The Bells had one maidservant, Nanse, who both kept house and cooked and seemed relieved to have an extra pair of hands to help, although she was particular about how things were done. By that first dinnertime, so many rules had been explained to Lily that she didn’t think she’d have a hope of keeping them in mind. But Nanse was friendly—an older woman with ruddy cheeks and fading copper-colored hair beneath her cap—and she sometimes sang while doing work, and Lily liked her.
Nanse was quick to praise. On seeing Lily smooth and spread a washing cloth flat to let it dry, Nanse said, “Ye are a careful worker, and I’m glad to have ye here. The last lass would not learn so small a thing as that. She aye would leave my washing clouts balled up and damp around the kitchen till they rotted through with holes.”
Lily hadn’t known there’d been another girl before her, although of course it did make sense, for there was too much housework here for Nanse alone to do it all, and keep the kitchen, too.
The house had many rooms and passages and stairs to be kept clean. The beds needed airing and making up, everything had to be dusted and swept, and the candles all kept in good order and new ones set in where required. There were linens—bed, body, and table—that had to be laundered and dried. The cooking seemed constant, as did the washing up, and any spare moments were filled with spinning and mending.
When evening came, Lily was so weary she wanted no more than to crawl into the low pallet bed she shared with Nanse by the kitchen wall and let the waves of sleep rise and roll over her, dragging her down till they drowned out the ache of her homesickness.
But the day’s final chore had to wait for the ten o’clock bell at night, when she and Nanse could haul out the ashes and chamber pot filth to the street to the appointed place, so overnight the muckmen could collect it in their carts. It was, apparently, a source of pain to Mr. Bell that not all of his neighbors in the close abided by the laws, but merely threw their excrement out of their doors and windows under cover of the darkness. Nanse told Lily Mr. Bell would sometimes hire the muckmen by himself, with his own money, to come through the close and make it clean.
“He likes things to look pleasing,” Nanse said.
Lily took this to heart. She had but one bodice and petticoat, but she worked always to keep them presentable, and kept her hair combed and tidy beneath her cap, and tied her apron with care.
She was not sure Mr. Bell had even noticed, for in fairness she did see him very little. He was busy in his shop all hours, and Lily so far had not been allowed to clean the shop. She reasoned this was probably because there were so many things of value there, and also many things that could be dangerous if not handled correctly, and Mr. Bell preferred to leave it in the hands of Nanse, a trusted servant with experience.
At mealtimes, Nanse and Lily did not wait upon the family, merely carried all the food into the dining room, where Mrs. Bell—a tall, spare woman with a gentle voice and manner—thanked them and dismissed them and attended to the service of her husband and their daughter by herself.
Nanse greatly valued this, because it gave herself and Lily time for their own dinner, which she urged the girl to never take for granted. “In the first place where I trained, when I was your age, we had scarcely time to eat at all, and what we had to eat was scarcely worth the effort. Bread and ale for breakfast and for supper, same as here, but there the loaf was always hard and dry, not good and fresh like we get from our baxter. And for dinner it was always broth, with boiled beef, or cheese, or herring. Not a bit of green, for health, and precious little flavor.”
Lily liked broth well enough, but she was glad that here the servants’ meals had more variety, and that even when there was broth there’d be tasty meat besides, however scant—perhaps some chicken or a piece of beef or mutton cooked with cauliflower, peas, or onions, followed afterward by pears. Once Mrs. Bell had even shared with them a dish of little gooseberry and cherry tarts, because, “There are too many of them, just for us. And you’ve been working hard.”
It was on that same day, when Lily was content and full of cherry tart and humming to herself while she was polishing the wood frame of a picture in the drawing room, that Mr. Bell walked past and paid a compliment.
“You’ve made that shine,” he told her. “I can fairly see my face in it. Well done.”
Lily wheeled and caught his smile’s edge as he carried on and through the door that led directly from the house into his shop, and the warm approval in that smile made her feel tall with pride.