The Ladie Upstairs, Jessie Elland (Extract)
Scullery drudge Ann longs to become a lady's maid. Ann can't quite remember how or when she arrived at the grand Ropner Hall, but she loathes spending her days toiling in the dank kitchen.
When a chance meeting with Ropner's Lady Charlotte leads to the opportunity to become her personal maid, Ann is convinced she has finally escaped her own version of hell. But has she? As Ann's new life above stairs takes a sinister twist, will it turn out that the terrors lurking there are worse than the devils she knows below?
Jessie Elland's deeply visceral debut is a dark and twisted tale of ambition and desire. Are you brave enough to enter Ropner Hall?
The sky was marmalade, and the many eyes of Ropner Hall splintered and reflected it back on itself in all its blazing glory. Ropner’s grounds yawned and the river stretched around them like a noose. It was a squat beast. Stony and stern, immobile but immortal, important because it is the only constant. And the story begins here, with the sugared sky, in the depths of Ropner where Petra decided to let herself be fucked by the footman.
Ann always felt, always knew, that fucking was for pigs. It was dirty and involved too much skin and was coloured a screaming pink or an evil dripping brown. ‘It feels good and it dun’t hurt anyone,’ Petra had said. ‘Except for if he tried ram it up where he shouldn’t. But if you tell her, I’ll come for you in the night. I’ll cover your head with your blanket and stick pins where I know your eyes are and curse you to be a mute like Rachel.’ Petra was going to burn in hell.
That stupid bitch’s skin would fissure into leather slices of pork crackling and even the tiny hairs on her arms would twist into burning orange worms. Petra would roast until there was nothing left but chalky ash that would draw itself back into her shape and burn all over again for all eternity. (God willing.)
Ann and Petra shared a room. It was cramped even by the standards of the servants, their thin beds abreast and almost touching. The peeling ceiling sloped sharply to kiss the headboards, and at night when the stub of their candle was snuffed and Mrs Hardy, the housekeeper, had locked them in, the room was pitch black. Ann didn’t know where Petra got it, or even when; none of the servants ever left the grounds.
Still, she knew Petra had a second key made or stolen because that was how the footman got in. The footman was Scarecrowfootman; tall and thin with yellow hair thatched over his head like straw. He had a crooked look, with gaps in his teeth that he whistled at the women through, and a slouch about him as well, as if he had been pecked in the field for too long and the frost had got to him and all his straw was spilling out. He was odious and lecherous and foul. All his badness had taken to his skin like a hatchet and disfigured his face with pockmarks. Ann hoped, very sourly, that it hurt him. That his skin itched so furiously that he would one day be overcome with the urge to scratch and scratch and scratch until he bled to death. That unpleasant beast tramped along the servants’ garrets every night. The vile creature would steal out his secret second key and twist open the heavy door Mrs Hardy had only just locked to leak into Ann and
Petra’s room like gas and soil it all over with sin.
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