Untitled (10 page)

   She pulls a lungful of air into herself before she can speak. "Robert," she says, "oh, Robert—he was after your work, then?"

   "There's precious little else in that room."

   Maybe he is right. After all, she has found no sign that the burglar was in the morning room. And yet—a careful man wouldn't have left any sign, would he?

   She lifts her cup to just beneath her chin, then glances up at Robert. "What could be gained from someone looking at it? Someone who's not an expert in the field?"

   Staring into the fire, he shakes his head. "That's the problem. I don't know."

Chapter 5

O
nly two days since the burglary, and the servants' frightened look has disappeared. Now they merely resent her once more—Mina sees it in the way Cartwright stands stiffly beside his chair, and the way Elsie peers at her from the scullery. Worst of all is Mrs. Johnson. "Well, Mrs. Robert," she says, "I don't know about that. The mistress doesn't much care for veal."

   "Your mistress is ill in bed and taking little more than broth. I am merely requesting a dish that is one of Mr. Robert's favorites."

   Mrs. Johnson won't hold her gaze. Instead she sucks in her cheeks and takes a dirty cloth from beside the stove. Then—the cheek of it!—she pulls open the oven, forcing Mina to step aside. Hot, buttery air rises out of the oven. Pies—two of them. Yet when is there pie for the upstairs table? Not more than once a week.

   "More pies, Mrs. Johnson?"

   "Yes, ma'am. Mr. Cartwright likes a slice of pie with his dinner." When she stands her face is flushed and strands of grey hair are stuck to her forehead. "Don't you, Mr. Cartwright?" she calls over.

   Cartwright leans forward. "I do indeed, Mrs. Johnson."

   "Your mistress cannot afford all of the butter and meat that this household gets through each week. Indeed, I can't imagine how it's possible for so few people to eat so much."

   Mrs. Johnson links her hands together over her belly. "Well, Mrs. Bentley has never complained. She wouldn't want us to live on bread and cheese as some mistresses might." For a moment she stares right into Mina's face, then she bends towards the oven again. "Excuse me, ma'am, but I need to get the pies out before they're overdone, and there's luncheon to start. Next time I'll be happy to come upstairs rather than putting you to the bother of coming down here. That's how the mistress has always done it."

   "Then you'll be so good as to bring up this week's bills from the grocer and the butcher, and be ready to explain where exactly so much butter and meat have gone. I'm sure Mrs. Bentley will also be eager to hear your explanation when she recovers." She stands perfectly still to let her words hang in the air. But Mrs. Johnson dips a cloth into the oven and pulls the pies out from the racks and slides them onto the table. "Did you hear me, Mrs. Johnson?"

   "Oh yes, ma'am." She wipes her hands on the cloth and twists her head towards Mina. "Next time I'll come to see you upstairs."

   Mina's hands lift, of their own accord it seems. What do they intend? To slap the broad face of this woman? To shove her, hard, against the table? However, they stop in midair, fingers curved, wrists bent back. Perhaps Mrs. Johnson notices, for she hurries away to the sink and Mina is left looking at the pies, and at Mr. Cartwright standing just beyond them.

   "Mrs. Johnson is used to having her kitchen to herself," he says, and gives a slight nod.

   "Yet it is not her kitchen, is it? It is her mistress's, and must be run according to her mistress's wishes."

   "Yes, ma'am," he says flatly.

   What good is it? She has got nowhere with these servants. Worse than that—she hasn't even left the room and their attention is elsewhere. Mrs. Johnson washing her hands at the sink. Cartwright tapping his fingers on the back of a chair. Elsie tugging at a loose thread on her apron.

   She walks out, pulling the door closed behind her. She doesn't walk away, though, not yet. No, she leans her head towards the door and listens to Mrs. Johnson's voice curl up in annoyance, hears, "think we were thieves," and "back to Paris." The audacity of the woman, when in all likelihood she has come to some arrangement with the grocer and the butcher for the household to be charged for more than it uses, and to make a profit by it. How to catch her, though? How to watch when she cannot spend her days down here overseeing what is delivered and what is charged for and what is actually cooked?

   Jane has noticed nothing. But this is not what Mina intended Jane to look out for.

   She makes for the narrow stairs, her shoulders uncomfortably stiff and her dress damp under her arms, up to the morning room, where she will sit and stare out at the gloom hanging over the city.

        
I
t's a cold morning, thick with fog, and Jane's called upstairs, up to Mr. Robert's study. She hasn't seen him in the two days since the burglary, but she's been thinking: Is there something she overlooked? Something that would explain the whole incident? The sensation that no one in this household quite trusts her has lingered. Maybe, she thinks, Mr. Robert wants to question her again, but what more can she tell him? As she knocks at the door she can't help but bite her teeth hard together.

   Of course she's been in this room since the last time Mr. Robert called her up, because there was the grate to clean and the fire to lay. This time, though, Mr. Robert is here and he seems out of place, something that doesn't belong in a room that she is used to seeing when she is the only person in it.

   "Ah," he says when she comes in. "Ah yes." He doesn't put down the document he is reading, and she understands that she should wait. The papers that the intruder left lying about have all been tidied away, back into the boxes that give the room a moved-in look. But then, she thinks, he and Mrs. Robert are only here for a few weeks. That's what she's learnt downstairs. With his mother sick and Mr. Henry coming back from India soon, this world she's been pulled into could soon break apart.

   She has stopped herself from asking more. That way Mr. Cart wright's eyes do not search hers out, and he doesn't say, "Wilbred. Not such a common name, is it?" or "I know that name from somewhere. I'm certain I do," as he has so many times already. Instead during meals she keeps her head down and her eyes on her plate while Mr. Cartwright tells them about what he's read in the day-old newspaper Mr. Robert lets him bring downstairs. A report of the burglary in
The
Times,
herself as the unnamed maid who opened the door, the police still investigating when in fact they have not been back.

   When she raises her eyes now she finds Mr. Robert watching her. It startles her, the intensity of that stare, and she looks away to the window and the backs of the next street's houses. Surely, she thinks, he must notice something not quite right in the way she doesn't want to meet his eye.

   Instead he only shifts in his chair, says, "Very good, very good." He comes around to the other side of the desk, where he stands so close that she catches the scent of Macassar oil on his hair. Then he grasps her chin and lifts it, turns her head this way and that. Inside she shrinks. This is not right. This cannot be right. But before she can think what to do he has let go, and she watches as he treads across the carpet to a cabinet where a wooden box waits. He carries it to his desk, then fetches a chair that he sets down beside her. "Please sit," he says. Not a request. A command. So she sits.

   He is rummaging behind his desk, and without glancing up tells her, "Remove your cap, if you wouldn't mind."

   But she does mind. Her cap? No. Her eyes are blinking fast, and her hands are twisting together in her lap. She wonders, is this how it is to be ruined?

   There come the thin sounds of metal on metal, of instruments of some kind knocking against the wood of the box, but she won't look. She'd run from the room except it would do no good. She has nowhere to go except downstairs, and what would she say? Why would they believe her? Or maybe—and her head twitches around in panic because he's coming close—this is what Mrs. Saunders meant by telling her that her character could be at stake. And if she resists? Will she be dismissed?

   He is carrying a large metal device like a pair of tongs designed to lift a very large egg, and the sight of them makes her whimper out loud. She presses a hand over her mouth.

   "Your cap," he says. When she doesn't move, he reaches for it himself. She hears a thin wail, and it takes her a moment to realize it is coming from her own mouth. He steps back, and she sees surprise in the arch of his eyebrows.

   "I'm a good girl, sir," she cries out. "Please. Please."

   He sits on the edge of his desk and lifts his hands, the device in one, the other palm out to her. "Calm yourself," he tells her quietly.

   She's not listening. Now that she has dared to speak, she can't stop. "I can't be ruined like this, sir. Have pity on me, sir, please, please, I can't—" Her voice breaks. Unable to say more, she brings her apron up to cover her face and, in the privacy of its white cotton, lets sobs rise through her chest.

   She's so caught up in her misery that it takes her a few minutes to realize that he has not said anything more, and has not come close again. In fact, it is so quiet that she wonders if he is still in the room. Has he left? Or is he watching her, silently? From the mantelpiece a clock chimes the quarter hour. Her crying has a halfhearted quality about it. She should be clearing the dining room and making a start on the stairs. In one go, she lets the apron drop.

   He's behind his desk, head bent, writing. Now that she has uncovered herself he looks up. "Ready?" he asks, and the dread creeps back into her.

        
I
n the end it wasn't so awful, at least not in the way she'd imagined.

   Still it took time—so much time. What's more, it has left her with the strange sensation that a part of her has been taken away and might be examined by Mr. Robert or anyone else who cares to see it, anytime they wish. All those notes he made on that small card, then tucked it away with so many others in a special box full of drawers upon drawers of cards. She even got up the courage to ask him what it was all for and he said, "To keep track of people. With this"—he tapped her card—"you'll never be able to pass yourself off as someone other than Jane Wilbred without me knowing."

   He smiled, but she didn't.

   Now she has to hurry to get the carpet swept. The tea leaves she sprinkles over it clump. While she was in the study fresh leaves must have been added to the ones she'd squeezed out, and now not only is she an hour behind in her work, everything is going wrong: the toodamp tea leaves, Mrs. Robert in the morning room just when she needs to give it a thorough going-over, her box short on blacking and Mrs. Johnson too busy to get more, the hem of her dress snagging on the sharp corner of a side table and ripping. She'll have to stay up late tonight fixing it. There'll be no time before that, what with having to catch up with all that has to be done this morning.

   Through it all—all this sweeping and carrying and polishing that make up her day—she feels the cold grip of the device he put on her head. What had she been expecting? Not that, that's for sure. Something more along the lines of the tales she'd wasted her money on when she first started at the Saunderses', at least until Mrs. Saunders found them at the bottom of her box. What a lecture she got. Stories rot the brain, they flatter a girl's vanity, they lead her astray. Mrs. Saunders had held up one of her magazines by the corner, as though touching it would contaminate her.
"Priscilla's Ad
ventures,"
she read out loud, then she looked up at Jane. "Is this the reading that our Lord sanctions? Will it make you modest and obedient and satisfied with your station in life?" Jane had to admit that no, it wouldn't. So Mrs. Saunders dropped the magazine into the fire, then the next, all of them one by one, and it had seemed an act of needless cruelty. At least she'd read them all except the last one, and as it curled up in the flames she resigned herself to never knowing what happened to Priscilla Tremault and Lord James. In the weeks afterwards, this was the story that lived on in her. Pushing a bucket of water and her candle across the floor as she scrubbed, she'd find all manner of ways for Lord James to rescue Priscilla from the count, and to marry her, and to keep his inheritance despite his uncle, because after all, she wasn't just a maid, she was the daughter of a French nobleman.

   Now, as she shakes the carpet brush free of the tea leaves sticking to its bristles, she thinks how those stories, and Mrs. Saunders's warnings, too, prepared her to protect her modesty, but did not tell her what to do when her master sat her in a chair and measured her head every which way, as though he was planning to make her a hat. Even after she thought he must be finished he kept measuring, with a whole boxful of instruments: her ears, her nose, the position of her eyes and mouth, the length of her arms, her fingers, and then, making her take off her boots and stand flat against the wall, her height. Afterwards he didn't tell her to move, so she stood there while he wrote on the card and filed it away, staring at her boots where she'd left them on the carpet, those ugly worn things, thick and heavy, sitting on a red carpet laced with designs of leaves and flowers that was so pretty you could have hung it on the wall and looked at it like a painting.

   Eventually when he turned around he seemed surprised that she was still there. He said, "You may go," in such a way that she felt caught out, as though she should have known. She gathered up her boots in one hand and her cap in the other and hesitated. Should she put them back on here, when he'd dismissed her? Or did she dare carry them out into the hallway when anyone passing would see her like that, cap missing, boots in her hand, creeping around as though she'd been up to no good? He must have seen her falter, for he told her, "Thank you, thank you for your time," though without really looking at her. So she stepped out into the hallway. A noise from the stairs—of feet shifting? Of someone leaning against the banister? She wasn't sure, but she hurried away to the dining room, where her brushes and dusters waited for her.