Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [33]
Chapter Eight
Edna Bruce was checking the monthly account from the butcher’s when she heard Beth sigh. Looking up, she noticed the girl looked unusually pensive as she sewed some buttons on to one of Mr Edward’s shirts.
They were in what had once been the butler’s parlour, the room at the bottom of the basement steps. In the absence of a butler it was used now as a sewing and ironing room, and as it was raining hard outside, Molly was there with them in her perambulator having her midday sleep.
It was six weeks since Beth and her little family had come to live in Falkner Square, and Mrs Bruce was delighted by how well it was working out.
She only ever saw Sam on Sundays because he left for work early in the morning, but she had found him to be a very pleasant young man.
Beth came in for three hours each weekday now, which suited everyone better as the laundry didn’t mount up into unmanageable amounts. She brought Molly over with her, and in good weather she stayed in her perambulator outside in the yard.
Not that she was ever in it for long! Mrs Bruce, Cook and Kathleen were all guilty of getting her out to cuddle her, as was the mistress too. On the odd occasions Mr Edward was home during the morning and came down to the basement, he too fell for her charms and stopped to play with her.
In truth, Molly had become everyone’s pet. Her curly hair, treacle-brown eyes and ready smiles made fools of all of them. She was a remarkably happy baby, she hardly ever cried, and would go willingly to anyone.
But the most surprising consequence of Beth coming to live in Falkner Square was that old Mr Langworthy had taken to her. That had never happened with anyone before. It came about because Beth volunteered to sit with him one afternoon while the mistress popped out for an hour. When she got back she found her father-in-law engrossed in listening to Beth reading from a penny dreadful. Apparently she’d put it in her pocket to read, expecting him to be asleep, but on finding him wide awake, she thought she might as well see how he liked it.
As old Mr Langworthy had been something of an intellectual snob before his stroke and wouldn’t have allowed such lowbrow reading matter in the house, both his son and daughter-in-law found this very amusing.
Now Beth often read to him, or just went in and chatted to him. She didn’t seem in the least put off by his incapacity, or that he spoke in grunts and odd sounds; in fact she spoke to him as she would to anyone else, about things in the news, books she’d read in the past, and about her late parents.
Yet however well things were working out, both Mrs Bruce and Mrs Langworthy were a little concerned that such a vibrant young girl had such a narrow life. It wasn’t a hard one by any means; most girls in service worked from six in the morning until their master and mistress went to bed. In fact, if Beth was married and Molly her own child, it could have been said to be a charmed life. But Sam was not her husband, and as he’d now got a second job as a barman at the Adelphi Hotel and was out every evening, Beth was always alone.
Mrs Langworthy herself had said it was no life for such a young girl to be stuck in a couple of rooms with a baby, and no family or friends to visit. Mrs Bruce thought perhaps this was what was ailing Beth now.
‘Is there something troubling you, Beth?’ she asked. ‘You are awfully quiet today.’
‘I was just thinking how hard Sam works,’ Beth said with a little shrug of her shoulders. ‘He wants to go to America, you see, that’s why he took the barman’s job. He thought some experience like that would stand him in good stead.’
This was the first Mrs Bruce had heard of this. ‘Is he planning to go without you?’ she asked.
‘No, he wants me to go too. But I don’t see how I can, there’s Molly to think of.’
‘People emigrate with children all the time,’ Mrs Bruce said evenly. ‘They manage. I’ve heard of some going with five or six children.’
‘Yes, but it’s different with Sam being my brother.’ Beth sighed, her blue eyes suddenly very sad. ‘I wouldn’t want to spoil