Chapter 2 #2
So she was to be a maid. It was like something out of a novel, and despite the reason for the farce, a thrill rushed through her.
If Charlie did not arrive quickly to collect her, she would have to blend in, fulfill her duties well enough that Mrs. Easton took her eyes off her.
If she was careful, and clever, she might learn something of her brother’s mysterious life and the reason for his last, strange letter.
The door at the top of the stairs opened. Caroline stiffened.
Black oxfords appeared, followed by long masculine legs and a torso clad in blue-and-white-checked cambric.
“Oi!” It was the curly-haired man who had stood so possessively beside Mrs. Easton, who had examined Caroline like she was a dish of food he had never tried before. He was holding her valise under one arm. “Come on up. I’m to show you to your room.”
Caroline forced herself to her feet, across the kitchen flagstones, and up the wooden stairs to where he stood, waiting for her. She could expect to be addressed like this, summoned like this.
“I’m Robert,” he said when she stood two steps below him. “Robert Ripley. But everyone calls me Rab.” He held out his free hand.
A queer smell filled Caroline’s nose—something chemical, something singed—under the cedar musk of his cologne. She stared at his long fingers but did not take them. “Caroline Huxley.”
Rab laughed and dropped his hand. “Follow me, please, Miss Huxley.”
The staircase was dim, lit only by sconces set at intervals into the walls.
At the ground-floor landing, Caroline heard the muffled sounds of the party she had stumbled into, but Rab did not lead her through that door.
Up they went, up, up, up, until Caroline’s legs and lungs burned with the effort.
“This is the servants’ staircase,” Rab said as they climbed. “Comes out at the west end of each floor by the dumbwaiter shaft. Handy for running down the chamber pots and running up the sheets.”
Caroline could not reply. It took all her effort to place one foot before the other.
“There are four floors total, plus the kitchen,” he went on, not a bit out of breath. “Parlor and dining room on the ground floor. First and second are guest quarters. Two wings per floor, four rooms per wing.”
“Sixteen rooms,” she said automatically, as though this were some strange math test. But Rab shook his head.
“A dozen. Plus two in the garret. The first floor has only four guest rooms.”
You are never, under any circumstances, to enter the east wing of the second floor.
How many times had she slipped past the locked door of her father’s study when he was away or asleep? She could be invisible when she needed to be.
Finally, when Caroline thought she could not climb another step, Rab opened a door onto a landing above her. Light spilled over her face.
“Nearly there,” he said, laughing down at the redness in her cheeks. “It may be a bear to get to, but you can’t beat the view. On a clear day, your window looks all the way to the Thames.”
The image snagged on something deep in her memory. But she had no time to think, for she had reached the top of the stairs.
Rab stood on a colorful rag run in the center of the small landing. On either side of him was a plain oak door with a brass knob. “That’s your room,” he said, pointing to the door on Caroline’s right. “And that’s mine.”
“Yours?”
The word came out before Caroline could stop it.
Rab laughed again. His teeth were very straight and very white, his canines overlong in a way that did something funny to Caroline’s stomach.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t snore.”
Caroline’s blush deepened. She had been thrust into some strange social game for which she did not know the rules.
Only Charlie had ever spoken to her like this; even between her and Eloise there was a layer of formality.
But this man was a stranger. A stranger in his shirtsleeves, for God’s sake.
A stranger whose bedroom door stood a mere six feet from her own.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said, handing over her valise with a mock-formal bow that still somehow looked elegant. “And I’ll knock when Jim and I manage that trunk of yours up three flights of stairs. If we manage it, that is.”
“Thank you,” Caroline called a bit belatedly, as Rab disappeared into the gloom of the staircase.
—
The room that was to be hers was small and sparse, but surprisingly pleasant.
In the light from the landing, she found her way to the bedside table and turned the key in the oil lamp, illuminating the room in buttery light.
It was small—no more than five paces from wall to wall—but the pitched roof, which was highest at the door and lowest over the window, lent a feeling of airiness to the place.
The wallpaper was a rose trellis pattern with little wrens.
A desk sat beside the window with a scuffed leather chair drawn up against it.
A little armoire stood across from the bed, crowned with a pitcher and a copper basin.
It smelled clean, of vinegar and beeswax.
The bed was made of dark wood, the quilt a starburst pattern in creams and yellows. Caroline shut the door, locked it, dropped her valise on the floor, and collapsed on the bed.
“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” she said into the pillow. “Where are you, Charlie?”
For the first time since setting foot in the boardinghouse, she allowed panic to wash over her.
Even in the deepest throes of her despair at Audley House, as the staff packed their things—some pocketing a candlestick or a few silver spoons, which she pretended not to notice—she had never felt this alone.
She had imagined Charlie’s long, slender arms around her, had imagined him waiting for her, leading her into the next chapter of her life.