Summer 1895
"Tessie! Tessie, wake up! Master James has spilled his port again."
Tessie Moran, eighteen and not yet in love, was dreaming of handsome young men and moonlight. She could not easily be roused from her enchantment.
The housemaid gave her a violent poke. "Tessie! If you want me to be waking your sister instead, then that's all right with me."
"Mmn? No ... no, leave her be. I'm ... awake." Slowly Tess dragged her unwilling body into a sitting position, forcing her eyes to adjust to the light of the maid's kerosene lamp, forcing her mind to accept the fact that it was two-thirty in the morning, the party was over, and now the linen must be done. Her head drooped. Her hair—thick, wild, auburn—tumbled over her shoulders, and her one thought was, I shan't put on a cap—not at this hour.
"Will you be lighting the lamp, or is it the entire night you expect me to stand here?" the maid asked in a low hiss.
"I'm sorry, Bridget," Tess answered in a sleepy yawn. She removed a match from its porcelain holder and struck it. The little burst of flame lit up a complexion white and smooth and sprinkled faintly, almost whimsically, with freckles. The eyes, long-lashed and deep bottle-green, were expressive, and their expression just now was of weariness, of exhaustion.
It was high season in Newport.
"Thank you for not waking Maggie," whispered Tess as she turned on the gas and touched the match to the night lamp. The lamp glowed and Bridget left instantly, bound for her own garret room down the hall.
As quietly as she could, Tess changed from her cotton nightgown into an even plainer cotton shift. The garment, devoid of any snippets of lace or other bits of vanity, nonetheless encircled her lovely throat, skittered around her tiny waist, and fell over her rounded hips with alluring perfection. Not one of the ladies at Mrs. Winward's dinner party that evening wore a gown sewn as subtly as that cotton shift. Tess was a sorceress with a needle, and she sewed only for herself.
For herself, and for her sister Maggie, who lay peacefully, for once, in the small metal-framed bed opposite her own. Maggie had slept through Bridget’s interruption, and the dry, hacking cough that had plagued her nights lately remained undisturbed. Tess hovered over her sister, longing to caress her feverish brow but not daring to wake her. Maggie was two years older than Tess; she might have been ten. Shy, never robust, seldom joyous, Maggie was in every way Tess's opposite. She seemed to Tess not to fuss very much about this thing called life; her attitude was of one who waits, simply, and sees.
During their early years in Cork, and then later at the comfortable Meller estate in Wrexham, and now at the palatial Winward summer "cottage" in Newport, Maggie, of all the Moran family, had chafed the least at her domestic situation. In Ireland she'd been the meekest of scullery maids; in England, the gentlest of dairy maids; in Newport, the most resigned of laundry maids. Whether her mistresses were kind or harsh, Maggie smiled her faraway smile and did her work quietly.
That amazed Tess. Looking down at her frail, beloved sister, her brow damp, her thin chest rising and falling with the effort of breathing, Tess clenched her fists and swore an oath that was anything but meek. It was cruel: anyone could see that Maggie was too weak for the grueling job of laundry maid at such a large house. But when Tess had pleaded with the head laundry maid to assign Maggie less physical work like sorting and mending, she had been angrily dismissed from the interview. In retrospect, it had been a—what would her ladyship have called it?—a faux pas. A misstep. Tess had succeeded not only in alienating the head laundry maid by her impertinence, but she had drawn attention to her sister’s illness besides. Un faux pas. Absolument.
Maggie's eyes fluttered and opened. "You're dressed, Tessie." It was said without emotion. "They've done with their cigars, then?"
"Shhh. Back to sleep. Yes, they've done, and it's only the merest bit of a spill."
"Mother Mary—not the damask, is it?"
"Yes, it’s the blessed damask, and it's nothing at all for you to worry over."
The damask tablecloth, twelve yards long and imported from London, weighed nearly as much as Maggie and cost far more than the entire Moran family had so far earned in their service to the Winward family.
Maggie struggled to get up, but Tess pushed her gently back onto her pillow.
"Margaret Moran, stop jumping about like a flea on a rug and listen to me. Don't I have the strength for two? And are you thinking that your influenza is a joking matter, by any chance?"
"Oh, Tess ..." A tear slid down Maggie's thin cheek. "It isn't influenza, is it."
Tess swallowed a lump as hard as a diamond. "I surely don't know what else it could be."
Maggie's voice dropped to a threadbare whisper. "Tessie, I spit up ... blood this morning." Her wide eyes in her pale face looked not so much fearful as guilty.
"Ah!" exclaimed Tess with a righteous anger she did not feel. "And whose toothbrush is it that's always dry as a bone? Whose apple is it on the nightstand, all shriveled and uneaten? If it's your gums that are going to bleed, you've only yourself to blame." Tess forced her mouth into a stern, motherly smile as she tucked the blanket around her sister.
The two exchanged a long, infinitely sad look. "Yes ... it must be my gums," Maggie said in soft agreement.
Tess, not trusting her own voice, kissed her sister gently on the brow, took up the night lamp, and stole out of the room.
A kind of desperate anger scorched the edges of her thoughts as she made her way quickly down the three flights of stairs to the wet-laundry room. Maggie would get well, if only she had enough rest. Her lungs needed the cool dry air of the dairy house on Lady Meller's estate, not the wet, steaming oppression of Mrs. Winward's laundry room. A soft word, a friendly smile—if only they'd never left England! The Moran family were as happy in Wrexham as they'd ever been in their lives. Except for her mother, all of them had flourished under Lady Meller's care: Will had learned his ciphers, and Tess, to read and write fluently, and when Maggie was laid low with scarlet fever, it was Lady Meller who'd nursed her, and actually got Maggie to laugh and joke about her bright strawberry tongue.
If only they'd never left Wrexham!
"Well, you took your own sweet time, princess." It was one of the underfootman, a short, hostile young man, seated on one end of the laundry room table, his legs crossed with casual insolence. He was smoking a cigarette, which would earn him an instant dismissal if the head footman happened to come upon him.
Tess ignored his baiting greeting and walked past him to the laundry chute. The bin was filled almost completely by the damask tablecloth. Very carefully, Tess began to unload the heavy, figured linen, conscious of the scrutiny of the footman behind her.
Without turning around she said, "You needn't wait for me. I'll turn down the lights after."
"I'm in no hurry," he said lazily. "Besides, this is the best view in town."
Tess stiffened, and he added, "Where's your sister, anyway?"
"She'll be down soon," Tess lied.
"I don't know why; she ain't much use at washing. And she don't glaze linen worth a tinker's damn," he added. "So Enid says."
"Enid is wrong," Tess said as she gathered, with great effort, the cumbersome folds.
"She don't think much of you and your lippiness either, princess. If I was you, I'd stay on the sunny side of the head laundress. You'll go nowhere without her good opinion, that I know."
"Please move, Mr. Boot. I need the table." Tess spoke to the air just above the top of his slicked-down head. Peter Boot fancied himself a fine figure of a man, but he was much too short ever to serve upstairs. Unfortunately, the realization had made him quarrelsome and aggressive.
The footman dropped his cigarette over the side of the table onto the clean stone floor, then slid off and ground the butt under the sole of his shoe. "You're a stuck-up little princess, you know that? But you ain't got no title. You ain't got no money. So why, I ask myself, is she so stuck-up? Sits all to herself at the servants' mess; won't come out walking when a young man kindly offers to take her. I ask myself, is it because she can do her letters? They say a little learning is a dangerous thing," he added, his voice dropping to a soft, menacing whisper. "So what gives you the right to act like a stuck-up little ... princess? Hey?"
He took up a place beside her, close enough for her to tell that his pomade reeked of almond oil. Despite the rapid hammering of her pulse, Tess was not actually frightened by the footman's bravado: she was taller and perhaps stronger than he, if it came to that. But with Maggie ill, Tess dared not react to his provocation. She could not afford the simple luxury of slapping Peter Boot's face.
The footman, with a cunning developed during years of abusing lesser domestics, understood Tess's position exactly. "I could make things easier for you, princess," he said, "if only you'd let me."
He could not make things easier for Tess, but he certainly could make them more difficult. Tess refused to answer, instead focusing intently on fold after fold of the endless cloth, hunting down the offending stain. Damn Master James and his port.
"You hold it in real good, princess, I'll give you that. In that way you ain't like the rest of the micks, are you? No little tempers always on display—all your fire's in your hair. And someplace else, I'll bet," he added slyly, slipping one arm around Tess's waist from behind and clutching at her breast.
She pulled away. "No! Please—please don't do that," she begged. "Only let me do my work."
Once before Tess had been plagued by a fellow servant: she was twelve, he was a hulking stable boy, and when she ran sobbing to Lady Meller, the boy had been sent packing. But Tess had hardly ever spoken to her American mistress, and the housekeeper always sided with the butler and the men. "I just want to finish my work and go back to sleep," she said faintly.
"You can't deny you like it," the footman insisted, dogging her heels as she put on a kettle of water. "You micks are all alike—all shy and holy on the outside, all hot and sassy on the inside."
"I'm not like that at all," she answered in some distress.
Rather self-consciously, she stretched the soiled portion of the cloth over a large bowl and secured it with a piece of twine, then sprinkled salt over the stain. All the while Peter Boot remained silent, watching her lazily. The heavy iron kettle on the furnace hot plate came to a boil, and Tess wrapped a cloth around its handle and prepared to pour boiling water over the wine spot from a height above the bowl.
"Stand clear lest you be splashed," she warned the footman, hoping he would simply go away altogether; but he did not move.
Suddenly from the sealed-off kitchen came the loud crash of a tray of cutlery falling to the floor and the sound of the cook's voice, angry and scolding. Tess jumped, and her aim faltered: the stream of boiling water hit the edge of the bowl and glanced sideways onto the underfootman's arm.
He hissed in pain and fell back. "You little slut. You did that a-purpose!"
"I never did!" she cried.
"I'll get even for that, you stupid bitch!"
A voice bristling with authority cut them short. "What's all this?"
It was Mr. Waterman, the butler. "Ah—a Moran. I might have known," he said in a pleasant, scathing voice to Tess.
Holding one hand over the sleeve of his scalded arm, Peter Boot muttered, "I was helping her with the cloth and the fool splashed boiling water on me."
Tess swung her look from the butler to Peter Boot, taking in with loathing the little man's thinning, carefully slicked hair, his narrow, closely set eyes with their heavy, drooping lids, his nervous, twitching hands, and said to herself: he isn't worth it. Aloud she said formally to Mr. Waterman, "I'm sorry, sir. It was an accident."
"I dare say." To the footman he said, "Come along, Boot, and get some bicarbonate for that." Mr. Waterman turned one more time to Tess. "Never let me see you without your cap again."
Tess was left alone with the damask tablecloth and twenty-four serviettes, which she set to soaking in a copper tub filled with soda solution. The stain was gone, but not so her suspicion that Peter Boot was right: she had done it on purpose.