Alice guessed she must have been about twelve years old at the time. What had been her life before that day was a complete blank. The awesome personage who had conducted her to the Hall had said something about “found wandering.” Her name was Alice Lovesey because they had found that information on a label pinned to her ragged clothes. Her feet had been cut and bleeding as if she had been walking for a long time. No one knew of a Lovesey family anywhere in the neighborhood. The girl was not of gentle birth for she had a country burr. And so that was that. She was hired as scullery maid and tied body and soul to the lower regions of Wadham Hall. Alice found one day that she could read and write and that seemed to her a marvelous thing, but she did not mention this fact to the other servants since she had discovered that to do anything that brought one to the notice of the others, usually resulted in blows and torments and extra work.

For it is a sad fact that a bad master hires bad servants. The Duke was callous, cruel, thoughtless and arrogant, and so the upper servants were hired in his image and brutalized the lower servants in their image, and so all the unhappiness went down the chain of command and fell on the shoulders of the very bottom layer who had no one to be nasty to but each other.

Despite the drudgery, Alice had grown and survived and had been at the Hall for seven long years. It is possible that she might have been quite a beauty if she ever had the leisure to clean herself but, as it was, she appeared to the others as a dirty, insignificant creature who never spoke.

One day when the Duke and Duchess of Haversham had an even larger house party than usual, tempers in the kitchen were running high. The guests had arrived two weeks ago and seemed destined to stay forever. For two weeks the servants had been run ragged, carrying slops, carrying hot water, carrying meals for what seemed like twenty-four hours a day since some of the guests stayed up all night, while the others rose early to hunt or shoot.

Then horror of horrors! One of the guests had found a cobweb in his chamber pot and had complained of it to the Duke. The Duke had sent for the Groom of the Chambers and had given him a tongue-lashing. The Groom of the Chambers had in turn insulted the butler, who had berated the housekeeper, who had screamed at the head footman, who had cursed the other footmen, and so on, until the Cook had given Alice a public whipping in the middle of the kitchen, for someone had to take the blame.