Chapter Two
Marcombe Hall sat at the head of its avenue like something that had never once been hurried.
Honey-coloured stone, a long symmetrical front, rows of tall windows giving back the last of the afternoon without warmth.
The lawns were cut close as baize, and not a leaf lay on the gravel, though it was September and the limes along the drive were dropping them by the hundred everywhere else.
The carriage that had brought her the last six miles was a Wycliffe carriage, crested and well-sprung, and it had made the hired chaise before it feel like an apology.
Elowen had watched the country grow tidier and richer the nearer they came, until even the cottages looked swept, and the swept look of everything had begun, by degrees, to feel less like prosperity than a held breath.
A footman came down the steps before the wheels had stopped, handed her down, and took her trunk.
“Her ladyship is lying down with the headache, miss, and begs you will make yourself comfortable until dinner.”
“And Mrs Pike?” Elowen asked. “The housekeeper. She is expecting me, I think; she had my letter.”
The footman’s face did something careful. “Mrs Pike is poorly, miss.”
And that was all he would say. He set her trunk inside the door and left her standing in the great cold hall like a parcel delivered to the wrong address.
The hall was the size of the whole ground floor at Wrenfield.
A great cold staircase went up into shadow.
A long-case clock ticked somewhere out of sight.
Dead dukes looked down from the walls in their gilt frames, every one of them with the same long, careful face.
There were no flowers anywhere, and no smell of anything—not polish or woodsmoke or cooking—only a clean stone coolness, the smell of a house that was kept rather than lived in.
She had been travelling since before light, and her feet had swelled in her half-boots.
Chairs stood ranged along the wall, gilt and high-backed and so exactly placed that she could not picture a living soul ever having disarranged one by sitting in it.
She did not sit. She stood in the middle of the cold hall and waited to be remembered, and felt, somewhere beneath her patience, a small flat spark of temper she did not let herself examine: at being fetched clear across the county like a chair, set down in a hall, and forgotten.
She had been standing perhaps ten minutes, cold through her pelisse, when she heard the bell.
It came from deep in the house, thin and frantic, the sound of a pull worked too hard by an impatient hand.
She waited for an answering tread. None came.
The bell stopped, then started again, more urgently than before, and still the hall stayed empty, and the clock ticked on as though a bell ringing into silence were the most ordinary thing in the world.
At Wrenfield, a bell that rang twice unanswered meant something had gone wrong, and her feet had started before she gave them leave.
She followed the sound out of the hall, down a corridor that narrowed and grew plainer as it went, the marble giving way to flagstone and the silk to whitewash, until she came out into a long, low passage that could only be the spine of the house below stairs.
The bells hung along the wall in two rows, two dozen at the least, each on its own coiled spring beneath a little ivory tab. One was still dancing, a bright brass bell halfway along, and beneath it the tab read, in faded copperplate, Lady Amabel.
A scullery maid stood frozen at the far end of the passage with a colander in her hands.
“Is there no one to answer it?” Elowen asked.
“Mrs Pike answers the family bells, miss. Always Mrs Pike.” The girl’s eyes were huge.
“Only she went down in the larder of a Thursday, and they carried her up, and she’s not been right since, and the men are all gone to the home farm, and I daren’t go up to the family, miss, I’m only the scullery, and it’s been ringing and ringing…
” She ran clean out of breath. “It’s Lady Amabel’s.
She’ll be wanting something and there’s nobody. ”
Elowen had been in the house a quarter of an hour and did not know which stair was which.
She went up anyway, gloves still on, bonnet still on, the girl’s frightened directions in her ears.
The house went on and on around her as she climbed—long galleries, shut doors, the cold gleam of a great deal of money and no sign at all that anyone lived inside it—and the bell pulled her through it like a thread.
It brought her, by a back stair and a gallery and a turning she would never have found twice, to a bedchamber where a girl of seventeen sat up in a vast bed in the half-dark, the bell-pull still gripped in her fist.
“You’re not Pike,” the girl said. Her voice wobbled. “I rang and rang. I rang half an hour and nobody came.”
“No. I am Miss Vane, and I have only just come. They tell me Mrs Pike is unwell.” Elowen crossed to the bed. “Were you frightened?”
“No,” said the girl.
And then, because Elowen had asked it gently, and no one in that house had asked her anything gently in some time, her face came apart.
“Yes. The room would not stop going round, and I rang, and I rang, and I thought… I thought everyone had gone. That the whole house had got up and walked out of doors and left me here, ringing.” She scrubbed at her eyes, furious with herself for the tears.
“It is a stupid thing to mind. I daresay it is nothing.”
“It is not a stupid thing to mind. Anyone would mind a dark room that would not hold still.” Elowen drew the heavy curtains back a hand’s breadth, since a turning room is always worse in the dark, found the water jug, wetted a cloth, sat down on the edge of the bed, and laid the folded cloth across the girl’s hot brow.
She took off her gloves at last to wring it.
“You’ll stay?” Amabel said. “Tonight, I mean. You won’t go down and leave me by myself.”
“I will stay until you are asleep.”
“Aunt Seraphina said a lady was coming. To see to the house, and to me.” The girl’s voice was growing soft and slurred with lateness and the cool of the cloth.
“To bring me out. Everyone is forever going to bring me out, as though I were a mare to be walked round a ring at a fair. You won’t be tiresome about it, will you? Tell me you won’t.”
“I shall do my best not to be.”
“Good.” A pause; she was drifting. “Are you clever? You sound clever. Aunt Seraphina is clever, and my brother is clever, and I am not clever at all. I am only frightened. There is a great deal of difference between the two.”
“Being frightened is not the opposite of clever,” Elowen said. “One may be frightened and still do what must be done.”
“Are you ever frightened?”
“Every day of my life.”
The girl smiled, drowsy. “I shall like you, I think. No one clever has ever troubled to like me. They are all too busy being clever at my brother.” Her eyes were closing.
“He is not unkind, you know. My brother. People think he is, because he does not say much and he never smiles. But he is not unkind. He is only…” She yawned hugely.
“…far away. Even when he is in the room with you. Like one of his own portraits downstairs, on the wall.”
“There,” Elowen agreed, and stayed where she was until the breathing beneath her hand went slow and even and sure.
When the girl had drifted off, Elowen went back down and did what should have been done hours before.
She found a housemaid to sit with Lady Amabel, sent up barley water and dry toast against the morning, and gave word that Mrs Pike was to be left to rest and not roused for the family’s bells on any account, and that anything the family wanted was to come instead to Miss Vane.
The scullery maid took it all with relief, and then with a kind of wonder, as though being told plainly and kindly what to do were a thing that had run short in the house.
No one had thought to show her where she was to sleep, so she found the room for herself, at the cold end of a passage above the servants’ stair: a narrow room, a narrow bed, a washstand, a window overlooking the stable roof, a fire laid but not lit.
It was a between-room, above the maids, below the family, the kind a house keeps for a person it has not yet decided what to make of.
She lit the fire herself, since there was no one to do it for her, and she did not unpack her trunk. Unpacking was a thing you did when you had been told how long you might stay.
She did take out one thing. She set the candle on the washstand and drew the pressed heartsease from the bodice of her travelling dress, where it had ridden against her heart the whole way, and looked at it a moment in the small light: flat and brown, the purple long gone out of it, a thing of no use to anybody.
Then she put it back where it had been. It was the only thing she had carried to Marcombe that no one could find a use for, and she meant to keep it that way.
Her way down in the morning would take her through the passage of bells again, past the two patient rows beneath their little names—Lady Amabel, the Duke’s Study, the Library, the Blue Morning Room, Lady Seraphina—names enough to keep a houseful of people running from dawn to dark. But that was for the morning.
No one had asked whether she had eaten, or was tired, or wished to sit.
She had been at Marcombe a handful of hours, and in them she had nursed a frightened girl, set a household to rights, and lit her own cold fire, and not one soul in all the great house had thought to wonder whether the new lady might want a single thing herself.
Three nights ago, packing by candlelight, she had imagined Marcombe might offer, for a little while, the mercy of being unknown. She understood now that she had been wrong about that inside the hour.
Somewhere below her, faint and thin, a bell began to ring.
She went to answer it.