His Mother’s Rooms
Chapter twenty-four
His Mother’s Rooms
Henry
Henry did not go to bed after Violet left him in the garden. He stood in the cold until he was shivering, looking up at the dark face of the house.
The key to his mother’s rooms hung in his study, on the board behind the door, where it had hung for a dozen years.
He took a lamp and went up through the sleeping house, past the long gallery, into the east corridor.
He stood before his mother’s door and took a breath.
He had not been inside since the month they buried her.
The key turned without resistance. The door swung open on its hinges, smooth and silent.
Henry frowned. A sense that something was deeply amiss crept over Henry, though he could not name the dread. Holding his lamp high, he paused upon the threshold for one breathless moment, then crossed into the room.
Holland covers lay over the furniture, grey in the lamplight, draped exactly as he remembered ordering them.
Nothing was out of place. He walked the room slowly, once round, the lamp throwing his shadow up the walls, and the dust lay thick on the mantelshelf and the bedposts, and a cobweb the size of his two hands spanned the corner above the window.
He came to the writing desk and set the lamp down and began taking off the covers. Dust rose and turned in the lamplight and settled on his sleeves. The webbing had glued the cover’s hem to the wood, and it tore softly when he lifted it. He opened the right-hand drawer.
He looked inside, searching his memory for something that might have been important.
He opened the left-hand drawer, and the shallow centre drawer, and went through them.
He tossed aside paper, a stick of sealing wax gone to powder, a dry inkwell, a child’s watercolour of a horse that was probably Harold’s.
He found nothing of import and stood up.
He searched the room: under the bed, behind the headboard, the underside of every drawer, the shelves, the trunks, the pockets of her dresses, the boxes in the closet. Nothing.
He drew the bedclothes back into place, lifted the lamp, and went out, turning the key in the lock. Just as he traversed down the corridor, a chilling revelation struck him regarding the truth of his mother’s chamber.
The atmosphere had been lately stirred.
He returned to his bedchamber and went to the connecting door and knocked.
“Come in.”
Violet was sitting up against the pillows with a shawl over her nightgown and a candle burning at the bedside, and a book in her lap with its face-down. She did not look surprised to see him.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Fine.” He stayed by the door. He was aware, too aware of her hair loose over the shawl, of the warmth the room had that his own did not. “I searched my mother’s room. It had been locked for over a decade. Or it should have been.”
Violet tilted her head. “Someone has been going in?”
“That seems to be the case. The dust is thick enough. But the air is wrong. A room sealed twelve years should smell of twelve years. This one does not.”
He watched her absorb the contradiction.
“Were you searching for anything in particular?” she asked.
“Her book. A cloth-bound volume, so thick,” he showed her with finger and thumb, “she was never without it. Everything she knew was in it. The simples and the dangerous kind. She kept it in the right-hand drawer of her writing desk. When we closed the room, I made a point that her things should stay where her hands had put them.” He looked at the candle rather than at her.
“It is not there. And the dust on that desk is as deep as the dust on everything else. Whoever took it did so when my mother died.”
He heard her suck in a little breath. Her hand moved to her throat.
“There is no workroom in her chambers,” he said. “No equipment, no hidden space that I could find.”
“They must work in that room,” she said. “What other reason do they have for airing an empty room?” She leaned forward. “Let us look together in the daylight. Perhaps that will help.”
“Very well. And it has just occurred to me there were girls about Mother sometimes. I do not know if they were in the stillroom with her.”
“Who would know?”
“Mrs Greer, perhaps. I will speak with her at dawn before the maids are down.”
“Carefully,” Violet said. “Give her a reason that is not the reason.”
“I have a reason.” A corner of his mouth moved. “You have taken the stillroom in hand; a husband may decently ask who else in his house knows the work.”
“Look at us,” she said softly. “Conspirators.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, and the candle fluttered, and he was aware that it was deep in the night. He was standing in his wife’s bedchamber and there was nothing in the world he wanted less than to leave. Which was precisely why he made himself go.
“Sleep,” he said. “One of us should.”
“Henry.” He stopped. She was looking at him over the candle flame. “Thank you for telling me.”
He inclined his head, and went back into his room, and closed the door with great care, as though it were something that could bruise.
When he entered the kitchen at quarter to six, Mrs Greer set down her cup with alarm and rose swiftly.
“Your Grace.”
“Sit, Mrs Greer. Nothing is wrong.” He took the chair across from her and watched her sit back down in astonishment. “A small matter. Her Grace has taken the stillroom in hand. You’ll have seen it.”
The alarm seemed to ease. “I have, Your Grace. Restocked and ordered proper. It does the heart good to see it used again.”
“She means to go on with it. I shall like to see her attended to. There was a girl brought up to it, in my mother’s day. Whom did she teach?”
Mrs Greer considered only briefly. “Only the two, Your Grace, that were properly taught. Mrs Garrick. Her Grace your mother soon discovered she knew her mushrooms and hedge-greens from her country days and took her in hand for the kitchen remedies. She still makes the simple ones; the horehound syrup for the boot-boy’s cough this past winter was hers. ”
Henry gave a small approving nod, encouraging her to continue.
“And Sarah.”
He did not move. Mrs Greer must have thought he was confused, because she continued, “Sarah Baker, that’s maid to Her Grace now.
Her grandmother kept this house before me, God rest her, and when the child was orphaned, Her Grace your mother took a particular interest. Had her up to the stillroom from nine or ten.
Taught her the letters at that very bench, I believe, along with the rest of it.
” The warmth in her face was wholly unguarded now.
“Her Grace used to say Sarah had the steadiest hands she ever taught.”
“Indeed,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Shall I tell Sarah Her Grace would like her help with it, then?”
“No.” The word came too quickly. He mended it at once, evenly. “No. The duchess prefers to manage it herself for the present. It was an idle question. I would not have it carried further… to anyone.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Mrs Greer would never in her life suspect what she had just revealed, because to her the household was a body, and she would as soon suspect her own hand.
He thanked her for the information and went up.
Henry was at the connecting door. His hand was, in fact, already on the wood, with the names in his mouth and every resolution about certainty going quietly to pieces, when he heard the outer door of Violet’s chamber open.
The light clink of a tray. And then a voice, bright and easy and ordinary as the morning itself.
“Good morning, Your Grace. There’s a hard frost. I’ve brought your chocolate up hot.”
Sarah.
And Violet’s answer, blurred with sleep: “Thank you, Sarah. Set it by the window.”
He stood with his hand flat against the door, close enough to hear his wife wake, while the steadiest hands his mother ever taught moved about her room.
Curtains opened. The fire seen to. Small domestic sounds, each one ordinary, each one intolerable.
It was the longest posting of his life, and it lasted perhaps four minutes.
The outer door closed. He knocked once and went in.
Violet was sitting up with her shawl about her shoulders, and one look at his face had her sitting upright. He crossed the room, and the first thing he did was look at the cup steaming gently on the window table.
“Have you—”
“No.”
The relief went through him with a force out of all proportion to a cup of chocolate. He sat on the edge of the bed.
“Two,” he said. “My mother taught two. Mrs Garrick.” He watched her take it in. “And Sarah.”
Violet looked at the door her maid had just gone out of. For a long moment she said nothing.
“I cannot credit it,” she said slowly. “They are both so likable.”
“Mrs Greer says Sarah is the more skilled out of the two,” Henry said. “What expertise was required for the concoction?”
She was looking into space. Her gaze returned to him slowly. “The blend was no amateur’s work. Whoever prepared it knew exactly what each ingredient would do and what it would hide.”
“She does not enter this room again.” It came out of him flat and final even though he wished to shout it and have her arrested. “I will have her dismissed—”
“You will not.” Her hand reached for his and gripped it firmly. “Dismiss her and she will disappear with the evidence.” She let go of his hand abruptly. Henry was sorry to be released. “We must find the proof before she knows we are looking.”
“You understand what you are proposing. Her hands on you. Every morning.”
“I have been handling it for weeks. I can manage it.”
“Kit Harris stays within call whenever I am not. He goes where you go.”
“Agreed.”
He withdrew the way he had come. He was barely on his own side of the door when he heard the bell.
“Shall I dress you now, Your Grace?”
“Please,” said his wife.