A/n: Apologies for the screwed up formatting, but fictionpress is being idiotic and insisting on centreing everything, no matter how many times I click the 'Align left' button. I cannot express how incredibly frustrating this is for me and how much I feel like smashing something with a hammer right now.

The Reading Maid

Paxton Hall, England, 1910.

Matron remembers the day Rosie appeared on the steps of the house, bringing her repetitive cough with her, a small suitcase in each hand (one hers, the other holding her mother’s possessions), and a letter from her mother asking for work to be found for Rosie within the Lady’s house. Matron had bustled the child through the front door and into the kitchens to get some food into her. Even though she had heard tales and knew something of the girl’s history, she had wisely kept her mouth shut.

Matron knew from the older kitchen-hands that Rosie’s mother had left the employ of the house when she had been pregnant with her child; disappeared with some man or other, and there were rumours that the Lady had been upset at the time, though no one could say why for certain.

And now here was Rosie, on the doorstep, and when Matron had gone to inform the Lady of the house she had wondered, for an instant, if the Lady would allow the girl to stay. She had, of course, and suddenly Matron found the sole responsibility of a motherless girl thrust into her square, capable hands.

***

Rosie was always getting into trouble but the Lady of the house wouldn’t let the Matron let her go. Despite the girl’s unorthodox, unpredictable ways, her grandmother had been the Lady’s ancient nursemaid all those years ago, so there was an obligation there to keep her well provided for. It wasn’t that Rosie was lazy or unwilling to work, the Matron reflected; it was just that she was so easily distracted.

Matron had lost count of the number of times she’d come in to the library to find the young girl standing motionless beside a shelf, feather-duster tucked under one arm, her wide eyes hungrily devouring the open book in her hands.

Matron would make her presence known in no uncertain terms and Rosie would immediately drop the book, her pale face blushing scarlet, and begin babbling apologies. Once scolded she would tuck the loose strands of her fiery hair back under her cap and scurry away to complete her tasks.

The girl, thought Matron, was too curious for her own good. It wasn’t fitting for someone in her position. But there was no denying she was bright. Always asking questions. And she obviously derived some deep pleasure and cause for thought in those infernal books, though Matron couldn’t for the life of her see what their appeal was. Silly things. No time for escapism when there was the real world to deal with.

***

Matron had a whole household to run, and she preferred it to run as precisely and consistently as clockwork. There were sheets to change, floors to mop, meals to organise, clothes to wash, all of it never-ending. The big old house where they lived and worked hummed its own particular song, a continual background buzz of the day-to-day.

Matron didn’t need more distractions in keeping the busy household running smoothly, and so she was determined that Rosie would not be a distraction but another set of working hands.

She tried to ignore the weight of history that the girl brought with her into the house. She already had the uncomfortable sensation, in the few years of her employment there, that the servants of the house were continually comparing her to Rosie’s grandmother, the great Matriarch who (to Matron’s mind, at least) seemed to be remembered as a figure carved in stone, larger than life, mother to all. And Matron sometimes felt the pressure of trying to live up to such an extraordinary figure. (She did not allow herself to feel that way often – she did not like her imagination to run away with her).

Rosie’s grandmother had been Matron in the Lady’s early childhood, as well as Nursemaid. And as the Lady was an only child, she had spent more time in Rosie’s mother’s company than perhaps was appropriate for one of her status. Apparently, the servants gossiped, they had been close to friends, firm childhood companions. And as they grew older, Rosie’s mother was no longer satisfied by her position in the household. She had left when she was just a couple of years older than Rosie was now, and no one had heard from her since. (Perhaps the Matriarch received occasional letters, but if so she never saw fit to speak of them).

Matron would have preferred to leave all of that comfortably buried. The girl was more trouble than she was worth, perhaps. But the Lady had demanded that she be kept on, and so she would.

Really, though, the girl stirred Matron’s frustration rather than her anger. She was not an easily angered woman.

Young ones, she thought to herself, could be so predictable. One could rely on them to be unreliable. The only reason Matron did not come down more firmly on Rosie was due to the girl’s personal circumstances – she was adrift in the world, but perhaps she could settle here, in the household, if given the chance. Despite what some people said, Matron was not entirely lacking in compassion. She merely believed in a certain level of professionalism.

Matron had never been a mother. She had never felt the desire to be one. She had married once, long ago, but she was widowed now for many years. She made a point of running the household in a distinctly efficient, no-nonsense manner.

***

Indulgence was not a word that Matron was very familiar with, having received none in her own youth and giving none in her maturity. Why should she spoil people for the real world? In the long run, it would be unkind.

Rosie knew that the real world was indulgent. She felt it in every spring breeze, every scone warm from the oven, every page of a book that made her tingle. She liked rain, and open windows. But she had no one to tell this to.

***

Sometimes, sleeping alone in her tiny room in the servant’s quarters, Rosie had vermilion dreams. It was a colour linked to royalty, richness, blood, vitality. Princess dreams; almost a fairytale colour. A fruit, perhaps the first one that the serpent nudged towards Eve’s trembling, parted lips. (Rosie had begun to sneak sections of Paradise Lost into her illicit reading schedule). When Pandora opened her box, the texture of the interior must have been a rich vermilion velvet, the colour of blood; she would not have been able to resist running her fingertips over it, stroking it. Rosie thought that she would quite like to own a cat that had velvet fur.

Vermilion was the colour of her childhood, in brief, vivid flashes. The colour of the stage curtains. Sometimes, of roses. Her mother had left behind housework to take to the stage, as a bird takes wing, finally entering its element.

Rosie always remembered her dreams, even years later, if not the exact events then the colour and the scent and the mood of them.

She remembered her mother in the same way.

***

Rosie could not remember her grandmother, for she had never met her. But merely being in the house seemed to give her a sense of her presence. She imagined that she would share the same scent, that of gleaming oiled wood and dust. (No matter how often they dusted, a thin layer seemed to remain on every surface. Rosie thought it must have something to do with age).

Rosie’s grandmother had been a solid part of the history of the house, just as integral as the sturdy wooden beams or the grooves worn into the servants’ back stairs.

The house was older than any of them. It held a kind of fascination for her. She tried to picture her mother growing up here, within its old, ivy-encrusted stone walls, and outside in the small orchard in the summertime, or in the large green gardens. She couldn’t match up the two images of her mother; the girl in this orderly, calm house and the woman that she was on the stage, a smoky-eyed creature in front of the vermilion curtains.

***

The Lady’s husband had been in India in the colonial days and the house was full of the evidence: small, carved figures in twisting, dark wood, ornaments, dolls, rugs. From the Orient there was an enormous paper fan, spread and hung on the wall above the fireplace. There was a big old grandfather clock in the hall, donging out the hours relentlessly. The carpet was so thick that it muffled all footsteps.

Everything in that house had a history. Every object had originally belonged to some ancestor, passed down through the generations. On the wall above the sideboard near the kitchen there was a decorative plate engraved with the family tree. Every object had invisible roots, connections.

The air was different inside the house – as if it was the same air that had been trapped in the rooms when the house had first been built, absorbing the atmosphere over the centuries. Normally Rosie found it comforting, but sometimes it became stifling and she would throw the wooden shutters on the windows wide open to coax in a breeze.

The trees grew up close to the house. They had probably first been planted a respectable distance away from the walls, but they were now so large and overgrown that their branches kept most of the house in shadow. Small creatures could be heard skittering up and down the trunks at night, and often the Lady would have some seed left out on the small balcony to attract the birds.

As time passed, Rosie became accustomed to the rhythm of the house, its ebb and flow. Everything in its time and place.

***

On Tuesday mornings the bed sheets were changed. Generally the Matron was in charge of the main bedchamber but on this particular Tuesday morning she was detained by some crisis with the cook, and in a pinch for time she sent Rosie in her stead.

Rosie was nervous as she entered the large room. No mistakes here, she was determined. (She would prove to Matron that she could be trusted to keep her head about her). She was going very well indeed, the crisp white sheets smoothing out perfectly without a wrinkle, when she moved around to the other side of the bed and a picture in a dull silver frame on the dressing table caught her eye. She clasped her hands firmly behind her back as a reminder not to touch. She even promised to only look briefly – a bedchamber was different to a library, after all. It was a private place, but no one could own books. Just a quick glance, then, she promised herself in a conciliatory fashion. She bent over a little to peer closely at the black and white photographtrapped behind the diminutive pane of glass.

It looked like it had been taken in the gardens of the house. Perhaps it had been cut from a larger image, as the composition appeared un-posed. It showed two young girls, five or six years of age, both in white smocks, playing together on the lawn, under the wide, shadowy branches of the old oak tree. Their heads were bent together in concentration over whatever imaginary game they were concocting. On the far side of the image, almost disappearing under the ornamental silver frame, an older woman sat on the bench, watching over them, her hands folded in her lap.

Rosie recognised the older lady first. It was her grandmother, she was sure of it. She’d seen photographs of her before. But that meant the two girls must be… Rosie bent until her nose was almost touching the glass. The two girls were Rosie’s mother, and the Lady.

She’d never seen pictures of her mother as a child, and there were only a few more recent images in the possessions that her mother had left her when she passed away. A sudden flood of unfairness washed through Rosie. Why did the Lady get to have this photograph? Why did she get to keep two members of Rosie’s family trapped in the tiny frame, when all Rosie had was a suitcase full of belongings and a Matron who didn’t like her? It stung to realise that the Lady had known Rosie’s grandmother when Rosie herself had not, and the little photograph nestled right beside the bed hinted at an ongoing fondness.

Someone was coming down the hall. Rosie jumped to her feet, and smoothed out the wrinkles she’d left on the edge of the bed. She left the photograph sitting on the bedside table when she went.

***

Matron saw Rosie coming up the deserted street through one of the rain-spattered windows in the upstairs hallway, where she was folding the sheets fresh from the laundry and placing them neatly in the linen cupboard. She’d sent the girl down to the market to run some errands, hoping she’d get back before the rain set in.

Rosie did not seem to be hurrying. Every half-dozen steps the girl would raise her hand to her mouth briefly, and Matron thought she could almost hear the cough through the pane of glass and the distance. She had heard it enough times that its never-changing cadence had become engraved upon her mind as part of the continual background noise of the household. It never varied in pitch or tone, and Matron had long ago given up worrying that the girl was coming down with an illness like the one that took her mother from God’s earth. Though if she didn’t get herself out of that rain soon, Matron would have no sympathy at all for her chills and fevers. Silly child, staring up at the grey sky like it held the answer to all life’s mysteries and letting the raindrops fall into her eyes.

The sight of her there, standing motionless in the middle of the street, brought a memory shimmering into Matron’s mind.

***

Once, almost a full year after the girl had come to the house, Matron had entered the library to find Rosie captured by the page. She had been about to interrupt, to scold and chastise, but as she opened her mouth she noticed the film of moisture over the girl’s eyes. She paused her tirade just for a moment, and as she hesitated, a drop of liquid escaped the corner of one eye and dribbled down a flushed cheek. It seemed to take the girl completely by surprise, and she reached up to wipe it away with an expression of puzzlement.

It was strange because Matron had never seen the girl cry before. Despite her tumultuous upbringing and interrupted childhood, and her flighty nature, she was not one for public displays of grief or emotion. Even at her own mother’s funeral, which Matron had taken the day off to attend, her eyes had been dry and somehow distant. So the sight of that single, unexpected tear in the library that day was unsettling.

Matron had decided to be lenient, just that once. She’d backed out of the library slowly, closing the doors silently behind her. She marvelled; how could bound bits of paper and ink create such unexpected emotion? The girl was young and foolish, she rationalised. But in an unspoken, unacknowledged part of her mind, Matron was perhaps the tiniest bit jealous.