Page 12 of The Maid's Secret

Both men’s faces blurred in front of me. Gasps and shouts rang through the crowd. Cameras zoomed in on my face, and questions were hurled my way.

“Molly, you’re a multimillionaire!”

“Molly, can you hear us?”

“Molly,mi amor.Are you okay?”

I couldn’t answer. Gold stars unfurled at the edges of my vision. Jewels and quatrefoils danced and jeered.

Then, suddenly, my world faded to black.

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Chapter 4

My dearest Molly,

It is a great irony that as the curtains close and my life fades to darkness, I begin my story.

There once was a young maiden named Flora Gray, who lived in the lap of luxury. Her house was not a house. It was a glorious, imperial manor with white Roman columns at the entry, a grand oak staircase inside, a ballroom, a library, a conservatory, and so many bedrooms that, try as I might, I can’t remember them all. Gray Manor, the country estate was called—a most appropriate name since it described not only its color but its character.

To say it was stately is an understatement. Molly, it was grander than any museum you’ve ever visited, more austere than a mausoleum, more imposing than a supreme court of law. My father and mother presided not only over the manor house but over the sprawling property as well, which included barns and stables, gardens and glades, a workers’ cottage, ponds, and vast hunting grounds.

You may wonder how it came to be that I lived on such a grand estate and never spoke of it, but the secrets I have kept from you willstay that way no longer. This may come as a surprise, but I did not always live a life of penury. Put plainly, I was not always poor. My father, Reginald Gray, was a man of considerable means, descended from a long line of men of considerable means. Not only was he the revered patriarch of the Gray household but he was also the wealthy magnate and CEO of Gray Investments, a company with inestimable holdings all over the world. A man made of money, Papa had never known poverty or the pangs of cold or hunger, nor had he ever suffered the myriad deprivations of the common man. As a child, I was convinced that in lieu of blood, coins jangled in his veins, and where his heart should have been was a cavernous bank vault housing a ruddy cashier who counted bills in a steady rhythm—a beat that would stop only when there was no more cash to count. Oh, Molly, how I revered my father when I was a child.

“What separates a gentleman from the masses is money. Wealth makes the man,” he used to say.

To me, Papa was half man, half deity—commanding his dominion through some divinely ordained force. Like a Greco-Roman god, he was shifty, his moods a storm of unpredictability. Still, when I was young, he showered me with such warmth and generosity…at times.

I recall him in my mind’s eye before all the troubles began—before the dissolution of assets, the threat of a merger, and the dismissal of servants and staff. I can see him sitting in his office chair—the Capital Throne, my mother called it—handsome and imposing behind his oak desk. A smile breaks out on his face the moment he sees me, his only child, standing in the doorway. I could not have been more than five years old at the time.

He puts down his pen, shoves his adding machine aside, and holds out his strong arms. “My dear girl,” he says. “Come.”

I run to him, my black patent shoes click-clacking on the herringbone floor, the baby-blue skirt Mrs.Mead dressed me in swishing against my legs. When I reach him, he lifts me into his lap, where I curl like a cat, purring with contentment.

“My little Flora,” he says. “An exquisite beauty. The moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you were my precious blossom, and so I named you Flora—a delicate flower, a refined and rarefied bloom bringing color to my days.”

I can still smell the scent of him, his imported French cologne, musky and deep, the prickly fabric of his Savile Row suit scratching my tender cheek. But as quickly as Papa showered me with affection, he was equally quick to take it away. This was the era of rock ’n’ roll and poodle skirts, and yet in honor of Papa’s father and the many hallowed men who’d come before him, my father was running his household like an Edwardian fiefdom, with him as the self-decreed feudal lord. The world around Papa was innovating and modernizing at lightning speed, something he feared and abhorred in equal measure. Papa believed in tradition and continuity, hierarchy and stability. But above all else, he believed in his family’s superiority, untouchably above the common man.

My mother, pitiful creature that she was, worshipped Papa. Never did she let me forget how lucky I was to bear the family name. But she’d confessed to me how she’d used her feminine wiles to win Papa, captivating a man of great wealth and stature and, in doing so, making her family proud.

Audrey Gray—Mama—was an ethereal being with raven-black hair and skin so white it was almost blue. She was a much-coveted beauty—or had been, before my birth robbed her not only of her feminine wiles but, according to her, of “all the joys in life.”

Mama acted as though she was a pedigreed aristocrat when in fact her family’s money was more nouveau than Papa’s. But marriage had changed everything, legitimizing Mama’s family history and changing it forever. This transformation, however, came at a cost. I don’t know what my mother feared more—Papa himself, or losing her claim to the Gray family name.

Over time, I have come to realize my mother was a victim of many things, including circumstance, but it took me decades to see her thatway. I will not sugarcoat the truth, Molly, and I hope you will understand when I say that both she and Papa lacked the milk of human kindness. Rarely did Mama have a good word for me, consumed as she was with her vanity and flaunting our family’s good name.

She would beckon me into her lap when I was a child, holding me close to her heart, but her words offered little warmth. Whenever a lugubrious mood overcame her, which occurred often—meaning every time a younger, more febrile female specimen caught my father’s wandering eye—my sad mother would repeat the same refrain: “Flora, you were born in a bath of my blood, my first child, destined to be my last. And to my colossal disappointment, you were born a girl.”

Born a girl—a fact I was never allowed to forget. Sometimes, it was meant as a boon, but most often, and more so as I grew up, I learned that my gender was a transgression. I could hardly be blamed for it and yet I was. I’d robbed my mother of beauty and a chance to bear other children while at the same time I’d stolen from my father any possibility of getting what he wanted most—a male heir.

It’s a sad truth of human experience that repetition dulls the impact of just about anything—but this is especially so in the case of suffering. By the time I was seventeen years of age, I was only dimly aware of the increasing volatility of my family circumstances. Little did I know that the comfortable high life at Gray Manor was coming to an end. Cracks were beginning to show in the veneer of our family’s prosperity.

Once upon a time, Gray Manor had teemed with full-time domestics, but the staff had begun to dwindle. I watched, wide-eyed, as one by one my father dismissed loyal, long-suffering servants, making excuses for frog-marching them out the door. “That stupid maid used a monogrammed silver spoon as a shoehorn,” or “I never liked the look of that chap.”

The workers dwindled to a skeleton staff, but my father could not dismiss everyone. The two very best remained. They were closer tome than my own kith and kin, a fact that both galled and mystified my parents. Closest of all was Mrs.Mead, my beloved nursemaid, who’d raised me as her own from the time I was born. Ruddy-faced and portly, she had a special smell, like a warm loaf of bread fresh from the oven, and the kindest eyes you ever saw, one blue and one green. When she looked my way, it was like the sun shone on me and me alone. I loved her with all my might, trusted her with my whole heart. When I scraped my knee or elbow, she’d console me, then dress the wound with a bandage.

“There, there. They stumble who run too fast.”

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