Temperance Angel ran her hands down the sides of her bodice and looked herself over in the full-length mirror that stood to one end of her dressing room. She was satisfied with what she saw. Jane, her lady’s maid, had done well this morning. Temperance’s hair was parted neatly down the centre and drawn back over her ears into a most pleasing arrangement. She would have the girl add some flowers later on, before Lady Egerton paid her long-awaited call, but for now it would suffice. Temperance’s skirts fell flatteringly over her new crinoline cage; a French one that she had ordered especially on the advice of Lady Egerton. It was wider than any she had worn before and she knew she would have to take great care not to cause herself any embarrassment. She had heard terrible stories of women exposing themselves when they sat down too carelessly and the cage flew up in their faces. Worse still, she had heard tell of a fashionable young woman in Paris who had burned to death after a lighted cigar had rolled under her voluminous skirts. Temperance shuddered. She would never allow anything like that to happen to her.
Temperance was a beautiful woman and she was well aware of the fact. But she never took it for granted. She knew it was only her pale, almost translucent skin, her fierce green, almond-shaped eyes and her rich auburn hair that had got her where she was today. She turned heads. Arthur Angel would never have looked twice at her if she had been ordinary-looking. He certainly would never have married her. Temperance was not born stupid, only poor. She knew that no matter how beautiful she was, she would never have enticed a titled gentleman into marriage. There were limits to what the daughter of a lowly clerk could achieve. So Temperance had set her sights on the next best thing. A man of ambition.
Charles Angel was a man to be reckoned with in the small town of Bridgwater. He owned the local flour mill and had amassed a small fortune for his troubles. He was one of the new breed of industrialists who had gained respect in the town, not from his breeding, but from his wealth. He had a troupe of plain daughters who, despite the richness and fine cut of their gowns, could not hide from the world their unfortunate resemblance to a herd of farmyard pigs. But Charles Angel also had a son. Arthur was the youngest of the family and, although not a handsome man, he wore his plainness with a determination that somehow managed to organise his muddled features into a pleasing order. He was set to inherit the mill from his father and throughout the whole of her seventeenth year, Temperance had contrived to cross paths with him at every opportunity. In a town as small as Bridgwater, this wasn’t a difficult thing to arrange.
Temperance timed her daily errands so that she was passing the Angel household (a magnificent red and yellow brick house known locally as Lions House, due to the lion-topped gateposts that flanked the front steps) at the exact time Arthur was leaving on his way to the mill in the mornings. She discovered that Arthur and his family attended the church of St Mary’s on the other side of town to the church she and her father usually attended. So, much to her father’s consternation, she insisted on making the extra twenty-minute journey there every Sunday morning, even though it meant her father had to go without his customary Sunday lie-in. But as Temperance had been running the household since the death of her mother five years earlier, her father had little choice in the matter.
It wasn’t long before Arthur Angel began to tip his hat at Temperance. She wasn’t at all surprised. She blushed at him prettily and lowered her eyes. But that was all. She didn’t encourage him. She wanted to reel him in slowly. She wanted to be certain that when she finally caught him, there would be no chance of him slipping from her grip.
The months passed. Temperance made the best of her limited wardrobe by trimming her gowns with fresh pieces of lace she bought cheaply at the market and by pinning artfully arranged flowers in her hair. Arthur Angel, along with tipping his hat, began to greet Temperance with a polite Good morning or Good afternoon. She did not reply of course; decorum dictated that a young woman out on her own must never acknowledge the attentions of a man. Even so, she began to let a comely smile pass across her lips. A smile that would not fail to set Arthur Angel’s heart beating fast.
Eventually, on a stark Sunday morning in the autumn of that year, when the sun shone weakly on the mulch of fallen leaves in the churchyard, Arthur Angel approached Temperance’s father and introduced himself. Temperance stood to one side and was relieved that she had shined her father’s only good shoes and mended the hole in the elbow of his ancient Sunday suit. She could not remember exactly what was said that day. She was distracted by the way her father kept pulling nervously at his collar and at the way his face flushed a ridiculous red. But whatever he said cannot have been too awful, because the next thing Temperance knew, Arthur Angel had taken her gloved hand and brought it to his lips.
After that, they met every Sunday in the churchyard once the service had finished. But now it was Temperance’s father who stood to one side while Temperance was wooed by Arthur Angel. As was only right and fitting, Arthur left it a good few weeks before asking permission to call upon Temperance at home. This was the moment Temperance had feared the most. This was the real test. Could she entrance Arthur Angel so much that he would fail to notice the shabbiness of the tiny terraced house she shared with her father? Temperance spent the days before Arthur’s visit scrubbing the house from top to bottom. She washed threadbare curtains, swept the floors until there was not a speck of dust to be seen, polished the windows to a shine and begged and borrowed from neighbours until she had a decent choice of plates and teacups, and a teapot that poured without dribbling.
On the morning of the day Arthur was due to call (it was raining, much to Temperance’s annoyance. Wet weather always made the house look bleaker), Temperance was up before dawn. She dragged the old tin bath in front of the kitchen fire and poured in kettle after kettle full of steaming water. The water was hot enough to turn Temperance’s skin a bright pink as she sat in the bath and methodically rubbed the washcloth between every toe, around her feet, up her legs, across her hips and onwards, not missing an inch of flesh. Then she dried herself carefully and put on the second- or third-hand brocade gown she had found after rummaging around in the back of the pawn shop on Corn Street. It fitted her perfectly and its green velvet bodice complemented her eyes much better than she could have hoped for. She disguised the musty smell of the old velvet by sprinkling it with the last few drops of lavender water from her dead mother’s only perfume bottle.
Once satisfied with her own appearance, Temperance called her father and instructed him to clean himself thoroughly in the now tepid bathwater. She supervised his dress, combed his hair flat and bade him sit quietly in the small front room she had temporarily transformed into a parlour. With the tea laid out on the table and a few small fancies on a good china plate, all that was left to do was to wait. Temperance knew that the rest of her life depended on the next few hours and she had never been as nervous or as excited or as terrified. When the knock finally arrived at the door she almost choked on her own heart.
Little did Temperance know, but she needn’t have bothered to go to so much trouble and effort. Arthur Angel was already frantically in love with her. He wouldn’t have cared less if he’d had to pick his way through the worst of slums to get to her. When Temperance answered the door to him the rest of the world fell away. Arthur could have been in a palace or a hovel. He didn’t notice the damp in the corner of the room, or how threadbare the rug was. He didn’t notice how the delicate china teacups that Temperance poured the tea into didn’t all match. He barely noticed her father sitting quietly in the corner of the room and he certainly didn’t taste the sweetness of the pastries that Temperance had gone to so much trouble choosing. All he noticed was how Temperance shone. He feasted his eyes on her long white neck and drank in the greenness of her eyes. He had never wanted something so much in his whole life and within half an hour of his arrival he was down on his knee asking for her hand in marriage.
As luck would have it, Charles Angel, who was not entirely in agreement with his only son marrying so low, met with a nasty accident while observing the installation of a new roller at the mill, leaving his entire fortune to Arthur and giving the inhabitants of Bridgwater a reason to gossip when St Mary’s church hosted a funeral and then a wedding within two days of each other.
Temperance took to running Lions House as if she had been born to it. Arthur agreed with her suggestion that a newly married couple should enjoy complete privacy in the early days of wedlock, so the Angel sisters and Charles’ widow were dispatched to a small but adequate cottage on the outskirts of town. Temperance looked at her grand new home, at the fine furniture and large army of servants it contained, she looked at her costly trousseau, that had all been handmade for her by a Bristol dressmaker, and she could not believe how easy it had been to get the life she had always dreamed of. Arthur, for his part, could not believe how lucky he was to have the wife he’d always dreamed of. Neither of them could have been more satisfied with the way things had turned out.
Within a year, Temperance had produced a son they named Eli and a year later a daughter named Alice. If Arthur was puzzled by the change in Temperance that came about after the children were born, he never said a word about it. He adored his wife and if she was not as enthusiastic in the bedroom any more, well maybe that was to be expected after the rigours of childbirth? When she moved out of their bedroom altogether, he meekly accepted it as her right to a good night’s sleep. He grew used to containing his passion for her and counted his blessings instead: that he was fortunate enough to have the most beautiful wife in the whole of Bridgwater.
Temperance’s beauty dominated the Angel household. It drew everyone towards her and made them want to please her: from the lowliest maid-of-all-works to all of Arthur’s business associates. By the time any of them recognised the dark truth behind Temperance’s perfect façade, it was too late. She had them caught in her trap, and none was brave enough to speak out against her. No one, that is, except for her daughter, Alice Angel.
Alice saw straight through her mother. From the moment she was born, Temperance was aware of the baby’s small black eyes following her around the room. Temperance found it disconcerting that a mere baby could make her feel so uneasy. She would dream of the child’s miniature fingers digging into her face and peeling back the skin to reveal the ugliness of the blood, bone and muscle underneath. Temperance spent as little time as she could with the child. She called her difficult, awkward and wearing, although the nanny she engaged to look after the child found Alice to be nothing but sweet and lovable. In truth, Temperance could not bring herself to even like her daughter. Temperance felt different towards her eldest child, Eli. If love made your insides turn soft for a moment, then Temperance assumed she loved her son. She could feel his adoration of her: it poured from him. He would hold his arms out to her and when she picked him up he would press his velvet cheeks against hers as he wrapped his little arms around her neck. He was a beautiful boy. He had inherited Temperance’s auburn hair and green eyes, and Arthur’s soft nature. Eli grew into a gentle and caring young man and, best of all, his love for Temperance never wavered.
Alice, on the other hand, grew worse the older she got. Once the girl learned to speak, there seemed to be no way of training her tongue. She questioned her mother endlessly and challenged her on every decision. But, why must I wear that? Why can’t I play outside with Eli? Why can’t I go and see Papa now? Why do you love Eli more than me? The girl was insufferable. She didn’t act at all like a young lady should; she was ridiculously untidy and raced around the house like a common street urchin. Temperance despaired of her. She could barely bring herself to look at the girl at times. It didn’t help that Alice looked so different. She hadn’t inherited her mother’s ethereal beauty, but neither did she take after her father’s side of the family. Alice had an intensity to her. Everything about her was more than it should have been. Her hair was blacker than coal, her skin creamier than the freshest milk and her eyes sharper than a kitchen knife. If Temperance believed at all in changelings, she would have sworn that Alice had been swapped for an otherworldly creature at birth.
It was Alice that Temperance was thinking about as she stood admiring herself in the mirror. The damned girl was suffering from hysteria, she was sure of it. She was sixteen now and should have long since ceased to be a thorn in Temperance’s neat side. But she was so wilful. Everything with her was a battle. She should have been completely corset trained by now. But no, Alice being Alice, she would take the thing off at night, complaining that it was too uncomfortable to sleep in. Of course it was uncomfortable. A good, straight and comely posture could not be gained without a modicum of discomfort. But Temperance had got her own way as usual. She saw to it herself that every night now, Alice’s hands were strapped to her bed. There was no tampering with corset laces now. A few more weeks should do it, then hopefully Alice’s wayward mind would be restrained, along with her figure.
Temperance checked the clock on her mantelpiece. It was seven o’clock. Time for the day to begin in earnest. She would go and untie Alice first, say goodbye to Arthur before he left for Bristol, then instruct the cook on exactly what was needed for Lady Egerton’s visit.