Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Page A

well.’
    She said, ‘I have a great staff of servants, to make sure that it does. This is a well-kept house, Miss Smith, and I hope you will take to it. I don’t know what you might be used to in your last place. I don’t know what might be considered a lady’s maid’s duties, in London. I have never been there’—she had never been to London!—‘so cannot say. But if you mind my other girls, then I am sure they will mind you. The men and the stable-boys, of course, I hope I shall never see you talking with more than you can help . . .’
    She went on like that for a quarter of an hour—all the time, as I have mentioned, never quite catching my eye. She told me where I might walk in the house, and where I must take my meals, and how much sugar I should be allowed for my own use, and how much beer, and when I could expect my underclothes laundered. The tea that was boiled in Miss Maud’s teapot, she said, it had been the habit of the last lady’s maid to pass on to the girls in the kitchen. Likewise the wax-ends from Miss Maud’s candle-sticks: they were to be given to Mr Way. And Mr Way would know how many wax-ends to expect, since it was him who doled out the candles. Corks went to Charles, the knife-boy. Bones and skins went to Cook.
    ‘The pieces of soap that Miss Maud leaves in her wash-stand, however,’ she said, ‘as being too dry to raise a lather from: those you may keep.’
    Well, that’s servants for you—always grubbing over their own little patch. As if I cared, about candle-ends and soap! If I had never quite felt it before, I knew then what it was, to be in expectations of three thousand pounds.
    Then she said that if I had finished my supper she would be pleased to show me to my room. But she would have to ask me to be very quiet as we went, for Mr Lilly liked a silent house and couldn’t bear upset, and Miss Maud had a set of nerves that were just like his, that wouldn’t allow of her being kept from her rest or made fretful.
    So she said; and then she took up her lamp, and I took up my candle, and she led me out into the passage and up a dark staircase. ‘This is the servants’ way,’ she said as we walked, ‘that you must always take, unless Miss Maud directs you otherwise.’
    Her voice and her tread grew softer the higher we went. At last, when we had climbed three pairs of stairs, she took me to a door, that she said in a whisper was the door to my room. Putting her finger before her lips, she slowly turned the handle.
    I had never had a room of my own before. I did not particularly want one, now. But, since I must have one, this one I supposed would do. It was small and plain—would have looked better, perhaps, for a paper garland or two, or a few plaster dogs. But there was a looking-glass upon the mantel and, before the fire, a rug. Beside the bed—William Inker must have brought it up—was my canvas trunk.
    Near the head of the bed there was another door, shut quite tight and with no key in it. ‘Where does that lead?’ I asked Mrs Stiles, thinking it might lead to another passage or a closet.
    ‘That’s the door to Miss Maud’s room,’ she said.
    I said, ‘Miss Maud is through there, asleep in her bed?’
    Perhaps I said it rather loud; but Mrs Stiles gave a shudder, as if I might just have shrieked or sprung a rattle.
    ‘Miss Maud sleeps very poorly,’ she answered quietly. ‘If she wakes in the night, then she likes her girl to go to her. She won’t call out for you, since you are a stranger to her now: we will put Margaret in a chair outside her door, and Margaret shall take her her breakfast tomorrow, and dress her for the day. After that, you must be ready to be called in and examined.’
    She said she hoped Miss Maud would find me pleasing. I said I did, too.
    She left me, then. She went very softly, but at the door she paused, to put her hand to the keys at her chain. I saw her do it, and grew quite cold: for she looked all at once like nothing so much as