Between her thighs throbbed the dull ache he had left her with. A burn, a soreness. She shifted onto her side, found that worse, and lay flat again.
She had been told certain things by Letty who had the habit of reading everything she could manage. She’d used a half-comic voice to explain the act and the pain that may come with it. She had been told by her mother, two evenings ago, with a candle between them.It is briefer than they tell you. It is not, in your case, going to be kind. He will be careful or he will not. Either way it is over, and you do not have to think of it again until the next time.
Brief, yes. Kind, perhaps. He had used the oil. He had asked if she was ready. She did not know what else he could have done. The hurt had been a sharp surprise. She had set her teeth against the inside of her lip, and they had held until the cry came out around them. After that there had been a different hurt, steadier, and she had pleaded with him to continue because to make him stop was to give him grounds to leave the bargain entirely.
There had been no pleasure in it. Whether women were supposed to feel pleasure she could not say. Her mother had not gone that far in her instruction, and Mrs Bickle, her mother’s particular friend in herbs, had spent twenty years compounding remedies to lessen her own husband’s appetite while compounding others to raise her own, and had achieved neither. Mrs Bickle had once told Violet that the marriage bedwas the smaller half of her difficulty, and that the larger half was the years on either side of it.
Violet thought of Mrs Bickle and understood her, at last.
Was that all she had to look forward to? The pinch of him pushing in. The held breath. The cold of the linen afterward. A husband leaving without a word. She would have to lie beneath him on every night he came, until she conceived, and after that as well because the contract required it and because two thousand pounds would keep her sisters fed but only a husband’s goodwill would see them married.
A small dry sob came out of her before she could brace for it. She pushed her face into the pillow, let three more come out, and stopped the rest.
The house was unfamiliar. The Hampstead house creaked at the joists in places she had known since she was nine. This house creaked elsewhere, in patterns that meant nothing to her. She listened anyway.
She woke before six. The room was still dark. She lay for a moment not knowing where she was. Then she remembered and put her feet on the cold floor.
At Thornwick she would have been up at half past five, checking the fires, putting the kettle on and making porridge. Here there was no sound she recognised and no routine that was familiar.
She dressed in what she had, with short stays she could lace herself. Her old shoes. Her hair she twisted up and pinned as if there was manual labour to be done and no one to see her do it.
The corridor outside her room was dark. She had no candle and did not know where one was kept. She put her hand onthe wall and followed it. The wallpaper was smooth under her fingers, a heavy weave she could feel the pattern of without seeing it. The corridor turned. A staircase presented itself, not the great staircase she had come up the evening before but a narrower one, uncarpeted, that went up and down. She took it down.
The house, in the early dark, was a different creature from the house she had been led through last night. The passages were cold. The floors were stone. Somewhere below her a door stood open onto a draught, and the draught carried the smell of coalsmoke and bread and the particular mineral smell of a kitchen range that had been banked overnight and not yet brought up. She followed it.
The kitchen was enormous. She had known it would be, but the scale of it, seen from the doorway in the grey half-light of a February morning, was something else. A long scrubbed table. Copper pans above it in rows. A range that took up most of the far wall, with two spits and an oven door wide enough to take a goose. A scullery she could see the edge of through another door.
A woman was at the range. She was stoking it, her back to the door. The woman was perhaps fifty. Stout. Her cap was already on. Her sleeves were already rolled. She looked at Violet over her shoulder and slowly rose to her feet. Violet tried a small smile and approached.
“Good morning.” She tried to keep her voice friendly.
The woman turned fully, her eyes moving over the dress then back to her face.
“Mrs Greer didn’t tell me she’d hired anyone new. You’re early.”
“I—”
“Well, don’t just stand there. There’s bread on the board if you’re hungry. Don’t touch the butter, that’s for upstairs. I’m Mrs Garrick. You’ll call me Mrs Garrick or Cook.”
“Yes, Mrs Garrick.”
She should have saidI am the Duchess of Iredell, but it felt like a lie. And she did not want to say it. She wanted to keep her hands busy, have something to do.
“Can I help with anything?”
Mrs Garrick looked her over a second time. “Can you peel?”
“Yes.”
“Turnips in the larder. Through there. Knife’s on the hook. Peelings in the bucket, not on my floor.”
The larder was through a narrow passage past two closed doors. At the second she slowed. The smell coming through the gap beneath it was one she knew. Dried lavender, chamomile, something sharper underneath. A stillroom. Her mother’s kitchen at Thornwick had smelled like this in autumn, when the bundles hung from every beam.
The larder was cold and dim and smelled of root vegetables and hanging game. The turnips were in a hessian sack by the door. Violet took the sack and the bucket and the knife back to the long table and sat on the bench and began to peel.
She had peeled a thousand turnips at Thornwick. Her hands knew the work. The knife turned in her grip. The peel came off in long curls.
Mrs Garrick glanced over once, saw the peel going into the bucket. “You’re quick,” she said. “I could use quick. Where did Mrs Greer find you?”