Lily (4 page)

“Yes, ma’am. I beg your pardon.” She made her voice contrite, but inside she burned with indignation. Head bowed, leaving Trayer and the coachman to see to the luggage, she followed Mrs. Howe along a flagstone walk that led around the house to a small courtyard and stone basement steps. The housekeeper opened the door at the bottom and swept inside; Lily went more slowly, feeling her way in the dark. She was in a corridor; at its far end a dim light glowed, and Howe trudged toward it stolidly. It proved to come from the kitchen, an enormous, echoing chamber whose far wall was taken up entirely by the biggest brick hearth Lily had ever seen.

“Dorcas!”

A girl, a wan wisp of a child no older than twelve or thirteen, jerked herself awake on a stool next to the hearth. “Ooh, ma’am, ee’re back, I weren’t sleepin’!” she said in a nervous gush, scrambling off the stool.

“Let the lamp burn out, didn’t you? Ignorant girl! Nothing but the candle to greet us, and I
told
you what time we’d be back. Get upstairs; I’ll deal with you in the morning.”

Dorcas mumbled, “Ais, ma’am,” looking terrified. She was small, dull-haired, and gray-skinned, with a sore on her lip. Scurrying out, she threw Lily only one quick, curious glance.

“You’ll help Dorcas in there tomorrow,” Howe announced, shrugging a massive shoulder toward a door that led to the dark scullery. “Have that grate cleaned and the fire lit before Mrs. Belt comes in—that’s the cook. She starts the breakfast at five. Now get off to bed.” She took Lily by the elbow and hustled her back out into the dim corridor. “The servants’ stairs are at the end of this hall, straight ahead. Lowdy’s room’s in the attic, the first door on the left. Go on, now.” Lily was halfway down the hall when Mrs. Howe called out, “And get a cap for that hair by tomorrow or I’ll cut it off!”

Feeling her way in the deepening dark, Lily had to fight back tears. She muttered, “Damn,” as her elbow struck the wainscot with a sharp crack. She found the steps by stumbling up the first one, barely catching herself before her chin hit the fourth.
“Damn,”
she said again, holding onto the wall—then stopped, arrested by a sound somewhere above her. A voice? Yes, loud and angry, a man’s voice—and now a terrific muffled thud.

She climbed the last stair to the first-floor landing and stood still, peering around the corner down the length of a wide, high-ceilinged hall. She made out a door at the far end, broad and grand, and realized it must be the great front door Mrs. Howe had forbidden her to use. Another hall bisected this one halfway to the door; the voices—two now, one raging, one placating—came from the right. She saw two huge shadows lunge in the writhing light from candles in a sconce along the wall, and would have retreated to the dark staircase behind her—but then the first voice came again. The words were garbled, unintelligible, but underneath anger Lily heard the bare, wrenching sound of a wild anguish. The rawness of it pierced something inside her—she found she couldn’t move. Flattening her back against the wall, she held her breath and waited.

“Jesus God, Cobb, she took him. Why? Why did she take him?”

Devon Darkwell, Viscount Sandown, the master of Darkstone Manor, shook off his steward’s grip and lurched drunkenly into the relative brightness of the entry hall. Swaying, he stood under the wide, unlit chandelier and drank four swallows of brandy from the crystal decanter in his hand. French brandy, his brother’s smuggled finest; it went down as smooth as warm silk. But tonight something was wrong with it. He’d been drinking steadily since early afternoon and he wasn’t drunk yet. Or not drunk enough.

Arthur Cobb reached out with his good arm—the other ended in a handless stub at the cuff of his coat—and muttered, “ ‘Ere, now, all’s well, ee’ve no call t’ be swingin’ this about. I’ll just take—”

Devon jerked away, irritated, and then stared down in bloodshot perplexity at the silver hunting pistol lying in his palm. He couldn’t remember taking it out of his desk drawer. The sight of it exhumed the macabre remains of his vicious meditation. “I wish she weren’t dead,” he rasped, hollow-eyed. “If she weren’t dead, I could kill her.”

His black-bearded steward stiffened, and reached once more for the gun. Devon’s hand clenched around it harder and he bared his teeth, intent on the chaos of bitterness and violence inside him—when a sound, a soft intake of breath, diverted him. He whirled, facing the darkness, and saw the pale outline of a face, receding.

“Stop!” The face halted for a second, then retreated again. “Stop, I said!” He took three unsteady steps forward. Was it a woman? “You there, come here,” he commanded. A moment passed. Then the figure approached, unwillingness obvious in every lagging footfall, and he saw that it was a woman, a girl, with dark hair and light eyes. He’d never seen her before.

She stopped again, and something told Devon she would come no farther now. He fumbled the pistol into his jacket pocket and moved toward her, snatching a candle from the wall bracket as he went. “Who are you?” he demanded when he reached her. He held the candle high and peered at her.

Lily clutched her hands together, quelling the impulse to fling them up like a shield between herself and this staring giant of a man who smelled of drink and looked capable of anything. His straight brown hair hung to his collar, wild and disheveled; his coat was rumpled, his white stock untied and wine-stained. He had a dangerous face, and the expression in his bleak blue eyes frightened her. Gathering her nerve, she said, “I’m Lily,” in a quiet voice, and waited for whatever would happen next.

Devon’s stare narrowed. She was tall and slender in her dark gown. A pale, gentle face. Green eyes, or maybe gray. Her mouth looked soft; a forgiving mouth. He couldn’t tell what color her hair was. While he watched, some of the fury in him abated, seemed to shrivel under the steadiness of her level gaze. “Are you?” he said, and was surprised to hear something close to composure in his tone. “Yes, I can see the resemblance.” He wanted to touch her, to find out if her white cheek was as soft as it looked.
Lily.
But he had a bottle in one hand, a candle in the other. “What are you doing in my house, Lily?” She could tell him anything, he thought, anything at all: what he wanted was to hear her voice again.

Lily realized she wasn’t afraid. There was no anger in the man’s face now, only pain, and a whimsical politeness. “I’m your new housemaid, sir,” she explained softly. And then, appalled, she watched his face change again, slowly, this time to cold contempt.

Devon stepped back. “Of course,” he said, lips twisting in a nasty smile. He let the candle thud to the floor and reached into his pocket. The girl’s frightened gasp pleased him. Behind him, Cobb muttered something; he broke off when Devon whirled and jerked the pistol up and out with both hands. Squinting, he squeezed the trigger and fired.

The great glass chandelier in the foyer dropped like a boulder and struck the bare wood floor with a deafening crash. Lily screamed, twisting away from a spray of flying crystal. The master spun back around. She saw his face, black with some inscrutable emotion, and shrank back. He took a step toward her, at the same moment the man named Cobb plucked the gun out of his hand.

Devon snarled; Cobb braced himself. But instead of attacking, Devon fell back against the wall, striking his shoulders with a rough thud. He uttered curses in a soft, passionless monotone. His hand shook when he raised the brandy decanter to his lips.

Cobb turned away, toward Lily. “Get upstairs, girl,” he advised in a low voice.

“Why?” Devon wiped his mouth with his sleeve and fixed her with a sardonic eye. “She’s the bleeding
maid,
isn’t she? Let her clean up the mess.”

Her knees wouldn’t stop trembling. She looked back and forth between the two men in confusion, unsure if the master was serious or not.

“Go on,” Cobb repeated stolidly. “Where be your room?”

“I—I’m to sleep with someone called Lowdy.”

“Go up, then. Say naught o’ this to Lowdy or anyone, d’you hear? Keep it to yourself.”

“Yes, I will,” she promised. But she saw skepticism in the man’s black stare.

She threw a last glance at Devon Darkwell. He had slid to the floor. His forearms hung heavily between his knees; the empty decanter dangled from his fingers. He was staring into space, head against the wall, and there was nothing in his hard eyes now except emptiness. Lily picked up her skirts and ran.

“My real name’s Loveday. Loveday Rostarn. Pretty, edn it? People’ve called me Lowdy all my life, though, so I reckon I’m stuck wi’ it. Is that all ee d’ have t’ sleep in, an?”

Lily glanced down at her worn shift. “Aye, this is it.”

“Well, they d’ say winter’s over, though hereabouts you can’t be sartin till summer. An’ ’ave ee no clawthes but that dress yonder, an’ no other shoes? How did ee come t’ such a press?”

“I—it—everything was stolen, at a fair. All me money an’ every stitch I owned.” It was almost impossible to speak Irish to Lowdy Rostarn; Lily’s brain was too tied up trying to understand what Lowdy was saying to her in Cornish. What a pair they were going to make!

“Ee d’ look all done in, poor lamb. Blaw out the candle an’ crawl in. Mrs. ‘Owe d’ give out but one candle a week t’ each maid’s room, Sundays, so we’ve four nights t’ go on that bit o’ nub. But tes dark as a blatherin’ sack wi’ no moon t’night. Are ee hungry? I ‘ad a pennorth o’ broken biscuits, but I et ‘em.”

“I was before; I think I’m just numb now.” Lily took a last look around at the distempered walls and bare floorboards, the sparse, ill-assorted furniture, the spotted mirror and chipped washbasin. The room was cold now—what must it be like in February? She imagined waking up shivering, finding ice on the water in the jug, the face flannel frozen solid. She blew out the candle and crept between the sheets of the cast-off iron four-poster—two-poster now; the other two had been cut down so the bed could be wedged sideways under the eaves. Everything smelled of damp and mildew and rot. The mattress was lumpy and ridiculously thin. Lowdy pushed half of the hard pillow over for Lily to share. She murmured, “Thank you,” and thought about her new bedmate.

For herself, Lily would probably not have welcomed a pathetic-looking intruder to her small room and smaller bed in the wee hours of the morning. But Lowdy had seemed genuinely glad for the company, causing Lily to wonder if domestic life in this great mansion of a place was lonely sometimes for a young girl. Lowdy was seventeen, and had worked here for two years. She was short-legged, small-breasted, and wide-hipped, and her solid little body looked strong, much stronger than Lily’s. She had pretty black hair, cut short, and a sensible face. But a chipped front tooth appeared whenever she smiled, which was often, and then she looked playful and a little sly. Her thick Cornish accent was completely unfamiliar to Lily, almost Slavic-sounding if she let her mind wander and didn’t concentrate. Luckily the girl spoke slowly, with a phlegmatic deliberateness mat usually allowed Lily to decipher the meaning of one sentence before she started another.

“What’s it like to work here?” Lily whispered in the darkness. But what she wanted to know was what “the master” was like, and if the scene she’d just witnessed downstairs was typical or an aberration. Lowdy was a heavy sleeper, however, and knew nothing of gunshots and crashing chandeliers; and since Lily had promised the man named Cobb that she would say nothing of the incident, she could see no way to ask the question directly.

“Oh, no worser’n any an’ betterer’n most.” Lowdy yawned and settled on her side. “Tes Mrs. ’Owe you d’ want t’ be watchin’ out for. Her’s as mean as a splatty ol’ pig, I’d as lief bait a bull as cross ’er.”

“What does she do?”

“She hits, is what. Enid, the girl last but one afore ee, she smoted ’er onct so rough-like, she breaked ’er arm. An’ Sidony, the scullery maid as was ’ere in September month two years past—before me, but I heard of it—she falled down the dairy step and near died. Naught was said above-stairs, but below they all knowed it were ’Owe. An’ the maid no more’n a cheeil at the time, a little small tiddler o’ thirteen.”

Lily lay still, appalled. Tales got spread in tight-knit households, she told herself; gossip blossomed and grew. Surely Lowdy was exaggerating.

“An’ ee did ought t’ stay clear o’ Trayer as well, for what he does is worser’n hittin’.”

That had the ring of truth. She heard Lowdy yawn again and spoke quickly, before her sleepy informant could drift off. “What’s the master like? To—work for, I mean. Mrs. Howe said he’s very particular about the maids.”

Lowdy snorted. “Phaw, tes a cabby lie. Master bain’t in mind we’re alive, has eyes for naught but ‘is work.”

“His work?”

“Ais, ’im’s a great squire, owns a mine an’ land an’ sheep an’ what-not. Mrs. ’Owe d’ say such a thing about ’im bein’
particular
t’ make up for losin’ so many girls. She can’t keep ‘em, is what.”

“Why do you stay, Lowdy?”

“Pick me liver, where would I go?”

“Don’t you have family?”

“Naw. Hired on ’ere at me first fair, right out o’ orph’nage.”

They were both quiet for a time. Lily thought Lowdy had fallen asleep, and spoke softly in case she had. “Is the master ever a violent man?”

“Master? Nay. Nay, ’im’s just grim-like. Scarcely ever speaks, not t’ us, not t’ anyone. His wife runned off an’ left ’im, I heard. She’m dead now.”

“When, Lowdy? How long ago?”

“Don’t know. Afore me. He d’ have a brother, the
young
master, but ’e lives somewheres else. In Devon wi’ their mother, I b’lieve. Only comes ’ere when there’s smugglin’ afoot—an’ they d’ say ’e’s comin’ tomorrow. He’m a free-trader an’ d’ captain ’is own ship.”

This Lily definitely did not believe. As she lay pondering her next question, Lowdy began to snore.

She closed her own eyes and shifted on the hard, uncomfortable mattress. At least there weren’t any bugs. The casement window must face the sea, for in the new quiet she could hear its secretive whispering. She tried to put her thoughts in order, but memories butted and shuffled against each other and it was impossible. In her mind’s eye she saw her cousin sipping canary wine beside the fire, his great heavy legs braced against the fender. She saw the faces of the children she’d fled past in the alley. She saw Trayer Howe’s crude and patient staring. His mother’s black, spiteful eyes, and the two white streaks blazing in her dark hair.