry her hair, she decided that while the fairytale that her life had turned into seemed highly improbable and might disappear at any moment, she was going to make the most of it.
She pushed her hair into shape (for she didn’t have as much as a comb with her), then looked at the only clothes she had to wear: the limp, half-dead-looking