Above the Bay of Angels: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR RHYS BOWEN

  “Thoroughly entertaining.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Keep[s] readers deeply involved until the end.”

  —Portland Book Review

  “Entertainment mixed with intellectual intrigue and realistic setting[s] for which Bowen has earned awards and loyal fans.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “[A] master of her genre.”

  —Library Journal

  “Masterful weaving of these tales builds a nuanced, thematic portrayal of the inherent strengths of women.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  “Will grab you from the first page.”

  —San Diego Entertainer

  “An author with a distinctive flair for originality and an entertaining narrative storytelling style that will hold the reader’s rapt attention from beginning to end.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  ALSO BY RHYS BOWEN

  In Farleigh Field

  The Tuscan Child

  The Victory Garden

  What Child Is This

  CONSTABLE EVANS MYSTERIES

  Evans Above

  Evan Help Us

  Evanly Choirs

  Evan and Elle

  Evan Can Wait

  Evans to Betsy

  Evan Only Knows

  Evan’s Gate

  Evan Blessed

  Evanly Bodies

  MOLLY MURPHY MYSTERIES

  Murphy’s Law

  Death of Riley

  For the Love of Mike

  In Like Flynn

  Oh Danny Boy

  In Dublin’s Fair City

  Tell Me, Pretty Maiden

  In a Gilded Cage

  The Last Illusion

  Bless the Bride

  Hush Now, Don’t You Cry

  The Family Way

  City of Darkness and Light

  The Edge of Dreams

  Away in a Manger

  Time of Fog and Fire

  The Ghost of Christmas Past

  ROYAL SPYNESS MYSTERIES

  Her Royal Spyness

  A Royal Pain

  Royal Flush

  Royal Blood

  Naughty in Nice

  The Twelve Clues of Christmas

  Heirs and Graces

  Queen of Hearts

  Malice at the Palace

  Crowned and Dangerous

  On Her Majesty’s Frightfully Secret Service

  Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding

  Love and Death Among the Cheetahs

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Janet Quin-Harkin, writing as Rhys Bowen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542008266 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542008263 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542008259 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542008255 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First edition

  This book is dedicated to the real Mary Crozier. While not a marquise, she has a house almost as lovely as the villa in Nice, and she gives the most amazing tea parties.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  London, September 1896

  If Helen Barton hadn’t stepped out in front of an omnibus, I might still be sweeping floors and lighting fires at an ostentatious house in St John’s Wood. But for once I had followed my father’s advice.

  “Carpe diem” was one of my father’s favourite sayings. Seize the day. Take your chances. He usually added “because that might be the only chance you get.” He spoke from experience. He was an educated man from a good family, and had known better times. As the son of a second son, he could expect to inherit neither a title nor the property that would have come with it, and was sent out to India to make something of himself, becoming an officer in the Bengal Lancers. He had married my mother, a sweet and delicate creature he met on one of his visits home. It was soon clear that she couldn’t endure the harsh conditions of Bengal, so Daddy had been forced to resign his commission and return to live in England.

  From what Daddy told us, it had been made evident to him as a young man that he could expect no financial help from his uncle, the earl. He never told us why, or what rift had occurred within his family, but he was clearly bitter about it. However, he had finally fallen on his feet in a way and had acquired what was considered a prestigious position: he was in charge of guest relations at the Savoy, London’s new luxury hotel. His ability to speak good French and mingle with crowned heads had made him popular at the hotel. He had patted the hands of elderly Russian countesses and arranged roulette parties for dashing European princes, for which he received generous tips. We had lived quite happily in the small town of Hampstead, on the northern fringes of London. My younger sister Louisa and I attended a private school. We had a woman who came to clean and cook for us. It was not an extravagant life, but a pleasant one.

  Until it all came crashing down when the demon drink overcame my father. He worked at an establishment where the alcohol flowed freely amongst the guests. When invited, he took a glass, as it would have been rude to refuse. So who would notice if he later finished off a bottle?

  I remember the first time he came home drunk.

  “Roddy, where have you been?” my mother asked him when he arrived home at ten o’clock. “We waited dinner for you. I was worried.”

  “None of your business, woman.” He spat out the words.

  My mother winced as if he had struck her. My little sister grabbed my hand. We had never seen our father like this. He was normally so amiable and adored my mother.

  “Roddy, have you been drinking?” Mummy said coldly.

  “Just being sociable with the clients. Part of the job, don’t you know,” he said. Then he added, his voice rising aggressively, “I have to work for my living, or have you forgotten that? After all, it was because of you that I had to give up my commission in India and take a menial job bowing and scraping to those who should be my equals. Now where’s my dinner?”

  I saw my mother’s horrified stare as
she blinked back tears. After that day nothing was the same. It felt as if we were walking on eggshells. We never knew when he’d come home or what kind of mood he’d be in. Sometimes he was as jovial and affectionate as ever, but other times it was as if he’d turned into a monster I didn’t recognize. Louisa and I spent a lot of time hiding away in our bedroom. Mummy tried hard at first, begging him to stop drinking and think of his family, but nothing she said reached him, and in the end she just seemed to give up and fade like a wilting flower. She had never been strong to begin with.

  I suppose we had all been dreading what happened next. My father arrived home in the middle of the afternoon announcing that he had been dismissed from his job. “All because of some stupid Russian woman who said she’d seen my helping myself to a little sip from a bottle of Scotch. They took her word against mine. Can you believe it? Who’d want to work at a place like that? I’m well rid of it.”

  “But Roddy, what will we do?” my mother asked. “How will we pay the rent?”

  “I’ll find something else, don’t you worry,” he said breezily. “A chap like me—I’ll be snapped up in no time at all.”

  But he wasn’t. He tried in vain to find another position, but without a reference no respectable establishment wanted him. We watched him sink lower and lower into depression and drunkenness. We gave up our servant. I tried to be grown-up and take over the housework as Mummy seemed to have no energy for even the most basic of tasks. Daddy seemed genuinely concerned for her, but it didn’t stop his visits to the public house.

  It was a bitter winter that year, and the price of coal had gone up. We spent our evenings around the kitchen table where the stove provided warmth. Mummy developed a nasty cough. I thought she should see a doctor, but Daddy dismissed the idea. “It’s just a bad cold, Bella. Your mother always likes to dramatize things, you know that.”

  It might have started as a cold, but it turned into pneumonia, and three days later she was dead. I couldn’t believe she was gone. Neither could my father. “My precious darling Winnie,” he said. “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.” And he actually wept. He and Louisa and I hugged each other while the tears flowed. My mother was a genteel and sweet person who adored my father. They said she died of pneumonia, but I think it was of a broken heart.

  We moved to a squalid two-room flat above a butcher’s shop, with only cold water and an outside lavatory. Father occasionally picked up work writing letters for the illiterate, tutoring in French, but nothing kept the wolf far from the door. I suppose I had no idea how bad our situation really was until one day, just before my fifteenth birthday, he announced he had found a position for me. I was to leave the school that I adored and become a servant in a big house, so that I’d earn money to feed father and Louisa and someone else would have to feed and clothe me. I was more than shocked. I was mortified. We might not have been rich, but I was from a good family.

  “A servant? You want me to be a servant?” I could hardly stammer the words.

  “I feel as terrible about it as you do, my darling child,” he said, “but the truth is that I can’t afford to feed you. We’ll be out on the street if someone doesn’t pay the rent, and I can’t seem to find a position. So your sister and I are relying on you at this moment.”

  I wanted to shout at him, to tell him that we might have enough money to scrape by if he didn’t visit the public house so frequently, but I’d been brought up to be the good child, to obey my parents. I was doubly shocked when I found out that the house where I would be sent to work belonged to a nouveau riche man who had made money in the garment business. His factories turned out cheap blouses for working girls. He and his wife were loudmouthed and commonly ostentatious.

  I stood outside, staring up at the gables and turrets of an incredibly ugly house. “Daddy, please don’t make me do this,” I pleaded. “Not a servant to these people. I realize I must leave school, but there must be something else I can do.”

  “It’s only for a short while, Bella,” he said, patting my hand. “I promise you as soon as I’m on my feet again I’ll bring you home. Until then you are helping to make sure that your little sister does not starve.”

  What could I say to that? I realized then that he had always been a great manipulator, using his charm to get my mother to agree with whatever scheme he had in mind at that moment.

  So I went to work for Mr and Mrs Tilley at the ugly house in St John’s Wood. They kept a butler, a parlour maid, a footman, two housemaids, a cook and a scullery maid. As the lowest housemaid, I was responsible for rising at five in the morning, lighting the copper and the stove, then carrying heavy scuttles of coal to the bedrooms to make sure that the family awoke to warmth. It was backbreaking, soul-destroying work. I had to share a bed with Poppy, the scullery maid, in a freezing attic room. Mercifully I was so tired that I fell asleep instantly every night. It felt like a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake up.

  Then one day Mrs Tilley was entertaining. She liked to entertain frequently: coffee mornings and tea parties and extravagant dinners. All of these events meant extra work for us servants. We went through a frenzy of polishing silverware, making sure there wasn’t a speck of dust on the mahogany table that seated thirty and, in my case, ensuring that the fires were supplied with enough coal to keep them burning brightly. On this occasion it was a tea party. Cook had been baking all morning: scones and sponge cakes and shortbreads so that the kitchen was full of wonderful aromas. And all afternoon she had been making little tea sandwiches—cucumber, egg and cress, smoked salmon. After Elsie, the parlour maid, had gone up to the drawing room with the tea things, Cook noticed that she had forgotten to put the macaroons on to the tray. She thrust them into my hands. “Quick. Take them up before Mrs T notices, or there will be hell to pay,” she said.

  I ran out of the kitchen with the dish, up the stone steps and through the green baize door that separated the servants from the real world. Female voices were coming from the drawing room. I crept in. Elsie had already put the tray on the trolley and was pouring tea. I hesitated, unsure what to do next, when Mrs Tilley spotted me.

  “What do you want, girl?” she asked.

  “I’ve brought the macaroons, ma’am,” I said. “They weren’t quite ready when Elsie carried up the tray.”

  She heard my refined accent and frowned. “Are you trying to ape your betters, girl?” Her own accent still carried an undercurrent of her East End upbringing.

  “No, ma’am. I’ve always spoken this way. My father was a gentleman.”

  “Then what in God’s name are you doing here?” one of the other ladies asked.

  “My mother died. My father became too ill to work, and I need to support my little sister,” I replied. “There are not many jobs available to a fifteen-year-old.”

  “You poor child,” the woman said. “Life can be cruel.”

  Then she took a cream puff from the plate and bit into it. “You’ll never believe what I heard about Sylvia,” she said, her upper lip now lined with a delicate moustache of cream.

  “Do tell.” The ladies leaned forward. And I was instantly forgotten.

  You might have thought that my lot would have improved after that moment. It did, but only slightly. I still had to get up early to light the fires, but when Mrs Tilley was entertaining, she’d make sure I served them in the drawing room. “Her father was an aristocrat,” she’d say in a stage whisper. “Her parents died. I took her in, poor little thing.”

  I’d stand there like a statue, determined to keep my face a mask of stone to show them I didn’t care. I wanted these self-satisfied, patronizing ladies to know that whatever they said they could never break me. “One day,” I would whisper to myself. I wasn’t sure what I meant by it. Only that if I could just hang on long enough, then I’d find a way to escape. And I’d make something of my life.

  The only good thing about the Tilley household was that Mr and Mrs Tilley loved to eat. They ate very well. So well that I was able to take ho
me leftovers to Daddy and Louisa on my afternoon off every week. My father loved his food. He would have been a gourmet if we could have afforded it and spoke fondly about banquets he had attended, as well as Indian feasts, country picnics, Christmas at the family seat. His eyes would light up when he saw my weekly offerings, wrapped in a clean napkin.

  “My, my,” Daddy would say. “Roast pheasant. That takes me back to my childhood. I remember a banquet with the old earl once. We’d been out shooting. I’d bagged a couple of pheasants. My God, they were good. And smoked salmon. My dear, you are a miracle worker, a lifesaver.”

  He’d take my hands and gaze up at me adoringly, the way he used to look at my mother. I’d try to smile back at him, although I wanted to scream. I wanted to shout at him, “Your childhood was full of banquets. Do you know what mine is like? Have you ever scrubbed floors so that your hands are raw? Or lugged coal up four flights of stairs? You have no idea what you are putting me through.” But he had become so thin and pale that I couldn’t say anything to hurt him. He had called me a miracle worker, a lifesaver, and I think I really believed to begin with that I could make him well again if I brought home enough good food to fatten him up. I tried to find bottles hidden around the flat and dispose of them. After a while, however, I realized it was hopeless. He was going to drink himself into the grave. I knew I had to stay where I was, enduring Mrs Tilley, until Louisa could be somehow taken care of.

  Mrs Tilley boasted about having the best cook in London. “I lured her away from titled people,” she used to say. “It’s true what they say, you know. Money talks. I pay her much more than she was getting. And I’m told we have the best table for miles around.”

  We also ate well in the kitchen, and I found that I had inherited my father’s palate and appreciation of good food. Our cuisine at home had always been rather basic, even in the days when we had a cook, and I became fascinated with the process of creating such wonderful flavours. “Show me how you made that parsley sauce, those meringues, that oyster stew,” I’d say to Mrs Robbins, the cook. And if she had a minute to spare, she would show me. After a while, seeing my willingness as well as my obvious aptitude for cooking, she suggested to Mrs Tilley that her old legs were not up to standing for hours any more and that she needed an assistant cook. And she requested me. Mrs Tilley agreed, but only if she didn’t have to pay me more money and I should still be available to do my party piece whenever she entertained.