By The Sea, Book One: Tess Read Online Free PDF Page B

or pack a trunk full
of a lady's needs for a weekend. She spent the next few days under
Marie's sometimes offhand tutelage, carefully noting Miss
Cornelia's habits, from the time she preferred to be awakened to
the temperature of her bath water and her favorite kind of tea.
    Tess turned her mistress's wardrobe inside
out, marveling at the superb craftsmanship in the gowns from Paris,
brushing the satin boots with a light and loving touch. By the end
of the week she had memorized the contents of the French provincial
armoires that lined Cornelia Winward's dressing room. Miss Cornelia
herself, intensely vain, had shown a keen interest in Tess's
discreet suggestions for improving the cut or fit of one or two of
her gowns, and by week's end had gone so far as to assert to her
mother that Tess was the best lady's maid in Newport and that it
was too, too bad that plain Gertrude Vanderbilt was not lucky
enough to have Tess's good services for her coming-out party the
following week.
    Tess was dazzled. Only in her most far-flung
dreams had she imagined being privy to the nonstop glamour that
marked a Newport debutante's life. The laundry room might have been
a million miles away from the mistresses' bedrooms. Tess had been
often bored and always skeptical when the footmen and housemaids
sat around the servants' hall exchanging garbled and inaccurate
gossip about their masters and mistresses. But when Miss Cornelia
and her older sister Isabel excitedly compared notes after a ball
while their maids carefully removed the diamond tiaras from their
heads, well—it did seem to Tess that the gossip was much more
accurate. Besides, holding a tiara encrusted with diamonds and
pearls, if ever so briefly, brought home to her the idea of
boundless wealth far more dramatically than did carelessly spilled
port on priceless damask.
    Late at night, after Tess helped Marie to
see their young mistress comfortably to her bed, she would return
to the garret room that she would be sharing with Maggie for so
little longer and pour wonderful gossip into her sister’s ear.
Maggie would be lulled into a respite from her racking, painful
cough and into sleep, often with a dreamy smile on her lips. And
then Tess would ease her arm out from under Maggie's head and creep
silently over to her own bed, and next to it she would sprinkle a
handful of rice on the floor and kneel on it.
    "Dear Mother Mary, let Maggie get well," she
would pray as the little grains cut into her skin. "Don't let me
forget those I love best. Don't let me be jealous of a life I was
not born to live, or abandon those who gave me the life I have.
Make me remember. Amen." And then she would say a rosary, sometimes
only half-consciously, before she swept up the little grains of
rice with her hand into a box and fell exhausted into a deep, short
sleep.

Chapter 4
     
    Cornelia stood in the doorway of her
mother's bedroom and stamped her foot. "No! I will not have my maid
turning out beds for stupid guests. Isabel gets to keep a maid all
to herself. Why can't I have Tess?"
    "Because, darling," Tess heard Mrs. Winward
say from within, "you have two. Once Marie leaves, you can
have Tess all to yourself. But for now we're dreadfully
short-handed, and if Tess doesn't mind doing the guestrooms, I
don't see why you should."
    "Because it's embarrassing, mother!
How would you like it if your maid cleaned out the
slops of ... of some perfect stranger!"
    "Tess cleans out your slops,
darling," Mrs. Winward said with a tolerant smile in her voice.
    "Oh mother, that's perfectly different!"
Cornelia said in a tragic voice, and she spun on her heel and
marched unseeing past Tess, who was on her way to the opposite wing
to turn out the Blue Room.
    Tess was behind schedule, of course. Back in
Wrexham Lady Meller had been fond of saying, "An hour lost in the
morning has to be run after all day," and that was exactly what
Tess was doing. She'd gotten up before dawn to do what she could in
the laundry to ease the