Chapter 21
“I thought ink would be quieter.”
Sarah did not at once answer, because she had been a lady’s maid for nine years and one of the first things a lady’s maid learned was the order in which she might respond to a sentence she had not been entirely invited to hear.
She set the can of hot water down on the washstand.
She drew back the curtain by an inch and stopped.
The Brook Street area below was already grey with the morning fog, and a single lamp at the corner of Davies Street still burned.
“Miss.”
“You may say it, Sarah.”
“It is not so quiet, then, the ink.”
“It is the loudest thing I have ever read. I had supposed paper to be a polite material. I find it is not.”
There were letters on the coverlet, and on the small writing table, and two on the floor, one face up and one face down, where they had slid off when she sat down on the rug to read the third.
The case Cole had set on the Pembroke at three on the hour the previous afternoon stood open on the chair by the window, the leather lining the colour of old saddles.
Sarah had been with her since she was sixteen, and had never in nine years made any remark about the contents of any room she had entered.
She took the rooms and the case and the coverlet in with her hands at her apron, and made no remark now.
Sarah drew the curtain back an inch. “You did not go to bed, miss.”
“I did not undress. I sat on the bed. I should not call that not going to bed. Bed is a relative term, Sarah, like fortune.”
“Yes, miss.”
“I am not making sense yet. It is too early. I shall make sense by ten. By eleven I shall be witty. The day will be in working order by twelve and I shall come down to my mother and pretend I have slept.”
“Yes, miss.”
“Bring me the tea, would you. Not the chocolate. I cannot drink anything that thinks it is being kind to me this morning.”
“Yes, miss.”
Sarah went out for the tea. The fog at the window thinned and then thickened again, and the lamp at the corner of Davies Street went out as a lamplighter passed, and Melody picked up the letter she had set face down on the floor and turned it over, and read it for the fourth time.
It was dated June of ’13. The hand at eight and twenty had been steadier than the hand at five and twenty and far less neat than the hand at thirty.