The Unseen (22 page)

‘Oh, I don’t know. You could have cooked your way into somebody’s good graces.’ Cat smiles.

‘You’re just full of wise suggestions today, aren’t you? Come on, let’s get this done and get on with lunch. The mistress’ll be wandering around with her belly rumbling before long. Not to
mention this learned young man, whose work is so very bloody important.’

‘Yes, who would have guessed how important? The vicar treats him like royalty,’ Cat observes.

‘Doesn’t he just? Well, he must know something we don’t, I suppose.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Cat murmurs. Mrs Bell gives her a quizzical look, and Cat shrugs. ‘The vicar should be careful. Apparently, Robin Durrant has no household of his own. It seems to me he’s quite ready to take over this one instead.’

‘In what way, take over?’ The housekeeper frowns. Cat shrugs again.

‘We’ll see,’ she says.

When the dinner plates are scrubbed, dried and put away, the dining table swept, and the napkins either refolded and pressed or put into the hamper to be laundered, Cat slips out through the back door, saunters into the courtyard and puts a cigarette between her lips. George is away on the barge for a few more days yet, taking a load of timber up the canal to Surrey. Square fence posts with sharpened points at one end, the newly hewn wood pale and moist. Cat saw the men loading them when she went into Thatcham to post letters for Hester. George’s barge, and two others that had appeared to join it. The horses led from their ramshackle stables, snatching at the long green weeds as they were harnessed to the tow ropes, tossing their heads and flicking their tails at the crowding flies. The men wore thick canvas gloves, and had their trousers tied off with lengths of string just below the knee, to keep out the panicked rats that fled as the piles of timber were dismantled, reassembled on the barges. George, with his shirt plastered to his back, frowned in the sharp sunlight. She did not call out; felt wrong interrupting him at work. She likes the fact that she saw him, this time, but he did not see her. Like she owns a little bit more of his life than he meant to give. Now she wishes him back already. She
could walk alone in the dark but there seems little point, with nowhere to go.

She fumbles in her pocket for a match but one blooms in the dark beside her, makes her jump. Robin Durrant leans from behind the orange flare, smiles a little as he proffers it to her. For some reason Cat can’t define, her first instinct is to refuse it. But she accepts, takes a long pull on her cigarette and coughs a little.

‘Thank you,’ she says, guardedly.

‘You’re welcome, Cat,’ he says, and his use of her name sounds too familiar. Cat measures him up in the weak light from the doorway. He moves away slightly, leans against the wall; his body curved into an elegant slouch, hips pushed forwards, head tipped back.

‘What are you doing out here? You’re not even smoking,’ she points out. The yard has come to feel like her place; this afterdinner moment as her time.

‘I was; I was. I finished it just before you came out. Sorry if I scared you,’ he says, turning his head towards her. The contours of his face are softly lit. Clean, smooth brow, eyes lost in shadow. The long sweep of his jaw. His face is beautiful, Cat realises. Quite perfectly beautiful, like a painting of a saint or a representation of love. But also opaque, unreadable. His affability looks like a mask.

‘You didn’t scare me.’

‘No. I bet it would take something to scare you,’ he says. Cat ignores him, takes another long drag. The tip of her cigarette glows fiercely. ‘I hear you’ve been through it a bit. A bit of a firebrand, I hear,’ he says, companionably enough.

‘Who told you that? I thought the vicar’s wife was sworn off gossip.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t dear Hester. But word gets around in small places like this. I should know – I heard myself called “the fairy man” just the other day, by a passing child no more than six years old. Explain to me how she knew to call me that, I beg of you.’

Cat smiles briefly. ‘A little girl with dark brown curls and a turned-up nose, I’ll wager?’ she asks.

‘Oh, indeed – you know the culprit?’

‘Tilly. Daughter of Mrs Lynchcombe who takes in our laundry. I expect Sophie Bell has been filling her in on all your comings and goings, and the child is as sharp as a tack.’

Quite possibly. And yet, it is
you
I see, loitering behind doors when I am in discussion with the vicar or his wife. Listening hard, to all appearances,’ he says, archly. Cat bridles, turns away from him and does not reply. Above her head, moths dive and flutter at the light in the corridor, bashing the soft dust from their velvet wings. ‘Come now, Cat – you can’t pretend to be shy. You’re not the type.’

‘What do you know of my type? What do you know of me at all?’

‘I rest my case.’ He smiles.

‘You smile too much. People must guess that you’re mocking them,’ she says, blandly.

‘A surprising few,’ Robin concedes. ‘You’re unusual, for a servant, Cat Morley.’

‘How should a servant be? I thought your Society made no distinction between class or race?’

‘Indeed, it does not. But although such distinctions should not exist, perhaps they do nonetheless. Theosophy also teaches that if a person is made to toil or suffer in this life, it is to atone for wrongdoing in a previous life. The universal law and justice of karma.’

‘Yes, I heard you speak of it the other night. I am a servant because I was a murderess in another lifetime, is that it?’ Cat asks, drily.

‘Perhaps,’ Robin grins, pleased to have nettled her.

Cat thinks on this for a moment. ‘Perhaps. ‘Perhaps I was a starving pauper in a past life, but an exceptionally good one, and this is my reward. Perhaps you were a king, but a vile and corrupt one. And this is your punishment.’ She gestures at him – his rumpled
hair, his slightly creased clothes. Robin Durrant laughs softly. ‘Karmic justice, you call it? It’s no justice at all,’ she says.

‘Is the Christian way of thinking more just? That a deity should create a human soul and give it just one lifetime to exist, and in that lifetime he may bestow pain and suffering and misfortunes galore, and all of this is meted out for no reason at all? Or only to test that person? What a cruel God that would be!’

‘But how may a soul, in a new body, learn from its past mistakes if it may not be allowed to remember them?’ Cat asks.

‘Well …’ Robin Durrant falters. ‘Well. By following the teachings of theosophy towards a greater understanding of their condition.’

‘That is no answer. You say that to acquire knowledge they must first be in possession of that knowledge? How may a pauper living in the dust of darkest Africa even begin to guess at this grand scheme? There is no more justice in your theory of karma than there is in an arbitrary and unthinking universe.’

‘Is that what you believe in? A great nothingness? You are an atheist?’ Robin asks. Cat winces at the word, in case the vicar or his wife should hear it. She finishes her cigarette, grinds it into the bricks beneath her heel. The night is close and sticky. Sleep will be hard to find. In the distance, thunder rumbles ominously. The western horizon is an indigo smear, and all the usual night sounds are stifled, muted. Cat’s body yearns for George, and his heavy, sure hands.

‘I have been to the very edge of death. And I looked hard. And there was nothing there,’ she says eventually, her voice clipped.

‘You are very strange, for a servant,’ Robin repeats.

‘You eat no meat but you drink wine, and brandy, and you smoke tobacco. I should say you are strange, for a theosophist.’

‘Ah, but the Society is not peopled with saints, Cat. Only with sinners who are trying to do better.’ Cat rolls her eyes a little at this, standing up from the wall and folding her arms as she moves towards the door. ‘Not bed, surely? Aren’t you off out to see your sweetheart
tonight?’ Robin asks, quite pleasantly. At this Cat hesitates, shoots him a worried, angry glance. There is a hard edge to his smile now, a glint of knowing in his eye that makes her uneasy. Robin shrugs, too casually. ‘Word gets about. But fear not. Your secret is safe with me.’ His tone is nonchalant; makes a lie of the statement. Cat frowns, steps inside. ‘Wait – won’t you stay out and talk to me a bit longer?’ he asks. That slow, lazy, gorgeous smile.

‘Why on earth would I want to?’ Cat snaps, and then remembers herself, checks her tongue a little. ‘Goodnight, sir,’ she amends, and leaves him in the darkness.

In the morning, Cat takes the small stack of letters from the postman and is arranging them on a silver-plated tray to take up to the breakfast table when her own name catches her eye. A small grey envelope, with her name and the address written on it in a round, childish hand that she does not recognise. The postmark is London. Cat’s heart squeezes painfully.
Tess
, she thinks, slipping the letter into the pocket of her apron and hurriedly taking the tray up to the table. She dumps it rather abruptly in front of the vicar and retreats, not noticing Hester’s polite smile of thanks, or the way Robin Durrant’s eyes follow her. Ducking out into the courtyard she tears the letter open, squinting at the pale paper. The sky overhead is white with cloud so dense and uniform that is seems less like cloud and more as though the sky is too weary to be blue that day. But the letter is not from Tess.

Dear Cat
,

I am writing to you because I no that Mrs Heddingly opened the letter what you rote to our Tess, who is not here any more. I did not think she should of opened it for she could of sent it on but she did not. We all saw Tesses name on the front of it and later on I stole a look at it in her room. This was not the proper thing to do neither but it was her that did the first wrong thing by opening it. I did not read it I swear it I only looked to see who it was from and I rote your new place out so I could rite this to you. Tess is in the workhouse now. Frosham House it is called and it is on Sidall Road near Soho. I hear it is not as bad a place as some but it is still not a good place and those what go there do come out thin and week if they come out at all. None of us could do nothing to help her having no money ourselves to give to her and her having no people of her own. I must also say that while Mrs Heddingly did wrong in not giving your letter on to her she did speak up for Tess after what happened but the Master would have none of it. Frosham House lets in visitors in the afternoon on the third Sunday of the month and no other day. Me and Ellen went to see Tess last month but she would not come out to talk to us. I hope you are in a better way Cat. It is not the same place here without you and Tess
.

From Suzanne

The workhouse. Tess. Cat reads the letter again, heart sinking, feeling like lead in her chest. She shuts her eyes, and bunches her hand into a fist, the paper creasing and cutting into her. How could he do it? The Gentleman, with all his bluff good humour and progressive ideas. He must have known that without Cat there Tess would have kept herself quiet and well behaved. He must have known that put out of her job with no reference, there were only two places that the orphaned girl would end up. Either earning money on her back, or in the poorhouse. The injustice of it burns in the back of Cat’s throat like bile. At that moment, in spite of anything else, she hates him. Tess, just a baby still, given a choice like that. She would never have turned harlot. She was scared of men; still thought one day a handsome prince with gentle hands and a love of poetry would take a shine to her and marry her for her golden curls and her soft white body. And who knows – it might have happened one day. A tradesman or professional caller of some kind, rather than a prince; but still. Not now. Nothing for her now but endless toil and rat-eaten bread, and the stink of the
old and infirm kept in damp rooms with nobody to help them. How she hates him!

Cat didn’t realise, when she was released early from gaol, that it meant she wouldn’t see Tess again. Cat was released ten days before her two months were up, with her chest consumed by infection, her skin drawn tight over her bones, her hair shorn away and her lips cracked, weeping blood whenever she spoke. The WSPU sent a welcoming committee to collect her and two other girls released that day, freed before their time because they were fading fast and the government did not want to create martyrs. They were taken in a cab to a meeting hall, where a reception breakfast was laid out for them, and speeches made in praise of their bravery. It was only these speeches that kept Cat from sobbing with relief, and with pain, the whole time. She kept a check on herself by saying nothing – keeping her ruined lips tight together other than to murmur thanks when her Holloway medal was pinned to her collar.

She could not touch the food they had prepared. The other girls did – one picking politely at the sandwiches and slices of pie and fruit, the other tearing into it, so quick and frantic that she made herself choke. The women urged Cat to eat, to start rebuilding her strength. They even brought out a mug of broth after she’d turned down everything else. Cat tried a sip but could not swallow it, and in the end she spat it back into the cup, as carefully as she could. In an extravagant gilt mirror hanging at one end of the room, she caught sight of herself. A pale, ragged spectre, with scabs around her mouth, bruises on her neck and wrists. Her clothes hung from her bony frame, her scalp was an ugly grey where it was visible around her hat. As they bustled around her, the women of the welcoming committee looked like round, glossy birds; plump partridges or doves with their billowing chests and bright, cheerful eyes. Cat stared at her reflection, and hardly knew herself.

Later, they took her back to Broughton Street, and then The Gentleman took her straight to see his own doctor. The first and
only time she rode with him in his motor car. Dazed and exhausted as she was, still the novelty of riding in a self-propelled carriage was not lost on her. But it was only afterwards, when Tess was still serving her sentence and Cat was told a new position had been found for her in the countryside, that Cat realised she might not see her friend again, might have no chance to make amends. On the day she left London she was taken by bus to Paddington. Mrs Heddingly rode with her to be sure she caught the train, and tears streamed from Cat’s eyes to drip unheeded from her chin.