1880: a Blandy maid
Her Ladyship writes to her cousin as if I were a bandbox or a length of muslin grown unfit for her wardrobe, asking her kin in England if one “may bequeath a maid-servant”. Bequeath! As though I were her late aunt’s brooch, to be passed along when the fashion changes. You would laugh, sister, if it did not cut so near the bone.
She calls me “dour”—a Blandy by name and nature, says she—and allows I have taken a husband here (poor Tom, steady as the Ganges but browned by it) and borne a little one, our Agnes, who lisps already in the Hindi tongue. Yet for all that, I am “hardly a maid any longer”, but still suited only to scrubbing and stitching, or so she thinks. India has not changed her, Eliza; it has shown her plain. She notes my wish to see you all again, to breathe English air and hear the church bells of Blandyford, but turns it to her convenience: “It has never suited me before”, writes she, “yet now as I too am leaving..”. As if my heart’s longing were a trunk to be packed with the rest of her goods.
And the end of it? She wonders if her cousin might “give her in service” to one of the young ladies, “when they are of an age to need one”. Need one! As if I were a pony to be broken or a sampler to be stitched. Tom says little, but his eyes flash when he hears it read aloud; Agnes clings to my skirts, unknowing. We have scraped a life here, with the heat and the fevers, but it is ours, not hers to bestow. Pray for us, Eliza—pray I find my own way home, not as chattel in her gift, but as Mary Blandy, wife and mother, with my head high.
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