“Yes, Madame.”
It’s my third day here, and I’m still learning my way around the lower rooms where I am employed as a maid-of-all-work. The chateau is so large and full of shadows, I often lose my way. This is not the first time Madame Montant has had to redirect me, nor does she bother to conceal her impatience. I am here only on trial at the moment; she might yet dismiss me on a whim if I do not please her. Madame is a solid figure in her black gown with modest lace at the points of her collar, and since there is no mistress of Chateau Beaumont, she keeps the keys to the wardrobes and coffers on an iron ring at her waist. They jangle with irritation as she leads me back to more familiar terrain.
The chambers I clean are mostly reception rooms, chilly and neglected, where coffers are kept and the Beaumont silver is stored and displayed, little seen by anyone but the servants. But the rooms are expected to be spotless, whether anyone will see them or not, so I sweep and polish and scrub. I’m told the master takes great pride in his beautiful things.
“The master cannot abide slovenliness,” Madame reminds me as we trudge along. “And he has a particular aversion to spiders; woe be to any lazy girl who allows a spider to touch his person out of careless housekeeping.”
We arrive again at my morning chamber, and I can’t resist peeping through the doorway into the formal entry hall, its floor an enormous chessboard of black-and-white marble tiles. In its center stands the grand staircase panelled in rosewood that leads to the mysterious floors above, where I have never been. But Madame catches me looking.
“Attend me, girl,” she says sharply. “What goes on outside your chambers is no affair of yours!”
“I understand, Madame.”
“Be very sure that you do.” Her gaze is unrelenting. “Do not let me ever hear of you straying into the entry hall.”
“No, Madame.”
“And never, ever go abovestairs,” she warns me. “That is where Master lives. And, mind me, girl, you will do very well to escape the master’s notice.”
Master is away from home, attending to business in Paris. But he and his suite of gentlemen are expected back soon, and there is a great deal more bustle about the chateau now. I hear this from Charlotte, a kitchen girl. She’s been here longer than me but has yet to rise above the hearth. We share a straw-stuffed pallet in the close, dark cubbyholes behind the kitchens, where the servants sleep, near enough to choke on the sooty air at night, yet too far off to feel any warmth from the kitchen fires.
I prefer to keep my own counsel; I’ll not be one of those servants who gossips and pries. Charlotte, however, has no such scruples. She considers everything that happens at the chateau to be her affair and eagerly pours all she has gleaned into my ear at night when I hunger only for sleep. She tells me how fortunate I was to come along now, when a position had just opened up at the chateau. Madame Montant recently had to dismiss a chambermaid who’d let one of the noblemen of the region get her with child.
“It was no use her weeping and sobbing,” Charlotte tells me eagerly. “Madame would not have her in the house, even though she was the daughter of Madame’s own cousin.”
I am reminded how tentative my own position is.
“The silly girl even went to the curé. Can you imagine the humiliation?” Charlotte goes on. “But she hoped he’d compel the one as done it into marriage. Claimed he’d promised to wed her, the little fool. Of course, gentlemen always say that,” Charlotte adds with the absolute conviction of one who speaks from hearsay alone.
“And did the curé help her?” I ask, hoping to speed the tale along to some conclusion or other.
She stares at me, slack-jawed, appalled at my ignorance and delighted by her own superior knowledge. “Of course he did not,” she exclaims. “There would be far more scandal in a gentleman of noble birth wedding a commoner — a servant!— than in the birth of another bastard. The curé could lose his living for even suggesting such a degraded union.” She shakes her head at me pityingly. “Don’t be a goose!”
I am not goose enough to encourage her further, and I say no more.
But Charlotte’s tongue is accustomed to prattle on, whether or not anyone is listening. “The gentleman in question was one of Master’s companions-in-arms in the war. He is under Master’s protection, and so he may do as he likes.” She wriggles closer to me on the bristly pallet. “No one opposes the master.”
This morning, I patrol my chamber with a hand brush and dustpan for any dirt that might have collected in forgotten corners of display shelves or behind cabinets beyond the reach of my broom. Near the doorway to the entry hall, I’m surprised by a fragile tinkling sound from a nearby room and a gasp of alarm.
No official person is in the hall at the moment, neither housekeeper, footman, nor steward. There is no answering sound of rebuke. Perhaps no one else heard. But the sudden silence after the odd noise is all the more profound.
I take my brush and dustpan out into the back passage and peep around the next doorway. I see only a sideboard with fine things on display against one wall and two cabinets in the center of the room. But between the cabinets, a figure kneels before the sideboard like a penitent at an altar, dressed plainly in grey, like me — another chambermaid. She frets over a little pile of shiny debris on the marble part of the floor uncovered by the central carpet. Then I notice a smudge of red blood on her white apron as she clutches one finger in her hand.
I ought to turn away and pretend I didn’t see. What happens in other chambers is no affair of mine. But even as I give myself this sensible advice, I hear another voice in my head, my father’s voice, gentle and persuasive. Come, Lucie, it takes only a moment to be kind.
And because I cannot bear to disappoint my father, I hurry into the room. The girl turns huge, terrified eyes in my direction. She can’t be above fourteen years old, younger than me. She reminds me so much of the sister I used to comfort through all her childish traumas, I feel a sudden wave of homesickness.
“I didn’t mean it!” she whispers. “It slipped out of my hands!”
There’s no way of knowing what the thing was she dropped, reduced now to a few brilliantly enamelled porcelain shards and gold dust. Some small ceremonial plate, perhaps, or the sort of delicate, shiny bauble I’ve heard wealthy folk present to each other when they have won a war together.
“They’ll turn me out,” the girl keens softly. “Where will I go? How will I live?”
Blood still coats the finger she cradles in her lap. I dig into my apron pocket for a scrap of linen I was going to use for mending, squat beside her, and take her bleeding hand.
“No one has to know,” I tell her, and I bind the linen around her finger before her blood can stain anything else. “Go to the kitchen and wash your hands as you fill your mop pail. I’ll clean this up.” I tilt my head toward my brush and dustpan.
Her expression is disbelieving, but she slowly begins to nod.
“There are so many beautiful things here,” I point out. “Surely no one will miss this one.”
Wide-eyed, she nods again and dares a fleeting smile. “Thank you.”
“Quickly now,” I whisper, and she scrambles to her feet and dashes out.