Chapter 23
Chapter 23
By half past four the day’s gloom had thickened into dusk. In the hour when she would usually have been sitting in the housekeeper’s parlour catching up on mending, Kate made her way slowly upstairs to take fresh towels to Lady Hyde’s rooms.
It was a job she could have given to one of the girls, but they were in the stillroom, where the stove was warm, the lamp burned cheerfully, and the smell of proving bread ripened the air. Kate was glad to find something to do upstairs, in a part of the house where Frederick Henderson had no business.
He and Sir Randolph had been back for two hours at the most, but already she was wondering how she would bear it. He had claimed the housekeeper’s parlour with the same entitlement as he had tried to claim her that night in the gamekeeper’s cottage. The same casual assumption that what was there was his, to take and use.
He made sure that she was never able to forget that. Even when he wasn’t in the parlour, he left his stamp on the room. She couldn’t go in there without finding his coat thrown over the back of her chair, a coffee cup and a plate of crumbs left on her desk. The smell of him. Hair oil. Meat. Sweat. It made her stomach rise.
Lady Hyde’s room smelled comfortingly feminine, of Floris soap and rose potpourri. Kate took the towels through to the bathroom and went to the window to lower the blinds. She paused briefly beside the bath, resting her fingers against the cold enamel and remembering… silken water, her body warm and loose and thrumming. The way Jem had made everything seem simple and possible, quietly pushing back the boundaries that had narrowed her world, loosening her laces so she could breathe. The way he had brought her briefly to life.
Like a dragonfly. A short spell in the sunlight before the darkness closed in.
At the window she looked out over the parkland, raking the winter twilight for the shape of him or the glow of his cigarette as he walked. But the gloom was unbroken, and the church on the hill had already been swallowed by the encroaching night. And anyway, it was no business of hers where he was or when he would be back. Whether he was all right.
She left Lady Hyde’s room and went back along the dimly lit corridor. Her footsteps slowed as she came to the bedroom he had pulled her into on that sweet autumn afternoon. She watched her hand reach out, as if to touch the brass handle.
But she withdrew it, leaving the room closed up, its stillness and shrouded furniture and memories undisturbed.
The night smelled of sheep and sodden earth, with an iron tang of frost. The cold stung inside Jem’s nose and made his eyes water, though he didn’t particularly notice. The track was uneven and difficult to walk in the dark, even if he’d been sober. Which he wasn’t.
He very much wasn’t.
He had no idea what time it was but suspected he would find the back door locked when he reached the house. Goddard barely emerged from his room these days, but even he was likely to notice a footman coming in drunk, and after the curfew. For one misdemeanour he might get away with a reprimand and docked wages, but two…
He swore softly and walked faster.
It was probably time to leave anyway. At least now he knew the circumstances of his brother’s disappearance, though he might never dis cover exactly what had happened after Mullins had parted company from Jack that night. Constable Hollinshead certainly had no interest in finding out.
‘I remember the incident, as it happens…’ the policeman had said with mild curiosity, leaning back and folding his arms across his straining shirtfront. ‘I was stationed at Glossop at the time. Sergeant Timmis put a call out for men to go over and help with the search. Quite a team of us, there was… Weather was bloody awful—about this time of year, as I recall.’
Jem had listened with his jaws clamped tightly shut against a rising tide of frustration at the man’s casual indifference. He might have been leaning against the bar in the White Hart, relaying an amusing anecdote about a lost dog over a pint of ale.
‘We had a good look, of course…’ Hollinshead had stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Big place, Coldwell, as you know. We combed the woods and checked all the outbuildings, but no sign of the lad. Someone found a length of red silk, which it turned out had been wrapped around his head in the manner of a turban. The gentlemen had been enjoying an Indian banquet, you see, in homage to an ancestor of Mr Hyde’s, and the young man had been dressed up in the costume of an Indian servant boy. So, the silk was found, but not the jewel it was fastened with, which, it turned out, was a very ancient and valuable emerald, fashioned to look like a tiger’s eye, brought back from India by a previous Baronet Bradfield. The clothes the lad was wearing when he’d arrived the day before were gone as well, while the Indian get-up he’d worn to serve at dinner was left in their place…’
With that, the policeman had opened his large hands, as if presenting the shining truth. ‘So, there we are. It’s true the lad was never found, but that’s because Mr Hyde and Sir Henry were good enough not to press charges. Information was circulated to jewellers’ shops, but likely he would have sold the gem in an alehouse somewhere for a fraction of its worth. Most servants are honest—I’m sure you are yourself—but there’s always a few bad apples who’ll take advantage. I hope that puts your mind at rest…’
It had not.
Jem’s mind had been very far from at rest as he stumbled out into the street again. It churned and seethed and swarmed with dark thoughts. With the rest of his day off ahead of him, he only knew that he wasn’t going back to Coldwell before he had to, and so had walked, away from Howden Bridge on the road to Hatherford, where he had wandered from one public house to another, finding a seat in the farthest corners, speaking little, drinking a lot.
When he emerged, blinking, from the warm beer fug of the town’s least salubrious alehouse, he was surprised to discover that it was dark and a watery moon was spinning above the rooftops, bouncing between chimney pots. He had hitched a lift on a farmer’s cart as far as Howden Bridge and had fallen into a jolting, uncomfortable doze propped up against the milk churns until he was prodded awake at the crossroads.
The effects of the beer were wearing off now, and the cold air brought a certain clarity to his senses. Since he had left the police house his thoughts had been in a dark spiral, sucked down and inwards by the force of his bitterness. For the first few pints of ale, Hyde and Henderson had been at the forefront of his mind, the centre of the vortex; but as the afternoon wore on, hatred had burned down into maudlin sorrow and he had found himself thinking of Jack, swiping away tears with his shirtsleeve as he sifted through his memories of the boy that everyone else seemed determined to pretend had never existed.
But now, lurching over the rough ground and jolted back towards relative sobriety, he could think only of Kate. He passed Black Tor, a silhouette against the pewter night with ghost sheep huddled beneath it, and felt himself falling helplessly back through time to the day of the fair.
The cold stung his lungs. He tipped his head up to the stars and felt despair scour his insides. He remembered how she’d looked that day, her blouse sticking to her wet skin, her hair slipping from its pins. And how guarded she’d been, how spiky, and how unexpectedly protective it had made him feel. As well as other, less noble, things.
She was perfection. His foolish heart stuttered, and his drunken head reeled, wondering how he had ever had the luck and the nerve to touch her. She was as far above him as the spinning stars, the marbled moon, and yet for a little while she had been his.
Until he let her down and fucked it up, like he fucked up everything.
It was Kate that kept him here, even though she’d made it clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him. He didn’t blame her. It was his fault that she’d been at the gamekeeper’s cottage alone, and that Henderson had been able to—
His mind shut like a steel trap on what Henderson might have been able to do.
The reason she wanted nothing more to do with him was the very reason he couldn’t leave. At least while he was at Coldwell there was someone to look out for her, to keep an eye on that bastard. He couldn’t change what had happened, but he could do his best to make sure it didn’t happen again.
In his pocket his fingers closed around the dragonfly brooch he’d spotted in the window of the pawnbrokers in Hatherford all those weeks ago. This afternoon, he had gone in and emptied the coins from his pocket onto the counter. The shopkeeper, a crabbed old man with thistledown hair and small, moist eyes, had been in his trade long enough to know that when young men bought jewellery it was usually a transaction of the heart rather than the head. He had counted the coins with yellowed fingers like crows’ claws and pronounced them insufficient for such a pretty piece.
Jem left the shop with the dragonfly brooch in his pocket. He watched from outside as the man’s crab-like arm extended into the window space to drop his St Christopher in its place, amongst his hoard of mouldering treasures.
Afterwards, slumped in a corner of the Red Lion, Jem turned the dragonfly between his fingers, and realised what a stupid impulse it had been. A pitiful gesture—utterly inadequate. She had been married to a man who bought her diamonds.
She was still married to him.
Jem could offer her nothing. He had a shameful past and an unpromising future: no money, no prospects, no power. He couldn’t marry her. He couldn’t support her. He couldn’t even protect her. In fact, it was he who had put her in danger.
The night air had sobered him up a bit, but his self-disgust cut deeper than the cold.
He was late, he was drunk, he was trouble.
She’d be better off without him. Better still if she’d never met him at all.
‘Ah—Mrs Furniss. There you are. I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.’
Kate put the Derby coffee service, brought down from the drawing room only half an hour ago, back into the china cupboard in the housekeeper’s parlour.
‘Not at all, Mr Henderson,’ she said coolly. Without turning to look at him she locked the cupboard again, keeping hold of her chatelaine and closing her fingers around the scissors. ‘Just busy, as I’m sure you are too.’
‘Not particularly.’
Henderson yawned, not bothering to cover his mouth. He was sprawled in the velvet armchair by the fire, one ankle resting on the other knee and the newspaper spread out across his lap. ‘Sir Randolph is in the library, and I imagine it’ll be a while before he goes up to bed. Poor sod. You’d think after being away for a week a man would be hurrying up to join his new wife, wouldn’t you?’ His eyes went to the door in the corner. ‘Are you turning in yourself? Please—don’t let me stop you…’
‘I won’t.’ Her voice was flint and ice. ‘My bedroom is upstairs now, in the maid’s attic.’
Nothing had been said about what had happened. How could she call him to account for what he had done in the empty cottage in the woods when that would raise the question of why she had been there in the first place? However, the following day she had moved her things from the room adjoining the housekeeper’s parlour, up the stairs to a slant-ceilinged room across the landing from where Abigail, Eliza, and Susan slept.
She went to the door, holding herself rigid against a shudder of loathing. As she touched the handle Henderson spoke again.
‘I’ve been hearing about her ladyship’s plans for Christmas. It’s quite the extravagant programme of festivity you two have come up with. Carol singers and charades and musical entertainments—a full week of enforced merriment. Apparently she even wants to revive the tradition of the servants’ ball on Boxing Day.’
His voice was a sneering drawl. Kate wanted to turn on him and snap that Lady Hyde’s plans were of her own making—did he really think that she would have been instrumental in the creation of all that extra work when they still hadn’t managed to secure more help? Did he honestly imagine that she felt any enthusiasm for the ordeal of a servants’ ball? Instead, she kept her tone neutral. ‘Christmas is traditionally a time for entertaining. It’s hardly unusual to spend the season with family.’
‘It is for Sir Randolph. He loathes all that sentimental nonsense, as his wife should have known.’ He got to his feet and stretched expansively, then slid the gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘Looks like it’s time to lock up. Is that footman back yet?’
He always referred to Jem like that. As if Jem wasn’t significant enough to remember his name.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Kate said tightly. ‘The male staff are Mr Goddard’s responsibility. As is locking the back door.’
Panic squeezed her lungs as Henderson came towards her. His hands were in his pockets and he stopped a foot away, moustache twitching upwards in a small smile of amusement as she shrank back.
‘Not anymore.’ He produced a bunch of keys and dangled them in front of her. ‘Not while Sir Randolph is in residence, anyway. Getting on a bit, is Mr Goddard. It’s nice to give the old boy a break, ease the burden a bit.’ He flipped the keys around his finger and captured them in his fist. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with the footman when he comes in. If he comes in. Who knows where he is, or what state he’ll be in?’
The skin between her shoulder blades crawled as she walked ahead of him along the corridor. She went through the door to the back stairs and let it swing shut behind her before allowing her shoulders to slump and her breath to escape in a rush. For a moment, she leaned against the wall, her heartbeat reverberating through her body as visceral panic subsided and a colder fear crystallised.
Who knows what state he’ll be in?
She remembered the dark glisten of blood on Jem’s ashen face. The bloom of bruises on his chest. Wherever he was now, she knew what state he was likely to end up in if Henderson stayed up alone to ‘deal’ with him.
Grasping her skirt, she raced up the stairs and slipped soundlessly along the ladies’ corridor, where the lamp burned low outside Lady Hyde’s rooms. She held her keys to hush their jangle as she unlocked the door to the nursery wing, and shut it carefully behind her, feeling her way through the dark to the stairs. Her hands shook as she turned the key in the door that led outside.
The wind was as sharp as a blade and the night was full of noise. The house was a blank black slab above her, blotting out the moon-marbled clouds. Keeping close to the wall, she put her head down and hurried through the shadows to find somewhere to wait.
Eliza lay under her blanket, listening to the glass rattle in the window frame.
The giant fist squeezing her guts had loosened a little, but she didn’t dare move in case she disturbed it again. In the bed a few feet away, Abigail sighed and turned over, altering the rhythm of her soft snores. Wide-eyed, tensed against the waves of nausea that battered her body like the wind battering the house, Eliza had never envied her more.
She had taken two more pills, as the leaflet instructed, after lunch and tea, and had begun to wonder if Octavius Pink was no more than a charlatan. She had asked Mrs Furniss for rags, ready to express confusion and dismay that it was only a little over a fortnight since she’d last requested them (she’d been careful to maintain the fiction of needing them), but Mrs Furniss, who seemed vague and distracted these days, had handed them over without challenge.
Nothing had happened.
Until they had been clearing up after dinner upstairs, when the sickness hit her like a fist in the stomach. She’d made it to the privy at the back of the stable yard and thrown up the bread and cheese they’d had for tea, and then the dinnertime mutton stew. In the reeking darkness of the earth closet, her hair wet with icy sweat, helplessly tumbled in wave after wave of retching, she had felt a glimmer of relief. This must be what the leaflet meant by ‘obstructions removed.’ She had sent a silent apology to Octavius Pink, for doubting him.
She had felt better after that. The nausea had abated and she felt lighter. Freer. It wasn’t until they had washed up the coffee service and were preparing the early morning tea trays—always the last job before turning in at night—that she had felt a twist in her guts and the sensation of her stomach turning to water and fled back across the yard.
‘It must have been that mutton,’ she muttered when she finally came upstairs, to find Abigail waiting up for her. The candle stub showed shadows of concern on Abigail’s face.
‘Really?’ she said doubtfully. ‘I feel right as rain.’
‘You wait—everyone’ll be the same by the morning.’
But morning seemed like a lifetime away. Abigail was asleep within minutes of blowing out the candle, while Eliza lay rigid, the blankets bunched in her fists. Outside, the treetops heaved, and clouds churned across the moon, and it felt like her insides were performing much the same movements. Hauling herself up and clutching her stomach, she grabbed her shawl and shoes and slipped out.
At first, it seemed pitch black on the back stairs, but it wasn’t really, not when her eyes adjusted. Besides, she’d toiled up and down them enough to know every step blindfolded. The kitchen passage was dark too. The shapes of familiar things—the table outside the scullery, the staff photographs on the wall, the row of silent bells—loomed dimly as she passed them, bent double against the griping in her stomach. There used to be a spare key for the back door, kept for emergency purposes under the mat (the old baronet had been paranoid about fire), and she prayed it was still there. As she groped for it, she felt the burn of acid in her throat and, shoving back the bolts, threw herself outside, coughing a stream of vomit onto the cobbles as she ran to the privy.
Slumped on the wooden seat, she listened to the wheeze of her breath. It was like being wrung out from the inside, she thought, and an image of the laundrywomen’s mottled arms, twisting and pulling wet sheets, swam into her head. Oh God… She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
Perhaps she dozed. The next thing she knew there were voices, though she couldn’t tell if they were just a trick of the wind. Shivering violently, she pulled her shawl around her and listened.
Nothing. Only the muted roar of the night. And then, unmistakably, footsteps scuffling on the cobbles of the yard.
‘Gimme a second.’
It was Jem’s voice, slurred. In the icy darkness, Eliza felt her eyes widen and she started violently as the door to the adjacent privy slammed hard against the dividing wall, making it judder. She heard the sound of liquid splattering on the soil in the trench below. And then another voice, close at hand, low and soft.
‘It’s past eleven. Are you in trouble? What happened?’
Eliza’s mouth fell open.
Mrs Furniss?
‘What happened?’ Jem repeated with a strange sort of laugh. ‘ What happened? Such a simple question, so bloody impossible to get an answer.’
‘What do you mean?’
Mrs Furniss was good at controlling herself. Eliza had never heard her lose her temper—not properly—but you could tell when she was angry because her voice went all clipped and cold. It wasn’t like that now.
It wasn’t like that at all.
‘Nothing,’ Jem mumbled. ‘You shouldn’t have waited up. I would have slept in the stables and faced Goddard in the morning.’
‘It’s not Mr Goddard I’m worried about. Henderson’s onto you. He’s waiting.’
‘ Bastard —I’ll fucking kill him—’
‘No! Jem— no . Shhhh…’ There was another scuffle of feet and the huff of heavy breathing. Cowering in the dark, Eliza could tell that Mrs Furniss was restraining him, that they were grappling together. ‘Don’t give him the satisfaction. This is what he wants—an opportunity to pin something on you. An excuse to give you another battering. Stay out of his way. I’ve unlocked the door to the nursery stairs—go to bed quietly. Make him wait for nothing and find that you were where you should be all along.’
Another thud against the wall. The breathing settled to a steady, sawing rasp. Eliza couldn’t see them, but she had a mental picture of them clasped together. (Surely not?) And then Jem spoke again, in a tone of such desolation it sent a chill through her.
‘I’m sorry, Kate. Jesus , I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have to do any of this for me. I don’t deserve it, and I don’t have any right to—’
‘Jem, don’t. Please —’
‘I want to explain…’ His voice was raw. ‘All of it, from the beginning. I wish we could go back. I’d do it so differently—I’d tell you everything from the start—’
‘It wouldn’t change anything.’ The words contained an ocean of sorrow. ‘It’s too late—it’s over, and it should never have happened. Now, get yourself to bed without waking the whole house.’
The privy door slammed shut and footsteps retreated across the cob bles. Eliza’s chest heaved out air, and she wrapped her arms around her scoured-out stomach, feeling utterly empty.
When I said I’d tell you everything, I meant about Jack, and my past. Secrets like that are dangerous. They usually come out in the end, often from the mouths of those who don’t wish us well, who use them for their own purposes. But looking back, there’s something else I wish I’d said. Something far more important.
I wish I’d told you that I loved you.
Maybe that wouldn’t have changed anything either, but I’ll never know for sure.