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I came into the Riggs household in the winter of 1903, when I was seventeen years old. I’d done nicely selling flowers in the London markets for a year, but a cold, wet summer had wreaked havoc on all the farmers, and I couldn’t buy any decent blooms to sell. The big sellers snatched them up and left the rest of us with naught. Sachets of dried lavender and hyssop hardly paid the rent. I resorted to dirty char work, which paid little. I could barely pay for my room and certainly had no money to heat it. Then my luck changed. I had sold roses and sweet pea in Covent Garden Market with a girl named Margaret, and it was thanks to her that I found a new undertaking. Margaret had been hired to cook for a household, and she brought me there.
After Margaret left Covent Garden we still had a pint together sometimes. She knew that I was on my own and she thought me a hardworking girl, which I was, and she knew I needed a better wage. In fact, I considered my industriousness my best quality, alongside pretty, brown curls, of course. She gave me a stellar reference when Missus Riggs began looking for a live-in house servant. I am forever grateful. Being taken into that household changed my fortune.
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The devil makes work of idle hands, and over the months those excursions allowed me to stay out of any trouble and concentrate on work. And I wasn’t only drawn to Master Riggs, but I also had to keep myself from the handsome tradesmen who came to and fro. A simple effort with the fat butcher and the scrawny milkman, but by the summertime it was not so easy to leave off the virile carpenter who was around the yard for days on end, with his shirt off and the summer sun making sweat glisten off firm, undulating muscle.
“Why did you close the curtains, Emma?” Cook asked, looking at me as though I were mad. “It’s not even midday. Besides, summer sun is fleeting.”
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