The Disgrace of Kitty Grey Read online

  He frowned still and I made a face at him, and after a moment his mood changed, and he smiled, caught hold of my free hand and kissed it. I believe he would have kissed me on the lips then – and I was willing enough – but we heard a cry of ‘Will! Oh, Will!’ from further along the river and turned to see Betsy running through the trees from the direction of the village.

  Now, I loved Betsy as if she were my own little sister, but I have to say that my heart sank on seeing her, for I hardly ever got time on my own with Will. Although Betsy had lived with Kate and her husband for three years, the couple had four young children of their own and not much time to bother about an extra one. Consequently, Betsy doted on Will (and he on her) and she spent most of her waking hours with him down by the river, splashing through the reeds, chasing insects to feed to the frogs, climbing trees and playing house.

  She reached us and Will picked her up and swung her round. When he’d put her down and she’d caught her breath, her first question was to ask why I had a cow with me.

  ‘I’ve got Daisy in tow because I’m training her,’ I explained. ‘She’s going to be acting in a play and I have to teach her how to behave herself, how to walk daintily and come to me when I call.’

  ‘A play?’ She frowned at me. ‘What? Like in church at Easter?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘You can help me get her ready, if you like. You can walk her up and down along the riverbank and . . .’ I tried to think of what else an obedient cow would do, ‘. . . get her to answer to her name.’

  Betsy looked from me to Will. She was scarce five years old but she knew that I was trying to be rid of her.

  ‘It’s for Miss Sophia and Miss Alice,’ I said persuasively, for although Betsy had only ever viewed these two young ladies from afar, I knew she very much admired their gowns, their hair and their fashionable demeanour. Quite often, when the Misses went down the drive in their smart little carriage with parasols aloft, I saw Betsy peeping over the wall at them.

  ‘Is it really for them?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘Honestly and truly.’ I crossed my fingers and added, ‘And Miss Sophia asked especially that Miss Betsy Villiers should help in the training of Daisy.’

  Betsy fell for it and, taking the rope from me, she marched off with Daisy. When she got to the trees we heard her say, ‘Daisy! We’re going to walk along here and when I say Stop! you must be a good cow and stop walking.’

  Laughing, Will and I went to sit in his rowing boat and, after we’d shared a kiss or two, he started talking about the subject he lately held most dear to his heart: London. Where, apparently, the streets were paved with gold and every man could live like a king.

  ‘The watermen on the Thames earn four pence a trip and there are always customers. It’s possible to earn ten shillings a day. A day!’ he repeated. ‘If I saved I’d soon have enough money to buy a little cottage.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do while you’re off in London earning all this money?’ I asked. I looked at him coyly. ‘And what if I have my head turned by a visiting peddler or a lad at the Friday market?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be here to have your head turned – you’d be by my side. You’d have to come to London with me.’

  ‘To London? What would a milkmaid do in London? ’Tis all gin shops, taverns and coffee houses.’

  ‘For certain it is not!’ he said. ‘People live in houses there, just as they do here. And where there are people there are servants – and milkmaids. You’ll easily find employment.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think I’d like it there,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen pictures . . . there are robbers and footpads and a deal of noise and clamour. People get knocked over in the streets and mown down by horses. Besides, I’d never see my family.’

  ‘You hardly see them now,’ he pointed out, which was true, for although my mother and father were only ten miles off in Arlington, it was too far to walk there and back on my day off and near impossible to get a lift on a cart. Carts went to market, and to the next village, but there was no reason for anyone to go to Arlington. ‘We’d only need to stay there a year or so,’ he said. A strand of hair had escaped from my cap and he took it up and twirled it around his finger. ‘Just think, Kitty, one year in London and then we could be wed.’

  I sighed. I had to own that it was a tempting thought.

  ‘Whereas if I stay here, the Lord knows how long it will take to get a proper roof over our heads. I know I could not ask you to . . .’ He gestured behind him towards the hut.

  I answered quickly with a disgusted ‘No, for certain you could not!’

  ‘It might be ten years. Do you really want to wait ten years for me?’ he asked, his fingers encircling my wrist.

  ‘But they say London is a wicked place . . .’

  ‘We’d be together. I’d protect you from all wickednesses!’

  ‘But where would we live if I ever agreed to go? Which I certainly don’t,’ I added hastily.

  ‘We could live with my cousins,’ he said. ‘They’re watermen born and bred and they live –’

  ‘Near the Cathedral of St Paul’s,’ I said, for I had heard about these blessed relations regularly. ‘I know all about them! They can see the very dome of it from their window.’

  ‘So they can,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘But what about Betsy? She’d miss you terribly.’

  ‘She’d stay safe at home with Kate, and we’d send her toys and sweetmeats from London. And we’d soon be back here and then she could come and live with us in our own cottage. After we’re wed, of course,’ he added, seeing the look of pretended affront on my face. His hand ran up my arm. ‘Come with me, Kitty. Let’s be together in London . . .’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, for although I did not intend to do any such thing and the thought of London rather scared me, I didn’t want him to know this, or to stop trying to persuade me.

  I believe there would have been some more kisses following this, but our tryst was interrupted then by a call of ‘Halloo!’ from the opposite bank of the river, and I jumped out of the boat and let Will row across and pick up the two men who were waiting to be brought over. I rescued Daisy from Betsy and she and I together fashioned a headdress for the cow made of willow-weed, rushes and kingcups, which suited the big, handsome animal very well. I assured Betsy that I would tell Miss Alice and Miss Sophia that she’d had a hand in the making of it, then made my way back to the big house, wondering all the way what would happen to us, to me and Will, if I didn’t go with him to London. I didn’t think he’d go without me – but I wasn’t keen to put this notion to the test.

  Chapter Three

  The first day of May arrived and it was impossible to say whether or not Daisy was trained. Sometimes she was, and sometimes she wasn’t. I loved all my cows, but I thought this particular one was perhaps the most agreeable: clean, sensible, dreamy, limpid-eyed. She was also reasonably regular in her habits, which made it possible to judge when she might open her bowels. This was particularly important if Daisy was not to bring disgrace to us all on the music-room floor.

  Miss Sophia and Miss Alice had visited the dairy several times (the model dairy, of course, not the real, stinking muddy place) in order to acquaint themselves with such necessities as milking buckets, butter scales, cream-setting pans and so on. It really would not do, I told them as respectfully as possible, to be seen holding a milking bucket at the wrong end of a cow, for although they were not actually going to milk it on stage (‘Oh, perish the thought!’ Miss Sophia had said), they should at least look as if they knew one end of a cow from the other.

  The milkmaids’ dresses were finished and I had been allowed to have a peep at them. They were of white silk rather than muslin and very pretty indeed, being in the newly fashionable high-waisted style with lace across the bosom and pink ribbands unfurling down the front. They were clearly completely impractical for a dairymaid; in real life the flouncing around the hem would be stiff wit
h mud and the pink ribbands would trail into the milking bucket in no time at all, but I didn’t say this. I had already worked out for myself that it was the idea of the pastoral life that was important, not the actuality. The Misses’ hair was to be dressed in ringlets for the occasion (as if I ever had the time to wear my own hair so!) over which they would not wear bonnets now, but ruffled mob caps in silk to match their dresses.

  On the first of May, everyone was in a gay mood, for most of the servants had been granted the afternoon off to go into the village and enjoy the festivities. Our hamlet was not large enough to be visited by a travelling fair, but the church was to be decorated with flowers, there would be peddlers selling sweetmeats and toys, a maypole had been erected on the green and morris men were to dance. Because we were taking the afternoon off, however, all our work had to be done in the morning, so there were chamber pots to be emptied, beds to be made, fireplaces to be cleaned out, meals to be cooked and (in my case) cows to be milked and butter churned, before we could make merry. Consequently, we were all out of bed that morning at three o’clock, trying to get as much work out of the way as possible before breakfast.

  But there was another, much more pleasant duty to be undertaken that morning, and at seven o’clock, our most arduous chores completed, we gathered by the door to the kitchen garden in order to go into the fields and wash ourselves in morning dew, for it was said that doing this on May Day morning would make a girl beautiful. Most of the female servants of the hall were waiting there, whether or not they believed this to be true – even those well past the first flush of youth whom you might have imagined had stopped caring about such things. I went, too, of course, even though I’d been working at the hall for four May Days now and had never seen any changes in anyone after we’d washed, either in the mirror or in one of my fellow servants becoming suddenly more beautiful.

  I noticed that Faith, Miss Alice’s maid, did not come to wait by the door but carried on making up a tray for her mistress’s breakfast.

  ‘Are you not joining us?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘But I shall accompany Miss Alice and Miss Sophia when they go out in the carriage a little later.’

  ‘They are going out for the May dew?’ I asked, and she nodded, while I thought how unjust it would be if either of these young ladies, after bathing in dew, were to be transformed into radiant beauties. Why, they already had the very best that life could offer: the finest of gowns, money, an education and a personal maid! If they became beautiful (instead of merely pleasant-looking), it would be annoying in the extreme.

  A dozen or so of us left the house together and went past my cows and into the next field, which was lush with forget-me-nots and daisies. Laughing and calling to each other, we rolled up our sleeves and tucked our hair into our caps in readiness to splash our faces. Whilst trying to twist my long hair into a knot, I looked towards the river, hoping to see Will and give him a wave. I knew he was sure to be up and about tinkering with his boat, for there was a deal of money to be earned that day from all the people who’d be coming and going. The morris men, for example, were coming over the water from Millbridge, and there were ten persons in their set: six dancers, a fool and three musicians to be taken back and forward, five at a time. If every day were as busy as May Day, I thought wistfully, then Will would have no need to go to London to work.

  Seeing him appear from his hut, I waved both arms and would have shouted if I’d been on my own. He didn’t appear to be looking in our direction, but then Betsy came into view, running along the riverbank to have her breakfast with him, and she pointed in my direction so that Will saw me and waved and whistled.

  Mrs Bonny straightened up from the grass, her face shiny with dew. ‘I trust that the ferryman is not signalling to one of my girls in that vulgar manner,’ she said, but I knew she was not being serious.

  ‘Aye. ’Tis me he whistles to,’ said old Ma Crocker, who comes in to do embroidery, and we all laughed.

  I patted my face with water to cool it down, then taking my courage in both hands said, ‘Mrs Bonny, I do believe he is waving to me, for I have spoken to him several times and . . . and we have an understanding.’

  ‘Indeed!’ Mrs Bonny arched her eyebrows.

  ‘I think Will –’

  ‘Oh, Will, is it?’

  I nodded, realising she must already know his name and was teasing me. ‘He – Will – intends to come to speak to you soon.’

  ‘I should think he does. And not afore time,’ she added drily. I felt myself blushing again, for I’d been told the rules about followers when I’d first started at the hall (although at eleven years old I could hardly comprehend what the term meant) and knew that Will should really have approached Mrs Bonny and Mr Griffin before now.

  A few moments later the dew had dried on our arms and faces and we had covered ourselves up with our shawls and were ready to go back to the hall.

  ‘You’re a sly puss, young Kitty,’ said Patience, one of the kitchenmaids, coming up close and speaking in my ear. ‘Now I know where you’re going when you tell us you’re putting your cows away.’

  ‘We’ve only been seeing each other a few months.’

  ‘But I can’t say I blame you, keeping him to yourself. He’s a good-looking lad.’

  ‘He is,’ I agreed readily.

  ‘Bit too handsome, to my way of thinking.’

  I should have left it at that, but couldn’t help but ask what she meant.

  ‘Why,’ she answered, ‘just that if I was courting a young man like that I’d never have a moment’s peace. He must have girls breaking their hearts over him every day.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ I began. He loves me, I was going to say, but the words stuck. Did he love me? How would I know?

  In the event, thinking about this weighty subject stopped me enjoying the May Day afternoon, because I couldn’t think of anything else. If Will did love me, why hadn’t he said so?

  I sighed as I admired the church flowers, heaved another sigh as I watched the maypole dancing, and did not stop long enough to see the morris men perform. I resolved to speak to Will on my way back to the hall but, of course, when I got there he was much too busy with all his May Day passengers, and I had to be content with a wink and a whisper that he would see me the following morning.

  Rather miserably I went home to prepare for Miss Alice and Miss Sophia’s evening performance, only to discover, with ten minutes to go before Daisy’s debut, that cows don’t like climbing stairs.

  Her route had been carefully planned: she was to climb the stone steps from the kitchens up to the hallway and from here proceed, quiet and unseen, into the dining room and through into the back of the music room, ready for the tableau.

  All the servants were now in on the secret, for, of course, it had not been possible to prepare Daisy – that is, soap her down, ring her little horns with flowers and hang a garland around her neck – without rousing their suspicion that there was something a little odd going on. Miss Alice and Miss Sophia’s personal maids, Faith and Christina, had been told of it some time ago, and had been practising not only their ringlet-making, but also applying a subtle blush of colour to their ladies’ cheeks so that they looked pink and sun-kissed, as if they’d been in the fresh outdoors. Now, though, they were berating me for not training Daisy well enough.

  ‘The very first thing you should have done, Kitty, was to try and make this cow go up steps!’ Faith said as the three of us endeavoured to push Daisy’s hindquarters upwards.

  I did not deign to reply, though I could have asked how I was supposed to train a cow to walk up and down the kitchen stairs in secret when there were a dozen or more people cooking meals in the same area.

  ‘Yes, the first and most obvious thing is the stairs,’ said Christina, puffing and panting. ‘Indeed, ’twas hardly necessary to teach it about anything except stairs.’

  Faith paused to draw breath. ‘And could you not have found a smaller cow?’

 
‘Quite! This must be the biggest and most ungainly animal in the herd!’

  I didn’t reply, indignant at the insults to Daisy. Why, she was not ungainly at all – or, if she appeared so it was only in the house. And that was as it should be, for cows are not bred for drawing rooms.

  It was Mrs Bonny, thank goodness, who came up with the solution. She fashioned a large sling affair from a length of sacking which had been used to bind up hay bundles and, with her at one end of it and Mr Griffin at the other, they came from behind with a ‘Heyyyy-up!’ and managed to scoop Daisy who, surprised and shocked, bolted up the steps before she hardly knew what she was doing. From here, with me holding tightly to her collar, we proceeded at a tidy trot down the hallway, through the dining room and into the back of the music room. Here behind folded screens, which hid them from the rest of the room, I found Miss Alice and Miss Sophia looking exquisite in their silk gowns (but, I was pleased to see, not turned into beauties from the dew). Around them, thanks to help from the gardeners, stable hands, estate managers and goodness knows who else, the scene was set for a pastoral idyll, with a painted backcloth showing sunlit fields, flowers and a thatched cottage. The two Misses were sitting on milking stools, their gowns becomingly arranged around them and their garlands colourful, surrounded by an array of gleaming artefacts for the audience’s contemplation: milk churns, enamel buckets, a cream separator and several other quaint dairy objects.

  Daisy was to stand between the two girls, face on to the audience (‘Whatever happens, we must not let anyone see the rear of the cow,’ Miss Sophia had instructed, her face registering horror at such a thought) and, still hidden behind the screens, I turned the obliging cow around. Owing to the length of time it had taken to get her up the steps, we didn’t have to wait long and, accordingly, when given the nod by Miss Sophia, I passed Daisy’s flower-bedecked rope to her and slipped back into the dining room, lingering by the doorway in case of any trouble.