CHAPTER 4

DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE IN THE HOUSE OF DAPHNE LARKSPEAR

Karen Lamberton-Marchment had rounded off her tour of the more obscure, rarely visited, corners of the great house with a thorough exploration of her rambling home’s other extreme, vis-à-vis the many basement rooms. This was an area that had once served as the ‘downstairs’ ‘engine room’ of the house, back in those far-off days of ‘domestics’, scullery maids, ‘tweenies’, parlour maids, butlers and footmen and the like. It was also a zone that had yielded much to investigation, offering discretion, privacy, security and isolation while requiring very little in terms of modification beyond the fitting of sturdy locks here and there, a little ‘bricking-up’ and the addition of one or two key fitments and fittings - all factors that went to bolster her plans.

Okay, so perhaps the house had never been grand enough to have justified a butler and footmen, but she couldn’t help but reflect on how such a household would almost certainly have included most of the rest of the domestic servant pack, back in that time of hand, foot and finger luxury. Now there was only the housekeeper; though she could be useful in her way. But of course soon, if all went well, there would be the addition to the household of a sort of governess-cum-school ma’am figure in the overbearing and domineering form of the redoubtable Mrs Daphne Larkspear - and perhaps the poor repressed young thing that presently ‘kept house’ for her. Yes, now she - Karen Lamberton-Marchment - had been left in charge the house was coming back alive.

The housekeeper, though, was a strange bird. She had always harboured some sort of unexplained grudge against the master of the house in his lifetime. It was something she had taken little care to disguise yet at the same time had apparently never been admonished for - something else that had always gone unexplained. Yet since his untimely passing this animosity of his housekeeper’s, rather then subsiding, had somehow become transferred on to his daughter’s shoulders, and noticeably so, as if the girl were acting as a proxy for her true target. But what had merely been a sort of grudging disrespect, in the case of his daughter, had become magnified, more focused somehow, manifesting as an almost pathological dislike that bordered at times on an out and out irrational hatred for young Alice. She knew her father’s housekeeper had few scruples and she had always thought she could read something of a spiteful nature in her, residing just below the surface. Now she was beginning to suspect that there might actually be some kind of psychopathology at work there too, perhaps something that might be amenable to a little manipulation - now that would be useful.

Full of self-satisfaction Karen Lamberton-Marchment now seated herself comfortably by the drawing room fire, a full schooner of sherry already in hand. It was a hand cut lead crystal glass, one of her best, one of the special ones she kept for such occasions, when she was in a celebratory mood, and the flames danced in the facets of its stem. Her mind was made up and her plans for her errant stepdaughter were now well in hand. With very little else in life to trouble her she could now afford the time to relax - it was a present to herself. Reclining back in her favourite resting place, one of a pair of elegant Georgian Revival high wingback armchairs in the manner of George III that were set to either side of the grate, her mind drifted back to the second meeting she’d had with her ex-teacher.

On that occasion she had visited Daphne Larkspear at her home, a Georgian townhouse standing on a leafy square situated in a surprisingly fashionable part of Hackney, East London. She remembered feeling a little nonplussed standing, waiting, on her ex-teacher’s step and not a little envious. She had always admired Georgian architecture and all things Georgian and yet her present home, though imposing in a rambling sort of piecemeal-built style, was in actuality largely early Regency, though she did her best to make it look the part.

She had been straight away introduced to the young girl who ‘lived in’ with Mrs Larkspear, shown what Daphne Larkspear had achieved with her over the years. It had clearly been intended as a demonstration of what she expected to achieve with her Alice once she had the girl in her hands. And it had been an impressive, if frightening one.

She recalled that the girl had been small built, much like Alice, though perhaps even more petite if anything, almost birdlike in stature. She had been with the ex-teacher since leaving school and had seemed to possess all those qualities she hoped one day to see in Alice. Quiet, subdued and polite, there could be no doubt as to that girl’s status about the house. It had been she who had come to the door, dropping a low curtsy with head bowed and fingertips lifting her skirt hem with the utmost servility.

She remembered the girl had been dressed head to foot in the garb of a servant girl, every detail carefully chosen to reinforce her position in life, both in her own eyes and those of others who might by chance make her acquaintance. The pastel lilac button-through dress she had been dressed in was in a thick, practical workwear-grade polyester that slithered and rustled and whooshed with every movement, yet was well fitted and closely tailored to her figure. The latter was particularly the case where it came to the bodice, which adhered closely to the girl’s extraordinarily high and thrusting bust line to the extent that the chunky hard plastic lilac buttons nestled deep between two sharply delineated hillocks yet without any hint of tightness or of pulling around the buttonholes.

It was an effect that had taken many fittings with the dressmaker to achieve, helped along by a longline underwired bullet bra, an old-fashioned open-bottom rubber girdle to control her waist and a pair of high-wasted elastic-fronted control knickers to further flatten her tummy. It was also an effect that was further augmented by the upper part of the dress being of a soft-toned lilac and white vertical candy stripe, the dress changing at the waist to a solid block of lilac for the skirt.

The latter was a plain, panelled A-line affair of a length chosen to just skim the floor with the girl kneeling upright and that fastened up the front with glossy plastic buttons matching those of the bodice. The skirt flared out from a remarkably narrow, fitted waist that was accentuated still further by a lilac-coloured plastic belt that was threaded through a series of belt loops and buckled at the front. The skirt front was covered to perhaps two thirds of its length by a lilac and white candy striped waist apron that was edged in lilac piping to match the bodice and that fastened behind the girl’s back by in large bow, the free ends of which hung down exactly to the length of the apron itself.

The bodice was topped off by an oversized Peter Pan collar that demurely buttoned high at the girl’s throat, extended almost as far as the shoulder seams and that was a solid block of lilac - matching the skirt - being finished off in a edging of diagonal lilac and white piping. The long sleeves, too, though candy striped like the rest of the bodice, were finished off by buttoned cuffs in a contrasting solid block of lilac trimmed with that same diagonal lilac and white piping. An embroidered crest occupied the single breast pocket and was topped off by the word ‘HOUSEMAID’ in a glittering scrolling gold thread that rivalled the few golden tresses that had somehow escaped from under the discipline of her maid’s cap.

The latter headpiece covered the top of her head in glossy plain lilac fabric, in the manner an elastic-edged mob cap might have, but rose up at the front to present the usual aspect expected of a maid’s or waitress’s cap and was edged all around by that same diagonally striped lilac and white piping that seemed to be just about everywhere, even around the buttonholes. That same nomenclature - HOUSEMAID - was embroidered across the front of the girl’s cap in large letters. Her waist length honey blonde hair had been tightly plaited and tied off at the bottom with a large lilac and white striped bow and was threaded through with a length of ribbon of the same type which had been plaited in with her hair.

What had been really surprising, though, was the coincidental discovery that not only did Mrs Larkspear happened to own exactly the same boots as she, albeit in her case for use in her rather modest garden rather than the stables, but that one of the tasks she had set the girl that day, something to keep her occupied while they were taking tea, should have been to clean them.

The woman had perfunctorily ordered her girl there and then, in front of her visitor, Karen Lamberton-Marchment, much as that same esteemed woman might have commanded her own stepdaughter, Alice - and without the slightest prompting on Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s part.

But her young Alice she had always brought to her knees and set to work in the reassuring privacy of home. This girl, Mrs Larkspear’s girl, had been toiling on her plump haunches in front of witnesses, unaccustomed visitors. That augmentation added something to the piquancy of the situation; it had made the girl’s red-faced humiliation seem almost palpable.

Of course Ms Lamberton-Marchment had commented - how could she not have? For starters she had expressed surprise as to the impracticality of those long sleeves for such a task, not to mention similar and perhaps even messier tasks such as washing up, scrubbing floors and the like. She had been informed in reply that the design was indeed as functional as the rest but that function in this particular case was somewhat different then, say, the choice of fabric. She said it was all about discipline and psychological control and to note that the girl had not even attempted to roll up her sleeves - in fact she forbade the girl to do so, it was one of her strictest rules.

Uniform was to be worn at all times, and in the manner she dictated - and that meant those cuffs and that collar remained buttoned at all times. It forced the girl to take exceptional care at all times in order not to dirty her cuffs and sleeves and in that way kept her permanently mindful of her uniform and thus of her position in life. It would be the same once she got Alice in the schoolroom in the school uniform she would devise.

“You see what I can do to a girl. Crush her, break her down bit by bit until pride is something she can barely remember having. This one’s been with me three years; she hasn’t left the house in the last two, not even for a minute, not even for as much as a walk in the garden. I forbid her to speak unless spoken to, I don’t allow her access to books, newspapers or magazines, nor do I let her listen to the radio or watch TV - and she loves me for it, loves me deeply in fact. I could make her lick those Wellingtons clean if I so wanted. And she would too, down on her knees, right there in the corner. She would lick them, slather over them, until the rubber shines if I told her to.” She smiled proudly as she addressed the girl directly, nodding towards the kneeling teenager. “...Isn’t that right, dear?”

Red faced the humbled girl had glanced shyly upwards, her eyes momentarily flickering between both her wickedly smiling tormentors before hurriedly averting, the shame of her position undoubtedly too much to bear. “Y,y,yess Miss Daphne”.

The voice had been pleasantly hesitant, endearingly uncertain and vulnerable. There had been an anxiety there, in that quavering, submissive tone, the hopeless acquiescence of a soul left eternally hanging in chains. But these had been psychological bonds the girl had been caught up in. It had been an entanglement forged of far stronger stuff than mere physical fetters, even if the latter had been manufactured from the strongest case-hardened steel. It had been the kind of entanglement she immediately knew she wanted woven around her Alice, and the thought had thrilled her to the very darkest reaches of her soul.

Karen Lamberton-Marchment could still recall forming the vivid impression that she could actually see those metaphorical heavy links, weighing down the girl’s bowed and rounded shoulders as the servant girl hunched over those boots, polishing away as if her life depended on it. She could still recall how the image before her eyes had swapped interchangeably back and forth with the one inhabiting her imagination, the vision she had had of the still - at that time at least - headstrong Alice Lamberton kneeling there in the girl’s stead. She had known then that that day would come - and who would be best to recruit to make it so.