#task001:secrets

(I have decided to do this task in a form of a letter! Enjoy.)

The letter came only days after Alexander’s death.

Miss Cassandra Eldridge,

     We have not spoken before now, and I do not wish to ever converse again unless it is absolutely necessary. I am Charles Hale, the son of the late Lord Hale and the only other surviving relative of my father.

     Let it be known: now that my father is dead and gone and has passed on to me the title of Lord, you are no longer welcome as a Hale. You are no longer welcome anywhere on the Hale estate and anywhere near my wife and I or our future children. 

     I could not say it while he was alive, but you were never wanted in this family. You are a fortune seeker and nothing like my mother, no where close to what my father deserved in his dying days, and a poor, pathetic excuse for a woman. In other terms, you are despised.

     In the year that you were married, my father spent nearly five hundred pounds on you alone. I expect that to be repaid to me in a years time; if not paid in full by then, I will add interest of five percent every month it continues to go unpaid. 

     In addition, I forbid you from using any courtesy title that may have been granted to you by marrying my father, and any title granted by his death as well. You will do this solely out of respect for my family, namely my late father and my wife, the new Lady Hale. She would be mortified to have any connection to you than she already has. (Out of the goodness of my heart, however, I will allow you to continue to be identified as Miss Hale. This is the only other name you may call yourself besides Miss Eldridge.)

     And, in case you were not informed, my father left no mention of you in his will. If you would like to dispute this statement, you can contact my lawyer and he will put you in your place. However, this means that you have no claim to anything in my father’s estate, and, if you refuse to follow my orders and compensate my family for your unnecessary expenses, I shall take you to court and have you imprisoned for debt.

Have a lovely day, Miss Eldridge.

Sincerely,

Lord Charles Hale

The moment she finished the letter, Cassandra burst into tears. 

She was done for. 

Samantha glanced around carefully before slipping into the library, shielding the candle in her hand to hide its glow from anyone who might be there. She had finished Romeo and Juliet, and now she needed to pick up something else. Maybe John Milton. The last guest had spent a solid two hours waxing poetic over his Paradise Lost, which did sound interesting. But his defense of free press also intrigued her. Maybe she would be lucky and they would be printed in the same book, otherwise she would have to wait on that defense. She only ever risked taking a single book at a time. Just in case.

To say that Samantha had secrets would be a touch overdramatic in her opinion. It was more she had plenty she didn’t see the point of sharing, and she had perfectly good reasons to keep it to herself. Added to the fact that if any of those aspects of herself did become common knowledge, it might adversely affect her chances in this household and the rest of her life.

All right, when it was phrased that way, it did sound uncomfortably like a secret. But it wasn’t the same.

It was just that the daughter of a Scottish thatcher and laundress wasn’t supposed to be able to become a maid in an English household, let alone dream any larger than that for herself. The first time she had mentioned to her older sister Amelia that she wanted to learn more books than just the Bible, leave the village, and maybe become a governess, Amelia had scoffed. ‘Don’t be daft Sammy, how are you supposed to do that? We don’t have the money for any of those fancy books, and no one is going to want to learn from someone who talks like us. You’ve seen their looks. Now help finish the chores so we can eat tonight.’

So in a way, that became the first secret. She pretended to her sister that she had given up on that idea and become focused on the same thing the people around her could imagine as a future. Then after everyone else had gone to bed, the tasks she set herself began. Three nights a week, she read from the family Bible until even the most unfamiliar words sounded easy in her mouth and mind. Three nights a week she stayed up going over the family account books to understand at least rudimentary maths and finances. The remaining night was spent scraping together every bit of spare wool and scrap of thread that could theoretically be spared to add whatever style she could to the one outfit she was saving for the day she left.

The hardest work she had to do came from that comment Amelia had made – no one wanted to learn from someone who sounded like her. The Scots had been part of the empire in name for hundreds of years, but even now, the Mckays were looked down on in their village for their clear heritage. She knew people considered Scots nothing but stupid, hot tempered, unreliable, drunk fighters, despite the fact that her family was built of hard working God-fearing folk. They were tolerated, but not respected in town. If Samantha wanted more than that, well, that meant no one else needed to know she was Scottish.

She told herself that she could use any position she earned to start to correct the dark perception of her people, but that was mostly to assuage any guilt she was feeling over what she was trying to do. Which was erase her accent. Countless hours of eavesdropping and practice went into erasing the most outlandish elements of her speech and polishing it into something like what her neighbors sounded like. By the time she arrived at Hudson Hall, she could easily pass as a lowborn English girl. Which she knew was one of the only reasons they had allowed her to gain the increasing responsibility she did instead of keeping her locked in the kitchen where she couldn’t interact with any of the guests.

Even now, after all these years, there are still times Samantha has to be careful not to let her accent betray her. When she becomes exceptionally angry or upset, her control begins to slip and the Scottish burr starts to become more pronounced. Usually, just hearing that is enough to have her calming down and gaining a better control over herself. But there’s a small part of her that can’t help wondering if someday she’ll be forced to end this charade because she slipped in front of the wrong person.

But the beauty of being here was that she finally had access to the books her heart craved. Working as a maid, she had slowly eased herself into being in the position of taking on most of the library duties. Which meant she had the time to look at the books, and she could reasonably justify being there if anyone asked. At first, it had been hard to know where to start because the sheer volume of them had been overwhelming. But time and persistence had taught her why they were organized the way they were, and where best to start.

Before long, she was sneaking books back to her room and hiding them under the mattress in order to read them at her leisure. Carefully, she took notes in a journal she had acquired for that purpose, keeping track of unfamiliar words, thoughts about the material, and any connections she could make to the real world. Occasionally she would be nearby when an intellectual came to visit, and she drank in everything they said and took notes, using that to shape what she paid attention to the next time she read. Someday she was going to be able to converse on their level. Then other people would sneak around, hoping to be able to listen to her.

Actually, she had heard of Lord Hudson allowing some of the staff to use his library, but every person she’d heard about was a man. Not a woman. So for Samantha, it was far better to keep her borrowing and her study a secret, because as long as it was, no one was able to tell her she wasn’t allowed or would think of firing her. It was also possible that what she was doing was completely fine, but she wouldn’t take the chances.

It was the opening of Bedford College that shifted her dream and solidified what she wanted out of life. A university. A women’s university with female teachers and female students, learning and engaging in the arts and sciences. A woman’s place where she wouldn’t have to be in service, and no one would expect her to marry and be satisfied with that. Before, a governess had been the highest she’d been able to dream, but that was just because she hadn’t been exposed to more. Now that she had, her dreams had gotten so much bigger.

All she needed was to find some way to earn the tuition for herself so she could become a student. From there, the world was bound to open up to her in the way she craved, and she could prove herself enough to be accepted as a member of the faculty. Then she wouldn’t ever need to be subject to the whims of the aristocracy again. She would be intelligent, respected, accountable to no one but herself and the other educated women she worked with. Maybe she could even publish her own work and start to expand the bounds of knowledge, truly leaving her mark on the world. No one was going to forget the name of Samantha Mckay. And no one would connect her back to that poor Scottish thatcher’s daughter. She would have finally, truly, remade herself.

It might have been nearly a decade since she had been here last, but as she had already discovered, so much hadn’t changed. That included the schedule the servants kept for maintaining the house when company was here. Which meant she knew the best to go in order to be alone with her thoughts, and that was the one thing she needed most desperately at the moment. She had hoped it would be enough to be around other people, greet the familiar faces, and feel like the adult she supposedly was. But the memories wouldn’t leave her alone.

Ellen was here. In this house. Catherine hadn’t seen her yet, but it only took a few discrete questions to confirm that she was still working here. In fact, she had risen all the way to the status of cook, which was impressive but unsurprising. She had always been dedicated. And she’d loved to cook. Too many nights to count had seen Catherine sneaking down to the kitchens, hoping to get a glass of warm milk or something to help her sleep because she had spent the last two hours tossing and turning, only to find that Ellen was already there, waiting for her with it ready. They would talk until Catherine grew sleepy. Sometimes, she would give the girl a snack to try and settle her, eyes twinkling as if she was committing some indiscretion by feeding this upstairs guest in the dead of night.

Eventually, those frequent late night milk and snack breaks morphed into something more. It was Ellen who knew about the long hours she spent perfecting every aspect of being an accomplished young woman, just as she was the one who knew that sometimes Catherine’s panic over every mistake could keep her shaking until the early hours of the morning. Ellen knew that Catherine’s favorite way to relax was to sew and embroider, and before long, she would sneak some of the servant’s mending to Catherine so she could do it as they spoke. It satisfied her to think she could lighten the load a little for all of the hard working servants, and that she could do something useful with her time for once.

By the time she’d become a teenager, Ellen had already become her best friend in the world, despite all the reasons it should never work. For a woman who spent every other waking moment stressing over how to be ‘the perfect lady’, this exceptionally close relationship was the only sign of the rebellion that was already brewing in her heart.

Then came that fateful night, right before the start of the Season. Catherine had been talking about how baffled she was by some of her agemates and how much time they spent talking about marriage. They would giggle over some man, tease each other over imaginary sweethearts, swoon and fan themselves as if this was something real they were reacting to. A few times, she even saw some of them blushing over the comments, as if this was something that really mattered to them. Of course, Catherine did her best to act the same. After all, maybe it was something you acted out until the feelings genuinely started to develop. She would talk herself into infatuation after infatuation, but all of them faded soon enough, and it wasn’t hard to look back and think that she hadn’t felt much. But she enjoyed these moments of closeness and connection with her female friends. So she tried to make that enough.

It was only to Ellen that she confided the secret growing fear. What if the other women did actually feel what they said they felt, and they weren’t just pretending? If that was the case, why didn’t Catherine?

Was she as broken as she’d always feared?

There had been a curious light in the woman’s eyes at that statement, but Catherine hadn’t understood it. Not exactly. She was too busy trying to be bright and interesting, someone Ellen could see as an adult and an equal instead of the child she had helped to comfort and take care of for so long. It was if this time, Catherine didn’t think she could just be the friend Ellen remembered when she left, but as if she needed to impress her in some way so she would still be friendly and interested by the time Catherine could come back again – after all, they had no way to communicate in between visits. Not without attracting unnecessary attention which would crash back on Ellen even as it left Catherine with the kind of parental scrutiny she had spent her life trying to avoid.

Then there was a moment. A moment when they were looking at each other, and it felt like something shifted inside Catherine. Maybe she moved first, maybe Ellen did, or maybe it was something mutual, but after a moment, their lips met. And it was perfect. It felt like a sun rising inside her to fill her body with a gentle warmth, an unquestionable rightness. It was the answer to a question she hadn’t even known she was asking. Time spilled out slowly as they gently explored each other’s lips. Catherine would have been willing to stay there forever, but the sound of a door slamming in the distance had both of them jerking away from each other. And back to reality.

Soon after, her family left the hall and she hasn’t been back since. But that kiss with Ellen had done more than open her eyes to new feelings about the woman she had grown up around, it had opened her eyes to the other women around her as well. Suddenly it didn’t feel as innocent when she watched another woman’s laugh and couldn’t resist a smile. She couldn’t hide from herself that small warmth when she held another woman’s hand. And no matter how desperately she tried to recapture that feeling with the suitors that paraded themselves in front of her, it just wasn’t there.

As she walked through the castle, there was a part of her that ached incessantly to see Ellen again. To talk with her, and recapture a little of that special bond that had sustained her for so long. To know that on one of her sleepless nights when her thoughts wouldn’t stop circling, she could go downstairs and talk about anything and everything that was on her mind with the one person who never seemed to judge her for her mistakes. The one person who had made her feel like she was enough, even if she wasn’t perfect. The one person who’s kiss she hadn’t been able to stop dreaming about, no matter how much time had passed, and wondering with something approaching an unholy hunger what it would be like to kiss her again.

The other part of her was terrified to see Ellen again. Ellen was the one person who could make her want things other than what she had, and also imagine that they might be possible. She was the kind of person who could hear Catherine talk wistfully about wanting to go out into the garden and spin wild circles in the night air until she was so dizzy she could fall asleep and push her into doing it. She could make Catherine laugh until her sides ached, even as they tried desperately to muffle themselves so no one else would catch them. She would ask hard questions about what Catherine wanted out of life, not for her family, but for herself. As a child, Catherine hadn’t had any answers. She had even fewer now.

Because there was a small treacherous part of herself that wanted to follow in Elizabeth’s footsteps. A part of her that wanted to be able to say to the world ‘Damn your expectations and damn your judgements, I’m going to do what’s right for me.’ A part of her that wanted to look at herself in the mirror, and feel like enough. For once. A part of her that didn’t want to worry about being the perfect lady, and instead wanted to find out what it was like to be happy. Happy not for a brief stolen moment, but for a lifetime.

Of course, it was completely impossible. She was a Bakesley. She was a woman. She had no income of her own, and she would need to rely on her husband to support her into her old age, and potentially support her sister if Elizabeth didn’t marry or inherit the Hudson estate. Her parents expected her to make a satisfactory marriage and prove to the world that they had raised their daughter well, even if she couldn’t be the son they had actually wanted. All of which meant that any sort of rebellion in general, and pining over the soft lips of a woman in particular, were completely out of the question.