The Peculiar Folly of Long Legged Meg Read online

  Ah, and there was the confirmation. Minty the viper struck again. Sometimes she almost admired the woman for her deviousness.

  Persey examined her small pruning shears, snipping at the air, checking for rust. "I can assure you both that I shall be on the lookout for this prodigiously talented fellow and make certain he feels welcome. Perhaps I might even be of use to him in some...small capacity."

  Again Albert received a nudge from his wife's foot. A sharper one this time.

  "I think not, madam. It would be best if you stayed out of his way entirely. He tells me he will bring workers in to do the job to his satisfaction. In fact, you may see some of them around the estate already."

  "But I know the grounds so well. I might have useful ideas—"

  "Surely the dower house herb patch keeps you busy on warm days when you might otherwise be restless indoors and you have no other little thing to do."

  "Herb patch?" she exclaimed hotly. "That, Albert, is a knot garden. Of my own design."

  "Then it should give you pleasant occupation out of the hired man's way, for the duration of his stay."

  "Perhaps, but I make no guarantees. I shall not seek him out, but if he should come across my path I will not divert my course. That is all I can say. Now you must excuse me. I have other matters with which to involve myself and I am spread thin as it is, giving my counsel to everybody, whether they require it or not."

  That said, she swept out through the French doors, her step determined and her head high, her shabby hat brim flopping with considerable fervor.

  Chapter Three

  1760

  Twytchel-on-the-Nene

  As it happened, Long-Legged Meg found her chance of escape before too long. A very fine guest arrived to stay at the inn and soon had the staff turned upside down with her demands at all hours of the day and night.

  Kitty Waddenhoe was an actress, so skilled at emulating the behavior and mannerisms of her aristocratic patrons, that she had acquired the title of "Lady" before her name merely out of habit. But there was something about Kitty that, to an observant soul, gave away her humble origins.

  From the kitchen window Meg had watched the lady arrive in a grand carriage and saw how every head turned. Men fell over themselves to bow before her, to give her a coin for the coachman, lend a hand with her trunks, or pass a kerchief when she did no more than look as if she might sneeze. When she entered the room, men fluttered around her, forgetting their companions, their previous conversations, their suppers and also— as Meg noted with her shrewd, watchful eyes— a few of their valuables. Pocket watches, rings, and even one or two brass buttons were waylaid over the course of "Lady" Kitty Waddenhoe's two-and-a-half-day sojourn at The Kingfisher Inn.

  Yet again, Meg appeared to be the only soul with her eyes open. At least, for the first eight and forty hours. She kept the discovery to herself, waiting for her moment.

  In the meantime, she made herself useful to the guest in any way that she could and had soon claimed the lady's attention by mending a torn sleeve for her with a very neat stitch, anticipating that she wanted wine before she had even asked for it herself, and preparing a most effective headache cure for her the following day.

  "What is your name, girl?" the lady asked drowsily, her shape slowly forming out of the churning sea of blankets as she lifted her eye mask from one side and blinked sleepily.

  "Meg, madam."

  "Meg what?"

  "Plain Meg, madam. I have no father willing to own up to it, and my mother gave me away to the parish church as soon as I were born, so nobody cared to give me another name."

  "But it is Meg short for Margaret?"

  "I don't think so, madam. Nobody ever said. It's always been just plain Meg." She supposed the three syllables of "Margaret" would take too long to shout and there was usually a sense of urgency whenever she was called for. If her name could be shortened any further it would be.

  Resting on one elbow, the lady pushed herself higher against her pillows, tugged off her eye mask and watched as Meg tidied her room, opened the window to let in some fresh morning air, and then folded petticoats and stockings neatly. "And what is in that marvelous remedy you gave me, Plain Meg?"

  "Oh, I couldn't tell you that, madam. 'Tis a secret recipe."

  "Of your own creation?"

  "Yes, madam. I've made a study of herbs and plants. 'Tis a wonder what they can do. The pains they can relieve."

  "Indeed, it is a remarkable concoction." Kitty Waddenhoe stretched both arms over her head and yawned. "I feel considerably rejuvenated. Perhaps I can purchase the recipe from you."

  "I'm afraid not, madam." She paused, looked at the lady sprawled in the bed and said, "You'd have to steal it from me while I weren't— while I wasn't looking. But I am very watchful and don't miss much." That, of course, was an understatement. Meg missed nothing. Often she was so caught-up watching how other people did things and storing it in her mind, that she felt as if she was on the outside looking in, as if she was a different breed in some way to all the other folk around her. A foreigner on this planet. An oddity. "I see what goes on. I see what other folks do miss."

  The woman in the bed said nothing, her body no longer relaxed among the bubbled pool of blankets, but tense and drawn up, coiled, and ready to strike, like a serpent letter 'S' inside an illuminated manuscript Meg had looked at once. She felt the lady's eyes continue to observe her progress around the chamber.

  "Will that be all, madam?"

  Finally Lady Kitty replied with a curt, "Yes. If I need anything more I can ring for it."

  "Very good, madam." Meg started for the door and then turned back, "Oh, madam, I found this in the passage last eventide. I thought it must belong to you." She walked back to the bed and held out her hand, palm up, to show a small silver snuff box inlaid with a hunting scene enameled in miniature on the oval lid.

  The lady looked at it and her eyes flared, the sleepiness well and truly shaken off now.

  "It is yours, madam, is it not? I thought it must be. I noticed that you have so many pretty little things in your possession—some of them having come but very recently into it. I was sure the snuff box must belong to no one else."

  Her gaze rose to Meg's face and then back to the snuff box. "How good of you to return it. Many young girls would not be so... dutiful." She reached out and took the object, her long, thin, sly fingers closing around it as if her hand were a spider and the snuff box a fly trapped in her sticky web. "And how clever of you to know it was mine."

  "As I said, I'm attentive, madam. Don't miss much what goes on."

  Lady Kitty studied her with even greater intensity. "You found it in the passage, you say?"

  "In the passage, madam, as a gentleman walked along it toward me. I was carrying a heavy basket, and he bumped into me quite hard in his haste to get by."

  "Did he indeed?"

  "After I found the snuff box in my hand, I did think of asking him if it were his. But since he walked off and didn't say sorry, I decided it could not be. A fine thing could not belong to such an uncivil fellow. And when I thought some more, I knew it must be yours, madam."

  The lady chuckled like a stream lazily winding down a hill. "So those clever fingers of yours, Plain Meg, can do more than sew a tight stitch and mix a cure for a sore head."

  "Indeed, madam. But I learn from watching others. I'm a very quick pupil."

  "And you hold your tongue as you learn?"

  Meg smiled. "Yes, madam. Whatever I learn about folk I keep it to myself."

  "But use it to your own advantage if you can?"

  "If I can, madam. Why not? Nobody does for me but myself. Nobody ever has. I'm all I have."

  Lady Kitty melted into her pillows again and considered, her shrewd eyes weighing Meg carefully from head to toe and side to side. Not that there was much of the latter. "You remind me of how I once was, young Meg. Does that surprise you?"

  "Of course not, madam, everybody is young once."

 
"That is not what I meant, as you well know, girl." The woman laughed heartily and clasped the snuff box to her bosom. "I meant that I was once a scullery maid with nothing to recommend me but wide-eyes and a quick wit." She paused, considering the lanky girl at her bedside. "You are the one who tells ghost stories, are you not?"

  "How do you know that, madam?"

  "I heard about the long-legged purveyor of equally tall tales."

  She shrugged. "'Tis just entertainment on cold, damp nights."

  The lady smiled, a finger to her lips as she pondered the possibilities. "And you do not have such a thick accent as the other maids here."

  "I've studied, madam, to speak different like. So I can get on."

  "Clearly, you're a clever girl and not slow in putting yourself forward. I like a girl with spit and ambition. Perhaps I might make use of you."

  Meg seized her chance, with just as much greedy alacrity as she'd taken that snuff box from its master's unguarded pocket. "I work hard, I'm tidy and I'm very cheap to feed. I'm quick to learn, as you see for yourself. And I'm discreet."

  The lady tapped her chin with one finger. "Have you ever worked in the theatre, girl?"

  "No, madam."

  "The life of an actress is not always luxurious, her fortunes not always rising. There are good days and bad. Often extremes. So it is for her maid too."

  "I suppose so, madam, but I'm no stranger to hardship." She'd never known anything else. It was lucky she had an imagination and could fashion, in her own mind, a better life. Whatever you envision for yourself, will come to pass, as Master Cosgrove had said. Always have a dream, a target at which to aim.

  Lady Kitty nodded. "If you are to travel with me, we really must do something about your clothes. I can't have my companion looking like something the farm cat mauled."

  Thus the lady made her decision with a "why ever not?" spirit, and a willingness to gamble, that Meg was soon to know well. And learn from.

  Her escape came not a moment too soon, for the rumors about her had begun to thicken. Folk said it was too much coincidence that both Dame Glossop and Doctor Woodruffe should have died so suddenly and the one person they had in common was Meg. The stories she liked to tell didn't help.

  "A girl with such a wicked mind is capable of anything," declared the spit-boy, John Jenkins, to anybody who would listen. And of the scar on her cheek he said, "Remember how the Good Lord marked Cain as a murderer."

  In a small place like Twytchel-on-the-Nene, where strangers were a rare sighting and the local residents themselves seldom had cause to travel farther than a few muddy miles in any direction, there was not much else to talk about other than who had died and how. Entertainment being in scant supply, imaginations were seldom put to use, minds dulled by the daily monotony. These, of course, were the same circumstances that lured an audience for her ghoulish stories. And now they were likely to send her to the gallows too.

  So she left that village without another thought, with only the frock she stood up in and her neck, of which she was rather fond, unbroken.

  * * * *

  Long-Legged Meg learned more than sleight of hand from her new mistress.

  "Above all things," that lady said to her, "gentlemen want to be admired. They want to be told that they are clever, handsome and amusing. But because they do not use their hearing as much as they use their sight, you must communicate your admiration without words. With your eyes, your smiles... and your hands."

  "My hands?" exclaimed the girl who had, while under Lady Kitty's tutelage, only learned how to use them for picking pockets. So far.

  Her mistress chuckled. "With your fan, my dear innocent Meg." She proceeded to teach her young maid how to manage the language of that most important of accessories. "I know how you like to tell ghost stories with your tongue. Think of your hands the same way. How can they— these fingers—draw a gentleman's attention, without being tactless or obvious? How can they conjure the effect you desire? With little gestures. Hints." She swirled her fan coyly and fluttered it, leaving only her eyes to speak for her. "Whispers that raise more than the hairs upon his arm."

  And so Meg learned, soaking up all Kitty Waddenhoe's wisdom, just as she once absorbed the inadvertent lessons of Master Cosgrove.

  Together the two women travelled back and forth across the country, staying in one place for no more than a handful of evenings, arriving at new destinations with considerable and colorful fanfare— as befitted a "famous delight of the Parisian and London theatre"— but often departing in the twilight hours.

  Sometimes, on dark, rainy, wind-lashed evenings, while Meg entertained with her stories in a tavern parlor, Lady Kitty took advantage of a rapt, huddled audience to slip her hand into a few pockets, sleeves, trunks and reticules.

  It became necessary for young Meg to learn even more ways of keeping the attention of her listeners, to draw them in deeper than ever. The ghostly yarn of the old lord, banging on the floorboards for his long-dead servant, was joined by more tales of morbid ill-luck, including a scullery maid killed by a stray ball thrown in a wild game of skittles, and an innkeeper's pregnant daughter who, jilted by her beloved on her wedding day, hanged herself and then returned to haunt the scene of her demise ever after. But Meg's favorite was the tale of an innocent farmer's wife, drawing water from the well one day, and rather than retrieving a bucket filled with water, finding it overflowing with blood instead. After which a headless corpse was discovered lurking in her well. Nobody knew how it got there, or even to whom the body belonged. And the head was never recovered.

  "But 'tis said," she always finished her tale with this lingering thought, "that the head of the drowned body is often seen in this place, by those who are guilty of some wicked sin they have yet to confess. It appears to them by moonlight, at the foot of their bed. And the bodiless head takes on the accusing features of one they have wronged."

  Inevitably those members of her audience nursing a guilty conscience in some matter, all looked the next day as if they had spent a sleepless night, sitting up watching a lit candle. Meg concluded she could have solved a great many crimes if she were in charge.

  Naturally these tales had to be embellished, not only with thudding noises that seemed to come from the ceiling, but with sinister groans from within the walls, and the grisly crack of bones breaking, accompanied by a slowly dripping echo. The necessary effects were brought about by Lady Kitty snapping a crisp carrot within a leather purse, rubbing a rusty nail on a piece of slate, or breaking an egg inside a small cheesecloth sack.

  All these tricks the actress had learned from her life on the stage, of course, where she had whittled herself a profitable career with very little actual talent, a great deal of enthusiasm, a fine bosom, and an ability to spot a lonely gentleman with plump pockets from fifty paces.

  Kitty Waddenhoe had enjoyed the company of many "protectors" and "patrons" from her audience on both sides of the English Channel, rich gentlemen who presented her with gifts aplenty while their fascination lasted. As a consequence, she was accustomed to living well, eating good food, drinking fine wine and wearing only the most exquisite lace and embroidered silks.

  "One should always be discerning, Meg. Do not settle for cheap wine, for the headache is much worse the next day. Expect nothing but the best for oneself. For if you do not, nobody else will either."

  The lady continued to expect only the most expensive of dinners and garments, even when new plays were scarce and patronage from wealthy gentlemen had dwindled. These were the hardscrabble times of which she had warned her new maid, when she was obliged to "harvest" valuables from their unsuspecting owners in order to afford her grand tastes.

  "It is their fault," she reasoned. "If not for gentlemen of their class nurturing in me an appreciation for the finer things in life and then dropping my company when it is no longer a pleasing diversion, or their wives return from the country, I would not be required to supplement my finances in such a manner, would I?"

  "Of
course not, madam," Meg replied, pretending she didn't see the gleam of wild and wicked delight in that lady's eyes whenever she'd had a successful evening's hunt in some crowded place.

  From her new mistress Meg also learned the art of grooming and dressing oneself. It was, she discovered, so much more than simply pulling on a clean, patched petticoat and washing her hair with scented water every so often. Of course, she had realized that clothes were important. It was, after all, Doctor Woodruffe's wig and his somber black coat that made him look as if he knew what he was doing, even when he had long-since forgotten, and possibly never knew. But until now Meg had only ever wanted to look respectable herself, not to stand out in any way. From "Lady" Kitty Waddenhoe she learned that a woman's appearance went much deeper than the garments in which she dressed. Meg had, so it seemed, completely underestimated the importance of maintaining her skin, nails, teeth and hair with a daily regime. All of these parts, so she gleaned from her mistress, made up the basis of a woman's armor. It was both her defense and her weaponry.

  "Trust me, girl, this is a battle. Every day, to stay fed, to stay alive."

  Meg did not need to be taught that. From her first knowing day, whenever it was that her brain clicked into working, she'd been aware, not only of the need to survive, but that it was entirely her responsibility to manage it. There was no one else to do it for her. They had barely managed to find her a name.

  From her new mistress she learned the importance of a woman's "toilette", the efficacy of elderflower water to keep a fresh complexion, and how a careful application of rice powder, and a delicate hand with the rouge, preserved a clear glow to one's face in the light of candles. Kitty was especially particular when it came to caring for teeth. She rinsed her mouth every morning and night with vinegar, rubbed them with a mixture of powdered sage and burnt rosemary ashes and cleaned between them with little wooden picks. She kept a jar of aniseed comfits to freshen her breath during the day, restocking her supply whenever she found them in towns such as London, Bath, and York.

  "Pleasantly scented breath, Meg, is more valuable to a woman than a gold ring on her finger. A woman needs her smile and her bite, so take care of your teeth."