Page 40 of The Maid's Secret

I stood stiffly, not knowing what to do.

“More champagne!” Carmen announced as she passed around flutes, shoving one into my reluctant hand.

“Clink glasses with your BFFs!” Steve ordered. I did what I was told, all while looking past the strangers to where Angela sat on the white satin bench.

“Aren’t you happy?” Carmen asked as she put an arm around me and squealed. “You’re overjoyed, right? A blushing bride?”

I could find no words. Not a single one.

“Oh, look! She’s crying!” one of the ladies said as she pointed at my watery eyes.

“This is Tears of Joy Bridal Shop, where we put the pride in bride,” said Carmen as she smiled at the camera.

I looked back at Angela. She was crying, too, her head shaking back and forth in disbelief. “I didn’t know this would happen,” she mouthed from across the room. “Molly, I’m so sorry.”

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Chapter 12

Dear Molly,

Long ago, a very wise woman offered me valuable advice: “Be careful, for what at first you hate, you may come to love later.” I never paid much heed, not to this nor to anything else she tried to warn me about. It took me years to understand how right she was and how the heart can be so capricious.

As you read this diary, I expect you’re experiencing no small measure of shock. And as you have now seen, the man you know as Mr.Preston, the doorman of the Regency Grand, was in fact closer to me, more critical to my early life than I ever let on—and closer to you, too, but more on that later…

For the moment, I entreat you to accompany me to Gray Manor on the day of the Braun Summit, a day when one man—Magnus Braun—would decide the fate of my entire family and change the course of our lives. But fate is a trickster, as unpredictable as the heart, and though my father should have played the pivotal role in that day’s events, I found myself cast as the unlikely lead—a part I was not prepared for and one I did not entirely understand.

In the days leading to the summit, Gray Manor became the seat of chaos. Uncle Willy had indeed found temporary staff to pose as full-time employees, so the house was teeming with servants who had no idea what it was they were supposed to be doing. These townspeople donned ill-fitting uniforms and tried to play their parts. There were maids with no notion of how to clean, chauffeurs with no cars to drive, and a sous-chef whose culinary prowess began and ended with the ability to butter bread. Mrs.Mead soon found herself teaching a young maid how to polish silver, and Uncle Willy informed the shocked new footmen that their chief purpose was not shining shoes but serving meals.

In preparation for the summit, Papa, more gaunt and harried than ever, held arduous strategy sessions with his board of directors in the vast main-floor boardroom of the manor. Somber men dressed in suits carrying ominous black briefcases marched in and out of our home with their heads stoically bowed. If by accident I met one in a corridor, I would curtsy and say “sir.” Distress was writ large on their faces. Like experienced physicians, they’d come with medicine, but they’d heard the death rattle and knew what was to come.

Meanwhile, my mother, smelling of vodka and lime, conveyed the truth of our situation in the plainest terms. “Even if we could liquidate everything, Flora, there still isn’t enough to save us from ruin.”

“Perhaps Magnus will take pity on us,” I suggested hopefully. “If he takes over Gray Investments, maybe Papa can work for him.”

Mama laughed bitterly as she clinked the ice cubes in her glass. “You don’t understand men at all. Emasculation is a sport—one man’s blood loss is another man’s transfusion. If Magnus wants to swallow us whole, he will. It’s that simple.”

“Then why hire all these servants to make it seem like we have endless means?” I asked. “What’s the point?”

“The point, Flora, is honor. The band must play as theTitanicsinks.”

If the threat of a sinking ship wasn’t bad enough, there was also the fact that the young man I was no longer permitted to call John (a.k.a.Mr.Self-Important Preston) was one of Uncle Willy’s temporary hires. He’d pulled his son out of classes for a full week, and wherever Uncle Willy went in the manor, his son followed, copying his father’s every move, bowing and scraping, opening and closing doors, passing serving dishes at meals, and generally acting like a pompous, lumbering baboon.

With each passing day, I despised that young man more. He lacked the poise of a proper footman, serving me from the right instead of the left at dinner, and deigning to ask me if I wanted bread instead of silently handing me the basket. I could not eat what he boorishly heaped onto my plate, nor could I bear to look at him, handsome though he was. When I passed him in the corridors, the very scent of him—for he’d taken to dousing himself with excess quantities of his father’seau de toilette—made me retch. I didn’t know then how love and hate exist in such close proximity, and when we fear love the most, we pretend to feel its opposite. Plus, I knew my parents would mock me for harboring feelings for a man below my station, so I convinced myself that what I felt was raging ire.

I was overcome with vicious thoughts about the young Mr.Preston. Like Goneril inKing Lear(which was on our syllabus), I longed to pluck out his eyes. Never once did I stop to ponder what exactly the young lad had done to deserve such an oversize serving of my vitriol or if perhaps there was some other emotion brewing beneath my extreme outrage. I relished pointing out his failings, especially in my parents’ presence. Once, at dinner, I noticed the way he stood to one side, a smirk on his face, judging us all.

“A footman keeps his hands behind him, not in front of him like a jockstrap,” I remarked without so much as looking up from my plate.

Mama covered her smile with her napkin. “Now, Flora, we can’t expect the new help to know everything right away. Good service is learned over time.”

“Only a waiter in a bad restaurant places a napkin over his arm,” Imuttered.

Mr.Preston Junior removed the offending napkin and placed it on the sideboard. “Please excuse my boorish ways,” he said to Mama and Papa. “I’m grateful for your daughter’s guidance, knowing her manners—and yours—are both nonpareil and anachronistic.”

Papa and Mama exchanged a perplexed look. “Quite the vocabulary you have, young man,” Papa said, but neither he nor Mama had quite grasped that he’d just insulted us all.

The day of the much-anticipated summit, I was glad to leave the manor and go to school, for at least there I wouldn’t run into John. In class, the headmaster gave out grades on ourRomeo and Julietessays and instructed me to go home and tell the fill-in footman on scholarship the “delightful news”—that his essay had earned the highest mark in class.

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