The Housekeeper’s Secret

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

‘So where is he, then?’

Eliza spoke out of the corner of her mouth as she stood beside Abigail on the front steps, watching the carriage navigate the drive’s final descent. Mr Goddard and Mrs Furniss were in place on the gravel below, and Thomas, the first footman, had come running down the steps just in time to take up his position behind them, ready to spring forward and open the door when the carriage came to a halt.

‘Must be still getting himself smartened up,’ Abigail replied. She didn’t have to ask whom Eliza was referring to. Lads as handsome as that didn’t appear at the kitchen door of Coldwell Hall every day, though Eliza would have shown an interest in any man under forty as long as he had most of his own teeth and didn’t smell of horse manure, like the Twigg boys. Abigail liked to think she set the bar a bit higher, but she had to admit the new footman had exceeded even her exacting standards.

‘He looked pretty good as he was to me,’ Eliza muttered.

Abigail’s snort of laughter escaped before she could stop it. Mrs Furniss looked round sharply, the spring breeze blowing a strand of dark hair across her cheek. Abigail pressed her lips together to hide her smirk until the housekeeper had turned away again.

The ring of hooves and harness was louder now as Johnny Farrow slowed the horses for the turn. Another figure sat beside him on the box, dwarfed by the coachman’s bulk. Frederick Henderson, Abigail thought with distaste, Mr Hyde’s oily valet. She remembered him from the last time Mr Hyde had visited his father. Fancied himself a cut above the rest of them, did Mr Henderson, walking around the entire time like there was a bad smell under his nose and even talking to Mr Goddard like he was there to do his bidding. She turned her attention back to the far more attractive subject of the new footman.

‘He’s called Jem,’ she whispered. ‘Jem Arden. I wonder if it’s short for something?’

‘He didn’t look short of anything to me,’ Eliza murmured.

Abigail giggled. ‘I wonder what’s brought him out here.’

‘Who cares? Let’s just hope he stays.’

Johnny Farrow brought the horses to a standstill at the foot of the steps in a jangle of bits and brass. Thomas stepped forward to open the carriage door, his red hair gleaming in the sunlight like the polished copper jelly moulds on the kitchen dresser.

‘Have you seen the London footman?’ Eliza flattened her apron as the wind caught it.

‘Oh, aye, I’ve seen him all right,’ Abigail muttered. He’d made it impossible not to see him, sauntering along the kitchen passage with his hands in his pockets, getting in the way and making out it was her fault for almost bumping into him. He’d looked her up and down, his eyes hovering over the top of her apron as he’d introduced himself as Walter Cox, his accent as foreign in these northern hills as if he’d come from somewhere far across the sea. ‘Very sure of himself.’

‘But handsome.’ Eliza flashed her a sideways grin. ‘What’s that they say about London omnibuses? You wait forever, and then two turn up at once. Even in a backwater like Coldwell.’

‘Aah, here we are, home sweet home!’

Below, Sir Henry’s middle-aged son emerged from the carriage behind his russet spaniel and—while the dog darted about excitedly, pink tongue lolling, plumed tail waving—puffed out his chest and took an expansive lungful of air.

‘The old place actually has a bit of sun on her! Not ruddy raining for once, eh, Goddard? Good show, good show.’

Mr Goddard’s rickety frame trembled beneath the hearty clap Randolph Hyde landed on his upper arm, but Hyde didn’t appear to notice, turning round to shout at the dog, which was lifting its leg against one of the stone pillars.

Kate stood stiffly at the foot of the steps, a smile of welcome pasted to her face. She was surprised to see how much Coldwell’s heir had aged since his last visit. The spring sunlight showed up the network of broken veins on his cheeks and the puffiness beneath his eyes. He was just past forty, but years spent in the Indian sun (and in the bar of the Bengal Club) had given him the appearance of a man much older.

‘Not much of a welcome party.’ Hyde’s dissipated blue eyes flicked without interest over the servants assembled on the steps. ‘Is my sister not here yet? And no sign of the old man…?’

‘Lord and Lady Etchingham are coming by carriage, Mr Hyde. They have yet to arrive,’ Mr Goddard said gravely. ‘Sir Henry is waiting for you in the Yellow Parlour. The cold—’

‘You don’t need to tell me about the bally cold, having been sitting in that God-awful carriage for the last hour.’ Hyde’s tone was petulant and he clapped his hands together, addressing the woman who was preparing to step down from the carriage. ‘Come along, my dear! Allow me to introduce you to the legendary Goddard, without whom Coldwell would quite simply crumble. And the delectable Mrs Furniss…’

Kate didn’t allow her smile to falter, though beneath the black silk of her sleeve, her flesh shrank from the hand he placed on her arm.

Thomas extended his hand to assist Miss Addison. The woman who emerged from the carriage was neither young nor fashionable and was wearing a rather fussy ensemble of cornflower-coloured silk that managed to look both obviously new and singularly old-fashioned. Kate bowed her head respectfully, raising it to see Miss Addison step on the flounced hem of her dress and stumble. Blushing fiercely, she shook out her skirts and gave a self-conscious laugh that showed prominent teeth.

‘Oh dear, how clumsy of me.’

‘Come along—let’s get inside,’ Hyde snapped, looking around for his dog. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m famished. Ready for tea at the first instance, swiftly followed by something stronger. Boy!’

Thomas jolted to attention, but it was the dog Randolph Hyde was calling. It came bounding back from where it had been capering on the grass, running between the horses’ hooves to follow its master, who was climbing the steps to the house.

Kate went forward. ‘Welcome to Coldwell, Miss Addison.’

There was a figure still seated inside the carriage. The lady’s maid, she supposed—they’d been told Miss Addison would bring one. Her drab clothing made her merge with the shadows, though Kate glimpsed a flash of white on her coat. Above it, the woman’s face was lost to the gloom, but Kate caught the gleam of her eyes. Like an animal, unblinking.

Deliberately, she turned her attention to Miss Addison. ‘If you’d like to come with me, I’ll show you to your room. I’m sure you must be tired after your journey.’

‘Oh—yes! How kind, thank you.’

As Kate climbed the steps, her senses prickled with awareness that she was being watched from inside the carriage. Pausing in the hallway for Miss Addison to catch up, she noticed that the delicate gold finger of the barometer was pointing to Change .

The servants’ basement was all noise and jostle when Kate went down after showing Miss Addison to her room. Wicker baskets were piled up in the kitchen passage, and there were trunks and valises stacked in the gloomy space beneath the stairs, waiting to be taken up and unpacked while the family were having tea.

Miss Addison’s maid was hovering by her mistress’s trunk, as if guarding it from brigands. When she saw Kate, she came forward with an air of brisk purpose. The flash of white Kate had noticed in the carriage was the ribbon of the temperance movement, pinned to her lapel, and for a moment Kate imagined she was about to thrust a pamphlet at her.

Instead, she said, a little testily, ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to show me to Miss Addison’s room. I have her jewellery here’—she held up a flat case, her eyes fixed on Kate with that peculiar intensity she’d sensed before—‘which I’m instructed to leave in the safe. You do have a safe here?’

‘Of course—Miss Dunn, is it?’

Kate matched the other woman’s crisp tone. To be completely correct, a visiting maid should have been referred to by her mistress’s surname below stairs, but visitors were rare enough at Coldwell to make such formality unnecessary. ‘If you give it to me, I’ll take care of it. Miss Addison is in the Kashmir Bedroom.’ She pointed to the bell board high up on the wall. ‘If you wait here, I’ll find one of the girls to take you up.’

Reluctantly Miss Dunn handed over the box, which was very new and bore the name of a provincial jeweller Kate hadn’t heard of. Leaving her there, she felt the woman’s eyes follow her down the passage to the stillroom, where Eliza and Abigail were preparing the afternoon tea trays.

Or should have been. Instead, she found them standing at the window, heads pressed together as they craned to look out into the yard, the loaf half-sliced on the table in a mess of crumbs and butter-smeared knives, the cherry Madeira cake still in its tin. They sprang apart at Kate’s icy voice.

‘Miss Addison’s maid is waiting to be shown upstairs. Abigail, go with her to the Kashmir room. Eliza, take this to the butler’s pantry and ask Mr Goddard to put it in the silver cupboard.’

Eliza took the jewellery box, and they sidled out sheepishly. Left alone, Kate moved to the window to see what they’d been looking at. The luggage cart had been unloaded and removed, and the two new footmen were out in the yard, washing in the water trough before changing into the uniforms draped over the laundry line. The London lad—beanpole tall and city skinny—had taken off his shirt to sluice his armpits, revealing skin the colour of milk with all the cream skimmed off it. Kate’s eyes slid over him to the stranger she’d seen from upstairs.

He was stooping over the trough to wash his face, his braces hanging down at his thighs, the muscles of his back rippling as he moved. No wonder the girls had stared. He looked like a different breed from Walter Cox: broader, firmer, better made. Mr Goddard had reported that his character reference described him as ‘honest, hardworking, and strong.’ At least one of those claims was demonstrably true.

She watched as he straightened up, pushing back wet, dark hair and sweeping water from his eyes. New faces were a rarity at Coldwell.

Especially faces like his.

‘Hard at work, Mrs Furniss? I hope I’m not interrupting you.’

‘Oh!’

‘Sorry, I startled you.’

Randolph Hyde’s valet was standing in the doorway, but he came into the room now, looking past her, out of the window. ‘I believe it’s Mr Goddard’s job to keep an eye on the footmen, but you always go above and beyond your own duties. Your thoroughness is commendable indeed.’

Frederick Henderson. She’d forgotten just how unpleasant he was. Or maybe he’d become more so since Mr Hyde’s last visit. He was short but oddly stocky, with oiled hair like patent leather, and his face was shadowed by a neat black beard which was possibly intended to disguise the pockmarks on his cheeks. He observed all the correct courtesies, but there was something insinuating about the way he spoke that turned them into suggestive over-familiarities. Kate remembered that from his last stay; it wasn’t what he said that set alarm bells jangling in her head but the way he said it.

To her irritation, she felt her face heat up.

‘Can I help you, Mr Henderson?’

‘I hope so.’ He held up the garment he was carrying. ‘Mr Hyde’s dinner jacket needs brushing.’ His eyes creased into a mirthless smile above the beard. ‘Chorus girls’ face powder is the very devil to remove.’

He picked a cherry from the cake on the table and popped it into his mouth, and for a second she saw the pink glisten of his tongue. There was a rumour that he’d suffered from smallpox out in India before he’d started working for Mr Hyde, but Kate didn’t know if that was true. There were a lot of rumours about Mr Henderson, and she wondered if—like the beard—they weren’t also designed to distract and disguise. The only things that anyone knew for sure were that he’d been Randolph Hyde’s man for a long time, and his loyalty was unshakeable.

‘Try rubbing alcohol,’ she said coolly, moving the cake from the table onto the workbench.

‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to furnish me with some?’

‘It’s in the storeroom.’

He had positioned himself so that he was blocking her exit. She eyed the doorway pointedly and waited for him to move aside. He did so but followed her along the corridor to the storeroom and leaned against the doorframe (again blocking her way) as she scanned the shelves of linseed and turpentine, beeswax and borax.

‘So… what do you make of all this, then? Sir Henry’s marriage ultimatum. The bachelor brought to heel. I daresay it’ll be strange for you to have a mistress at Coldwell, after all this time.’

She glanced at him. ‘If you’re talking about Miss Addison, aren’t you jumping ahead rather? Unless I’m mistaken, Mr Hyde hasn’t asked her to marry him yet.’

‘He’s going to. Strictly between you and me, of course.’ His voice was teasingly intimate and made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. ‘Why else do you think he’s brought her up here to present for the old man’s approval?’

‘Even so. You don’t know that she’ll say yes.’

He laughed. ‘You’ve seen her. She’s hardly in a position to say no—fast heading for forty and no hint of an offer for years. She’s something of a white elephant, is Miss Addison… father’s a Shropshire ironmonger who made a lot of grubby new money and spent it on piano lessons and deportment for his plain daughter. She’s quite the lady of the manor in Nowhere-on-the-Wold and too refined to be the wife of a local farmer. She must have thought all her prayers had been answered when Mr Hyde turned up at the local hunt ball.’

Kate couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Randolph Hyde would be the answer to anyone’s prayers but kept that to herself.

‘He wasn’t keen on the idea at first, I’ll admit,’ Henderson went on, ‘but with a bit of persuasion, he saw the advantages. The ironmonger’s money will come in handy. The state of this old place—’ He looked around with elaborate distaste. ‘It’ll take a lot of cash to drag it into the modern age and make it fit for civilised habitation again. And there comes a time when the idea of settling down becomes very appealing, even to the most confirmed bachelor.’ Henderson’s fingers brushed hers as she handed him the bottle of rubbing alcohol. ‘Things change, don’t they? Priorities shift. After years of travelling around the world, a man can realise that everything he needs can be found at home.’

A sinister softness had entered his tone. For a moment, Kate had believed that the touch of his fingers had been accidental, but the way he was looking at her—with a narrowed, appraising gaze—withered that hope. She jerked her hand away and buried it in the folds of her skirt, making the silver chains of her chatelaine rattle.

‘If that’s all? I have a lot to be getting on with.’

She locked the storeroom. Without looking back, she walked briskly along the corridor to the stillroom where, over the usual scent of sugar, tea, and nutmeg, the smell of his hair oil lingered.

The servants’ hall lay between the stone stairs and the kitchen; a long room with a fireplace halfway along one side and a row of windows along the other. (These were set high up in the wall, level with the front drive so any visitors—or their feet, at least—might be seen approaching.) Staff tea was served in there at half past five; and Jem followed Thomas, hanging back and waiting to be shown where to sit at the long table. He knew how much these things mattered in the below-stairs kingdom.

‘It’s not usually like this,’ Thomas said apologetically, gesturing him to a chair. ‘There’s normally only a few of us here—me and the girls, and Joseph. A lot quieter.’

Everyone had been too busy for proper introductions, but Jem was able to work out who was who. Lord and Lady Etchingham had arrived in time for afternoon tea, and their maid and valet took seats opposite each other now, on either side of Mr Goddard. Walter Cox, the loud London footman, tried to slide into the chair between the two housemaids, but the housekeeper, passing behind, redirected him, with a tap on the shoulder, to the empty space beside Jem. Cox grinned. ‘Worth a try, ladies,’ he said as he got up.

Randolph Hyde’s valet was the last to sit down. As everyone bowed their heads and the ancient butler recited grace, Jem could feel the valet’s eyes on him. When he looked up, the man was still staring, and their eyes held. Jem looked away first.

Around him, the business of eating got underway and the room filled up with the chink of china, the scrape of cutlery. It was the same in every servants’ hall; the race to swallow something down before a bell summoned you or time ran out and you had to set aside your own needs to attend to someone else’s. In some houses no talking was allowed at mealtimes, which at least allowed you to get on and eat, but this clearly wasn’t the case at Coldwell. Conversation was conducted in quick bursts, between mouthfuls.

‘Did you hear about the break-ins?’ Lady Etchingham’s maid said, addressing the table at large with an air of self-importance.

‘Break-ins?’

It was Miss Addison’s maid who spoke. She looked as on edge in this unfamiliar place as Jem felt.

Lady Etchingham’s maid glanced at her in surprise, as if she hadn’t noticed she was there and was directing her story at a more important audience.

‘Yes, two of them: one at Darnhall Park, one at Fellside—both in the last month.’ She leaned over to fork a slice of ox-tongue onto her plate. ‘They got in through a window both times and took some bits of silver and what have you. Isn’t that right, Mr Burns?’

Lord Etchingham’s valet didn’t look up from his plate as he nodded. Miss Addison’s maid put her hand to her throat as if feeling for absent diamonds, though the only adornment she wore was a white ribbon pinned to her plain dress. Looking down the table towards the housekeeper, she asked for confirmation that someone had put Miss Addison’s jewels in the safe.

Opposite Jem, the blonde housemaid, Eliza, rolled her eyes. ‘I did. Not in the safe—that’s in the library and we’re not permitted in there—but I took them to the silver cupboard in the butler’s pantry. That’s where we keep the valuables.’

‘You don’t have to worry, Miss Dunn,’ Walter Cox added, with a wink at Eliza, ‘I’ve been reliably informed that the hallboy’s bed is across the door to the silver cupboard, so anyone breaking in to steal would have to get past him first.’ He raised his voice to address the scrawny lad eating his tea on a chair by the door. ‘Isn’t that right, Joseph?’

Looking up, Jem was ambushed by a shock of emotion that sucked all the sound from the room. In that second, with his fair head bent and the plate balanced on his bony knees, the hallboy looked for all the world like Jack.

Jack, ten years ago, when Jem had seen him last.

Joseph nodded vigorously, his bulging cheeks turning pink. Everyone laughed.

Jem felt light-headed, as if he couldn’t get enough air. The conversation moved on to the upcoming coronation, and whether Sir Henry would be well enough to go to the London house during the celebrations. The light outside was fading, the lamps yet to be lit, and the shadows seeping in from the passage outside seemed full of secrets and menace. The livery Thomas had found for him was on the small side across the shoulders and in the collar. Perhaps that was why he felt so constricted. So suffocated.

‘So… Arden, isn’t it…? I must say, your arrival was well-timed. I understand you join us from a… railway inn , is that right?’

Hyde’s valet had been silent so far, as if the domestic small talk was beneath him. His tone now was friendly enough, but it didn’t conceal the barb.

Jem cleared his throat. ‘I was at the Station Hotel in Sheffield.’

‘I know that place,’ Thomas said. ‘It’s massive. Well—I say I know it—never been in, of course. Far too grand for the likes of me.’

Henderson ignored him, one eyebrow arched at Jem. ‘And where were you before that—the Coach and Horses in Hatherford?’

If this was an attempt at humour, it was an awkward one. Jem decided not to rise to the valet’s bait and to answer in earnest, to banish any speculation from the outset.

‘Before that I was footman for an American gentleman—a Mr Randall Winthrop, in Mayfair.’

He was aware of everyone around the table listening. Sweat sprang up on the back of his neck, but he forced himself to continue. ‘I’ve moved around a bit. I started out with Lord Halewood at Upton Priory and then I was at Deeping Hall in Hampshire for five years, with Lord Benningfield. His wife is French, so the household spent half the year abroad—’

‘Did you travel with them?’ Eliza asked, her eyes widening. ‘To France?’

Across the table, the valet’s face was in shadow, but Jem could feel the weight of his stare. He nodded, grateful for the interruption, and even more grateful when Thomas joined in, cheerfully spooning piccalilli onto his plate and relieving Jem of the burden of attention.

‘Rather you than me. I couldn’t go in for all that travelling abroad. In my last place, I worked with a lad who’d gone to America in his previous job. Sick as a dog all the way there and back, he was—five days each way. He said he—’

‘Thank you, Thomas, that’s enough.’

It was the first time Jem had heard the housekeeper speak, though he’d been aware of her all through the meal and had to make a conscious effort not to turn to look at her directly. He was certain she was the figure he had seen at the window earlier, though he wouldn’t have guessed that she was the housekeeper and would struggle to believe it now if it wasn’t for the heavy silver chatelaine at her waist. All the housekeepers he’d known had been twice her age and had come in roughly two varieties: the maternal sort, who ran the servants’ basement like a nursery, and the sour, hard-faced ones, who clanked their keys like jailers. (He knew all too well about those.)

He’d never come across one like Mrs Furniss; an aloof beauty with a cool, blue gaze that he felt might see straight through his tissue of falsehoods and fabrications. She was the last thing he had expected in this neglected, out-of-the way place, and for some reason that jolted him.

As if reading his mind, she looked up and caught him staring at her. It seemed she was about to say something but was interrupted by the scrape of a chair from the other end of the table as the butler got to his feet, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. A murmured groan went round the table as cutlery clattered down onto unfinished plates (the standard servants’ hall rule that everyone had to stop eating when the butler did was one of the reasons Jem had preferred work in a hotel). Beside him, Thomas crammed in a last mouthful of ham and piccalilli as they all stood up.

The butler drew himself upright from his habitual stoop and peered down his long nose at the rows of servants on either side of the table. ‘This is an important evening for Coldwell and its visitors,’ he said in his rusty voice. ‘I ask everyone to do Sir Henry proud. Let us make it an occasion to remember.’

The impact of this speech was slightly diminished by the distant slam of a door and the advance of heavy footsteps. The cook’s voice echoed along the passageway. ‘Right, then, everyone, let’s get this ruddy show on the road.’

Without turning his head, Jem knew the housekeeper’s gaze was still on him. The moment she looked away, he felt it. As if some physical contact had been broken.