The Flower Arrangement

By Adelaide Cole

London, 1903

Emma is a maid with ambition. She dreams of opening her own flower shop one day, determined never to lose her independence...or the pleasure she finds in lifting her skirts for a handsome boy.

Emma also dreams of what it would be like to share that pleasure with the master of the house–a fantasy that Master Riggs apparently shares. For when hears about Emma's plans, he proposes an arrangement: he will help Emma achieve her ambition if Emma will help satisfy his desires in exchange...

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781460821695

Adelaide Cole

No biography available at this time.

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The Flower Arrangement

Adelaide Cole

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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.

I hadn’t wanted to return to the countryside, where I had some family. A village was no place for an independent girl. I would be expected to marry and that would be that. I simply knew that I would lose all the pleasures and freedoms of my life. I’d likely be treated as a maid, but without the earnings!