A Little Death (6 page)

There was the hem of a skirt, very dirty, my head got stuck right under it and I remember looking up and thinking it must be a woman and how queer that she hadn’t got any drawers on, and the next thing—well, she must have kicked me, because everything started spinning round and round, and I thought I was going to be sick. I could hear Louisa whispering to me, ‘Quick, get up,’ and I got to my knees. The first thing I saw was Miss Childers—that was Louisa’s governess—trying to hold on to Jenny, the half-witted servant. Jenny’s arms were doing a sort of mad semaphore and Miss Childers was trying to catch hold of them. ‘What are you thinking of?’ she was shouting. ‘Control yourself!’ She tried to give Jenny a slap, but she missed. Jenny kept shouting ‘Come! Youcomewithme! Comewithme!’ Her words were sticking together like dates, and spit was flying out of the corners of her mouth. Some of it hit Miss Childers’s bosom and I remember thinking it looked like a little brooch. When she embraced me later, I noticed a small dark patch where the spittle had soaked into the material.

My head hurt and I felt sick. I shut my eyes and put
my hands up to my ears to blot out the noise, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Then one of Jenny’s hands struck down like a snake on my arm. ‘Yougetup, youcomehere,’ and she dragged me with her across the grass and through the yard. I fell over on the stones, but she scooped me up and sort of wedged me under her arm, and we went round the corner behind the hedge where the servant’s privy was. It was a little shed, covered in creeper, behind a thick privet hedge and designed so that you couldn’t see it from the yard, and no stranger could have known it was there. Jenny panted, ‘Look—you look,’ and pushed me round the side of it. I looked straight ahead and didn’t see anything, and then I looked down and there was Freddie, lying face down in a patch of mud. He was wearing a sailor suit, with his legs straight and his arms by his sides, like a toy soldier—or sailor, I suppose. He looked like a big doll dropped by a child and forgotten. That was my thought, that I’d forgotten him, and I think I said it out loud. On the top of his head the blood on his orange hair made it look like marmalade, sticky orange lumps, and the flies were landing on it, patting their legs up and down in the way flies do. Jenny kept her hand on my arm, she kept on screaming ‘Look! look! look!’ and pushing me towards Freddie.

She shoved me from behind and tried to make me touch his head where the blood was. I pulled back as hard as I could, but my fingers were getting closer and closer to the—
mess
—on his head. I didn’t want to touch it but I did touch his back, I couldn’t help it. I’m sure that Freddie was still alive at that moment, still breathing… I had my fingers on him for just a second, but I’m sure I could feel the movement… After that, the others came rushing up and Jenny let go of me. Roland was the first. For some reason he had a bamboo stick, a
cane from the garden, and he poked it at Freddie’s head where the flies were and made them buzz and fly out so that we all jumped backwards, and then Miss Childers pushed past us and took hold of the big collar of Freddie’s sailor suit and pulled it and Freddie’s head came up backwards and all the flies flew up and hit her face and her mouth, which was open, and she screamed and let go and ran away. Then Jenny fell down in a fit behind us. There was blood on her mouth and she was grunting like a pig and rolling about on the ground. We were watching her when I heard people coming up behind us and then Mrs. Mattie’s voice: ‘Quickly—get the children inside. What are you staring at! Hurry!’

A man took hold of my arm and pulled me towards the house. I tried to fight him off, but someone else grabbed me round the waist and lifted me into the air. Then I remember being pushed along the corridor to the kitchen and vomiting on the flagstones, and I recollect feeling ashamed because it was in front of the servants. We were all put into chairs around the wooden kitchen table. Louisa was crying and there was some food on the table, plates of bread with jam. I said, ‘It’s too big,’ because the slices were great big slabs and I didn’t want to eat it because it wasn’t thin bread like the nursery tea.

Freddie’s life must have ended while we were sitting around the table. I don’t know if the others knew, but some of the servants must have because they kept coming in and out, and whispering to each other. They were waiting for him to die. I was worried about the flies on his head, that they were eating him, or rather drinking him. I thought that they would drink up all his blood and kill him. We all ran away from him, not just the children, but all of us, the servants as well. They could have covered him up with a blanket if they didn’t want
to look at him, but they shouldn’t have just run inside and shut the door. Someone, just one, should have stayed with him while he died to keep him company. They were all afraid to go near him and he was only a little boy.

It was so hard to believe what had happened. Master Freddie was always running round the house and I used to go about my work thinking any minute now I’ll hear him running down the corridor, or he’ll come rushing round the corner, or he’ll be laughing… a few times I thought I heard his laugh, but then I’d remember. Even when we saw the little white coffin going out—the weather was all wrong for it. Scorching hot and the sky was the brightest blue you ever saw, not a cloud anywhere. I don’t remember if I cried. Ellen and the others were in floods, but once the coffin was gone we all had to get back to our work.

Everyone wanted to know what happened, but all we got from Mrs. Mattie was that Master Freddie was killed in an accident. That night every one of us girls was too upset for talking, but the next night me and Ellen sat up in our room with another girl called Mary and tried to make sense of what happened, but we couldn’t. Ellen knew the most, because she was quite shameless about gossip and listening to other people’s conversations. ‘William told me that Jenny was out there with Master Freddie, she had a funny turn and had to be locked in her room, that was how come she wasn’t there when you asked, Mary.’

‘What was
she
doing out there? She can’t have been
the one who found the poor little mite or she’d have told Mrs. Mattie.’

I said, ‘That was Miss Louisa’s governess found Master Freddie, must have been.’

Ellen said, ‘What, that Miss Childers? She didn’t half go barmy. I got ever such a fright when her hand come up through the window like that.’

‘Well, what do you expect? I heard that Jenny found him first and showed Miss Childers, and then she fell down in a fit.’

‘Where was he?’

‘Only out by the privy. We saw them going behind the hedge, didn’t we, Ellen?’

‘What was he doing there?’

Ellen said, ‘I don’t know. It was that nurse’s fault. She was to watch those children, not let them go wandering off getting killed.’

‘Well, I’ve heard that she was in her room at the very time Master Freddie was killed, saying her prayers. Didn’t do Master Freddie any good, though, did it?’

‘You want to watch it, saying things like that, Mary Spencer, or you’ll be in trouble.’

‘What trouble? Anyway, I’ve heard she just sits up there in the nursery and sings hymns and won’t come out. Won’t let Miss Georgina out, neither.’

‘Poor Miss Georgina,’ said Ellen. ‘They saw Master Freddie too, you know, the children.’

I said, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ and Mary said, ‘They never! How?’

‘They were with Miss Childers.’

‘Oh, I don’t believe you.’

‘Well, it’s true, they were out playing and when Jenny fetched Miss Childers, they all saw. One of the gardeners told me he’d taken Miss Georgina indoors himself.’

‘But we’d have seen them.’

‘No, we wouldn’t. They went the other way, past the boot room. It was when we were all in the scullery.’

‘I still don’t believe it. Whoever it was told you, Ellen, he was having you on.’

‘All the same, it was a funny sort of accident if you ask me, Master Freddie falling down and hitting his head like that.’

‘Perhaps he had a turn, like Jenny.’

‘Don’t talk daft.’

But there were plenty saying that: How could it be an accident? And the ones that weren’t saying it were thinking it. There was a great deal of talk about Miss Georgina’s and Master Freddie’s nurse too, because there was a lot of feeling against her. I heard one of the older ones call her a whited sepulchre, which I thought was a bit hard, but it’s true to say that she did develop a sort of religious mania after Master Freddie was killed and wouldn’t say a word to a soul, just kept on praying all the time. But it was poor Jenny I felt sorry for, when they all started on her. I think it was the policeman, really, that set it all off. Whether Mrs. Mattie gave him a nudge in that direction I don’t know, but he decided Master Freddie’s death was her doing. When I say policeman, I don’t mean him from the village, because a proper policeman came down to do an investigation. When he came along, we all had to go and sit down in rows in front of him as if we were at school, and listen to his little speech—Mrs. Mattie even got me to put a little vase of flowers on the table for him—and then we all had to leave the room and come back one by one so he could ask us questions. Of course, everyone was going, ‘Well, if it was an accident like they’re saying, what’s he want to ask questions for?’ It was horrible, we felt like we were being accused of something. I think that’s why some of them turned against Jenny. I’m not
saying they’d done something bad to Master Freddie and put the blame on her or anything like that, but once you got in there with the policeman, he kept on and on asking the same things, and if you said you’d got nothing to tell, he didn’t believe you. I was one of the last to see him, because they took us by the alphabet. He kept asking me if I’d heard people in the passageway when I was in the scullery washing out the cloths. I said, ‘Of course I did,’ because you could hear them coming and going. Not that I took much notice; I had my work to be getting on with. This policeman said, ‘Was the door to the passage open?’

‘Oh, yes, it was always open.’ Well, it had to be, people coming in and out all the time with great big trays—they’d have dropped the lot if they’d tried to open the door.

‘Were you facing the door?’ Because there were two sinks, one looking towards the door and one the other way, and I was at the one facing.

‘Yes.’

‘So you could see who was going past?’

‘If I looked up I could see.’

Then he said, ‘Well, who did you see?’

I said, ‘I can’t remember,’ because I couldn’t, not really, you don’t take notice of things like that unless you’ve a special reason, do you? The policeman asked, if he said their names, would that jog my memory, and he started off: Ellen, Mary, Dora, Doris and so on like that. Well, one or two I thought I could remember and I told him, and then he said, ‘Did you see Jenny?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t rightly know.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I don’t think I saw her.’

‘You’d remember Jenny, wouldn’t you? She’s different from the others.’

‘Yes, she is. But I can’t remember if I saw her.’

‘Think carefully,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to hurry.’

Well, I’m not so daft I couldn’t tell that he wanted me to say, yes, I’d seen her. ‘Some of the others said they’d seen her go down to the back door,’ he said. ‘So she must have come past you.’

I said, ‘She might have done,’ because that was true, she might have. The thing was, I could see Jenny coming along the passage in my mind, ever so clear, but I couldn’t remember if it was that day or another one, and it seemed so important to this policeman that I felt I mustn’t get it wrong. Well, he kept going over and over it, and he seemed so certain that in the end I thought, well, it must be me that isn’t remembering right, and I said, ‘Yes, I suppose I must have seen her.’

‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Well done.’ And then he clapped his notebook shut and that was the end of it.

Well, Ellen had gone in before me because her name was Corrigan, so that night we had a talk about it. I told her I didn’t feel right. I thought the policeman had made me say something against Jenny, even though I didn’t see how it could be, really, because five or six at least must have gone past while I was in the scullery and they weren’t all going to do something bad to hurt poor Master Freddie, were they? I said to Ellen, ‘I think it’s barmy, all these questions. Who’d want to hurt a child like Master Freddie?’ Because that was the part we couldn’t understand, either of us. I said, ‘I’m so worried I’ve got Jenny into trouble, saying what I said.’

Ellen said, ‘Well, if she did do something, I’m sure she never meant to do wrong.’

Poor Jenny. When the policemen took her away, the other servants stoned the carriage. I heard people say she’d gone mad and killed poor Master Freddie, and took the other children round to see the body out of
malice. Soon everyone was saying it, even Ellen. I was embarrassed to say anything in disagreement, because when had I ever had a kind word to say to the poor girl? I should have stood up for her, but I never, because I thought then they’d think I was like she was. But I noticed William wasn’t paying any mind to all the gossip and that made me like him all the more.

They never charged Jenny with anything. They took her away and locked her up in a loony asylum. She did go berserk after she saw the body, and the police told Mrs. Mattie it had sent her barmy for good. Most of them at Dennys thought she’d done it. ‘Why didn’t they charge her?’ that’s what they were saying. ‘Hanging’s too good.’ Some people thought the police never charged her because Mr. Lomax went and asked them not to, but I never saw how that could be, myself. More likely they couldn’t because she was too crazy for them to get any sense out of her. As I say, I can’t be high and mighty over that; there’d been plenty of times before Master Freddie died when I felt I should go and say something to Jenny, just something a bit friendly, but I thought: If the others see me talking to her, they’ll think I’m the same as her and I won’t get on. So I ignored her, same as the rest of them. But we were ignorant, we didn’t understand. And to be honest, I thought if you were mad then it was all funny turns and hide the carving knife. It’s not, though, and I know that now.