All I Want Is You (10 page)

As she was watching me now. Then she sat beside me and picked up the ivory shaft again. To my shame my blood still seethed with deep physical need, and the coolness of that ivory – she was wicked, she was drawing it now up and down my thighs, then across my breasts – roused me unbearably.

Her dark eyes gleamed as I wordlessly reached for it. She looked almost sorrowful. ‘Not this for you yet, Sophie. We must keep you a virgin, for my Ash.’

In that moment I loathed her Ash. But suddenly she had knelt with her face between my thighs, her pointed tongue was running lightly up and down my sex, and I simply could not believe the exquisite sensation. I cried out her name, I clutched at her hair; she lifted her face
to smile at me then started licking again, faster, stopping every so often to thrust inside me; such delicious torment, and her tongue was softly rasping, like a sleek cat lapping at milk.

I sighed and moaned, I cupped my breasts with my own hands, pulling at my own nipples, my world spinning around me. She pushed her tongue deep; I soared and exploded. She clasped my thighs and laid her cheek against them, steadying me until I finally fell to earth again.

She pulled me onto the bed with her and held me tightly in her arms. I think I was only half conscious, but I knew she was gazing at me, admiring her work. ‘My gift, to Lord Ashley,’ I heard her saying with quiet satisfaction. And fear gripped me again.

But I agreed, God help me. I agreed to it.

All through that autumn Lady Beatrice stayed on. It was because the Duke was ill, she told everyone –
her dear father-in-law
, she called him – and she sat often in his sickroom beside his bed, praising his dead son to the skies. The Duchess was extremely fond of Beatrice, letting her help with those flower arrangements and stroke the cats, though I knew Beatrice privately loathed the creatures. I wondered what the Duchess would say if she knew of Beatrice’s plans.

I only went below stairs when I had to take down Lady Beatrice’s trays, or needed to use the sewing room to attend to her clothes. The other servants thought I was giving myself stupid airs now that Her Ladyship had taken me as her personal maid. I wondered what
they would say if they knew what Lady Beatrice really planned for me.

Ill though the Duke was, Lady Beatrice’s presence lifted the gloom from the Hall and visitors began to arrive at Belfield again, among them the pale-haired aristocrat Lord Sydhurst. Beatrice called him ‘Dear Eustace’, and the servants muttered that she would no doubt be planning on marrying him. But I knew better.

Another of Beatrice’s friends who visited was a gentleman called Rupert Calladine, who owned a theatre, Beatrice told me, in London. Mr Calladine was a suave little man with eyes as bright as his brilliantined hair, who charmed the Duchess completely and persuaded her to hold an autumn ball. About a hundred guests arrived on the night, the gentlemen in evening suits and the ladies in dazzling gowns. Such was Beatrice’s influence on the ailing Duke that she’d coaxed him into taking a keen interest in the ball, and she was often to be seen at his side during the long evening, explaining the new music and new dances to him.

All of the servants were frantically busy, of course, and Mrs Burdett had asked Lady Beatrice if she could spare me for an hour or two that evening to help prepare the bedrooms for the guests who were staying. But I stole glimpses of the ball from the upstairs gallery whenever I had a moment to spare. I watched the guests dancing; I noted all the steps, and the way the young women dressed and talked.

Among the guests were some soldiers from a convalescent home near Oxford; the Duke had grudgingly
agreed to invite them, we heard, because his political friends had advised him it would be good for appearances. Several of them had lost limbs and were in bath chairs like the Duke; they wore their medals pinned to their uniforms and I saw them watching the dancing with strange, blank expressions on their faces. I pitied them with all my heart.

Two days later Lady Beatrice told me she was taking me to Oxford to see
The Maid of the Mountains.
She dressed me in one of her tea gowns, lending me also a sage-green coat and some heeled grey shoes. She herself wore a silk cream cardigan coat embroidered with tiny pink flowers and pearls, and when she drove me into Oxford that evening I felt I was walking on air. We had a private box, and from the moment the curtain went up I was filled with wonder at the music and the costumes; I remember how we drove back singing ‘A Paradise for Two’ at the tops of our voices.

Otherwise the rest of that autumn was a strange time, a time of waiting. Quite often Lady Beatrice would take me out in her motorcar on the excuse of buying gifts in Oxford for the ailing Duke, but she much preferred to drive round the country lanes with the roof down and the breeze fresh in our faces. She would sing, and I’d sing too. She’d stop whenever the fancy took her, and we’d run up a hill, or dabble our stockinged feet in a nearby stream.

I was supposed to spend hours throughout the day dressing her and doing her hair, and rushing about
saying,
Yes, my lady, No, my lady
, but Beatrice’s clothes were so modern and light, her hair so easy to manage, that she could almost, she laughed, do it all herself.

So she spent time on me. I shared her bath. She painted my toenails, and licked my feet:
Such beautiful feet, little Sophie!
With her rouge she reddened my nipples, like hers, and gave me silk underclothes to wear beneath my drab servant’s gown. She taught me dances like the Turkey Trot and the Boston Waltz – they were from America, she told me – and we practised the steps together arm-in-arm in her room.

She made love to me often, and though I was still desperately unhappy about her plan to give me to Lord Ashley, I think I told myself quite simply that given the choice I would do this all over again; because if I was to be a dancer I needed to be beautiful. And she was making me beautiful, I knew it, for I saw the way all the men of the house were starting to look at me. Even my poor work-worn hands were better now that I was no longer a scullery maid; Beatrice had shown me how to use a poultice of honey and oatmeal, and she smoothed some of her expensive Paris handcream on them at night.

Lady Beatrice intended to use me. Well, though I feared Lord Ashley’s arrival and he was a figure of dread in my mind, I was using
her.
And at night when the house was in darkness, I tiptoed to her bed, where she caressed me into bewildering ecstasy. ‘But you’re still a virgin, Sophie,’ she would emphasize. ‘Still a virgin, for Lord Ashley.’

I wrote for the very last time to Mr Maldon.

I don’t know where you are now.
I stopped with my pen in the air, struggling for words.
But wherever you are, you might have heard that the Duke is very ill, and I am maidservant to Lady Beatrice. I might not be here at Belfield Hall for much longer.

I gazed into the shadows, sadness coursing through me, then I dipped my pen in the ink once more and wrote on in near despair:
I wish you had written back to me. I wish you had come for me. I will not write again.

That night I dreamed – as I did almost every night now – that he was lying beside me and holding me in his arms. I dreamed of his flesh against my flesh; I teased my painted nipples in the dark, alone in my narrow servant’s bed.

I cried out a name I didn’t know, but I heard his voice, I saw his face.

Soon the October frosts were crisping the lawns and the gardeners’ bonfires sent spirals of drifting smoke into the chilly air. Nell had now returned, but to me she didn’t look strong enough to work from dawn till nearly midnight, and I thought it hateful that she still had to see Eddie almost daily when he’d all but wrecked her life.

For the first few days of her return I didn’t get a chance to talk to her alone, but I did learn from Cook that Nell had been regularly visited in the charity home by Will and his family, the Baxters. I wondered if Will was courting her and, one afternoon, when we
at last had a chance to be alone in the laundry room, I asked her.

‘No,’ Nell said sadly. ‘I think he visited me at first so he could ask about you, then he simply felt sorry for me. But it’s you he wanted, Sophie. It’s you he’s
always
wanted…’

She broke off; she must have seen my expression of remorse and regret because suddenly she rushed to me and hugged me tightly. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ Her voice caught and broke. ‘I loved Eddie so much – it’s all right, I’m over him now, but I loved him, Sophie!’

I held her silently while her tears fell.

Doctor Blakey came daily to see the Duke, who was no better. The family’s lawyer drove regularly from Oxford too for meetings with the Duchess, who was still desperate, Beatrice told me, to prevent the title and the entire estate going to Lord Ashley on the Duke’s death.

I saw less and less of the staff, but one evening as I went downstairs for some coffee for Lady Beatrice, I found my way to the kitchen barred by four of the menservants, Robert and Eddie amongst them. Something in their expressions made my heart hammer.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘you’re in my way.’

‘And you don’t like folks getting in your way,’ sneered Eddie. ‘Specially not common folks like us. But… you and Her Ladyship, now. The things we hear…’

I froze. Then, trying to breathe normally, I pushed past them and hurried on towards the kitchen. I realised Eddie was following me. ‘What you need,’ he said, ‘the
two of you, Her Ladyship and you, is a good bit of cock up you. And some day, bitch, you’ll get it…’

Suddenly I saw Mrs Burdett bustling along the corridor in our direction. Eddie sauntered off, whistling under his breath. I was shaking.

Mrs Burdett saw Eddie and frowned. She said to me, sharply, ‘Take care of yourself, young lady. I know you think you’re destined for better things, but remember pride comes before a fall.’

I dipped a curtsey. After Eddie’s verbal assault I was still trembling badly. ‘Thank you, Mrs Burdett. Good night, Mrs Burdett,’ I whispered. I fetched the coffee and hurried back upstairs. But late that night the house was suddenly in a state of uproar. Lady Beatrice called to me through my bedroom door but I was already wide awake. The old Duke was very ill, and Eddie had driven off in the Duke’s motorcar to fetch Dr Blakey, but it was too late.

The Duke died before sunrise. I sat alone in my room, knowing this meant change everywhere, for everyone.

The shutters of the great house were closed and funereal draperies were hung at the windows, as they had been for the deaths of Lord Charlwood and little Lord Edwin. The bell of the village church tolled across the mist-shrouded valley as I dressed Lady Beatrice in her mourning clothes. She was very calm, but I could tell she was brittle with excitement.

‘They’ve failed,’ she breathed to me. ‘The lawyers and all the old Duchess’s paid lackeys have failed to prove Ash is not the true heir.’

It was naturally assumed that Lord Ashley – the new Duke of Belfield – would arrive for the funeral, but where exactly was he? No one seemed to know. The old Duchess was in such a storm of rage and self-pity that everyone except Beatrice was frightened of her. She walked around the Hall with her stick banging on the floor, frightening her own cats away and demanding again and again if anything had been heard from Lord Ashley. She refused to give him his new title.

‘How can the son of a wandering artist and a Frenchwoman – a man who owns
factories
– be allowed to become the duke?’ she was heard to wail. The rumours about his unsuitability grew and grew. The servants still called him Lord Ashley, too, and muttered angrily, ‘It’s not right that we should have to call him our master.’

There would be hundreds of mourners for the funeral from all around the country, with dozens of house guests. I felt oppressed again, dreading Lord Ashley’s arrival, but Lady Beatrice was exhilarated. One afternoon, when I was tidying her room, she got me to take off her black bombazine gown and help her into a new frock of palest yellow silk with pleats that swirled light as swansdown from her hips. ‘Do you like this one?’ she asked me eagerly. ‘Do you?’

‘I think it’s exquisite,’ I said.

She must have seen the sadness in my eyes, because she hugged me suddenly. ‘Soon I’ll be a duchess, Sophie, and everything will be so different, you’ll see. Ash
must
be on his way.’

I think I shivered; she drew away from me, clicking
her scarlet-tipped fingers impatiently, then went to pull a pastel blue frock from her wardrobe. ‘Put this on,’ she coaxed, twirling it before me. ‘Then you’ll feel better.’

I did as she said, of course. Always now I wore the beautiful silk lingerie she’d given me, and she let her smooth white hands skim down over my hips with a sigh of satisfaction before helping me ease the blue frock over my head. She fetched two glasses from a cabinet and poured us both some gin.

The dress was divine. But… ‘It’s so short,’ I whispered.

‘And why not? Your legs are beautiful, Sophie. So slender and shapely. When you dance on stage in London, the men won’t be able to keep their eyes off you.’

Then quickly she went to put a record on and swept me into a foxtrot. She did that often, reminding me of my dream when she guessed I was becoming downhearted. I knew she was cynically using me, but her good humour was infectious, and as I thought again of my future in London my spirits soared. We giggled, we sighed, we kissed. Her mouth was sweet and warm; her tongue slipped between my lips, tasting faintly of gin and tobacco. By then we’d stopped dancing but her body was swaying slightly close to mine and she was rubbing herself against me. ‘Sophie,’ she murmured, ‘all day I’ve been thinking of you. Have you missed me?’

Once again her silken arms drew me close and her tongue twined with mine. She drew me to her bed and we lay there, our lovely gowns rustling. Her fingers with their red-painted nails were subtle yet teasing as they
glided up my thighs and found my secret flesh there, toying with me until I was gasping, clenching myself around her. She’d pushed down the narrow shoulder straps of my gown and my brassiere; her mouth fastened on my breast and I climaxed almost instantly, grinding myself against her hand, letting out little gasps of pleasure.