Chapter 5
When the clock struck nine that night, Caroline was lying in bed with her shoes on. She couldn’t bring herself to remove them, nor undo her corset, nor comb her hair. Never in her life had she been so bone-tired.
It had been years since she had entered Audley House’s kitchen.
As a young girl, Caroline had visited often, helped Cook by stirring the gravy or peeling apples.
She had liked the easy industry of it, the way her mind could wander as she worked.
But when she crossed the invisible threshold into adolescence, she knew, somehow, that it was impolite to intrude on the servants in their own spaces.
She kept to the drawing rooms and parlors and lost touch with the beating heart of her home.
As she helped Mrs. Easton prepare supper, Caroline had felt like a bumbling foreigner.
“More butter. More. More, girl. Have you never made mashed potatoes before?”
“You added salt, I trust? Miss Huxley? You did salt the water?”
“Trim and destring the beans. Destring. Yes, I am aware that they are string beans, but if you don’t want our guests to choke on the damned strings you must destring—oh, for heaven’s sake. I’ll do it myself.”
Caroline had mashed the potatoes and, under Mrs. Easton’s watchful eye, added a stunning amount of butter and cream; she had boiled green beans and stirred onions for the pie.
Before she knew it, the light through the cellar windows was gray and half a dozen pairs of feet filed into the dining room overhead.
Then Caroline, clutching a carafe of wine to her chest like a buoy, had followed Mrs. Easton up the kitchen steps.
As she emerged, blinking, into the shimmering light of the dining room’s chandelier, she tried not to stare at the men seated around the long table.
“Evening, gents,” the landlady said as she opened the dumbwaiter doors and pulled out the first steaming tureen. “Hope you’re hungry. It’s steak and kidney pie tonight…”
There was the Sikh in a coat of emerald green, his thick black beard gleaming beneath the bright white turban.
Beside him, the man in the battered rancher’s hat leaned his elbows on the tablecloth as he spoke to a stocky, swarthy man, who reminded Caroline of a drawing of a pirate in a picture book Charlie had given her.
Next to him, the bespectacled man looked like a child, his bottle-thick lenses barely clearing the table edge.
In the opposite chair sat the Black man, his wide shoulders straining against the seams of a fine dinner jacket, and beside him Monsieur Rodart, who flashed Caroline a polite smile, and beside Monsieur Rodart, Rab.
And at the head of the table, the faceted light carving his face into ridges and ravines, sat the scarred man.
Caroline looked at her boots. But not before his one good eye had landed on her with a cold, reptilian clarity that quickened the breath in her chest.
“Who’s this?” he growled, in a voice like metal dragged over stones.
“This is Miss Huxley, John,” Mrs. Easton replied matter-of-factly. “New kitchen maid.”
Half a dozen pairs of eyes landed on Caroline in a spectrum of interest and suspicion, but she could not meet them. Her stomach had gone cold and liquid.
“Pour the wine,” Mrs. Easton said to Caroline, setting the final dish on the sideboard. “Start at the head of the table. I’ll slice this up and follow right behind you.”
Caroline set her shoulders and strode toward the scarred man. John, she said to herself. His name is John. And I will not stare at him.
“Apparently they have someone in custody,” Rab was saying to Monsieur Rodart. “A Jewish man. Pizer, or Phizer. Something like that.”
Alfie shrugged an elegant shoulder. “I hope they’ve caught him. But if this Pizer is the man, is Leather Apron, I fear for the rest of the Jews of Whitechapel.”
“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” Rab said, glancing up at Caroline, who was standing awkwardly at the head of the table. “Either the killings will stop, or they won’t.”
“Wine?” Caroline asked. Her voice was high, obsequious. But the man—John—did not look up. He was scowling at the plate and silverware before him, one eye bright and blue as Chinese glaze, the other milky, unseeing. The gouges on his face were deep enough to lay a finger in.
“John,” Rab said loudly. Caroline jumped.
The scarred man looked up, startled, and met Rab’s golden gaze.
“Do you want some wine?”
“What?”
“Do you want some wine?” Rab repeated, nodding at Caroline.
That blue eye swiveled to her, as though seeing her for the first time. Caroline’s knees turned to gelatin.
John nodded.
Caroline’s hand had trembled as she poured. The man’s scent filled her nostrils: rust and dirt and sour age. Every nerve in her body turned to him, as though he was a dog who might wheel and bite at any moment. But she did not spill a drop.
And throughout the whole miserable supper she had not embarrassed herself, not dropped a plate nor tripped over her boots nor drawn any undue attention to herself.
Overall, she thought, she had played a convincing maid, aside from speaking French to Monsieur Rodart and her complete ineptitude in the kitchen.
Now, lying in her bed, Caroline stretched her arms overhead with a groan. Her feet throbbed. Her fingers were raw from lye soap and hot water, her fingernails black with scrubbing sand.
But she could not sleep. Not yet.
She got to her feet and staggered to the desk.
First, she pulled the little tin from the drawer and pried it open.
The bitter medicine dissolved on her tongue, filling her with a pleasant softness.
She prodded a finger among the chalky pills and counted silently.
Thirty-one. Enough to last her a month, if she was careful.
When her first week was through, she would take her wages to Rab’s chemistry and buy more.
She reached for her diary, trailed her fingertips over the wild roses embossed on its cover.
Charlie had given it to her, and the first page was filled with his scrawling handwriting.
To Caroline, on the occasion of your sixteenth birthday.
You take such deep pleasure in reading, I thought you might like to try your hand at writing.
Behind each of your favorite books there is a person hunched over a desk, pulling out their hair and fitting words together like bricks in a wall.
I have no doubt that were you to apply yourself, you could write a novel to rival the Bronte sisters.
Upon reading her dearest, most secret desire put out in plain words, Caroline had raised wet eyes to Charlie and cried, “But I have nothing to write! In every story something happens. Nothing has ever happened to me. I haven’t been to Leeds, let alone London!
I’m not even permitted to ride to the pond and back.
Eloise is my only friend, and she is dull as porridge. What story do I have to tell?”
And Charlie had laughed and said, “Nothing happens in Austen’s books, and look how successful she was.” Which had prompted, as he knew it would, a tirade from Caroline, who thought Jane Austen drastically overrated.
The notebook was filled now with insipid musings, phrases that had seemed profound at the time but, on second reading, were self-important or cliché.
She flipped to the last few blank pages and unstopped her inkwell.
Something had happened to her. Something worth recalling, worth putting down in paper and pen.
Today, she wrote, I, Caroline Foster, lately the daughter of the lord of Audley House, sister of the missing Charlie Foster, assumed the guise of a Whitechapel kitchen maid.
As she laid out the details, polished to a shine with adjectives and adverbs, the tension in her shoulders and jaw dissipated.
She forgot herself, forgot her exhaustion, forgot the hour.
When every strange detail of her day had been recorded, she tucked the diary in the desk’s drawer, undressed, and fell immediately, deeply, asleep.
And so the first week went.
Each morning, Caroline awoke to the sound of Rab’s knuckles when the sky outside was still thick and gray.
She rolled to her feet with a groan and reached for her black crepe gown, which was now stained with grease and smelled like the kitchen fire.
Teeth scrubbed, boots tied, hair pulled into a low chignon, Caroline stepped on the landing and stood for a moment, listening to the small sounds behind the door across from hers.
What does he do in there? she wondered as she descended the servants’ stairs. Sometimes strange odors, chemical and herbal, drifted out onto the landing. On the third morning, she opened her door to a haze of smoke and a stream of curses.
“Bad oil wick,” Rab told her when he opened the door to her frantic hammering. But he was careful to block the rest of the room from her view, and the odor was like no oil wick Caroline had ever encountered.
Caroline added Rab’s odd behavior to her list of questions about the Full Moon, which grew longer every day.
—
Her father had belonged to a men’s club, here in London.
Like everything she knew about Lord Foster, this information had been gleaned at the dining room table when his “business acquaintances”—fellow gamblers, Caroline later realized—visited Audley House.
But his men’s club could have been nothing like this.
She could not imagine her father’s stiff profile seated between Mr. Toussaint and Mr. O’Riley, could not imagine him in conversation with Mr. Bajwa or bug-eyed Mr. Tythe.
Lord Foster had spoken so disparagingly about the East End’s crime rate and immigrant population, which, in his eyes, were one and the same, that Caroline knew he had never crossed Leman Street, never seen the mud-streaked faces of children—British children, with button noses and blue eyes—never seen their mothers sitting on the pavement with their bonnets beside them, upturned to catch coins.