Chapter Ten

Next morning Linux was in the kitchen before us, frying kippers, calling out over the hissing of the oil, ‘Prudence. What time do you call this? Porridge is under the fire-cover. Fetch the bowls down.’ She turned. Eyes narrow as keyholes. I saw a scattering of scars across her cheeks. Smallpox, Pru was to tell me later. ‘As for you. You’ve taken this place with your elbow, haven’t you? Lifted the bread right out the mouth of so many English lasses, who’d have been perfectly good for it. Well. You’re here now.’ She squinted as if weighing me on a set of baker’s scales. I lifted my chin.

‘No shirking,’ she said. ‘No skirt-twitching. No thieving. None of the kind of fuss you made last night. A new girl’s disturbance enough, the least you can do is be a quiet one. Understood?’ She snapped her tongs in the air. ‘Understood?’

‘She can speak,’ Pru muttered, clanking down the bowls from the dresser. ‘Cat’s got her tongue.’

Linux nodded. ‘Quiet is good. Last thing we want’s a vain bit of baggage. You’d do well to pipe down too, Prudence.’

She spoke to Pru, but kept her eyes on me. I lifted my chin. ‘No shirking. No disturbance. I understand.’

‘Ma’am.’

‘Ma’am.’

‘You’ll be given a rushlight when you need it, soap once a fortnight. I won’t abide strange smells.’

I won’t make them, I thought. She motioned for me to follow her to the table.

‘Do you use spoons?’ The question almost choked a laugh out of me. She held one up, tapped it against one of the clay bowls, which was yellow as a yolk. She leaned over, close, face like a palm-reader. ‘Bowls? Do you know how?’

I stuffed my voice full of English vowels. ‘I am well acquainted with all the customs and habits of English dining,’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’

‘Your speech is good, at least.’

‘Yes. I read. I write, too.’

‘Do you?’

That was a mistake. I should have remembered that there are many who find an educated black more threatening than a savage one.

Linux made me sweep the hearth and refill the kettle for the hob and scrub the flags on the kitchen floor with sand while we waited for the water to boil, then sent me with a broom and shovel to light the fires up in the drawing room. The manservant, Charles, showed me how to shovel up the coal, strike the steel and flint together, holding both away from me and over the tinderbox, then blow on the tinder, which was grudging and limp until it caught in a thin blue flame, and how to push in the taper. After the first flame caught, he showed me how to pump the bellows over it, and then I was on my own with the fireplaces in the dining room and the library to see to, and coal scuttles to fill from the box beside the kitchen, down to the basement and back up, over and over. I worked as quickly as I could, feeling the prickle of sweat at my armpits.