Chapter One

 

"You are," Mr Greenwood, the Castlebridge Hall butler, informed me, "very late. Perhaps you would care to explain yourself, Miss Francis." To emphasise the point that the explanation must needs be a good one this, afore mentioned butler, flexed the long length of rattan cane in his hands ominously and raised an inquiring eyebrow in such a way as to indicate a marked degree of scepticism for any excuse less than provable natural catastrophe or the outbreak of armed conflict. All my carefully pre-prepared prevarications and pleas of extenuating circumstances seemed destined to fall on stony ground.

Wait a minute. I've done it again haven't I? I've gone dashing off straight into the meat of the narrative with nary a thought for those readers not abreast of events so far. Well, for the benefit of those who have not been following my memoirs to date, I shall attempt a brief résumé of the misadventures that had brought me face to face with this intimidating butler. Seasoned veterans of my recollections, to whom this is all old news, may feel free to pop out and put the kettle on while I bring the newbies up to speed.

It was half term at St Margaret Clitheroe's Catholic Girls' Boarding School and the student body of that grim institution of education, indoctrination and boiled mutton had been dismissed to spend a relief filled sojourn with their families and loved ones. This was not an option in your humble narrator's instance; my own family having effected a minor diaspora over the past few months. Daddy was holed up somewhere in the Caribbean with his secretary, a sizeable proportion of his former business partners' material wealth and a wary eye open for officials bearing extradition orders. Mummy dearest was meanwhile preening herself in a Manhattan penthouse, soaking her American sugar daddy for all he was worth and showing not the slightest intention of returning to old Blighty. The net result of this scattering to the far corners of the globe was a collective hand washing and abrogation of any further responsibility for the ill-gotten fruit of their loins, aka.... me.

I was lately just turned eighteen and, by all appearances, been cast adrift on the sea of life to drift, rudderless without even the barest provisions necessary to ensure a safe landfall. Except, of course, that I hadn't. Mother and father might have lightened ship in stormy weather by chucking me overboard but, as it so happened, I did have one last benefactor willing to throw me a rope. It was this unexpected patron that had led me in such doleful fashion to the venerable eaves of Castlebridge Hall and that bloody butler I've been telling you about.

It was, to be truthful, as much a surprise to me as anybody. The half term at St Margaret's just past had been the most turbulent an interlude in my academic life so far and that in a career that rather prides itself on its propensity for turbulence. It had started off with yours truly among the regular clientele of the Last Chance Saloon and facing summary expulsion from the old alma mater. I had managed to dodge that bullet by way of the soundest caning of my youthful experience to date and, in one of the biggest turnarounds since the Battle of the Bastards, I had ended the half term in total triumph; in great good favour with the school authorities, the beloved of the school's most prestigious exchange student and a heroine of the victorious school hockey team.

I won't go into detail about just quite how I had managed to extract my knickers from the fire, since I have covered the matter exhaustively in the earlier volumes of these chronicles. There was one stunning revelation amidst the whole sorry episode, however, and it is the one most pertinent to the matter at hand. At the very time, in the weeks just past, that I thought myself abandoned beyond all hope or redemption, it had been revealed to me that I did have one last champion of my failing cause. It was not a trivial or inconsequential champion either. The mysterious figure in the wings, who had contrived to extend a helping hand by way of assisting me from the depths of the brown smelly stuff, was no less a person than his eminence, Lord Rupert, Earl of Castlebridge, Chairman of the School Board of Governors and the school's most prominent benefactor.

To all intents and purposes, the old school pretty much owed its continued existence to Lord Castlebridge's misguided largesse. The Castlebridge estate had been shoring up the school's crumbling infrastructure and tottering finances since time out of mind. It is not too fanciful to say that St Margaret's School, in spite of its apparent affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church, was, in effect, the private fief of Lord Castlebridge himself and, without his and his ancestors' steadfast support, it would have long since suffered a well-deserved and unlamented demise. He was the one that paid the piper and, therefore, called the tune. To my horrified surprise, the melody he had commanded on this occasion concerned me and I had little option but to dance to it.

Now why exactly His Lordship had commanded this particular choreography is a little unclear. It was, I have to note, not without precedent. As I have already stated, Lord Castlebridge regarded St Margaret's as his own private domain and monitored it closely; continually dabbling in its management and lording over its day to day affairs. One of the aspects of this meddling was his intense personal interference in the individual performance and aptitude of its students. There was more than just detached academic interest to this intervention however. Lord Castlebridge regarded St Margaret's as almost a sort of recruitment ground for bright, young and talented girls to be nurtured and cultivated for future careers within his own multi-national business empire.

Now this may come as a surprise to anybody familiar with the current Earl of Castlebridge. He would not have struck one, at first glance, as a champion of women's education and corporate betterment. In fact, on casual acquaintance, you would have taken him to be the foulest male chauvinist since the late King Henry the Eighth shed wives faster than an autumn tree sheds leaves simply because of their obstinate refusal to provide him with a male heir. He was well known for serial infidelity to his long suffering wife and the female servants at his ancestral gaffe laboured under conditions of such Draconian discipline as to make St Margaret's look positively liberal by way of comparison. You would not, given this record, have placed His Lordship at the forefront of feminine empowerment.

Nevertheless, in spite of all appearances, Lord Castlebridge had sponsored numerous young women through the years; paying their way through university and beyond into successful careers under his patronage. He was said to have an uncanny ability to spot promising young female talent at a very early age and to support them. I was not, therefore, the first St Margaret's girl to find herself taken in hand by His Lordship and commanded, to her horror, to present herself at Castlebridge Hall to swap her school uniform for a maids' ensemble and commence her further education under a regime of domestic service punctuated by the occasional sound thrashing. I was merely the most recent and possibly the most surprising.

Given my own school record, you would have thought that His Noble Lordship wouldn't have touched me with the proverbial barge pole. My personal disciplinary dossier in the school's clerical records was by far the thickest of any in living memory and rather resembled the kind of ominous tomes that monks, who have taken lifelong vows of silence, are apt to spend their leisure time brooding over in dingy back rooms of the monastery library. There had never been a conclusive consensus over which girl in St Margaret's long and disreputable past had the honour of being the most caned girl in its history but it was generally regarded that I was well up there in the running for the title. I had not, until recently, distinguished myself in any way at St Margaret's other than for a proven ability for finding myself with my knickers down and having my rump tenderised by a length of rattan cane. Even my recent triumphs had been as much a case of blind luck or divine intervention for the most part.

I had no illusions about my new found status as heroine of the school hockey team for example. I had achieved that particular promotion through the expedient of discovering that Priya, the beautiful Indian exchange student I'd been shagging, just happened to be an Indian under 21's national hockey star and infiltrating her into the team. I had, it is true, scored the winning goal in the Autumn Catholic Girls' Schools tournament final against the old rivals of Mary Magdalene's but it had been Priya who had torn the opposition apart with her silky skills and she who had laid on the pass that enabled me to end the tournament in such dramatically triumphant manner. I had spent most of my St Margaret's career studiously avoiding anything resembling healthy sporting activity until our Head Mistress, Sister Claire, for her own inscrutable purposes, had drafted me, to everybody's horror and dismay, into the school hockey team. So I wasn't about to accredit my new found prestige to a sudden acquisition of talent on the hockey field.

In any case, Lord Castlebridge had developed an interest in me long before any supposed heroics on the hockey field and it begged the question why. Sister Claire, for her part, confessed herself baffled by it and had expressed the view that, his previous record notwithstanding, His Lordship had quite frankly taken leave of his senses if he was under the misguided delusion that anything could be done with Michaela Francis. She had, in point of fact, been on the point of washing her hands completely of me and having the bouncers toss me out the school gates on my ear when Lord Castlebridge had intervened and taken me under his protective wing. She had, I think, begun to concede that there might be hope for me yet but she remained not totally convinced and was doubtless advising His Lordship to keep a sharp eye on the silverware at Castlebridge Hall during my sojourn there.

So just why did Lord Castlebridge feel that I was worthy of his particular attention and patronage? Well there you have me, I'm afraid. If anybody had told me that I was suitable material to be groomed for corporate advancement in His Lordship's business empire I would have laughed in their faces. I can't imagine anything more arse paralysing than a desk job in some corporate finance company and my capitalist endeavours to date had consisted largely of peddling contraband on the black market and attempting to relieve bookmakers of their booty through wildly hopeful speculation. What possible future promise for me as a junior executive in one of his firms Lord Castlebridge envisioned was quite beyond me.

There was, of course, a darker possible explanation. For all his supposed championship of women's betterment in his business empire, Lord Castlebridge remained an unrepentant misogynist and a firm believer that any young lass is improved beyond measure by having her backside thrashed on a regular basis. In that respect, St Margaret's, with its devoted dedication to the principle that one spoils the child by sparing the rod, was a perfect recruiting ground for the sort of young women that His Lordship felt best suited his business model. Anybody who had suffered years of the St Margaret's regime would be perfectly accustomed to the sort of entrepreneurial training methods prevalent at Castlebridge Hall and regard a well caned backside to be merely part and parcel of their continued education. Doubtless, therefore, somebody who had had to drop her knickers for the cane with such monotonous regularity as your humble narrator would seem to be a perfect candidate for the Castlebridge Hall business school. I could see Lord Castlebridge thumbing through my disciplinary record and murmuring, "Hmm Francis... been caned more than anybody else in the whole school. She'll fit right in at Castlebridge Hall. Tell her to pack a toothbrush and a change of knickers and get herself to the Hall."

So here I was, duly presenting myself at Castlebridge Hall and without any real notion of just what I was supposed to be doing there. I had been told that I was to spend the half term gaining work experience in domestic service by labouring as a maid in the Hall. This seemed to make no sense at all at first glance. If I had doubts about my suitability for work in His Lordship's businesses, I was even less convinced about my aptitude for scrubbing floors, polishing woodwork or whatever other thankless tasks devolved upon a humble maid in a large country house. His Lordship, however, was a firm believer in instilling a sense of work ethic and due humility among his charges through a programme of honest, humble labour. There were women in high executive positions within his business empire who had started out on the corporate ladder on their knees in mundane toil in Castlebridge Hall. Even Lady Cynthia, His Lordship's wife and herself an old St Margaret's girl, had once spent her days, in a maid's uniform changing bedclothes and dusting mantelpieces at the Hall and, so rumour had it, had been well acquainted with the butler's cane should her labours have proved unsatisfactory.

Anyway, be that as it may, whatever the reasons for my deployment to Castlebridge Hall or to what purpose I was to be put whilst there, there I obediently was; quaking in trepidation and regarding a very large and intimidating butler, flexing a formidable length of rattan cane in his hands and informing me that I was late.

 

Chapter Two

 

Well I was late and, to be frank, I didn't have a very good excuse for being so or, at least any sort of excuse that was liable to satisfy sceptical butlers with a length of cane in their hands. Perhaps I am doing the vocation of butler a disservice but I can't imagine that a man who makes a career of looking down his nose disapprovingly at unwelcome guests is a man whose sensibilities are likely to be moved by a tragic tale of youthful love and broken hearts. I might be wrong of course. There may well be some butler, somewhere, who spends his leisure hours closeted in his pantry dabbing tears from his eyes over a volume of romantic literature. If such an unlikely scenario had ever come to pass, however, then I am as near as damn certain that it wasn't at Castlebridge Hall and did not involve the magnificent personage of Thomas Greenwood, butler of that establishment.

The reason I was late, you see, was simply because I had tarried on the way, being inflicted with the painful pangs of love lost. The previous day, my Priya, my beautiful, brilliant and darling Priya, had ended her stay as an exchange student at St Margaret's and shipped off back to India, leaving my heart hanging out to dry. To say I was devastated would be to put it mildly and it had driven all sensible thoughts out of my head. I had set off that morning for Castlebridge Hall under a cloud of gloom and despondency so thick it might well have featured in the local meteorological reports. I had had to change buses at some God forsaken little market town and, feeling quite unable to continue my journey without a cathartic break down, had paused for a couple of hours to take a later bus and to spend the interval feeling sorry for myself over a glass of wine in a pub's beer garden.

Now a sensitive and empathetic person might well have considered those to be justifiable grounds for a lack of punctuality but a flipping great butler was unlikely to be one. A butler would have simply regarded me with the same distaste he might accord a blemish in the dining room silverware and intoned, "I see Miss Francis. If I am to understand you correctly, therefore, you felt it unnecessary to comply with His Lordship's instructions regarding your arrival on the grounds that your girlfriend has dumped you and gone back to India. I fear His Lordship might regard that as less than adequate by way of an excuse I fear."

So I didn't even think about pouring out my tales of woe and lament to this particular specimen. Instead I mumbled some feeble whimpering about poor bus services and uncertain connections and ended up sounding either like a poor equivocator or just plain stupid. Either way, the butler seemed deeply unimpressed and indicated his lack of impression by raising an eyebrow and tapping his cane against his thigh impatiently. I noticed a peculiar physical phenomenon at this point... the more unconvincing my excuses became, the bigger that butler seemed to grow and that from a stature and body mass that was already pretty imposing.

What is it about sodding butlers that demands intimidating size and imperious authority? Is it part of the bloody job description or something? I mean when was the last time you ever heard of a butler described as medium sized and nondescript. They're nearly always afforded such adjectives as, magnificent, imposing, stately, aloof, grandiose, pompous and so on. I mean what is it about English stately homes that requires them to have their doors opened by somebody who would scare the shit out of any visitor unfortunate enough to knock on them? Well I don't know but, and you can take it from me, the specimen at Castlebridge Hall could pretty much be the original prototype for the model butler.

Having said that, it must also be noted that Castlebridge Hall was the sort of edifice that demanded nothing less of its butlers. On my laborious journey through Southern England, I had been harbouring ever increasingly hopeful fantasies that my final destination would be somewhere modest, perhaps even a little cosy and quaint. My first view of Castlebridge Hall had dashed all these hopes to ruin. You stepped through a set of gates the size of the lock gates on the Titanic's dry dock to face a tree lined drive, fully half a mile long, at the end of which loomed the terrifying bulk of the Hall itself. Now I'm not much of an authority on English stately homes but even I could discern that this was a pretty spectacular example of one. It wasn't spectacular from any point of architectural beauty you understand. In fact had not age and the best endeavours of creeping vines contrived to impart a certain character to it, you would have considered it a blot on the landscape. The front facade was essentially an enormous great granite cliff, topped with decorative crenulation, which, had it been placed by the sea, would doubtless have boasted a nesting colony of gannets. There was an enormous great, square clock tower emerging from somewhere amidst its structure and the front door was a massive portal, atop a pair of balustraded curved stairs and surrounded by neo-classical Grecian stone pillars, that nobody with less than a peerage to their name would dare pass through.

I hadn't even thought about walking up and knocking on the front door. Instead I'd navigated my way around the side of the Hall and wasted more time becoming lost among assorted wings and extensions in search of a servants' entrance. I had finally run some young maid to earth who, in turn, had passed me on to some lady I took to be the Head of Housekeeping. This woman had apparently never even heard of me and so she passed me along up the chain of command to face this butler.

It was clear that my first impressions on this butler were leaving much to be desired. After I had finished muttering my entirely inadequate excuses, he sighed deeply in intense dissatisfaction. "I see Miss Francis," he rumbled ominously. "However, if I may be permitted to offer advice, I suggest that you save your pleas of mitigation to utilise in explaining your tardiness to Lord Castlebridge."

I swallowed nervously. "L... Lord Castlebridge?"

"Yes Miss Francis. His Lordship, I'm afraid to say, has been growing increasingly concerned about your failure to arrive at the appointed hour. Indeed, when I spoke to him less than half an hour ago, he expressed the fear that something may be amiss. He gave me explicit instructions to present you to him, the minute you arrived. I am sure he will be most interested in hearing how a favoured protégé, for whom he has high hopes, has proved herself entirely incapable of following a simple bus timetable. Doubtless he will have much to say on the subject and will address the matter in detail once he has assured himself that you have arrived safely. If you would care to leave your bags here for the time being and follow me, I shall take you to His Lordship."