Chapter 11
Chapter 11
Kate’s dreams were vivid and uneasy.
Through the hot, airless night she flitted through half-familiar landscapes, full of contradictions and urgent imperatives she didn’t understand. In one dream, she was writing in her household ledger, her pen scratching rapidly along the lines, but when she looked back the ink had faded until all the pages were blank. In another, she was hurriedly trying to fasten her corset but each time she managed to secure one hook another would come loose. And then, her frustration turned to dismay as she realised that the reason it wouldn’t close was because, beneath the corset, her ribs were sticking out from her open flesh. And he was there, watching her.
Alec.
It’s because I love you—can’t you see that? All of this—everything I do—is for you. Why can’t you just be grateful?
His voice jolted her awake. She lay, not moving, her rapid breath steadying as she realised it was a dream. The room was empty.
Soft light was filtering through the curtains. She knew she wouldn’t sleep again so she got up, sliding her feet into silk slippers at the side of the bed. Opening the curtains, she saw that sunrise was still some time away, and the air was pearly and damp.
With no Susan to set water to boil and no Abigail to bring her tea, Kate shrugged on her housecoat and went to see to it herself. The passage was cool, the row of bells high up on the wall silent and swathed in shadow. The clock ticked sleepily in the kitchen. Passing the servants’ hall she glanced in, and felt her heart stutter in alarm as she saw a figure, slumped in Mr Goddard’s chair.
‘Jem?’
Her first, panicked thought was that the intruder had returned and Jem was hurt. His head was turned away, his hands resting on the arms of the chair and his back oddly straight, but as she approached, she could see that he was asleep. Or he had been. Her voice jolted him back to consciousness, as if she’d thrown a bucket of cold water over him.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.’
His rigid shoulders relaxed a fraction. He dropped his head into his hands. ‘Better you than Mr Goddard. What time is it?’
‘Early. Not yet five.’ They were speaking softly, almost in whispers. ‘Is something wrong? What are you doing here?’
‘I didn’t mean to fall asleep.’ He levered himself upright in the chair and his bruised face contorted with pain. ‘Didn’t think I’d be able to.’
‘Your chest? Is it very sore?’
A nod, almost imperceptible. ‘I can’t lie down.’
Guilt needled her. She wasn’t surprised he couldn’t lie comfortably on that shelf by the silver cupboard; she should have taken charge of the situation last night and given him permission to sleep elsewhere.
‘Would you allow me to bind it?’
With a sigh, he went to rub a hand over his eyes, pulling it abruptly away as his fingers encountered the swelling. The bruising was darker today, though its florid kaleidoscope of colours was changing. ‘I’d allow you to do anything that stopped it hurting.’
She remembered that pain. Like an oyster knife slipped into the gap in the shell and twisted. Her corset had eased it, she recalled. It had held the broken pieces of her together.
She returned to her room to get bandages from the medicine chest and calico and safety pins. When she came back, he was standing beneath the window with his back to her. He didn’t look round when she came in, or when she said, as matter-of-factly as she could, ‘You can take your shirt off now.’
Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of him unbuttoning it, easing it carefully off his shoulders and down his arms. She busied herself with laying out the calico on the table, folding and refolding to create a square the right size and thickness to place against his ribs.
‘Ready?’ she said, and he nodded.
In the milky light his skin was colourless, except for the livid bruising. It was best to avoid meeting his eye, to focus on doing the job quickly and efficiently, but that meant concentrating on his body. It reminded her of the paintings she had seen in the National Gallery on trips to London as a girl, when she had stood in front of huge canvases of gods and saints and soldiers. Of Christ on the cross, all lean, sinewy grace.
But the body in front of her was not conjured by the paintbrush of a master. It was flesh and blood. Solid. Silk skinned and warm to the touch.
A pulse throbbed in her wrist, her throat.
‘Can you lift your arms?’
He did as she asked. Skin moved over muscle, the hard ridges of bone. She swallowed. Tentatively she laid the calico wadding over the worst of the bruising and held it there with one hand while she unfurled the bandage, pinching the end so she could begin wrapping it around him.
There was no way of doing it at a distance, or without circling her arms around him. He stood completely still as she reached to pass the roll from one hand to the other, his chin raised as her cheek almost came to rest against his chest. She breathed in the warm scent of his skin and tried not to register its dry masculinity. Tried not to register anything about him at all.
‘Too tight?’
His face was impassive, but his jaw was set.
‘No.’
If only he’d revealed this injury on the night that it had happened. She could have been doing this with everyone else around, the girls looking on with compassionate curiosity, jostling to be the one to hold the wadding in place and pass the bandages while Thomas cracked weak jokes to lighten the atmosphere. How much easier it would have been. How much more… appropriate… than this quiet room with the rose-tinged dawn spreading outside and the two of them—she in her nightdress still, uncorseted, her hair unpinned—not speaking, not meeting each other’s eyes.
His chest rose and fell inches from her face as she reached and wrapped, and sometimes she felt the warmth of his breath on her hair. He had laced his fingers together, and his hands rested on the crown of his head, as if he was standing before her in surrender. As she pinned the bandage in place and looked up at him, she saw that his face wore an expression of weary suffering.
‘There. Has it made the pain worse?’
‘I don’t think so.’
She moved away, picking his shirt up from the back of the chair and holding it out to him. ‘Good. Go and get some sleep.’
‘But Mr Goddard—’
‘Leave him to me. I’ll explain. You’ve been on duty all night, after all.’
She watched him go, easing his shirt over his shoulders. At the door, he turned.
‘Thank you.’
After that, she went out of her way to avoid him.
It was easy enough. The servants’ basement was large, and they each had their own duties, carried out in different parts of it. Houses like Coldwell were designed to segregate the sexes. The male domains—footmen’s wardrobe, butler’s pantry, lamp room, coal store—were positioned at the other end of the warren of rooms from the stillroom and housekeeper’s stores. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to be aware of him. To listen for his footsteps and to hear his voice.
And so, the days became a sort of dance, where she sensed his movements and co-ordinated her own around them, maintaining a careful distance. She applied herself to the list of tasks she had drawn up and progressed steadily through them: conducting a long-overdue inventory of the linen cupboard, reallocating worn sheets and tablecloths from ‘best guest’ to ‘family,’ and from ‘family’ to ‘servants,’ and setting aside pillowslips and tray cloths that needed the attention of a needle. Trying to keep her mind from drifting back to the servants’ hall in the pearly dawn, and remembering.
Imagining .
In the slow, sultry afternoons she found it annoyingly difficult to stop herself from imagining. She didn’t always manage it.
In the Jaipur Suite and Sir Henry’s old rooms the work progressed steadily. Every day Kate made it her business to see how things were coming along, so she could report back to Mr Fortescue. A cast-iron bath appeared in Lady Hyde’s former dressing room one day—even Mr Kendall’s army couldn’t manhandle it up the stairs and they had to attach ropes to it and call Johnny Farrow and the Twigg boys to help. When she went up the next afternoon, it had been fitted beneath the window, with taps connected to the water pipes and a new copper geyser, which Mr Kendall proudly demonstrated.
She always made sure to go up before Mr Kendall left at the end of the day, so there was no chance of encountering Jem as he carried out Mr Goddard’s duty of securing the house. No chance of being alone with him in that room with the huge bed, swathed in dust sheets, which had provided—to her scorching daytime shame—the setting of a particularly vivid dream one sticky, restless night.
Sometimes, in the late afternoons, she would see him crossing the kitchen yard in his shirtsleeves, or, if she went up the back stairs to check the work in progress, she might catch a glimpse of him through the door of the footmen’s wardrobe. Once, passing the lamp room, she paused to ask him how his ribs were.
‘Improving, thank you.’ The bruising had faded on his face, and his split lip was healing, though still a little swollen. She found herself looking at it as he told her he was managing to sleep more easily. He didn’t say whether he had returned to the silver cupboard, and she didn’t ask.
The male servants were Mr Goddard’s responsibility.
Really, it was none of her business. No concern of hers at all.
There were worse places to spend a hot week in high summer, Jem knew that all too well.
The hills were purple with heather and above them the sky was an endless arc of blue. Buried deep in its overgrown park, Coldwell dozed in the sunshine. Despite the disruption of the tradesmen, it was hard to imagine a more peaceful situation.
And yet he was far from at peace.
It reminded him of another summer, seven years ago, of another empty, dust-sheeted house, when his search for Jack was just beginning. He had gone to Ward Abbey in Norfolk, the last place he knew his brother to have been, but had found the house closed up, the skeleton staff on board wages.
Undeterred, he had got work at the home farm, as a casual labourer helping with the harvest. He’d loved being outside and working on the land. The job was more physical than he was used to; more exhausting, but infinitely more rewarding than carrying trays and polishing silver, and he’d put in the effort to involve himself with the other workers, no matter how tired he was. He eavesdropped on their gossip, asked guileless questions about the abbey and the Halewoods, and went with them to the tumbledown pub in the little hamlet when work was done for the day. He played on their cricket team against a neighbouring village, as the maids from the big house draped themselves along the railing of Lord Halewood’s pavilion to watch.
He wasn’t proud of what he did that summer, and he knew his mother wouldn’t have been proud either. He’d never thought of himself as the kind of person who would pretend interest in a girl and use her to serve his own ends. Especially not a girl like Annie Harris: sweet, na?ve, willing.
She had been so eager to impress Jem that it hadn’t been hard to persuade her to sneak him into the empty house. In the glowing evenings she led him through its staterooms and up its staircases, uncovering its treasures. Unlike Coldwell, there were no locked doors at Ward Abbey. Tobias Forbes ( Frensham ) was either too arrogant or too stupid to guard his secrets carefully.
Jem had got complacent. Overconfident. It had been too easy.
Until it had all gone spectacularly wrong.
It had been a charge of larceny that had got him arrested. He’d been dimly aware of the stable lad who was sweet on Annie Harris but had dismissed him as insignificant, an easy rival to overcome. That was his first mistake. The silver spoons with the Halewood crest they claimed to have found beneath his mattress in the hayloft had been planted during the search… he was no thief. But he couldn’t claim to be guilt-free either. He had hung around after Annie had seen him out one night and climbed back into the house through a window that he’d unlatched. And he had quite deliberately used the girl and led her on too, though that crime didn’t appear on his charge sheet. The law was much less concerned about a servant girl’s heart than an aristocrat’s silverware.
The judge at Norwich Assizes had instructed him to ‘reflect on his poor choices and learn from them.’ It was wise advice. In the six months that followed, in the narrow, stinking cell and the dripping exercise yard of Norwich Gaol, Jem had plenty of time to go over what had happened at Ward Abbey and identify where he’d slipped up. He’d reflected and he’d learned.
He knew better now.
And so the long days passed slowly, marked by the ticking clock in the kitchen, the distant deathwatch tap of Mr Kendall’s hammers, and the fizzing drone of bluebottles in the pantry. He carried out the mundane tasks Mr Goddard set him and helped the stable lads prepare for the motorcar. He slipped through the house at dusk, checking that it was secure. Resenting every locked door he tried and looking for a chink in Coldwell’s armour of secrecy.
There was too little to stop his thoughts straying to Mrs Furniss. Remembering the feel of her fingers on his bruised skin. Remembering the way her hair, when it wasn’t pinned up in its daytime knot, curled softly around her face. Remembering the glimpse of her collarbone at the neck of her nightdress and the way she’d looked at him, all her brisk certainty gone.
He could relate to that.
It was a feeling he was beginning to know very well indeed.
June 27th
The rain isn’t stopping. Whatever action is planned has been delayed because of the weather, and so we are waiting. Everyone feels the strain, but some find it harder than others. The bombardment continues, and the noise makes it worse. Joseph is not coping well. I’m worried about him.
He joined up right at the start. August 1914. He saw it as a chance to be a hero, I suppose, and make up for what he did, or perhaps run away from it. He didn’t even have to lie about his age. The recruiting sergeant asked for his date of birth and Joe said he didn’t know exactly. The sergeant signed him up without any further questions.
The trouble is, there’s nothing heroic about army life. Boys like Joseph wouldn’t be so keen to join up if they knew how much time you spend sitting around listening to other men playing the mouth organ badly and arguing over cigarette cards. There’s too much time to think.
That’s why I’m writing this, even though you’ll never read it. In these long days of waiting, it feels better to do something. It’s a relief to put it on the page after keeping it in my head for so long.
And it gives me an excuse to relive every moment of that summer.