The Rise of Lucia

An advance extract from The Rise of Lucia by Dan Edwards, forthcoming from Four Hands Press.

Chapter One

Emmeline Smith came up from Warwickshire by train and from Paddington by cab, and got out at Stanmore House like an explorer stepping ashore to claim the place for the Crown — the only witness to the annexation being her mother, still inside the cab, paying the fare. This was not what her mother had intended, her mother holding that a lady waits to be handed down from a motor by a gentleman’s hand. But the only hand to be had was the cabman’s, and Emmeline had not waited even for that, having handed herself down, so that the point was conceded to her, as most points were.

She stood a moment on the pavement and took possession. Stanmore House stood in Harcourt Terrace, a quiet leafy run of houses off the Fulham Road, put up in the fifties with stuccoed cream-painted fronts, pillared porches, and long first-floor windows down to their balconies — the Italian taste, as understood in Kensington. Emmeline attributed it, on sight, to King George. That it was a good deal younger than that, and that the cream front was a skin of plaster troweled over common London brick and ruled into lines to pass for Bath stone, did not trouble her in the least; she had a deep sympathy with anything that had bettered its origins, and thought none the worse of the house for it. Four tall storeys and a portico; a flight of steps to a black front door, a brass plate, a brass bell-pull, a brass letter-box, and an aspidistra in the window the size of a small shrub. The brass was magnificent. A house that troubled to keep so much brass bright was a house that gave itself airs; and in Emmeline it had taken in a resident who would give it a great many more airs. She resolved on the spot to rule it.

For she had decided that Stanmore House should be the beginning of everything. Warwickshire was done with; they had sold the freehold, and sold it well, and the money was in the Funds, being respectable — which was as far back as Emmeline cared to trace it; and a girl of nineteen — pretty, with a little money behind her and a great deal of resolve ahead of her — had three evening frocks to unpack and meant to begin at once. There would be people in the house, and people were not to be met so much as managed, and arranged, and — in the fullness of time — set in their places like chairs before a recital. She mounted the steps and pulled the bell hard, twice. She was not nervous — or, if she was, it was a nervousness she would have denied to her last breath.

Below her on the pavement her mother was seeing the boxes down off the cab, counting them over, and telling the cabman where to set them — doing, in short, the whole of the arrival, while Emmeline merely arrived. Emmeline watched the work a moment, and then turned back to the door.

A stout maid opened the door, and advancing through the dim hall with both hands raised in welcome came Mrs Toller.

“Mrs and Miss Smith. Now this is a pleasure,” said Mrs Toller. It had not been a good morning, but the sight of the two women went some way towards mending it. The girl’s coat had been cut by a tailor who knew his trade, and both of them wore fresh, unmended gloves of the best quality. “Walk in, walk in — you’ll mind the dark, the blind’s kept down against the carpet, it’s a Turkey and the sun does fade them so.”

Lacey, the maid, was turning her sleeves back and stooping down towards the luggage. “Be careful with that!” said Mrs Toller. She could not leave anyone to anything, and ran her house single-handed, as a captain works a ship in a gale with none of the crew worth a rope’s end, sure that the instant her back was turned the vessel would be dashed on the rocks. Lacey took up the nearest box in her own time and carried it indoors at her own unhurried pace, which was the only pace she had.

The hall was indeed dark, and crowded with a hat-stand, a barometer, an umbrella-jar of blue china, and a great many framed engravings of cathedrals, so that one came into Stanmore House rather as into a stationer’s window. Emmeline pronounced it, privately and instantly, good; the hall was dingy, certainly, but she had already settled that such dinginess was not poverty but pedigree, a distinction brighter halls conspicuously lacked, and she meant to be able to say so, lightly, to people who had not yet learned it. There was a gong. A house with a gong dined at a fixed hour and dressed for it, and she had three evening frocks in the largest of the six boxes that had not yet been out of their tissue paper.

Mrs Toller had taken to them on sight — the good boxes; the mother in deep widow’s black, real crape and a deal of it; and the girl, slim and unhurried in her dove-grey tailor-made, who entered as the mistress of the house enters, and left Mrs Toller feeling, on her own doormat, almost like the visitor. Two ladies, in a word, who would pay on the quarter-day and never query an extra; and after the fortnight she had had, she could have wept with the rightness of them. “You’ll be very comfortable here, very comfortable indeed,” she said.

“We’re all so looking forward to getting to know you. We have Mr and Mrs Brunner, from Switzerland, who are no trouble at all; the Misses Crale, who are sisters; and a clergyman’s widow on the first floor, connected with the Hampshire Tollers — no relation to myself, the name’s a coincidence merely, though an agreeable one. You’ll meet nobody here who ought not to be met. We dine at half-past seven, and we dress.” Here her eye went past them to the doorway, where Albert, the boots, had got the trunk as far as the Turkey carpet and was dragging it across the pile, brass corners and all. The smile shut like a clasp. “Albert. Albert — not over the carpet, how many times — ” and was open again the instant she turned back to her guests. “You’ll forgive me. One does the whole of it oneself, in the end; there’s no help to be had now that’s worth its wages, and what there is wants watching every minute God sends.”

“It is a great comfort to be near a good church,” said Mrs Smith, who did not yet know that there was one, but meant to have found it by Sunday.

“Oh, I dare say,” said Mrs Toller. Whether there was a good church within a mile she neither knew nor had ever found the half-hour to discover; her parish was the house, and a more exacting one no clergyman ever served. She turned and led the way down the passage, talking backwards over her shoulder and naming the rooms as she went — the dining-room here, the drawing-room there, this door and that — without opening one of them or pausing for anyone to see in; then up the stairs she went, at a pace that left her guests to follow as they could, for none of these was the room she meant to show.

It was on the half-landing that she stopped, and there, for the only time, waited for her guests to catch her up; for the thing behind the door was no use to anybody who was not there to see it. She laid one hand upon the door and lowered her voice to a reverent pitch.

“And this,” she said, “is the bathroom.”

She threw the door open and watched their faces, for the bathroom was her best argument. There was a great enamel bath with claw feet, a cork mat, a towel-horse, and, fixed to the wall above the taps with a length of copper piping and a small brass tap of its own, a tall cylindrical apparatus of green-painted metal from the top of which a flue went up into the wall.

“A gas geyser,” said Mrs Toller. “Instantaneous hot water at any hour, day or night. You have only to turn the tap and apply a match and you have your bath piping hot in under five minutes. This is the only one on the entire street.” The geyser was her one jewel, and she loved it better than anything in the house, and least of all for the comfort of it; a hot bath was a hot bath, but a geyser was a thing to be known for. “You have only to ask,” she added, “and I shall light it for you” — which was to say that the lighting of it she had just explained so freely was not, on reflection, anyone’s business but her own; no one lit the geyser but Mrs Toller. And there was a plain pluck in it, for the thing roared like a dragon and frightened her every time, but every time she lit it just the same, day or night, sooner than trust the striking of a match to another living soul.

Emmeline measured the geyser at a glance as the one thing in the house worth commanding, and resolved to have her bath in it that very evening, before dinner and before the Misses Crale; for there was but one geyser to go around, and the order in which the residents took their baths was a thing that would very soon want settling, and would settle in Emmeline’s favour.

Mrs Smith looked at the geyser and was not easy about it. She had read distressing things in the newspapers — accidents, and worse than accidents — and a naked flame, in a room where a person was at her most defenceless and least prepared to meet her Maker, was a thing she would as soon have done without. But hot water ready to hand would be a great convenience of a Sunday morning; and she was not sure that a thing which got one to church on time through a cold London winter could be quite so dangerous as it looked. She said that it was most convenient.

“It is most convenient,” said Mrs Toller, and shut the door upon the shrine. “Now you’ll be wanting your tea. I’ll send it up. The front room on the second floor, that’s yours — two windows, and the loveliest leafy outlook; there’s a great plane tree, and you’d hardly know you were in London at all. Don’t you give the boxes a thought; everything’s brought up here the moment it’s wanted. Do go up and make yourselves quite at home.”

Emmeline went up to install herself in the front room on the second floor; behind her came her mother, who had seen to the whole of the journey and would presently see to the whole of the unpacking. Mrs Toller stayed on the half-landing, gracious no longer now there was no one to be gracious at, and fell to wrestling a toppling stack of sheets back into the linen-cupboard.