Page 13 of The Maid's Secret

If a visiting child tried to take a toy from me, Mrs.Mead ensured I got it back. It was at her kitchen table that I did my homework. And when I came down with the curse in my fourteenth year, it wasn’t to my mother I ran but to dear Mrs.Mead. She taught me to stanch the flow, both of the blood blotting my skirts and of my deeper, blooming shame.

“Chin up, Buttercup,” she said, two chapped hands on my cheeks. “You’re a woman now. You should be proud. I sure am.”

At this time of my life, as I reckoned with the dispiriting frigidity of my parents, I discovered how liberating it could be to assign my lived experiences to a fictional protagonist, placing them at a safe remove within the confines of fiction. I became so good at transforming my circumstances into poetics that my teachers lauded my creativity, and in so doing failed to recognize my coded cries for help:

In a bath of bluest blood she was born

A girl, unwanted, from her mother’s loins torn

There you have it, Molly. You’ve been introduced to dear Mrs.Mead and to your great-grandparents—the patriarch and matriarch of our tale. You’ll come to know them all better as I continue my story. I swear to you that no matter what treatment I endured at the hands of my parents, I loved them with every fiber of my being, a blinddevotion like no other. I emulated them and believed in their righteous superiority. I wanted nothing but to make them proud, yet in the end, I achieved the opposite of every youthful intention.

But let’s begin at the beginning rather than portend the end. Let us return to a very important day when your gran, seventeen-year-old Flora, was a carefree young student, filled with nervous anticipation as she posed an important question to her parents. You see, the great gift of being an only child with a distracted mother and a father on the cusp of financial ruin was that I was free to do as I pleased. And what I pleased was so different from what other girls my age were interested in. All they dreamed of were dancing and dates, marriage and mates. I, on the other hand, wanted to learn. And learn I did. I was a brilliant student, Molly, with a voracious appetite for history, languages, arts, and my favorite subject of all—literature.

My father had an impressive library at Gray Manor, completely for show, a glorious room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with leather-bound volumes organized according to subject and sometimes by author name: Antiquities, Art History, Charles Dickens, Economics, Egyptian Civilization, English Literature, Shakespeare. I swore to myself that I would one day read every volume in that room.

I loved learning so much that at the age of eight, I convinced my father to hire a tutor to teach me French, which I could converse in quite fluently after a year or two of lessons. At my private girls’ school, I sat in the front row of class, and not even the girls calling me “teacher’s pet” could dissuade me from giving my full attention to the lecture. The world grew bigger and brighter every day. Suddenly, I had proof there was more to living than the rigid, cloistered ways of Gray Manor, with its affected austerity and flagrant worship of wealth, class, and rank. I longed to suck the marrow of life through education, and I dreamed of higher academic pursuits. Maybe I could be anything—a teacher, a professor, perhaps even a writer?

I was the only girl in my school with marks high enough to pursue arts and literature rather than home economics and coiffure. Tworoads diverged, and I longed to take the one less traveled. But doing so meant leaving the girls’ school and sitting crucial exams that would, if I passed, allow me to apply to university. My dreams rested not just on the results of those exams but on whether I’d be allowed to take them at all.

At my behest, the headmaster of my school arranged a meeting with my mother and father, and on a cold, rainy Monday, he ventured to Gray Manor to petition my parents on my behalf.

Never before had I seen the headmaster look so meek as he did on that rainy morning in the grand foyer of my father’s mansion, wet from head to toe, slack-jawed as he took in the majesty of his surroundings. Uncle Willy, my father’s butler, escorted him through the corridors and up the grand staircase to Papa’s well-appointed office, where the poor man’s knees were shaking as he knocked with a clammy hand on Papa’s mahogany door.

“What do you want?” my father growled when the headmaster entered. “I don’t have much time.” Papa said all of this without so much as glancing up from his papers.

My mother was standing behind him, wearing a navy silk blouse and fashionable beige culottes she’d bought in Paris a few months before.

“Sir, madam,” said the headmaster. “Your daughter asked me to come. You’re very lucky. Rarely have I had a student as gifted as Flora—if ever.”

My father drew a deep breath and stood from his chair. It was a tactic of his, to stand and assume his full, imposing height, towering over everyone. His mouth shaped itself into a mirthless grin, a smile in name but not in spirit.

“Bit of a waste, no?” Papa said. “To have a daughter with brains.”

“I…I don’t see it that way, sir,” the headmaster countered. “Do you, madam?” The headmaster turned to my mother, expecting agreement.

“What I would say,” drawled Mama, “is that with a girl, it’s best to invest in her looks if you’re seeking long-term gains.”

“Beauty above brains,” my father quipped as he offered a hand to my mother, inviting her to stand by his side.

“I’m not here to dispute Flora’s beauty,” said the headmaster. “And she comports herself with grace at school. But you see, Flora has a chance to enter courses that will allow her to sit entrance exams for university. She has the aptitude for it, and the will, too. It would be a shame for someone so clever to eschew academics. It’s a gateway to any profession of her choice.”

“A gateway,” my father repeated. He slow-marched to where I silently stood in the threshold of his office. He appraised me with his hawkish eyes, then came to a halt in front of me.

“Headmaster, look at her. Take her in,” he said, putting a finger to my chin, pushing my bowed head up so my embarrassed eyes met those of my equally embarrassed headmaster.

“Is she not a fine specimen?” my father asked. “If Flora were a horse, she’d be a thoroughbred, don’t you think? Who am I to withhold such a gift from mankind?”

I know these words will sound harsh to your ears, Molly, but these were different times, and believe it or not, it wasn’t unusual for women to have their physical attributes assessed as if they were prizewinning livestock at a county fair. At the time, I found such appraisals either laughably silly or worse, complimentary, for I was too young to fear idolatry.

“What my husband is trying to say,” my mother offered, “is that our daughter should attend a finishing school for girls, where she will be trained in home economics and other womanly arts and where she will learn, if we’re lucky, to find herself a husband appropriate to her station.”

My father smiled at his wife, a real smile this time, with all his warmth shining upon her.

Despite my fears, I found the strength to speak up. “Papa, Mama,” I said. “Please excuse me for speaking out of turn, but I wish to takethe prep course and the exams. I’d like the opportunity to prove myself.”

“To prove yourself,” my father echoed.

“To whom?” my mother asked.

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