The Secret Countess Read online

  But for herself Anna would take nothing.

  ‘You will see, Pinny, it will be all right. Already I have found a most beautiful book in your sister’s room. It is called The Domestic Servant’s Compendium by Selina Strickland, and it has two thousand and three pages and in it I shall find out everything!’

  Miss Pinfold tried to smile. Anna had always been in possession of ‘a most beautiful book’: a volume of Lermontov from her father’s library, a Dickens novel read during the white nights of summer when she should have been asleep.

  ‘If you would just be patient, Anna. If you would only wait.’

  Anna came over and knelt by Pinny’s chair. ‘For what, Pinny?’ she said gently. ‘For a millionaire to ride past on a dapple-grey horse and marry me? For a crock of gold?’

  Pinny sighed and her sister’s budgerigar took advantage of the ensuing silence to inform anyone who cared to listen that his name was Dickie.

  ‘All the same, you cannot be a housemaid,’ said Pinny, returning to the attack. ‘Your mother would never permit it.’

  ‘I shan’t tell my mother. I’ll say I’ve been invited down as a guest. The job is not permanent; they’re taking on extra staff to get the house ready for the new earl. I shall be back before Petya comes home from school. Mama won’t notice, you know how she is nowadays.’

  Pinny nodded, her face sombre. The last year had aged and confused the countess, who now spent her days at the Russian Club playing bezique and exchanging devastating ideas on how to economize with the other emigrés. Her latest suggestion, attributed to Sergei’s mother, the Princess Chirkovsky – that they should buy chocolate cake from Fullers in bulk because of the discount, had given Anna and Pinny a sleepless night the week before.

  ‘You’d better keep it from Petya too,’ said Pinny drily, ‘or he’ll leave school at once and become an errand boy. He only agreed to go because he expects to support you in luxury the day he passes his school certificate.’

  ‘No, I certainly shan’t tell Petya,’ said Anna, her face tender as always when she spoke of her brother. Then she cast a sidelong look at her governess, seeing if she could press her advantage still further. ‘I think perhaps it would be sensible for me to cut off my hair. Short hair will be easier under a cap and Kira writes that it is becoming very chic.’

  Kira, whose family had fled to Paris, now had a job as a beautician and Anna regarded her as the ultimate arbiter in matters of taste.

  But Pinny had had enough. The comical dusky down that had covered Anna’s head in early childhood had become a waist-length mantle, its rich darkness shot through like watered silk with chestnut, indigo and bronze.

  ‘Over my dead body will you cut your hair,’ said Winifred Pinfold.

  Three days later, carrying a borrowed cardboard suitcase, Anna trudged up the famous avenue of double limes towards the west facade of Mersham, still hidden from her by a fold of the gentle Wiltshire hills.

  The day was hot and the suitcase heavy, containing as it did not only Anna’s meagre stock of clothing, but all two thousand and three pages of Selina Strickland’s Domestic Compendium. What the Torah was to the dispersed and homesick Jews and the Koran to the followers of Mahommet, Mrs Strickland’s three-volume tome, which clocked in at three and a half kilos, was to Anna, setting off on her new career in service.

  ‘“Blacking for grates may be prepared by mixing asphaltum with linseed oil and turpentine,”’ she quoted now, and looked with pleasure at the rolling parkland, the freshly sheared sheep cropping the grass, the ancient oaks making pools of foliage in the rich meadows. Even the slight air of neglect, the Queen Anne’s lace frothing the once-trim verges, the ivy tumbling from the gatehouse wall, only made the environs of Mersham more beautiful.

  ‘I shall curtsy to the butler,’ decided Anna, picking up an earthworm which had set off on a suicidal path across the dryness of the gravel. ‘And the housekeeper. Definitely I shall curtsy to the housekeeper!’

  She put down her case for a moment and watched a peacock flutter by, displaying his slightly passé tail to her. There was no doubt about it, she was growing very nervous.

  ‘“The tops of old cotton stockings boiled in a mixture of new milk and hartshorn powder make excellent plate rags,”’ repeated Anna, who had found that quotations from The Source helped to quieten the butterflies in her stomach. ‘“A housemaid should never wear creaking boots and—”’ She broke off. ‘Chort!’

  The avenue had been curving steadily to the right. Suddenly Anna had come upon the house as abruptly as William Kent, the genius who had landscaped the grounds, intended her to do.

  Mersham was honey-coloured, graceful, light. There was a central block, pillared and porticoed like a golden temple plucked from some halcyon landscape and set down in a hollow of the Wiltshire hills. Wide steps ran up from either side to the great front door, their balustrades flanked by urns and calm-faced phoenixes. From this centre, two low wings, exquisite and identical, stretched north and south, their long windows giving out on to a terrace upon which fountains played. Built for James Frayne, the first Earl of Westerholme, by some favourite of the gods with that innate sense of balance which characterized the Palladian age, it exuded welcome and an incorrigible sense of rightness. Anna, who had gazed unmoved on Rastrelli’s gigantic, ornate palaces, looked on, marvelled and smiled.

  The next moment, blending with the pale stone, the blond sweep of gravel, a huge, lion-coloured dog tore down the steps and bounded towards her, barking ferociously. An English mastiff with a black dewlap like sea coal and bloodshot eyes, defending his master’s hearth.

  ‘Oh, hush,’ said Anna, standing her ground and speaking softly in her native tongue. ‘Calm yourself. Surely you can see that I am not a burglar?’

  Her voice, the strange, low words with their caressing rhythms, got through to the dog, who braked suddenly and while continuing to growl at one end, set up with the other a faintly placating movement of the tail. Slowly, Anna put up a hand to his muzzle and began to scratch that spot behind the ear where large dogs keep their souls.

  For a while, Anna scratched on and Baskerville, shaking off five years of loneliness while his master was at war, moaned with pleasure. When she picked up her case again he followed her, butting her skirt lovingly with his great head. Only when he saw that, unbelievably, she had turned from the front of the house and was making her way through the archway which led towards the servants’ quarters did he stop with a howl of disbelief. There were places where, as the earl’s dog, it was simply not possible for him to go.

  ‘Snob!’ said Anna, leaving him with regret.

  She crossed the grassy courtyard and found a flight of stairs which seemed to lead towards the kitchens.

  ‘I shall curtsy to everybody,’ decided Anna and went bravely forward to meet her fate.

  Waiting to see what the London agency had sent them this time, were Mrs Bassenthwaite, the housekeeper, and the butler, Mr Proom.

  Their expectations were low. They had already received, from the same source, an under-gardener who had fallen dead drunk into a cucumber frame on his first day and a footman who had attempted to hand a dish of mutton cutlets gloveless and from the right. But then, having to recruit servants from an agency was in every way against the traditions of Mersham and just another unpleasantness resulting from the dreadful war.

  Mrs Bassenthwaite was a frail, white-haired woman who should have retired years earlier but had stayed on to oblige the Dowager Countess of Westerholme, shattered by the loss, within a year, of her adored husband and handsome eldest son. She was a relic of the splendid days of Mersham when a bevy of stillroom maids and laundry maids, of sewing girls and housemaids had scurried at her lightest command. Once she had prowled the great rooms, eagle-eyed for a speck of dust or an unplumped cushion, and had conducted inquests and vendettas from which ashen-faced underlings fled weeping to their attics.

  But now she was old. The austerities of war, the informality of modern life, its moto
rs and telephones confused her and she increasingly left the running of Mersham to the butler, Mr Proom.

  There could have been nobody more worthy. Cyril Proom was in his fifties, a bald, egg-headed man, whose blue eyes behind gold spectacles gazed at the world with a formidable intelligence. An avid reader of encyclopaedias and other improving literature, Proom, like Mrs Bassenthwaite, had once been head of a great line of perfectly drilled retainers: under-butlers and footmen, lamp boys and odd men, stretching away from him in increasing obsequiousness and unimportance.

  To this epoch, the war had put an end. More than most great houses, Mersham had given its life’s blood to the Kaiser’s war. Upstairs it had taken Lord George, the heir, who fell at Ypres six months after his father, the sixth earl, succumbed to a second heart attack. Below stairs it had drained away almost every able-bodied man and few of those who left were destined to return. A groom had fallen on the Somme, an under-gardener was drowned at Jutland; the hall boy, who had lied about his age, was blown up at Verdun a week before his eighteenth birthday. And if the men left to fight, the maids left to work in munitions factories, in offices or on the land; creating, as they departed, a greater and greater burden for the servants who remained.

  It was during those years that Proom, sacrificing the status it had taken a lifetime to acquire, had rolled up his sleeves and worked side by side with the meanest of his minions. With the rigid protocol of the servants’ hall abandoned, Jean Park, the soft-spoken head kitchen maid, was even persuaded to step into the shoes of Signor Manotti, the chef, who returned to his native land.

  Lady Westerholme had done what she could to ease the pressure on her depleted staff. She shut up the main body of the house and retired, with the earl’s ancient uncle, Mr Sebastien Frayne, into the east wing, trying, amid a welter of planchettes and ouija boards, to follow her loved ones into their twilit world. Inevitably, her sadness and seclusion and the economies forced upon her by two lots of death duties took their toll. The shrouded rooms through which only the dog, Baskerville, now roamed, grew dusty and cold; in the once trim flowerbeds, wild grasses waved their blond and feathery heads; the proud peacocks of the topiary grew bedraggled for want of trimming. Finally, when the armistice was declared the servants, waiting anxiously for news, wondered if Mersham was to share the fate of so many great houses and go up for sale.

  For the whole hope of the House of Frayne now lay in the one surviving son, Lord George’s younger brother, Rupert. The new earl had spent four years in the Royal Flying Corps, his life so perilous that even his mother had not dared to hope he might be spared. But though his plane had been shot down, though he’d been gravely wounded, Rupert was alive. He was about to be discharged from hospital. He was coming home.

  But for good? Or only long enough to put his home on the market? Remembering the quiet, unassuming boy, so different from his handsome, careless elder brother, the servants could only wonder and wait. Nor were there any clues in the instructions the new earl had sent from his hospital bed: the state rooms were to be re-opened, everything that needed to be done to bring Mersham up to its old standard was to be done – but any new staff engaged to make this possible were to be strictly temporary.

  And hence this agency, which up to now had spelled nothing but disaster and whose latest offering had just been admitted to the housekeeper’s room.

  Anna had curtsied – she had curtsied deeply – and now stood before them with clasped hands, awaiting her fate. And as they studied her, the butler and the housekeeper sighed.

  Neither of them would have found it easy to describe the characteristics of a housemaid, but they knew instinctively that despite her navy coat and skirt, her high-necked blouse and drab straw boater, this girl had none of them.

  The entry on ‘Slavonic Painting’ in his Encyclopaedia of World Art gave Proom a head start on Mrs Bassenthwaite in accounting for the long, lustrous eyes framed in thick lashes the colour of sunflower seeds. It threw light, too, on the suppliant pose of the narrow, supple hands, the air of having simultaneously swallowed the sins of the world and a lighted candle which emanated from the new housemaid. The saints on Russian icons, Proom knew, were apt to carry on like that. There, however, the religious motif suddenly came to an end. Though Anna had attempted to skewer her hair back into a demure knot, glossy tendrils had escaped from behind her strangulated ears, and the bridge of her attenuated Tartar nose was disconcertingly dusted with freckles.

  ‘Your name is Anna Grazinsky?’ said Proom, consulting the paper from the agency, already aware that he was playing for time. ‘And you are of Russian nationality?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I see here that you have no previous experience of housework?’

  ‘No, sir. But I will work very hard and I will learn.’

  Proom sighed and glanced at Mrs Bassenthwaite, who lightly shook her head. For the girl’s accent, with its rolling ‘r’s and lilting intensity, quite failed to disguise her educated voice, as did the shabby coat and skirt the grace of her movements. ‘Inexperienced’ was bad; ‘foreign’ was worse . . . but a lady! This time the agency had gone too far.

  ‘I’m afraid you may not understand how hard you would be expected to work,’ said Proom, still somehow hoping to avoid his fate. ‘We are taking on temporary staff for a period of intense cleaning and refurbishment prior to the Earl of Westerholme’s return. During this time no formal training would be given and you would be expected to make yourself useful anywhere: in the kitchens, the scullery, even outside.’

  ‘Like a tweeny?’ enquired Anna, gazing at him out of rapt, tea-coloured eyes.

  Tweenies had loomed large in the English novels of her childhood: romantic, oppressed figures second only to Charles Kingsley’s little chimney sweeps in their power to evoke sympathy and tears.

  Proom and Mrs Bassenthwaite exchanged glances. Neither of them felt equal to explaining to Anna that nothing so mundane as a tweeny would have been allowed within miles of Mersham, these unfortunates being confined to lowly middle class households employing only a housemaid and cook.

  ‘I really think, Miss Grazinsky,’ said Mrs Bassenthwaite, leaning forward, ‘that you would do better to look for a different type of employment. A governess, perhaps.’

  Anna stood before them, silent. It was not, however, a passive silence, reminding Proom inexorably of a puppy he had once owned not asking to be taken for a walk.

  ‘I promise I will work,’ she said at last. ‘Most truly, I promise it.’

  The butler and the housekeeper held steady. If there is one thing dreaded by all experienced servants, it is a gently bred female below stairs.

  Then Anna Grazinsky produced a single word. ‘Please?’ she said.

  Mrs Bassenthwaite looked at Proom. After all, they were only taking her on as a temporary measure. She nodded and Proom said, ‘Very well. You can have a month’s trial. Your salary will be twelve and six a week – and there’s no need to keep on curtsying!’

  Anna had been dreading a dormitory shared with the other maids, who would despise her, but she was assigned a little attic tucked under the domes and urns and chimneys that adorned Mersham’s roof. It was stuffy with its one small window, but scrupulously clean, containing an iron bed, a chair, a deal chest and a rag rug on the floor. A brown print dress and two starched aprons were laid out for her with a white mob cap. Another uniform, black alpaca with a frilled muslin cap and apron, hung behind the door for ‘best’.

  She unpacked quickly, placing Selina Strickland’s tome on the chair beside her bed. It was very hot there, under the roof, and very silent. And suddenly, standing in the tiny room, sealed off from the body of the house and the world she had once known, she felt so bereft and homesick that tears sprang to her eyes.

  Her father’s well-remembered voice came to save her. ‘When you’re sad, my Little Star, go out of doors. It’s always better underneath the open sky.’

  She went over to the window and pushed it open. If she pulled hers
elf up she could actually climb out on to the ledge that ran behind the balustrade . . .

  A moment later she was standing there, one arm round a stone warrior and sure enough it was better, it was good . . . Mersham’s roof, glistening in the sunshine, was a gay and insouciant world of its own with its copper domes and weathervanes, its sculptured knights at arms. The view was breathtaking. Facing her was the long avenue of limes, the gatehouse, and beyond it, the village with its simple, grey church and trim houses clustered round the green. On her left were the walled gardens and the topiary; to her right, if she craned round her warrior, she saw a landscape out of an Italian dream: a blue lake curving away behind the house, a grassy hill topped by a white temple, an obelisk floating above the trees . . . She could smell freshly cut grass, the blossoming limes, and hear, in the distance, a woman calling her chickens home.

  One could be happy here, thought Anna. Standing there, on the roof of his house, watching the honey-hued stone change colour with the shadows of the clouds that raced across the high, light sky, Anna Grazinsky addressed the absent and unknown earl: ‘I will make your house very beautiful for you,’ she said. ‘I promise. You will see!’

  Then she climbed down into the room again and picked up the brown print dress. It was too large, but the apron would hold it in and she’d manage for now. The cap, though, was a problem. Whatever angle she put it on, it slipped drunkenly, if not unbecomingly, over her ears.

  ‘But first I will go and wash,’ decided Anna, for she had grown hot and grubby on the roof – and set off to search for a bathroom.

  It was a foolish and unproductive quest. Since the lovely Palladian house had first been built, in 1712, there had been many improvements – but a bathroom on the servants’ floor was not among them.

  Rather more servants than usual had gathered in the kitchen for a quick cup of tea as Anna came downstairs. For, of course, news of her foreignness, her general unsuitability, her gaffe about the ‘tweeny’ had spread like wildfire.