Downstairs Rules by Sullivan Clarke

Chapter One

    Ella Carter gripped the handle of her suitcase and stepped closer to the edge of the platform, craning her neck as she eyed the line of cars and carts coming approaching the platform. All around her were happy reunions - friends, relatives, lovers. Train stations were such happy places.

    This was the second train ride she’d taken in her twenty-five years. The first was to Brighton, where her parents had moved when she was just three years old and they’d gone to serve in Lord Chatworth’s fine home. Before that they’d served Lord Norman Chatworth’s brother, Sir Richard Chatworth. But her parents’ marriage four years earlier had caused complications among the staff - petty jealousies had arisen among some of the other maids, all of whom had secretly desired Malcolm Carter before he’d set his sites on pretty blonde apprentice cook Louise Jennings. After several years of watching his fair wife suffer from the backbiting, Malcolm had gone to Sir Chatworth and informed him that the conditions were unlikely to change. Women, he said, would be women and it would be easier for his family to start anew somewhere else than it would for all the other maids to be replaced, even if they were in the wrong.

    “I’d rather lose the lot of them than part with my best valet,” Sir Chatworth had insisted. “And if I cannot stop you from going, the least I can do is keep you in the family.” the Carters had been sent to serve with Chatworth’s brother.

    Ella had grown up thinking of herself not just as a Carter, but as an extended member of the Chatworth family. Lady Miriam Chatworth had sons, but no daughters and adored her maid’s little girl, which she insisted upon seeing whenever Louise brought her to the house. Louise played with Lady Miriam’s sons, even though Lady Miriam’s visiting aunt once rebuked her for allowing the boys to mingle with “rabble.”

    “What’s rabble?” she’d asked her mother later that night.

    “It’s an unkind word that high-born people use to describe low-born ones,” her mother had said.

    “Are we rabble, mummy?” Ella had asked

    “There is no rabble, my dear. We all have parts to play,” her mother had said.

    “Like a game? Like chess?”

    Louisa had smiled. “Yes, like chess.”

    “Daddy plays chess,” Ella had said. Sometimes in the evenings, he would play chess with Gibbs, the footman.

    “Yes he does,” her mother had replied, and the pawn and the rook are as important to the game as the queen.

    “Daddy says the rooks and pawns die trying to protect the queen,” Ella had observed.

    “Perhaps,” Louise had observed, smoothing her daughter’s blonde hair. “But in the all the pieces go in the same box, don’t they? In the end, death claims us all. And we all come to our creator as equals. Never let anyone tell you there is no pride in service. Christ was a servant, after all.”

    Her parents’ pride in service was heightened by the status of the family they served. Louise was still quite young when she discovered that even among servants there was a caste system of sorts. The servants of nobility were just as prone to scorn the maids of the upper middle class as the nobility were to scorn those on the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Ella was groomed for service at an early age. Her father taught her which wine to serve with meals and her mother taught her to serve tea and told her all the secrets for getting stains out of cloth, how to light a fire, and how to cook. But it was discretion that her parents considered the greatest skill.

“Learn early how to keep a secret, Ella,” her father had said. “Holding a confidence is the key to holding a job in one of these great houses.”

    Ella started as a maid when she was fourteen. Like many of the other girls brought by parents who served the Chatworths, they were more educated than the children of parents who served those with less status. A good maid needed to be able to read to