Roses Have Thorns by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910859476
Publisher: Canelo Books
Published: 2017-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty

The doors of my memory burst open at Lambeth. I’d managed to keep them closed over the week at Kew but now, as I sat huddled in that bleak little room, guilt and shame overwhelmed me. Miss Annabel, the memory of her face, her voice – all tormented me. From the very beginning I had deceived her. ‘Lady’s maids do not come out of the workhouse’ – Lord Warminster had spoken the truth; if she’d known that I’d been born out of wedlock she would never have engaged me as her own maid. Personal servants, spending so much time with their masters and mistresses, could not come from the gutter.

The lesser sin had led to the greater: in my pride and stupidity I’d read my lord’s casual attentions as love. Unmindful of my origins, my head stuffed full of silly stories of fairy-tale princesses and beautiful actresses, I had forgotten what I was – a servant and a bastard. And now, because of my sin, I was to bear another bastard. I was doing to my child what Aunt Agnes had done to me.

I remembered the slights, the taunts, the humiliations that I’d suffered in childhood, and now my child would suffer them too. Lord Warminster’s rank would protect her at first, at Eston where he was in command – but what would happen when she grew up? Then his rank would be a curse to her, because she would not be able to hide her origins as I had done – the big red book would see to that. She would never be able to wear the three ostrich feathers and make her curtsey at court, as an earl’s grand-daughter should do. He would buy her fine dresses, dainty shoes, jewellery – but everyone would know what she was: the bastard daughter of a servant. So she would be an outcast, and learn to hate the mother she had never known.

When she moved inside me now I sensed her anger and resentment, and she became a burden to me, a burden that had to be carried, although my back hurt and my legs ached. And when the time came for me to deliver her I would scream aloud in pain, as Aunt Agnes had screamed. Fear clutched my throat and crushed my chest, because I knew I was a coward.

Shame kept me imprisoned in my room. I would have stayed there always, except for the necessity of buying food. He had ordered me to eat, so that the baby would grow strong and healthy – for him. There was the postal order, too: it came on the second day, and I had to go out to cash it. I was too ashamed to go to a post office nearby, in the streets I’d known before, so instead I walked for a long way in the other direction, praying that no one would recognise me. As I walked I saw London as it really was: ugly, noisy and filthy. Over the last year I’d grown used to a different London, the London of the West End.

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