Chapter 13
Chapter 13
Mr Goddard returned at teatime.
Kate heard the wagon rattle into the stable yard, and Mrs Gatley’s voice (she always spoke at a volume that could carry across a kitchen and above the clash of pans) reminding him about the cheese and onion flan in the larder, calling Jem to assist. Kate knew that she should go out and welcome Mr Goddard, enquire about the day, and give him a chance to enjoy his moment of celebrity, but she kept to her room.
Much to her relief, there had been no sign of Jem when she came downstairs, flushed and damp from the bath. When she went back to her parlour, she discovered that the laborious tasks of emptying the tin tub, rolling back the rug, and restoring the room to order had been done. It was almost as if none of it had ever happened.
Except it had, and she would have to face him again sometime.
In the aftermath of her terror and the weeping that followed, she felt bruised and fragile, as if a hard shell had cracked and peeled away, leaving her exposed. Once again he had seen her, and this time it had changed everything.
Eventually the sounds of activity died away and the basement was quiet again. The light changed: the shadows slid down the walls and the heat subsided into a stuffy, enveloping warmth. Kate was hungry but couldn’t gather the courage to go to the kitchen for food. She was acutely aware of the presence of the others—Mr Goddard and Jem—as if she could hear them breathing through the walls. But still, the soft knock at her door was completely unexpected.
She opened it to find Jem standing there. She was so used to seeing him in uniform that in his own clothes he seemed like a different person from the inscrutable, impeccably mannered footman. This was the man who had sheltered from the rain beneath Black Tor and walked back with her across the steaming heath. The man who had gathered her into his arms and held her while she cried.
His hands were in his pockets and he was standing a little way back, appearing utterly at ease. Except for the faint flicker of a muscle in his jaw and the slight hoarseness in his voice. ‘There’s going to be fireworks,’ he said, then paused and cleared his throat. ‘This evening. They’re setting them off up on the hill before they light the bonfire. I wondered if you’d like to watch them?’
The bonfire had been the subject of some discussion in the servants’ hall in the preceding weeks. It was part of a national network of ‘celebration bonfires’ that were to form a chain the length and breadth of the land, and a local committee had apparently been formed to oversee its construction, on the highest part of Howden moor.
‘Watch them?’ She was thrown, picturing a walk to the village to join a clumsy jostle of beer-sodden revellers, the effort of assembling her professional mask and keeping it in place amid the merriment. The journey back with him in the dark. ‘I—I don’t know, I—’
‘Not from the village,’ he said, as if he’d read her mind. ‘From here. You won’t even have to leave the house. I know the perfect place.’
‘Where?’
She had wondered how she would broach what had happened before, and thank him for what he had done, but somehow, he had made it unnecessary. She’d thought it would be impossibly embarrassing to face him, but as he smiled at her in the fading light, embarrassment was the last thing she felt.
‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’
It was a different world. One she hadn’t known existed.
She had followed him through the servants’ basement, waiting outside the footmen’s wardrobe while he went in and picked up a cloth-covered crate from the table, taking care not to make a sound as they went up the back stairs. At the door to the footman’s attic she hesitated, suddenly doubtful.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Just to the corridor,’ he said. ‘There’s a way out onto the roof. I’d imagine there must be one in the maids’ attic too, though obviously I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
His smile was deliberately charming, as if he was trying to persuade her of his honourable character. It worked. Her heart was beating too fast, but she had come too far to go back downstairs to her quiet room and another evening spent poring over invoices or stitching frayed seams. His hands were full, so she opened the door herself and let him go ahead of her up the stairs.
It looked the same as the girls’ attic but smelled unmistakably male. It was twilight up here, and they both trod softly on the creaking boards as she followed him to the low window at the end of the landing. The sash had been raised to its fullest extent and beyond it the park was spread out, softened by the evening. A breath of warm air blew a curl across her cheek.
He leaned through the open window and put down the crate, then stood to the side. Placing one hand at the small of his back, as he would do when attending the family, he held out his other, and bowed slightly.
‘After you…’
She laughed, to cover up a lurch of nervousness and misgiving. ‘Is it safe?’
‘Completely.’ His face, with its mottling of faded bruises, was grave in the half-light, his voice low. ‘Have you never been out there?’
She shook her head, trying to remember if the window on the girls’ side was the same. Did it open wide like this one? She thought she knew the house well, but she couldn’t think. Couldn’t focus.
‘Then let me show you.’
It was easier than she thought, climbing through, especially with his hand to steady her. She felt a brief rush of vertigo as she got her bearings, and found herself in a new landscape, one of sloping slate, lead-lined gulleys and rows of chimneys as tall and solid as terraced houses. Pressing herself back against the reassuring solidity of the wall, she took in the dizzying panorama of the park: the folds of land where the shadows pooled, the dark copses of trees. The sky was marbled with fine veins of cloud, stained pink and apricot by the sun, which had sunk to rest on the smoky line of the distant hills. It looked like the painted ceiling of some grand rococo ballroom.
‘Oh! It’s… astonishing! Familiar, but so different.’
‘I thought you would have discovered it long ago. There’s a wall dividing this half of the house from the other so you can’t get round to the maids’ side, but I assumed they’d go out on their half.’
‘There is a window on the maids’ landing…’ Without the distraction of his touch her memory clarified. ‘It’s got bars across it though, so you couldn’t climb out.’
‘How unfair.’
And how unsurprising that the girls should be the ones to have their freedom restricted. She followed him round the corner, to the north-facing side of the house, where the temple was disappearing into the darkness of the trees behind it, somewhere between magical and menacing. Setting down the crate in the lea of a dormer window, Jem pointed out the silhouette of the coronation bonfire on the hill.
‘The fireworks are being set off just outside the village, but we should be able to see them from here.’
‘What’s in the box?’
He moved the cloth aside, to reveal half of Mrs Gatley’s cheese and onion flan and two bottles of beer. ‘I thought you must be hungry. I took some of this to Mr Goddard earlier and I could see you hadn’t had any. Between you and me, it’s wasted on him this evening. The hospitality in the lounge of the White Hart must have been pretty generous. Very decent of him to condescend to accept it really, given how he feels about the village.’
His tone was grave, but his eyes gleamed with amusement as he unstoppered one of the thick glass beer bottles. Kate smiled.
‘Very noble indeed. Mr Goddard has long held that the White Hart is a den of the utmost iniquity. A couple of years ago he dismissed two footmen when he discovered they’d been seen in there. Two footmen, gone at a stroke! Poor Thomas had to do the work of three men until we eventually managed to find a replacement.’
‘Big houses usually have no trouble in filling places,’ Jem remarked idly, holding out a bottle. ‘They’re the jobs we all want, aren’t they? Why is it so different here?’
‘Because it’s not like other houses, is it? Too cut off and stuck in the past. Until now, anyway, with all Sir Randolph’s modernisations.’ Taking the bottle, she shook her head in wonder. ‘You’ve thought of everything.’
‘If I’m honest, I didn’t really think at all.’ He cut the flan, dividing it into small pieces, easy to eat with their fingers. ‘If I had, I would never have come to find you. I would have talked myself out of it and come up here alone.’
The parapet that ran around the edge of the roof was high enough to ensure that the attic windows couldn’t be seen from below, wide enough to sit on. She leaned her hip against it and half turned to look at the undulating outline of the ancient hills. Silence stretched for the length of one sighing breath, and then she said quietly, ‘Perhaps that would have been better.’
‘For you?’
‘For us both.’ She hesitated, summoning courage. ‘Jem, about what happened earlier—’
‘You don’t have to say anything.’
Her laugh was harsh in the soft evening. ‘We can pretend it never happened?’
‘If that’s what you want. You don’t owe me anything—no explanations—nothing. You don’t have to tell me where you came from or how you ended up in this place, or what happened to make you scared to be alone here on a summer’s afternoon.’ He tipped the bottle to his bruised lips and added, almost absently, ‘I don’t need to know any of those things to know that you were made for a better life than this.’
‘This isn’t such a bad life. There are worse places to live.’
‘There are better ones too.’
‘Such as?’
‘A home of your own. Filled with fine things, and a housekeeper to look after them. A husband to love you.’
‘I don’t want those things.’ She took a cautious mouthful of beer, the bottle feeling unfamiliar against her lips. There was no point in pretending, not now he had seen her with the mask ripped off. ‘I had them before—or most of them. I had a fine house and expensive furnishings. I had a cook- housekeeper and a between maid.’ She hesitated, realising she was about to cross a line. ‘I had a husband too. But he didn’t love me.’
His voice was rough. ‘Then he was a fool.’
She sighed, perhaps as much with the relief of speaking the truth as the pain of confronting the past. ‘He was ambitious. Clever. He’d come from humble beginnings, in Glasgow, and worked his way up—by skill and determination, he used to say, though that was only half the story. He was no fool. But he was also… not a good man.’
‘Why did you marry him?’
A moth flitted palely through the dusk. She watched its progress until it was swallowed by the blue.
‘Because I was the fool.’
And bit by bit, the light drained from the pastel sky as she told him about a na?ve eighteen-year-old girl, desperate for romance and excitement, who had fallen for the charming stranger who had crossed the Assembly Ballroom to seize her dance card and tear it up so he could have her to himself all evening. Darkness spread across the park like ink bleeding into a blotter as she described his artful show of amazement when, at the evening’s end, she’d told him her name, and he’d pretended to be horrified at having been so bold with the Haven Master’s daughter, as if he hadn’t known who she was all along. As if he hadn’t planned everything.
There was only a pale strip of gold left above the hills as she admitted how easily she had fallen for his lies and charm and flattery.
‘He was the most exciting thing to happen in my sheltered life. My father saw through him, of course. He knew his stories didn’t add up. He tried to stop me, but it was too late; I had already… compromised myself. I believed that he’d fallen in love with me.’ Her voice hardened with self-mockery. ‘He told me he wanted to marry me—that he couldn’t wait. I was too infatuated to spot the warning signs. I didn’t even think it strange that he didn’t invite any family or friends to the wedding. He told me his parents were dead, and he was so far from home… I felt sorry for him, being so alone in the world. He said I was all that he needed.’
‘What happened?’
Jem’s face was impossible to read in the velvet dusk. They had moved, so they were both sitting on the stone parapet now, their backs to the dusk-veiled park, their knees almost touching. Only crumbs remained of Mrs Gatley’s flan. Kate took another mouthful of beer before carrying on.
‘It was harder for him to maintain the pretence once we were married. It became clear that my father was right—his business was built on illegal trade and gambling big amounts of money with ruthless men. He took back the diamonds he’d bought me as a wedding present the week after we returned from honeymoon, and the piano he wanted me to play at his business soirées was removed by the bailiff. He wanted to entertain and impress the right people, but he would go into a rage about me spending too much. The first time he hit me was because I had borrowed money from my mother to pay the dressmaker’s bill for the fine clothes he expected me to have. After that it happened more often, and more easily.’
She heard Jem’s soft exhalation of disgust.
‘He was always sorry afterwards, but only because he regretted the loss of control. He wanted to think of himself as better than that, and he hated that I saw him for what he was. I knew what he was capable of, and in the end that became dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’
She rolled the bottle-stopper between her fingers. ‘Something happened…’ She swallowed. ‘A body was found in the harbour. It was so b-badly beaten they couldn’t confirm his identity, but I knew as soon as I heard. Alec had gone off to meet this… person a few days earlier—someone who’d sold him short in one of his illegal deals. The next morning two men turned up at the back door—rough men—and I heard enough of their conversation to piece it together when I read the report in the newspaper. That was the day before the coronation. I confronted him… I wanted him to realise he’d gone too far—to encourage him to tell the police everything in the hope of being treated leniently because he’d been cheated, but he—’
A muted crack, like the sound of a gunshot, made her start and jump to her feet, her head whipping round in panic. Jem stood up too, closing the gap between them and taking hold of her shoulders.
‘It’s all right. It’s only the fireworks starting. See?’
Very gently, he turned her around. Across the shadowy park, above the dark treetops, a starburst of white lit up the sky, quickly followed by another and another.
The sense of alarm dissipated, and she was left with the tingling awareness of his touch, the warm solidity of his body at her back. It was cooler now, and she longed to lean into him, but the irony of recounting the disaster that had blighted her past while stumbling into one that would jeopardise her future wasn’t lost on her. She forced herself to step away.
‘Go on. What did he do?’
‘He hit me, of course…’ She heard his low curse as she sat on the edge of the parapet again, watching scarlet splash the sky. ‘But it was different that time. Before, it had always been a flash of temper, but that night I thought he was going to kill me.’ She gave a choked laugh. ‘Perhaps he would have if he hadn’t realised already how hard it is to dispose of the dead. He pulled himself back, made the usual excuses, promised me it wouldn’t happen again. I promised myself the same thing. I knew if it did, it might well be the last.’
‘And so you left…’
‘Yes.’ It was almost a whisper. ‘In the evening of coronation day, when he was at the dinner I was supposed to have attended with him. I knew the city would be crowded and I wouldn’t get another chance like that. The maid was out at the celebrations; I’m not proud of myself, but I went up to the attic and put on her clothes. A well-dressed lady with a blacked eye would attract concern and attention, but a poorly clothed woman would be overlooked. No one would notice her in the crush of the station, nor remark which train she boarded.’ She met his eye with a small smile. ‘A female servant is an invisible creature.’
The fireworks were like shooting stars, trailing light over the inky sky and exploding into constellations of brilliance. They both watched in silence as red, white, and blue glittered across the darkness, and then he said softly, ‘Where did you go?’
‘London. Where everyone goes to disappear. I’d asked my parents for help before, but they didn’t want to know. They’d never really forgiven me for marrying him in the first place. As far as they were concerned, I had made my choice, which was shaming enough. They certainly didn’t want me back under their roof when it all went wrong. And what could they have done anyway? He would have found a way to get me back, or shut me up for good.’
The fact that her options were so limited had made it easier to decide what to do. With only the small amount of jewellery not yet reclaimed by Alec to sell, she had to find a means of supporting herself quickly. Entering domestic service was more favourable than the other path available.
‘I went to a servants’ registry on Tottenham Court Road. I needed somewhere cheap to stay and they had a boarding house where you could lodge while seeking employment. I made up a story about my previous employer making inappropriate advances, which was why I’d had to leave without a character. They made one up for me.’ She attempted a smile. ‘To go with the name I had made up.’
She had been Katherine before, sometimes Kitty to her parents and friends, but never Kate. Her new surname had come from an enamel sign advertising biscuits on the wall of the refreshment room at Bristol station. Furniss’s Original Cornish Fairings . She remembered staring at it from her seat in the third-class carriage in the endless minutes before the train pulled away, hardly daring to breathe; keeping her eyes fixed to it as the engine gave a hiss and heaved into motion.
‘Kate Furniss,’ he murmured, and on his lips, it sounded like a caress.
Her sudden shiver was only partly caused by the evening chill. She stood up, so their eyes were almost level, and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this—all my dark secrets. I’ve never spoken about it before.’
‘Why shouldn’t you?’ The eyes that held hers were like spilled ink. ‘They aren’t so dark. Any shame belongs to him. You’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘And yet it’s as if I’m serving a prison sentence,’ she said with quiet bitterness. ‘I’m not free of him, am I? I’ll never be free.’
The fireworks had stopped, and it seemed much darker with nothing but the empty sky above them. In the quiet she heard the rasp of stubble as he dragged a hand over his face.
‘Do you think he’s still looking for you?’
‘I can’t afford to assume he’s not. Alec Ross is not the sort of man to let things go—not wives nor grudges. That’s why I was so unsettled by the idea of someone watching the house, breaking in…’
‘You thought it might be him, or people sent by him?’
She nodded, swaying a little, and wondered how strong the beer had been. She wasn’t used to it anymore.
Afterwards she would go over it in her mind, replaying the moment when he had put his hand to her waist to steady her, then gently taken her face between his palms and stroked his thumbs across her cheeks.
‘I’m glad you told me. You’ve carried it all yourself, all this time. You don’t have to do that anymore.’
A hesitation. A breath. A heartbeat. And then his lips on hers, warm and full of tenderness, kissing her in a way she had only been kissed in her most secret imaginings.
He pulled away almost immediately, shaking his head.
‘Oh, God, Kate, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—’
But it was too late.
It had been too late when she’d circled her arms around his chest in the servants’ hall the other morning. When she’d touched his cheek on his first night at Coldwell, when she’d seen him washing in the kitchen yard. It had been too late from the moment their eyes had met as he’d stood at the top of the hill.
She couldn’t be sure if her unravelling had been sudden, or slow and gradual; if it had happened in an instant, or in increments. She just knew that it had happened, and she couldn’t go back to how she had been before.
As she raised her chin to kiss him back, she didn’t want to.