Paying Guests (33 page)

Slowly the footsteps ebbed away into silence and the green baize door swung, creaking on its hinges a little for the last time, as the servants went upstairs to bed. She heard the soft whimper of Georgie’s voice as Polly went by her door and thought – I must tell that child not to keep Georgie up so late; he should be put down to his cot at the same early time each evening, whether he is teething or not. And I don’t think he is having any trouble in that direction anyway, for he eats like a horse and grows like a weed.

The house slid into silence at last, broken only by the occasional creak of a timber as it relaxed in the cooling air as the fires in the drawing and dining rooms were allowed to die. Her own had gone out long since, she realized and wondered if she had in fact been dozing, for the room was suddenly very cold, and her eyes felt hot and sandy.

She looked at the little clock on her mantle and was surprised. Two in the morning. She had indeed dozed off. How foolish, she thought drearily. Now I must go to my room and undress and wash in cold water and probably not be able to fall asleep again when I do get into bed.

She extinguished the oil lamp, once she’d set a light to the candle she would use to see herself upstairs and then stretched a little, very conscious of her stiffness and the way her bones ached. She felt flattened and miserable and somehow drained of all energy, and it was an effort to make her way heavily into the hall, closing her door quietly behind her and then making her slow journey upstairs
in the thick darkness, which was barely touched by her single candle.

She reached her room without mishap, and managed to light her oil lamp from the wick of her candle at the second try only, which was a comfort, for her bedroom lamp was a capricious one that sometimes sulked and refused to accept a flame without considerable coaxing. She had been meaning to replace it with a better one and kept forgetting; had it been in a guest’s room, of course, it would have been dealt with months ago. But it’s only mine, and who cares about me? she found herself thinking. Duff is the only relative I have and he is quite obsessed with Sophie. My friends are few and the only really trusty one has turned his back on me for a Miss Fanny Goodall, and I have an inferior lamp in my bedroom; her self pity was well in evidence as she pulled off her gown. She managed to unlace her stays and step out of them with a breath of relief and finally to leave her chemise and drawers on the
chaise longue
without actually weeping at the sorry state of her situation. She would sort out fresh clothes in the morning rather than tonight, in her usual careful manner. All she wanted now was to get into bed and see if she could recapture sleep and perhaps wake up next day in a healthier and better frame of mind.

She had put on her nightgown and brushed her hair in a perfunctory manner and was about to extinguish her lamp when she heard it, and lifted her chin sharply.

An extra creak outside her room. A door opening softly and then closing. She stood there listening, trying to hear, and frowned. Memories of Mr Greenwall, who had crept out of the house with all his luggage without anyone noticing, came rushing back to her. Surely there wasn’t anyone in the house now who would behave so? She tried to think of who might. The Graylings? Mr Cumming? The French family? None of them seemed likely, and yet –

The only way to find out was to see for herself and after a moment she deliberately lowered the wick on her oil lamp and taking it in her hand, moved very softly to her door. She set the lamp down on the floor behind it and then very slowly, opened it.

Outside it was all very black, and she knew she would be unable
to open the door fully and see out properly as long as there was any light at all from her own lamp, and so decided to extinguish it completely. Her eyes would soon accustom themselves to the darkness and if there was anything to see or hear she would know it. So she bent, blew down the lamp chimney, and the light vanished in a tendril of acrid oil-scented smoke, and blackness enclosed her like a blanket.

She stood upright again and listened. Still nothing, and now she slid out of her room. This time she did hear something; a faint hiss of breath and a soft burring that could have been speech, or even laughter. Whatever it was, she thought, with fear running icy fingers across her shoulders and filling her belly with even colder sensations, that was no timber contracting in the coolness of the night. That was people wandering about in her house. And it was now – it must be – close on half past two in the morning. A ridiculous hour for sensible, honest people to be about. And she buried her fear in a conscious wave of anger that anyone should dare to behave so under her roof, and moved along the hallway.

She followed all her senses. She could not only hear but feel there was someone near; there was added warmth in the air, and smell too, a rich scent which she knew but could not quite place. She actually pulled back her ears to make it possible to pick up every hint of sound, and stretched her eyelids and even her nostrils as she moved slowly and carefully towards what she believed to be the source of the sounds that had first attracted her attention.

It all happened very quickly. One moment there was just herself and her suspicions pushing her forwards across the dark hallway of her second floor and then there was hubbub. She found herself entwined with other bodies, arms and legs and yielding softness and hard muscle, and she yelped in surprise as someone pinched the soft flesh of her right upper arm shrewdly and a voice deep and half whispering said words she had never heard before but knew to be very powerful swearing indeed.

A match flared and then a candle wick kindled and she was standing blinking in the suddenness of the light, feeble thing though it was, staring at the source of the sounds that had brought her from
her room. And as she looked, her still confused feelings about Jem’s news mixed with weariness and a sense of deflation and the fear that had come when she had first heard the sounds in the hall, became a shriek deep in her throat. She opened her mouth to let it out; but before it could, a hand came down over her shoulder from behind and clamped itself over her face.

SHE WAS TO try often, in the times that were to come, to remember all that happened then, but never could. There was so much confusion, so many mixed feelings inside her, of anger as well as fear, excitement as well as terror, that she was barely aware of what was going on outside herself. But she did at last recognize and understand the voice that was speaking so urgently into her ear and managed to nod her head in acquiescence.

‘Please, Tilly, there is no need to be so alarmed, please, do not make a great din – we don’t want the whole house woken, do we? Please, it’s just me – Silas, only me – and there is no harm done, after all. Please Tilly – be quiet so that I might let you go.’

Once she had managed to nod her agreement the hand was taken from her mouth and she lifted her own to rub tentatively at her lips, which felt numb, and he was at once all compunction.

‘Oh, I do so hope I did not hurt you, Tilly, but it was imperative, I thought, that I keep you quiet. I knew you would be mortified if you woke everyone and they all came out and saw – well, perhaps not saw, but understood –’

‘Understood what?’ she hissed, instinctively pitching her voice to the same level as his, for he was whispering. ‘What is going on here?’ And she turned her head and stared about her. The candle that had been lit was still burning, sitting in a small china candlestick on the floor, tilted a little drunkenly so that wax dripped on to the polished boards, and her housewifely eyes noted that and were angered; but there was little to see by the light of that single flame.
The door before which she stood was firmly closed, and she peered, to each side and at once identified which door it was: Sophie’s; and she caught her breath and closed her eyes as she tried to remember what she had seen in that brief movement before that hand had come down over her face.

Sophie, indeed, and in the darkness inside her eyelids Tilly could see the fine cambric nightgown she had worn, one shoulder slipped halfway down her arm in a fashion that showed far more of her breast than it covered, her hair in a luxuriant tumble about her neck and her arms up and –

Tilly’s eyes snapped open and she stared at the door in front of her. Duff. He had been there too, with Sophie’s arms about his neck and his head turned towards Tilly, his mouth half open with shock. And – she swallowed as she remembered – he had been wearing nothing at all as far as she could see in her memory. Certainly his chest had been bare, as Sophie’s creamy round arms set against Duff’s darker skin made very clear.

‘I don’t –’ she began but Silas set two fingers to her lips and jerked his head to move her away.

‘Please, not here,’ he breathed, and in one swift movement took her by the elbow while bending to pick up the candle in its stick, and started to lead her towards the top of the stairs which led down to the drawing room.

But before they could reach the stair head, there was a click as somewhere along the hallway a door began to open and in a trice he had blown out the candle and had pulled her sideways to stand close to the wall. In the heavy blackness Tilly held her breath as she heard Miss Knapp’s voice, thin and reedy with uncertainty – a rare sound indeed from that usually formidable lady – calling out, ‘Is anyone there?’

Behind her, Silas too was holding his breath, and for some reason she took her lead from him. There was no reason why she should not have called out that it was she, Tilly, who was wandering about her house in the middle of the night, which no doubt Miss Knapp would have accepted without question, for who had a better right to wander about than the owner of the house? But by the time Tilly
had thought that through it was too late to answer, for Miss K was still standing suspiciously at her door. It was almost possible to see her as a thicker blackness against the pervading darkness of the hallway. If Tilly had spoken now it would have seemed exceedingly odd, she decided. So she still held her breath; and just when she was certain she could do so no longer, but would have to gasp for air in a most audible manner. Miss K at last took a deep breath of her own, and went back into her room and clicked the door shut behind her.

They stood still for a second longer, and then Silas tugged on her elbow and before she realized what he was doing had pulled her into her own room and closed the door silently behind him without so much as a snicker of sound from the lock. And as she stood there in amazement, he moved further into the room with the sureness of a cat which could see in the dark and again lit the candle he was still holding. He must have had a match in his pocket, she thought absurdly, blinking a little as the candle flame lifted and dipped wildly, sending shadows leaping alarmingly over the ceiling, and then the light became richer and stronger and steadied as he found her oil lamp, still sitting on the floor behind her bedroom door, and bent and picked it up and lit it, without, to her chagrin, any difficulty whatsoever.

He stood there holding her lamp high and staring down at her and she took a deep and shaky breath and said, still speaking quietly, but with definite anger in her voice, ‘You have no right to be in this room, sir! Please to leave at once!’

‘Oh, Tilly,’ he said and smiled, a rather bleak smile but one with genuine amusement in it for all that. ‘Please, don’t be so absurd! Can you not imagine how Miss Knapp is now? She will have woken Miss Fleetwood and they will both be lying there listening with their ears out on stalks. If I leave now they will certainly hear me and they will be out of their room like jack-in-the-boxes and staring about them. Do you wish them to see me emerge from your door? We had to come in here – but now we are here it will be best if we stay for a while until those two old besoms fall asleep again.’

She glared at him, non-plussed. He was, of course, right. Both the
Misses K and F were inordinately curious. There could be no doubt they would be peering about for some time, and the thought of what their reactions might be if they should suspect that she and Silas – her heart quailed and with it her legs seemed suddenly to become jellies and she almost tumbled across the room to land on her
chaise longue
in a little huddle.

At once he set down the lamp on the small table that stood at the foot of the
chaise longue
and was on his knees beside it. ‘Oh, my dear, are you overcome? You are fully entitled to be, for this has been a dreadful ten minutes for you.’

‘Ten minutes?’ she said and glanced up at the clock. It was indeed just a quarter to three and she took a deep breath and shook her head. ‘Only ten minutes.’

‘Well, not much more,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘A little bewildered, perhaps,’ she managed. ‘That is all.’ And she put her hands up to her head to smooth her hair, suddenly very aware of the fact that she was wearing just a nightgown and a thin silk wrap and that her hair was tumbled about her shoulders. ‘I am not sure what is happening here.’