Free Downstairs Rules by Sullivan Clarke Page A

her mistress should she need to, Louise said. As Lady Chatworth’s maid, Ella’s mother often read to her employer while the other woman did needlepoint or prepared to fall asleep.

    Ella didn’t realize until her teens that she was being groomed to be a lady’s maid. When her mother passed away when Ella was only seventeen, a devastated Lady Chatworth would hear of no one other than her beloved Louise’s daughter filling her shoes.

    “She knows me almost as well as her mother,” Lady Chatworth had said. “And she is so like her. I cannot possibly entertain the notion of having any other serve me than Ella.”

    So Ella had become Lady Chatworth’s maid, and the relationship they forged eased some of the pain of Ella’s loss. But as it had done with the Carter’s former employer so many years ago, jealousy now reared its head again. Ella’s eight years serving Lady Chatworth were marred by the obvious envy by one of the housekeepers, a seasoned and trusted servant who had vied unsuccessfully for the position that Ella would fill. The majority of the staff blamed Ella’s parents for - as they put it - shoving Ella at the lady of the house, although it had never been Louise’s intention for her daughter to succeed her, for they never expected Louise would die young. But Ella and her father, who had now risen to head butler, focused on their employers and ignored the gossip, even though Ella often felt very alone among her peers.

    With Lady Chatworth she was happy. The woman would ask her maid’s opinion on matters and share confidences she shared with no one else, not even her husband. Ella soon found she was able to predict her lady’s moods and needs. She made herself indispensable through instinct and discretion. Lady Chatworth, whose sons were away at school, doted on her pretty maid and told her a dozen times a day how important she was.

    “What would I ever do without my pretty little maid?” she asked with a smile whenever Ella stoked the fire or brought Lady Chatworth her reading specs or picked out just the right dress without being asked.

    And Ella wondered what she’d do without Lady Chatworth in her life. Romantic prospects were few and far between, for her lady was nothing if not demanding. Whenever Ella did get a free day to go to town or take a walk, she found herself the object of admiring glances by footmen or chauffeurs or grooms, but as the maid of Lady Chatworth and the daughter of the stern house butler, Ella was intimidating to the young men who would have otherwise approached her.

    “I shall die a spinster,” she laughed one day when Lady Chatworth inquired as to whether any young man had caught her eye.

    “There are worse ways to die,” Lady Chatworth had said. “Besides, no man could care for you as well as we do. And take it from me, being married is no guarantee of love.”

    Lady Chatworth had looked in the mirror as she’d made the pronouncement, her hand moving to the wrinkles by her eyes. “Once the bloom is off the bride, the man’s eye will wander to someone else.”

    Ella had laid a comforting hand on her lady’s shoulder. It was no great secret that Lord Chatworth was unfaithful. Even though he tried to be discreet, those who shared the Chatworth’s status had little more to do than gossip, and Lord Chatworth’s exploits always found their way back to his long-suffering spouse.

    “They may be a diversion, m’lady, but you’re his wife,” Ella had said, and Lady Chatworth had smiled.

    “This is true, Ella,” she said. “And as long as I am you will always be with us.”

    Those words had brought a wrench of pain to Ella’s heart just days earlier, when she’d stood in the chapel graveyard on the Chatworth’s estate, watching her mistress’s body being lowered into the ground. The illness that consumed her had been rapid; from the time Lady Chatworth felt the first nagging pain in her stomach to the day she died was a brief three months.