Chapter 31
Chapter 31
Once the initial awkwardness wore off, the evening seemed to be a success.
It had been a lean and quiet Christmas for most, cut off in their cottages by the snow, so there was a mood of festivity and an appetite for celebration. And however numerous his faults, it had to be said that Sir Randolph was a generous host. Beneath the blaze of the chandeliers, cheeks grew red with beer and cheer as the evening wore on.
Henderson caught up with Kate in the dining room. She wasn’t hungry but had drifted there to give herself a purpose, as if the staff couldn’t be trusted to serve themselves from the buffet without her supervision. Lady Hyde came across, to remark kindly upon the marvellous job Miss Dunn had done with the blue dress, and how much better it suited Kate. She chattered (with a trace of wistfulness) about the hunt ball she had worn it to, back home in Shropshire, until Frederick Henderson joined them, apologising to her ladyship, and asking Kate to dance.
As always, he had worked it out carefully and left nothing to chance. By approaching her in front of Lady Hyde, Kate couldn’t refuse. Not without appearing rude. She had no choice but to take the arm he offered and go with him into the hallway, where the band were playing the opening bars of ‘The Blue Danube.’
‘Forgive me for stealing you away like that,’ he said, his voice an intimate murmur as he guided Kate round the floor. He was only an inch or so taller than she, so his lips were level with her ear, and his breath fanned her neck. Through her gloves she could feel the heat of his hand and through the thin silk of the blue dress she could feel the heat of his body. The smell of him made her rigid with revulsion.
‘You really left me no choice, though; I’ve been trying to catch up with you for the last hour to ask for a dance. A more cynical man might say you were avoiding me, Mrs Furniss. I must say, you look very lovely. Are you enjoying the evening?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Henderson,’ she said tersely. ‘I’m quite giddy with enjoyment. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be.’
Above them, the second baronet smirked knowingly, as if he were enjoying her discomfort. Henderson laughed, ignoring her sarcasm, rather like an indulgent parent with an overtired child. ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ he said mildly. ‘A sophisticated woman like yourself, with such a refined background; a woman who has experienced the finer things in life… I’m sure there are many places you’d rather be, Mrs Furniss…’
He paused, steering her carefully around Platt the gamekeeper and Mrs Gatley.
‘Or should that be… Mrs Ross ?’
The pain came in waves, like water in a tin bath. Every movement created more, gathering force and momentum until it was impossible to stay afloat and they dragged him under.
Davy hauled him up, hoisting Jem’s arm over his solid shoulders. Jem clamped his jaw shut, biting down on the howl that tore through him, aware, through the haze of agony, that it might frighten Davy away if he let it loose.
He couldn’t afford to frighten Davy away. Even though, at that moment, being left on the floor in the tunnel seemed preferable to this agonising, uneven progress along it.
His head lolled against Davy’s arm. There was an angry buzzing sound inside it. Nausea rolled him in its powerful swell, and there was nothing to do but give himself up to it. He was jolted back to consciousness by his own jagged cry and the searing, white-hot pain in his shoulder as Davy set him down on a bare wooden floor.
Later, when the sawing scrape of his breath had steadied and the agony had subsided a little, he could see they were in a square room, with arched windows on three sides and a fireplace on the fourth. The windows were crowded with stars and let in the silvered light of the moon, enough to faintly illuminate the intricately carved wooden panels around the walls, the murky portrait hanging on the chimney breast. The details of the painting were lost to the shadows, but he could make out the dark oval of a face, the white froth of a lace collar beneath it. The gleam of a jewel fastened to a headdress above.
‘Is this the tower?’
Davy nodded. He had retreated to the other side of the room, where there was a blanket on the floor and a little collection of supplies: the stub of a candle, a jam jar, a handful of sweet chestnuts with a scattering of their spiky cases. He picked up one of the chestnuts and began to pick at its shell, scowling with concentration. The lower half of his face was darkened with a scrubby beard, which seemed at odds with his childlike manner.
‘Is this where you’ve been hiding?’
Another nod. Jem knew now that Davy was capable of speaking, but it seemed he’d rather not.
‘We were worried about you.’
Tentatively Jem pressed his fingers to his face, around his eye, across his cheekbone, and down past his ear. Robson’s fist had struck him at the angle of his jaw; Jem gave a sharp inhalation as his fingers found the place. His tongue felt fat from where he’d bitten it and he could still taste blood. It hurt to open his mouth. To speak.
‘It’s safe here,’ Davy mumbled. His voice was hoarse, his words indistinct, as if he’d fallen out of the habit of forming them.
‘How did you get in?’
Davy shuffled over to the fireplace and dropped the chestnuts onto a coal shovel, laying it carefully over the remains of a faintly glowing fire. ( He can look out for himself in the woods, no doubt about that…) ‘The tunnel, of course,’ he replied, with a hint of scorn. ‘From the church. It went to the old house, before this one. No one knows about it except—’
He broke off abruptly, his face closing again like it had in the woods.
‘Henderson,’ Jem guessed.
Davy was crouching in front of the hearth, his broad back hunched over, his grimy coat blending into the gloom. He had gone very still.
‘Henderson makes it his business to know everything at Coldwell, doesn’t he?’ Jem said, with difficulty. ‘And to stop everyone else finding out what it suits him to keep quiet.’
Pain was throbbing in big, florid pulses through his shoulder and down his arm. It was echoing around inside his head. He wanted so much to lie down on the dusty floorboards and sleep.
Not now , he told himself ferociously. Not yet .
Davy shuffled the chestnuts on the fire shovel.
‘But you know just as much as he does, don’t you? More, I bet…’ It was hard to speak around his swollen tongue and the great tiredness that dragged at him. ‘You’re like the watchman here, Davy…’ He made himself pause, balancing his burgeoning sense of urgency with the need for caution, to avoid alarm. ‘You saw what happened that night years ago, didn’t you? When the gentlemen had an Indian banquet in this very room, and the boy went missing…’
Davy set the shovel down with a clatter, so the chestnuts rolled across the hearth. He didn’t stand upright, but his hands covered his ears, like they had that day in the snow. He rocked his body, making a high whimpering sound.
‘It’s all right…’ With a mammoth effort, Jem hauled himself to his feet and leaned against the wall until the fog of pain cleared and the urge to vomit passed. ‘It’s all right, I promise. He can’t hurt you.’
He reached out to put a hand on Davy’s shoulder, but the boy flinched as if he’d landed a blow. ‘I never said anything!’ he cried, ‘I didn’t! He made me swear on my mam’s life—he said if I ever said one word he would cut my tongue out. He said he done it to a boy in India. One word , he said…’
Dear God.
‘He’s a bad man .’
So that’s why Davy the chatterbox had stopped speaking. Wincing, Jem sank down onto the window seat, cradling his left elbow in his right hand as a white shaft of pain speared his shoulder. Closing his eyes, he breathed out through tight lips, concentrating on the whistle of his breath.
Out… and in again. Out and in.
‘I’ve said it now, haven’t I?’ Davy moaned. ‘I’ve said words and now I’m going to get into trouble… But what they did was worse and nobody told them off, not even the constable …’
Jem’s eyes opened a crack. Davy was rhythmically hitting his fists against his head. It almost seemed that he was talking to himself, letting the words he had held back for so long spill out.
‘You won’t get into trouble,’ Jem prompted hoarsely. ‘I promise. What did they do?’
Davy thrashed his head from side to side. ‘They took his clothes off!’ It was an anguished wail. ‘He was wearing… clothes like that—’ In the glow of the fire he pointed to the portrait. ‘But when I found him, he was…’
‘Naked?’
Davy nodded, his eyes wide, his face a mask of shock. Jem felt his throat close in anguish. And anger.
‘He was sleeping. He didn’t know the good places to go, like I do. It was too cold to be out without a coat… there was a… a sharp frost —’ (Jem heard the voice of Mary Wells in those words.) ‘I put my coat over him, and I was going to get my mam, but he caught me… the bad man. He made me show him where the boy was.’
Through the blue shadows Jem could see the imploring expression on his face. ‘He picked the boy up and carried him, but he didn’t take him to the house. He took him to the tunnel and left him there, and he told me not to say one word . He told the constable that the boy had run away! Everyone believed him, but it wasn’t true. He told a lie .’
So that was it. The information Jem had chased all these years.
The ending to the story.
Jack, the blond-haired kid who had loved animals and bread pudding—who had been shy and quiet and had no patience for reading and writing but could recognise any bird from its song and any tree from its leaf—had been stripped naked by a pack of baying men and left outside in the woods on a November night. And Henderson had chosen to get rid of him like rubbish to protect his master’s name.
He wanted to tell Davy that it was all right. To reassure him he wouldn’t be hurt and thank him for trying to help Jack. In a minute he would, when the ache in his throat had subsided and he could speak. But for now, he turned his head away and pressed his cheek to the window, where his tears felt warm against the icy glass.
The attics felt bitingly cold after the crowded downstairs rooms. Cold and dark. Kate lit the lamp in her room with a shaking hand and stood numbly, holding the spent match, not knowing what to do after that. For the next five minutes, or the next five years.
The flimsy foundations on which she had built her life had collapsed, and she felt like she was falling, with nothing to hold on to.
How did Henderson know?
He had given some sketchy explanation that she had barely heard—Alec turning up at the Savoy, a gaming acquaintance of Sir Randolph’s. ( I must say, he’s not the sort of man I thought you’d go for, Mrs Furniss, though I daresay that roguish charm might have a certain appeal…) It had been all she could do to keep herself upright and get through the rest of the interminable ‘Blue Danube,’ because she knew that leaving before it finished would cause a scene. She hadn’t trusted herself to speak, and to ask the question that now filled her head, squeezing out all other thoughts.
Did Alec know she was here?
Distractedly, she began to scrabble at the back of her dress, desperately trying to reach the row of little buttons that fastened it. It had been made for a lady who enjoyed the assistance of a maid; Abigail had fastened her into it earlier, but Kate couldn’t wait until the festivities had ended and the girls made their way up to bed to take it off. Nowhere felt safe anymore. She was shivering with cold, and her mind felt as frozen as her body in the thin, exposing dress. She pulled at the silk, not caring if it tore, until a knock on the door stilled her.
‘Mrs Furniss?’
Miss Dunn’s voice from outside was an urgent whisper, close to the door. Had it not been for the stupid dress Kate would have called out to her to go away, said that she was unwell, but she went across to let her in.
It struck her that there was something different about Lady Hyde’s maid recently. It was strange to think that she had seemed so timid and insignificant when she had first come to Coldwell, faintly ridiculous with her air of anxious disapproval and her temperance ribbon. But as she came into the small room there was a determined set to her jaw and a steadiness in her gaze, though her hands twisted together and her thin lips were pale.
‘He’s told you, hasn’t he?’ she said without preamble. ‘About your husband?’
Kate’s head reeled.
All this time she’d believed that she had escaped the past. She’d thought that no one knew who she was, or where she came from, but it seemed that illusion was as flimsy as her safety.
‘How did you know?’
A thought, like a dark spot on her brain, had begun to spread. Jem was the only person she’d told, and he was gone. Had he betrayed her more completely, more cruelly than she’d begun to comprehend?
‘I’m so sorry.’ Miss Dunn’s voice was low and steady. ‘I’m afraid I have played a most regrettable role in this situation, a fact for which I can only beg for your forgiveness and understanding. It was I who identified the… gentleman ’ (a slight hesitation over the word, and a faint trace of scorn) ‘at the Savoy as your husband. I wasn’t thinking straight at the time. I wasn’t… myself.’
Kate turned round, pushing her fingers into her hair, making it pull at the pins.
‘But… how ? How did you know ?’
She could barely articulate the question, but Miss Dunn, recovering her composure, took charge. With a cursory ‘May I?’ she pulled out the chair from beneath the table and sat down. ‘I should have been honest with you from the start; I see that now. But we pack our pasts away when we enter service, don’t we? It never does to ask too many questions in the servants’ basement.’
She tucked her skirt carefully about her knees and clasped her hands in her lap as she told Kate that her father was a Methodist minister, who had moved to Bristol when she was a child. She described a household dedicated to the Methodist movement, and how she, from a young age, had joined her father in working for the church, and become an active member of the city’s Band of Hope, enthusiastically spreading the word about the benefits of abstinence.
Kate had seen the temperance disciples, of course. A city like Bristol—with its teeming population of dockers and stevedores; its brisk brewing and import trades and countless taverns, gin palaces, and alehouses—provided fertile ground for those earnest young women distributing pamphlets on street corners, the children singing hymns and carrying banners in Sunday parades ( Buy Bread Not Beer! ). She had never paid them much attention, but Alec hated them with a scornful passion. Joyless harpies , he’d called them. Silly spinsters who should keep their noses out of men’s business .
‘It was through my work for the Women’s Total Abstinence Union that I crossed paths with Mr Ross…’ Miss Dunn didn’t look at Kate as she spoke, instead keeping her eyes downcast and folding the lace edge of her handkerchief over and over. ‘I didn’t know his name, but he was a regular in some of the places we used to hand out our tracts and periodicals. It wasn’t unusual for us to be mocked and jeered, but I remember him because on one occasion he took the pamphlet I offered him and made a great show of reading it out loud, feigning sincerity, only to set his lighter to it and insult me in the… crudest, coarsest terms.’
Kate could imagine. Alec Ross had taken a great deal of trouble to cultivate his cultured persona and polish his thin veneer of charm, but it didn’t take much for the mask to slip, especially with drink inside him.
‘I went out of my way to avoid him after that. I’m sure he wouldn’t have recognised me once he’d sobered up, but I never forgot him. Which I suppose was why I noticed him coming out of the theatre one evening, with his lovely young wife on his arm.’
She raised her eyes and looked at Kate with an apologetic half-smile.
‘So, you knew?’ Kate croaked. ‘From the day you arrived, you knew who I was…?’ She remembered the carriage arriving at the front steps on that bright spring day, when so much change had come to Coldwell. She remembered the figure inside, the glint of her stare in the gloom.
Miss Dunn shook her head. ‘No—not straightaway. I had a feeling I recognised you, but I couldn’t put my finger on from where. It had been years since I’d moved away from Bristol… Before I worked for Miss Addison, I had a position as a shopgirl in a department store, and of course you see an awful lot of faces in that type of work. It wasn’t until I saw him again—Mr Ross—in the hotel that day, that it came back to me. I recognised him immediately. Not so much his face—the years and the drink haven’t been kind—but his accent caught my attention. And his attitude. Arrogant… if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’
‘And you told Henderson.’ Kate sank down onto the edge of the bed, rubbing her fingers over her forehead. ‘You told Henderson what Alec Ross was to me.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
Miss Dunn’s tone had changed. Even through her own distress Kate registered the sudden terseness. A shutting down, a drawing inwards. Miss Dunn’s lips were pressed together more thinly than ever, and her handkerchief was a tight twist between her fingers. ‘I wasn’t myself,’ she muttered. ‘He tricked me. Took advantage.’
Kate’s head snapped up. She waited. Miss Dunn’s face was composed, but one hand had gone to her breast, to the ribbon badge, and her chin trembled. When she spoke again, her voice was little more than a whisper.
‘It was a wedding, so of course there was a lot of imbibing going on. I don’t judge anyone for that, but as you know I don’t partake of alcohol myself, ever , and I never have. Abstinence is the foundation of my faith—it’s… fundamental to my whole being. Lady Hyde had made it clear that I was at the wedding as a guest, not a servant, and had very kindly made sure there was a non-intoxicating fruit cup for me. It was something of a speciality of the hotel, I was told, and though I found it a little bitter for my taste, I appreciated her consideration.’
Kate’s mind jumped ahead. She knew what was coming next, without Miss Dunn’s faltering explanation, because she knew Frederick Henderson.
‘I began to feel a little woozy halfway through the wedding breakfast. It was rather warm, and I…’ Her face started to crumple, but she took a sharp breath in and carried on, her tone laced with bitterness like the fruit cup Henderson had laced with alcohol. ‘Well, by the time Mr Ross appeared I was feeling very light-headed indeed. Not quite in command of myself, you might say. I was so surprised to see him there, and I conveyed that astonishment to Mr Henderson, who—as far as I recall—took a great interest. A very great interest indeed.’
Kate was shivering. Now that the initial shock was wearing off, the whole thing had an air of wearying predictability. She could picture all too easily how it had happened: Henderson, the master manipulator, always watching out for weakness to pounce on and exploit.
‘I tried to tell you when we got back from London, at the wedding dance, but there was no opportunity.’ Miss Dunn sounded weary. ‘And then I wondered if I was being selfish, burdening you with it. I wondered if I was just trying to ease my own conscience by confessing. As time went on, I allowed myself to hope that Mr Henderson might have turned out to be more honourable than I gave him credit for.’ She gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘Of course, that hope was entirely misplaced. He was waiting for his moment, wasn’t he?’
Kate stood up, pacing across to the door and back, though it took only three steps to cover the floor. Her thoughts were bouncing around madly, like the glass ball in one of the roulette wheels on which Alec used to lose so much money. This is what she had feared, for years, and yet she hadn’t made a single contingency plan.
She thought of the body in the harbour, beaten beyond recognition, and put her hands to her own cheeks. ‘He’ll kill me if he finds me,’ she sobbed. ‘What shall I do?’
Miss Dunn’s gaze was steady.
‘Exactly as I say.’