Chapter 10
Chapter 10
The servants’ basement was eerily still in the aftermath of their departure.
The silence was as thick as cream. Going to the larder in the middle of the afternoon, Kate poured a glass of lemonade from the jug and listened.
Amos Kendall and his men were working in the late Lady Hyde’s rooms—known as the Jaipur Suite—installing a bathroom in the old dressing room. Mr Goddard had opened up a long-disused door below the nursery corridor, once used by nannies to take the children out to the gardens, and Mr Kendall’s invading army had decamped to the back of the house, removing the worst of the disruption from the servants’ basement. Sipping her lemonade in the cool of the larder, Kate could just make out the rhythm of their saws and hammers, like an echo from another time, made by the ghosts of the workmen who had built the great mansion more than a hundred years before.
But there were other noises too, closer and more worldly. The stable lads were clearing out the coach house and a block of empty stalls to make way for the new motorcar and its driver (not assisted, Kate gathered, by Johnny Farrow, who was refusing to facilitate his own replacement), and she could hear their activity. Nearer still, there was a steady thud: a little slower, a little less regular than a heartbeat. Taking her glass of lemonade she went to the stillroom, from where she could see out into the yard.
Jem was there, outside the woodstore, and for an unguarded second, she felt a spark of relief that he wasn’t on the train speeding away from Coldwell.
She quickly extinguished it.
The pitch pine dividers that had formed the horses’ stalls had been hauled out and leaned against the wall in broken pieces, which he was chopping into kindling splints. Sipping her lemonade, she watched. He worked slowly and without enthusiasm, which she initially assumed was because of the heat of the day and the tedium of the task. But then she noticed how he bent stiffly to pick up each post and hesitated before raising the axe. She couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were tense and hunched and he paused often, pressing a palm into his side.
Returning to the larder, she poured another glass of lemonade, before going out into the dusty heat of the yard. The smell of burning lingered but was overlaid with a resinous tang. As she crossed the cobblestones, she had a clear view of Jem’s battered face in the second before he looked up. She saw the way it contorted in pain as he swung the axe.
‘I thought you might be thirsty.’
He set the axe down, carefully, and took the glass.
‘Thank you.’
She could go back inside now; there was no reason not to. If it had been Thomas chopping wood, would she have done that? Not if he appeared to be in pain, she told herself briskly. She wouldn’t be doing her job if she did. She was the housekeeper. She had a duty of care.
‘It looks like it’s healing all right,’ she said, watching him drink. His swollen top lip meant that he could only sip slowly, and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth as he lowered the glass. ‘Is it still very sore?’
‘It’s fine.’
She shook her head, looking down at the ground. The hem of her skirt was fringed with dust and she shook it out absently, making her chatelaine chime. ‘Henderson did a lot of damage, for an accident. Two blows to the face before he realised his mistake…? And I don’t think that was all, was it?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does if it means you’re struggling with your work.’
‘I’m not struggling—’
She sighed. She wasn’t going to tell him that she recognised the signs. That she knew, with a weary certainty born of experience, that for every visible bruise a man left with his fist there would be twice as many where they couldn’t be seen.
‘Where else did he hit you?’
‘He didn’t—’
She gave a tut of impatience. ‘Lift your shirt please. Show me your chest.’
She wondered if he too was reminded of his first night at Coldwell, after the incident with the sauceboat, when she’d sent him to wash his ashen face. He hesitated, as he had done then, before reluctantly doing as she asked, looking past her as she let out a long breath and came closer.
‘Oh, Jem…’
A livid bruise blossomed on his side, spreading up over the bars of his ribs and round to his back, dark purple and mauve and blue with a mottled halo of red. Without thinking, she reached out and brushed her fingertips across it.
Instantly he flinched away from her touch.
She snatched her hand back. ‘Sorry. Did I hurt you?’
‘No.’
He moved away, gingerly touching his swollen cheek. Kate’s chest burned inside. She sensed that he wanted her to leave, but she couldn’t. Not without finding out more.
‘He didn’t just punch you, did he?’ In her mind’s eye she saw him, slumped on the floor in the moonlight, and pictured Henderson’s polished shoe thudding into his ribs. She raised a hand to her throat, pulling the high collar of her blouse away from her neck. Jem stooped to collect up the kindling he’d made. This time his face didn’t alter, but his jaw was set and a muscle pulsed above it.
She bent to help, her greater efficiency forcing him to step back and make way. He didn’t protest, though she sensed how much he wanted to. The chains at her waist swung forwards as she stooped.
‘What is it between you two?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘What do you mean?’
She carried the haphazard armful of split wood into the woodshed and dropped it into the old zinc trough where it was kept. ‘You and Mr Henderson,’ she said, brushing splinters and sawdust from her skirt as she emerged again. ‘You clearly don’t like each other.’
‘I’d say you’d have more to worry about if I did like him.’ The corner of his mouth on the undamaged side lifted into a wry smile. ‘I mean, do you?’
‘Like him? That’s not the point. I don’t get into fights with him that disrupt the running of the house. So far he hasn’t smashed up my face and broken any of my ribs.’
It was intended to sound far-fetched and ridiculous, but as she said it, her throat tightened. Swallowing, she went on. ‘I don’t think anyone likes him, but we manage to keep things civil. Is there… some history between you?’
He didn’t answer straightaway but shook his head slowly. ‘Not as far as I know.’
‘As far as you know? What does that mean?’
‘Nothing.’ She sensed something closing off inside him. ‘I’d never come across him before I came here. Why would I? He was out in India for years with Sir Randolph, wasn’t he?’
It was true. Sir Randolph had retired from his post and returned last year, taking up residence in Portman Square. She remembered Jem saying that he’d worked in Mayfair and wondered if their paths could have crossed in London. But why would neither have mentioned it? Why would Jem be lying now?
He bent to pick up the axe. ‘It’s just as you said. He doesn’t like me, that’s all.’
High overhead swallows circled and swooped through infinite layers of blue. The afternoon sun gilded his forearms, bared by his rolled-up sleeves, and found the golden lights in his hair. She looked away.
It was plausible enough. Looks might not have been so important out in India, but—rightly or wrongly—in the grand houses of England they meant better pay, increased opportunity, and greater respect. It was easy to see why Henderson, with his pitted face and short, stocky stature, would hold a grudge against someone like Jem, who had been blessed with more than his fair share of physical advantages. It wasn’t hard to understand how Henderson might seek to assert his superiority in other ways.
‘Yes, well… Try to stay out of his way in future,’ she said crisply, though the minute the words left her lips she regretted them. It wasn’t Jem’s responsibility to appease Frederick Henderson, to avoid triggering his temper, or undermining his sense of self-worth.
It had taken her a while to realise that no one should ever have to do that.
She picked up his empty glass and took it inside. Rinsing it under the scullery tap, she ran her fingers over the place where his lips had touched and wondered for the hundredth time who Jem Arden really was and what he was doing at Coldwell.
Damn.
Jem swung the axe and winced at the retort of pain that shot through his chest. He turned to look at the open mouth of the kitchen door and thought about going after her.
I don’t know him , he could say, but I think he knows me. I think he’s worked out that I’m the brother of a boy who went missing here nine years ago. I think he suspects that I’ve come here to find out what happened. And if he does, I’m sure he intends to stop me, by whatever means it takes.
He kicked the shards of split wood into a rough heap, trying to imagine how he would explain. He pictured that slight frown—the two faint lines that appeared between her fine brows when she was thinking—as she listened. It sounded so far-fetched; that a lad could have come here as part of an ordinary Friday-to-Monday party and just… disappear. How could he expect her to believe it when he couldn’t really make sense of it himself?
She would ask for evidence, and he would offer her… nothing solid. Only the sparse collection of facts he had gathered about Jack’s movements that autumn, supplemented with the things he had heard in London when he’d worked for Mr Winthrop: the servants’ gossip and rumour that had led him to Sir Randolph, and Coldwell…
She would think he was unhinged.
He swiped the back of his hand across his sweat-slick forehead. He’d seen how alarmed she was at the idea of an intruder. She was hardly going to give a sympathetic hearing to someone who had conned his way into the household with the intention of seeking justice for an old, unproven crime. She would think him a fantasist or a fool, possibly both. At a single stroke he would sever the cautious connection that was growing between them and she would order him to leave.
He couldn’t risk it.
After what had happened before, he’d vowed not to involve anyone else in his search, but as the keeper of the keys, she had access to all of Coldwell’s shuttered rooms and the power to unlock its secrets.
Like the queen on the chessboard. The most useful piece in the game.
Kate passed the remainder of the slow, hot afternoon making potpourri.
In the days of the late Lady Hyde there had been a rose garden, and though it was now tangled and neglected (Gatley couldn’t spare hands to tend a space that the family never set foot in), the old-fashioned bushes still bloomed, untamed and unseen. After last night’s rain, the damask roses were heavy-headed and ready to drop, ripe for gathering in fragrant fistfuls and spreading out in the stillroom to dry.
At six o’clock, when the heat was subsiding and the basement passages were filled with perfume, she went to the pantry to cut bread and cheese for tea. Mr Kendall and his troops had finished for the day and the silence was as thick and golden as honey. She could hear a fly buzzing drowsily against a windowpane somewhere, the clock ticking in the empty kitchen, but nothing else. It should have been peaceful, but somehow it felt like the house holding its breath.
Waiting.
For what? she asked herself crossly. Precious little happened at Coldwell, even when the full staff was in residence. What on earth was she expecting when the place was empty?
Without the structure of routine, there was too much time to think, too much space inside her own head to fill with things that weren’t helpful. When she’d eaten, with the light summer evening stretching ahead, she opened her ledger to apply herself to the household accounts, working steadily down the columns of figures and sorting through the invoices for items for the Jaipur Suite and its new bathroom, until her neck was stiff and her fingers cramped from writing.
The pinkish light washing the room told her she had missed a beautiful sunset. She stood up, arching her back and flexing her aching shoulders, suddenly restless. Impatient to get out of the small, stuffy room and go up and look for herself at the suite of rooms where all the items she had chosen would be displayed.
The passageway was haunted by the scent of roses. She closed her door firmly, so the sound rang out, and made no attempt to still her jangling keys or soften the retort of her footsteps on the back stairs as she climbed up to the second floor. As she walked along the ladies’ corridor, her shadow slid along the wall at her side, hunched and black, like a premonition. She suddenly saw herself, an old woman, dressed in the same sober black, walking the same corridors, her frame as shrunken as the narrow horizons of her life.
She flapped the unwelcome image away, like a crow from a freshly turned field.
Inside the Jaipur Suite the smell of plaster dust and sawn wood had banished the lingering whisper of old Lady Hyde’s favourite lily of the valley scent. The rose-coloured silk (Jaipur was known as the Pink City, apparently) that had been hung when Coldwell had its last revamp in 1819 had been pulled down from the walls in the adjoining dressing room and piled in a heap on the floor, ready to make way for the peacock-print wallpaper Kate had ordered. The room had been cleared of its furniture—all but the bed, which was too large to move, but had been covered in holland cloth and stood in the centre of the space like a tented pavilion. Lengths of lead piping lay on the floor, and ladders leaned against the walls. Standing at the door to the dressing room Kate saw that a section of the ceiling had been pulled down and the floorboards beneath lifted, where the pipes for hot water would be laid.
She tried to imagine what it would be like when it was finished, and her mind was unwillingly drawn back to another house, another bathroom. Piped hot water. A deep bath, panelled in mahogany. Dark green tiles with a patterned border of lilies, and a white porcelain sink as wide as the tin tub most people still bathed in…
Nothing but the newest and best for you, my angel. Didn’t I promise you would have the finest home in the city?
The echo of his voice in her ear was as close as if he was standing behind her. She could almost feel his breath on her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut, but above the whooshing in her ears she still heard footsteps. It was ridiculous that her mind could still play such tricks, after all this time—
‘Oh. Sorry.’
Her eyes flew open, and she turned to see Jem standing just inside the bedroom door. Embarrassed heat exploded in her cheeks as he held up a ring of keys. ‘Mr Goddard asked me to lock up. I didn’t know you were here.’
‘I came to see how the work was progressing, and check that everything was secure.’ She took refuge behind her mask of brisk efficiency, shutting the dressing room door and folding the shutters across one window, then the other, so that darkness enfolded them, hiding her embarrassment. ‘I haven’t heard about any more break-ins, but we can’t be too careful.’
They went out into the corridor. She would have gone back the way she had come, but he had turned in the other direction, towards the nursery wing and the staircase the workmen used, and she found herself following. He walked stiffly, one arm folded across his chest, his shoulders tense. A heavy door separated one part of the house from the other, and he propped it open for her with his foot rather than use the hand that was tucked under his arm. In the mauve dusk his face was drawn, the bruising beneath his right eye matched by a blue shadow of exhaustion under the left.
She looked away, thanking him as she passed.
The two worlds on either side of the door couldn’t have been more different. Where the ladies’ corridor was hung with red striped wallpaper (faded now to soft rose and claret), the walls in the nursery wing were painted: hard, shiny brown on the lower half where grubby fingers could reach, cream above. There were no gilt-framed portraits here. Cleaner squares on the scuffed paintwork showed where pictures had once hung, though for the most part they had been taken down. Only one remained, hanging crookedly in a broken wooden frame.
Jem paused as he passed it. It was a print of a golden-haired little girl in white-frilled petticoats holding a basket of kittens, but its Victorian sentimentality was somewhat marred by the rash of pale scabs that appeared to have broken out on the child’s face. He lifted a hand to run his fingers over the dusty glass.
‘Wet paper pellets, apparently,’ Kate said, answering the question be fore he asked it. ‘Fired through a straw. You find them all over the place in the nursery wing.’
‘Randolph Hyde?’
‘Who else?’
She continued along the corridor and heard his exhalation of impatience and disgust as he followed.
‘I’ve never been in this part of the house before.’
‘Not many people have. It’s been closed up for years.’
‘Since he and his sister were children?’
‘Not quite that long. When Sir Randolph and Lady Etchingham left the nursery and the last nanny moved out, it was used for visiting servants when the family had house parties.’ She stopped beside the last door and opened it. ‘See?’
It was a large, square room, and with no furnishings or carpet to be damaged by the sun, its shutters had been left open. The last of the day’s light fell on the collection of thin, straw-stuffed mattresses that were haphazardly piled on the dusty floor and leaned against its flaking walls.
She’d expected him to glance in without much interest, but he stepped past her. Going across to a few lumpy pallet mattresses that were stacked against the walls, he began moving them with his free hand, examining them as if he was looking for something on their stained canvas covers.
‘Did they have a lot of parties?’
‘Not by the standards of many houses; this place is too inconvenient for guests to get to. But Sir Randolph has always been a great one for parties, so I believe when he was at Cambridge the house would be filled with his friends for long stretches in the holidays—much to Sir Henry’s disapproval. Apparently when Randolph entertained, it was always on rather an epic scale. I understand that was why Sir Henry sent him to India, in the hope that a job would make him mend his wild ways.’
She was talking too much, trying to smooth over the earlier awkwardness and compensate for her nervousness at being with him like this, the two of them alone in the vast house, with the day dying away to an echo outside.
Jem let the mattress he was holding fall back onto the others, raising a cloud of dust and a waft of musty straw.
‘And did it?’
‘No. Quite the opposite, I believe. But it removed the problem from Coldwell. Mostly, anyway. On the rare occasions he came home I think it was worse than ever. He used to get together with his old Cambridge friends here. Apparently the parties used to get rather out of hand.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know exactly… Mrs Walton was too loyal to gossip, but she was getting a little confused by the time I knew her. Sometimes she used to say things without realising, as if she’d forgotten she was speaking out loud.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh—I don’t know… She’d mutter under her breath about young Mr Hyde’s sins finding him out, and God knowing the secrets of our hearts, that sort of thing. She was very devout, and very loyal to Sir Henry—like Mr Goddard—but that loyalty didn’t extend to Randolph. She barely bothered to hide her disapproval of him. When I first arrived, they were very short-staffed, and I always got the impression that she blamed him for servants leaving. If it was because he’d been inappropriate with the maids, I think she would have said…’ She gave an awkward laugh. ‘Perhaps he brought ladies of ill repute here or something. I suppose that would explain why those pages were removed from the visitors’ book, wouldn’t it?’
The light was almost completely gone now, and the room was full of shadows, making everything melt into the dusk. She could see the outline of Jem’s shoulders against the window, but it was impossible to see his face or read its expression.
‘Did Mrs Walton keep records? Of visitors and their servants—that kind of thing? If so, you could find out who was here when those pages were removed.’
‘Her bookkeeping was very erratic, especially by then—much to Mr Fortescue’s exasperation. She always said she held all the information she needed in her head, but that got rather erratic too. Poor Mrs Walton… Her mental decline must have been underway already, but it became quite rapid after I started.’
It was through helping her with the figures, keeping track of invoices, and taking charge of paying bills that Kate—for all her youth, inexperience, and ‘borrowed’ character—had learned the responsibilities of a housekeeper and been in a position to take over. But she didn’t want to admit that to Jem Arden, who had a habit of drawing too much out of her as it was. Her keys chimed softly as she straightened up. ‘We’d better go, before it gets too dark to see.’
She went ahead of him down the stairs, holding up her skirts and treading carefully so she didn’t miss her footing in the gloom. Outside the air was soft, scented with summer. She waited as he locked the door with one of the giant keys on the ring Mr Goddard had given him, and they walked back, along the side of the house, beneath the shuttered windows of the library and the billiard room. The tower on the hill looked like an illustration from a child’s storybook against the pink-streaked sky. A single star glinted above its turreted roofline.
Back inside the familiar below-stairs world, the silence lay heavily over everything, like the dust sheets upstairs. Mr Goddard hadn’t lit any lamps, and the blue dark was scented with roses. In the corridor outside the butler’s pantry and the footmen’s wardrobe Jem stopped.
‘I’ll say good night, then.’
‘You’re sleeping down here?’
‘Of course.’ His swollen mouth made his smile more lopsided than usual, but as he straightened the arm that was crossed over his chest, he winced. ‘Trying to sleep, anyway. Can’t leave the Coldwell treasure hoard unattended.’
She knew how hard the pull-out bed by the silver cupboard was. How narrow. It was intended for a boy of Joseph’s size rather than a man of Jem’s, but it wasn’t her place to go above Mr Goddard and give him leave to sleep upstairs. And a selfish part of her was glad he was there, close by.
She nodded. ‘Good night, then.’
Glancing back as she turned into the stillroom passage, she saw that he was still standing there, dissolving into the summer dark like a ghost.
In his defence, Jem did try to return the keys to Mr Goddard.
After she’d gone, he knocked softly on the door to the butler’s pantry, but no light showed beneath it and no sound came from inside. Mr Goddard had been instructed to carry out an audit of the wine and spirit cellars during Hyde’s absence, jettisoning anything that had gone off, working out what required replenishing before the wedding. When Jem had gone in earlier, there had been several dusty bottles on his desk and a crust of purple on the old boy’s lips. He wasn’t surprised when there was no answer to his knock.
And so, when he was sure all was quiet, he went quietly up the back stairs and along the ladies’ corridor, through the door to the nursery wing. In the room Mrs Furniss had shown him, he lowered himself gingerly onto one of the straw-stuffed mattresses on the floor, gritting his teeth against the jagged shards of pain that speared his ribs.
The pain was so much stronger than it had been at first, and worse when he tried to lie down. And so, he sat, propped up against the wall with his arms wrapped around his chest, looking at the star-scattered sky, and wondering if Jack had been here, in this room, in November 1902. If he had slept on one of these stained pallets, squeezed in amongst the snoring bodies of other footmen and carriage grooms.
And if he had, what the hell had happened after that?