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little Sarah.
    There were so many things she hoped for, now she was in London. Who knew what would happen to her in such an exciting place? She’d taken the first step out of poverty, and would work hard to go further yet.

Chapter Three
    After Christmas, Renie still occasionally got lost in the areas of the hotel where guests were not to be found, and got teased a lot about that. But she couldn’t help it. It was easy enough to find your way round the main part of the hotel where the guests stayed, but there were two levels of cellars below that, where employees did dirty or menial jobs, mending, cleaning, fetching and carrying coal and oil. Only they were called ‘basements’ because ‘cellar’ was considered a rather common word.
    Worst of all was going down to the lower basement, which was mainly storerooms, because there were very few people around and it gave her the shivers as her footsteps echoed on the stone paving. Once she let a door slam behind her and couldn’t open it again because the wood was damp and it had stuck fast.
    She thought she’d be trapped there for hours till someone noticed she was missing and her lamp wouldn’t last that long and she’d be alone in the dark. She nearly panicked, but fortunately she heard footsteps in the corridor and calledfor help. And even more fortunately, it wasn’t one of the pageboys.
    After that, she made sure to prop the doors open carefully before she went into a storeroom. It was her job and she had to do it, so she gritted her teeth and tried not to jump at strange noises, because if the pageboys found out she was afraid, they’d make her life hell, she knew. When she had been new to the hotel, they’d played a few nasty tricks on her until Maud had had a word with them. No one would dare play tricks on Maud.
    The front cellars connected at several points with the side basement beneath the hotel’s rear wing. There was one wide passage and several narrow sets of stairs. The wing had been built later to extend the hotel and the guest rooms here were not as spacious – or as expensive – and were used mostly for guests’ servants, who had their own dining room and sitting room.
    Three worlds under one roof, she thought: guests, staff and visiting servants. And in each world there were several different groups as well, such as upper and lower servants, who didn’t sit down to eat together. It could be very confusing to a girl from the country.
     
    As he started to recover, Gil, who had almost lived out of doors and been very active, fretted at sitting around inside the house and wasn’t the easiest of patients.
    His mother came to see him morning and evening when she was at home, and for her he held back his frustration, but she could tell how he was feeling.
    She stopped Walter in the corridor one day to say, ‘I don’t know what we’d do without you. My husband means welland I love my son dearly, but neither of us is any use in the sickroom.’
    No wonder. The master had never bothered to get to know his children, just barked orders at them, Walter thought. Mr Rycroft might lavish money on his children, but that wasn’t the same as loving someone.
    The mistress cared for her children in the way most upper-class ladies did, from a distance. After all, Mrs Rycroft had a busy social life with her husband and they spent most of the year in London.
    A nanny had brought up their three sons, young nursemaids had played with them or taken them for walks. As he grew older Gil became mad about horses and spent a lot of time in the stables with Walter. It was a pity old Nurse had died a few years ago. She’d have been a great help just now.
    Walter left his deputy in charge of the stables, and tried to keep his lad from plunging into deepest despair.
    When Gil was allowed to get up, he had to be lifted into a wheeled chair by Walter and the nurse, because the broken arm and leg were still in plaster. Dr Laver would remove that after a month or so.
    Mr