A Woman of Substance. Barbara Taylor Bradford

In the sudden conflagration her face was illuminated. A small frown now creased her brow and her cheerful expression was obliterated, as she remembered with clarity and bitterness what her life had been like without that timetable.

      On that day, early in February, when Polly had been struck down and forced to take to her bed, Emma had resignedly accepted the fact that she had to do Polly’s work as well as her own. She knew she had no alternative. Strong of constitution and basically optimistic of nature, she had scurried about the Hall like a demon and with immense energy, telling herself that Polly would be up and about the next day and well enough to do her own work again. But this had not happened. Emma was suddenly burdened with the whole load of domestic chores seemingly for an indefinite period. She soon became overwhelmed by her innumerable duties and acutely nervous about completing them efficiently.

      Those first few days she had been bone tired at the end of every day, for she started working at six o’clock in the morning and barely stopped for breath, let alone a rest, until she finished at seven in the evening. By then she was almost always too weary to eat her supper and, in fact, it had usually taken a supreme effort of will and the last ounce of her strength to crawl up the attic stairs to her room. White and shaking and speechless with exhaustion, she had hardly had the energy to undress, and she invariably dropped on to the uncomfortable little bed in a dim and mindless stupor. She would fall into a heavy and stupefied sleep at once, and yet she never felt refreshed when she awakened the next day. Her back and shoulders still ached, her eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue, her arms and legs were like leaden weights, and her hands were sore and raw.

      As she had shiveringly dressed in the cold attic room and washed in the icy water from the washbowl, she had seethed with a fulminating anger she found hard to quell. Yet she did not dare to complain for fear of reprisals from Murgatroyd or, even worse, dismissal. Daily, she dragged her weary body through that mausoleum of a house, up and down the many stairs, along the winding corridors, across the great hall and larger rooms, dusting, polishing, sweeping, black-leading grates, stoking fires, making beds, cleaning silver, ironing linens, and taking care of Adele Fairley’s needs as well. And as she did, she often wondered how long she could continue without collapsing. This thought terrified her even more and made her grit her teeth and marshal her diminishing energies, for the money she earned was so desperately needed at home. She could not afford to collapse, for the sake of her family, and so she pushed herself almost beyond endurance, propelled by sheer force of will power and sustained by the icy terror of losing her job.

      One morning, after about a week of this backbreaking toil, Emma was cleaning the carpet in the drawing room, rushing up and down and across the immense expanse of florid flowers and arabesques entwined in oriental convolutions, the carpet sweeper a dangerous weapon in her hands as she handled it with force and a certain abandon. As she had raced to and fro, a staggering thought entered her mind and it so amazed Emma it brought her to a standstill in the middle of a clump of purple rosettes. She leaned on the carpet sweeper, totally absorbed in her thoughts, and slowly a look of absolute comprehension crossed her face. Emma had just realized that the cleaning and care of Fairley Hall was difficult to manage because it not only was badly planned but was downright muddled. At that moment, it also struck her that this was due to Murgatroyd’s poor organization and his haphazard distribution of the work. Lots of minor jobs were repeated daily, and unnecessarily so, and too much time was wasted on them because of Murgatroyd’s pernickety fussing about trivialities. Then again, major jobs such as cleaning the silver, ironing the mountains of washing, and dusting the panelling in the library were all jammed together to be completed in one day. It was not possible for one person to accomplish all of this work properly, and also attend to the general chores which had to be done the same day. But there was a solution and it had come to Emma in a flash, as she had stood poised with the carpet sweeper in the centre of the drawing room floor. It was a solution so simple she was surprised no one else had ever thought of it. The solution was planning. She suddenly knew that if the work was planned properly and systematically, in a sensible way, and distributed more intelligently, it would be easier to manage. Of this she was absolutely confident, and the more she thought about it, the more convinced she had become.

      In an effort to make some sense out of this muddled daily routine, Emma began to time herself at each job, and then scribbled down the amount of time each one took on a scrap of paper culled from the wastepaper basket in the library. She next made a list of all the daily chores, plus the major tasks for the entire week. For several nights thereafter, as exhausted as she was, Emma had forced herself to stay awake as she wrestled with the problem. She had studied her piece of paper assiduously, pondered over each chore and the time involved, and then she had set about creating her own special work plan. She first distributed the heavier work more evenly, staggering the jobs that were complicated or time-consuming over the whole week, so that they were easier to handle along with the daily routine. She also allocated a given amount of time to each specific chore, ruthlessly cutting corners with the less important ones for expediency’s sake. Satisfied at last that she had made a semblance of sense out of what had previously been a hopeless muddle, she had copied her makeshift plan on a less grubby piece of paper and had hurried excitedly to show it to Cook, well pleased with herself and also vastly relieved. If the new routine was followed precisely the work could be accomplished in a more orderly and practical fashion, to the benefit of everyone.

      To Emma’s amazement Cook had not only been thunderstruck but had thrown a temperamental fit that was unprecedented, and had gone on to warn her, in the most dire terms, of Murgatroyd’s most certain and deadly wrath at such unthinkable and unwarranted cheekiness, her plump red face clouded with worry and also alarm. Only then did Emma recognize the magnitude of what she was proposing and she had trembled at the thought of Murgatroyd’s bellicose temper, his strident invectives and stinging blows.

      But Mrs Turner had not reckoned with that streak of stubbornness in Emma, that implacable will. Almost at once, both of these characteristics overcame the girl’s initial misgivings and she firmly resolved, in her doggedly wilful way, to be neither thwarted nor forestalled in her efforts to bring a little ease and orderliness to her work. As she listened impatiently to Mrs Turner’s continued and overly ominous rantings, it occurred to Emma, now coldly calculating, that she could not permit herself to be deterred by Cook, whom she had just decided was a fool. She determined there and then that the only way to accomplish her purpose was to circumvent Murgatroyd altogether.

      ‘I’m going upstairs ter show this plan of mine ter Mrs Wainright,’ Emma had announced in a hard, firm voice, her face sternly set. ‘We’ll see what she has ter say about it all. She’s already been planning them there menus since she’s been here, and I bet she’s going ter start running this house afore long. And about time somebody did!’ she had finished defiantly, and, as was later proven, quite prophetically. Without another word to Cook she had turned and marched up the kitchen stairs, before her nerve failed her, leaving Cook aghast at her temerity. For a split second, the usually verbose Mrs Turner was rendered speechless, flabbergasted at this unexpected display of vociferous rebellion on the part of Emma.

      She finally found her voice. ‘Going up ter see Mrs W. won’t be doing yer no good, lass,’ she had cried vehemently as Emma continued to climb the stairs without looking back. ‘Yer stepping out of yer station in life, my girl, and that’ll get yer nowt but the sack!’ she continued as the door had banged loudly behind a silent and determined Emma.

      Emma had barely spoken more than two words to Olivia Wainright in the short week she had been visiting at Fairley, and she had felt shy and awkward as she had tapped on the library door. At Olivia’s bidding she had entered the room and had stood nervously in the doorway, hesitating, her hands clenched tightly at her sides, paralysed by unanticipated fright. Olivia Wainright was sitting behind Adam’s desk, attending to the sadly neglected household accounts he had asked her to look into, and which previously had been handled by Murgatroyd. In her tailored dark serge skirt and white lace blouse, with its high neck and leg-of-mutton sleeves, she looked the epitome of aristocratic elegance. A large and exquisite cameo brooch relieved the severity of the high neckline and a long strand of rosy pearls gleamed lustrously against the guipure lace bodice, and there were matching pearl studs at her ears. Her dark hair was swept up into an elaborate pompadour and it gave her face a fragile appearance, like a lovely flower