Plain Jane Read Free Page B

He made a move to the scullery door, but, as he did so, the door swung open and Lizzie staggered over the threshold. Bright blood spurted from a vein in her wrist and her eyes were wild with fear.
    ‘Gad’s ’Oonds!’ cried the officer.
    Rainbird snatched out his handkerchief, seized a wooden spoon, and twisted a tourniquet around the top of Lizzie’s arm. ‘What happened, girl?’ he demanded, forgetting their peril in this new fright.
    ‘I was in the Green Park,’ whispered Lizzie through white lips, ‘and I slipped and fell in the snow and cut my wrist on a broken wine bottle.’
    ‘We will get her to St George’s Hospital,’ said Alice, coming forward into the light. ‘You will help us, Captain.’ She said it as a statement, not as a request. The captain looked at the golden wings of Alice’s hair shining under her crisp cap, at the slow rise and fall of her beautiful bosom, at the creamy skin of her face, and the wide cerulean blue of her eyes.
    The deer was forgotten. Orders were barked out. A hackney carriage was brought to the door outside. Rainbird picked Lizzie’s frail body up in his arms, cursing softly under his breath as he carried her up the stairs.
    Joseph followed, digging his hand in the pocket of his livery. He brought out a lace and cambric handkerchief and looked at it longingly. It was his dearest treasure. Then he leant over Lizzie where she lay back in a corner of the hackney and held out the handkerchief. ‘For you, Lizzie,’ he said in a low voice. He leaned forward and kissed her thin, white cheek.
    Now Lizzie had harboured a secret love for the tall footman since the first day she had started work at Number 67. ‘Thank you, Mr Joseph,’ she whispered, taking the handkerchief and putting it in her bosom.
    The captain was to say long afterwards that he had never seen such a brave servant girl. She had smiled dreamily while a surgeon at St George’s had stitched her wound. So transfigured by happiness did she look that an old lady at the hospital fell to her knees in awe, thinking Lizzie was a dying girl on the threshold of heaven.
    The snow was falling thick and fast as they put Lizzie to bed in one of the best bedrooms upstairs. Palmer would not venture out on such a night, and Lizzie, who had cut her own wrist to save them all, must have only the best.
    Then a terrified Dave, who had not the faintest idea of what had been going on, had to be rescued from the chimney. He was sobbing with fatigue, having hung onto the rungs with the weight of the carcase on his back for some two hours.
    ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Angus,’ said Rainbird severely to the cook. ‘Two children nigh dead over your folly.’
    ‘Aye, weel, you’ll sing a different tune when ye’ve all got a bit of roast venison inside,’ said the unrepentant cook, untying the deer from Dave’s back.
    ‘Lizzie saved us all,’ said Mrs Middleton. ‘God bless her.’
    Rainbird sighed wearily as the snow whispered at the area windows, which were set high up in the wall. ‘It is so cold,’ he said. ‘We have nothing to make a fire, Angus. Do you expect us to eat that animal raw?’
    ‘I cannae dae everything,’ said the cook sulkily.
    ‘They had coal delivered next door today,’ said Dave, recovering from all his shocks with his usual resilience. ‘Sacks and sacks o’ it, straight dahn the coal ’ole in big shiny lumps.’
    Rainbird’s eyes sharpened. ‘Lizzie must have heat,’ he said. ‘
We
must have heat.’ He sat for a few moments in brooding silence. He looked round at the servants who, with the exception of Lizzie, were all sitting about, made listless by the intense cold.
    ‘No one must ever steal anything again,’ he said, ‘but there is no harm in
borrowing
. Now, as we were returning from the hospital you must have noticed that Lord Charteris next door was leaving for the country with all his staff. That means the house is empty.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Joseph, looking at