The Unseen (36 page)

Gradually, air returns to her lungs, and she breathes more easily, and her head clears and sound comes back into vibrant clarity. She gets to her feet, and glances to her right. The vicar is looking for a new target. The police have made off with Keith Berringer, who seems keener to go with them than stay and be preached to.

‘The path to righteousness is one of purity and chastity, one of cleanliness and honesty …’ the vicar announces to fleeing figures left and right, waving the cross at them as though he can cure them with one glimpse of it.
Run, now
, Cat tells herself. But it is too late. She has risen into his eye line, and he turns upon her, pounces. ‘You! Young woman! You have no place here! Women are created mild, the meek vessels of subservience to Godly rule …’ His voice tails off to silence. Their eyes meet. For a second, she thinks he will not recognise her. Many are the men who would not know
their own servants outside their uniforms, outside the house, least of all in the dark and muddied. But he frowns, struggles to place her, and in the second before she flees, Cat sees that he does. His eyes widen with shock.

10

Hester wakes briefly in the night and stretches out her hand to find Albert’s side of the bed empty. Thinking it must be near morning, she sleeps again, with a shroud of ill-defined hopelessness weighing her down. She feels listless, as if there is little point in her waking up at all. But when the morning comes, and brash sunshine lances between the curtains to wake her again, she sees that Albert’s pillow is smooth and plump, and the sheet on his side of the bed is still pulled taut. He had been sitting up with Robin Durrant, deep in discussion, when she came up to bed the night before. Now it seems that wherever he’s slept, it has not been in his own bed. Hester dresses herself as neatly as she can without calling for Cat to help her. She feels strangely uneasy, after seeing Cat and Robin Durrant talking in the courtyard. He had seemed agitated, pacing up and down. The way he’d stood so close to her, the way he’d gesticulated, all seemed far too familiar. As though they knew each other well, as though they had a relationship of some kind that she knew nothing about. Amelia had called Robin beautiful; perhaps Cat found him so as well.

She pins up her hair, smoothes her cheeks with a little powder and goes downstairs in her morning dress, only to find Albert sitting in the parlour, hands on his knees, staring straight ahead. The hems of his trousers are caked with dust and grime, his shoes encrusted with it. Of Robin Durrant, there is no sign.

‘Albert! Are you all right? Where have you been?’ she asks, standing close to him, taking one of his limp hands in hers. He looks up at her slowly, like an old, old man, and blinks once or twice before seeming to recognise her.

‘Hetty! I was waiting for you. Forgive me. I was too troubled to
come up to bed. I thought it best not to disturb you until now …’ he murmurs.

‘Disturb me? Why? What on earth is going on?’ Hester holds his hand tightly. She does not like the way his gaze seems to come from a great distance, the way his voice is soggy with fatigue and bewilderment.

‘I fear there is a pariah in our very midst … a spot of rot and blight to blemish the purity of our home,’ Albert says, grimacing as though his own words taste ill.

‘A spot of rot? Albert, please, you’re not making sense!’

‘The servant girl. The dark-haired one. We must be rid of her at once,’ he says, more decisively.

‘Cat? Why must we? What has happened to her?’ Hester asks anxiously.
A spot of rot
. She thinks of what Amelia had caught her husband doing, and of the familiarity she had witnessed between Cat and Robin. Her throat goes dry. ‘Is it Mr Durrant?’

‘What? What do you mean? This has nothing to do with Robin! Is he back? Is he back from the meadows?’ Albert half rises from his chair only to slump back again, wearily.

‘I don’t know … Albert, where did you sleep?’

‘No, no. I couldn’t sleep. I can’t sleep. There is too much to think about … The girl must be gone from here … as soon as possible. No wonder! No wonder I have not managed it! Tainted! With debauchery … it taints everything it touches …’ Albert throws up his hands abruptly, face falling into despair.

‘Debauchery? What debauchery?’ Hester struggles to keep up, crouching beside him and trying to read his face. It is closed to her, thoughts she cannot read churning behind his glassy gaze. Without warning, tears spring into her eyes, hot and stinging. ‘Bertie,
please
. Explain this to me,’ she begs. Albert looks down at her and smiles; a small, sad-looking smile.

‘Of course you don’t understand. You, who are everything a wife should be,’ he says. Hester smiles too, glad at least that the argument following her unwanted caress seems forgotten. ‘I went
with the police last night, to a notorious gambling den in Thatcham. I went to try to convince the men to change their ways, to give up such ungodly pastimes … I tried to explain the damage that they do to themselves, to all of us … to the whole of mankind!’

‘But … what has this got to do with Cat?’

‘With Cat? Who is Cat?

‘The
maid
, Bertie. You said the maid would have to be let go …’

‘Yes! By all means, she must go! She was there, Hetty – she was there, fleeing like one of the rats as the police stormed in and turned out the nest of them … I saw her! I knew her at once!’

‘You must be mistaken, Bertie … why in heaven’s name would Cat be in Thatcham, and gambling, for pity’s sake? It couldn’t have been her – she was upstairs and in bed, I’m sure of it!’

‘No, no, you are not sure.
I saw her
, Hester. A liar and a gambler and no doubt a lascivious doxy besides …’

‘But you
must
be mistaken,’ Hester insists.

‘I want her gone. She will be the ruin of us all.’

‘No, Albert! On this you must listen to me – please. You’re mistaken. She’s a good girl! She works hard—’

‘It has come to a fine state of affairs that my own wife should doubt my word,’ Albert says, coldly. ‘Call her up, and ask her. Ask her, then, and let’s see how deep the roots of her dishonesty go!’

Hester finds Cat making up the master bed with fresh linens, the dirty ones twisted into a bundle by the door. Hester steps over it, suddenly finding her feet like lead, and her tongue made of wood. She smiles weakly when Cat looks up, and notices the dark shadows under the girl’s eyes and that, however well brushed they have been, her shoes still look dirty, muddy.

‘Sorry, madam. I won’t be a moment, but I can finish this later if you’d rather?’ Cat says quietly.

‘No, no, Cat. It’s quite all right. There was … actually something else I wanted to talk to you about,’ Hester says reluctantly.
Cat throws her arms wide and a clean sheet billows out, falling slowly and with expert aim into just the right position. She twitches it a couple of times, and then stands up, turning to face Hester with a look of such calm resignation that Hester knows the answer before she has asked the question. ‘It’s true then? You were out in Thatcham last night? And gambling? My husband says he saw you there …’ She trails off, surprised by the way her nerves jangle, and to find that she has been hoping it has all been a mistake. Praying it, even.

‘He saw me there, it’s true. But I was not gambling, madam,’ Cat says, looking straight at Hester without flinching; that black, disconcerting stare of hers.

‘Oh, Cat! How could you? How … how on earth did you
get
there?’

‘I borrowed the vicar’s bicycle. I’ve done it many times before,’ Cat announces, tipping up her chin defiantly, as if daring Hester to rebuke her. Hester stares at her, dumbfounded, for a long moment, until Cat speaks again. ‘I suppose I shall be let go?’ she asks, and though her defiance remains, there is a slight tremor in her voice.

‘I don’t know … I don’t know. If the vicar finds out you took his bicycle … You have done it many times?’ Hester breathes. ‘But, to do what? When do you sleep?’

‘I do not sleep easy, madam. Since I was gaoled I … I do not sleep easy. And you never said I could not go out of the house when the day was over. It was never said that I shouldn’t! All I wanted was to have some taste of life beyond these four walls. Is that a crime?’

‘No, no, it’s not a crime, Cat! But it is not seemly! Those places in Thatcham, and at that hour of the night, unaccompanied … it is no place for a young woman on her own! Anything could have happened to you! People might have thought the
very
worst of you! It’s just not the done thing, Cat! I never said so explicitly because I never thought it needed saying! And you know I have the right of
it!’ Hester cries, her voice rising higher and higher, beyond her control.

‘I was not always unaccompanied,’ Cat mutters.

‘Oh, and who went with you? Not Sophie Bell, I know that for sure …’ Hester falters, as Cat’s meaning becomes clear. ‘You mean … you have a sweetheart?’ she asks. Cat says nothing, but a flicker of emotion kindles in her eyes. ‘I see,’ Hester says, quietly. Was that what she had witnessed, in the courtyard? A lover’s tiff? She looks out of the window, at the far green blur of distant trees. Birds are singing, as they always do. The air is bright and dry, but suddenly the house feels far away, removed. Or perhaps it is she, Hester, who is far away. Disconnected from all the things she thinks she knows. ‘But,’ she gropes weakly for some redeeming feature in it all, ‘but you were not there to gamble? Last night?’

‘No, madam. I was not there to gamble.’ Silence falls in the room, and the dust sent up by the billowing sheets slowly settles, one twinkling mote at a time, onto the polished surfaces of the furniture. Hester weaves her fingers together in front of her and studies them for a time, and she can just about hear Cat breathing, fast and shallow, like some cornered creature, ready to fight. ‘Shall I pack my things then?’ Cat says at last. Hester shakes her head.

‘I must … speak with my husband about it. I believe you are good at heart, Cat; I do believe it. If you are to stay, I must have it from you that you will stop these visits to town. Perhaps you might walk out with your … gentleman friend on a Sunday afternoon, when you have free time. But you must not go to the public houses in town any more, and you must not sneak out in the night. Can I give my husband your word on this?’ Hester asks, her voice shaking. The hardness in Cat’s eyes softens a little, and her mouth thins, pressing into a single line of unhappiness; but her answer, when it comes, is resolute.

‘No, madam. I cannot swear to it.’

*

Hester pauses at the top of the stairs before going back down to Albert. She puts out a hand to grasp the banister, and sees that it is shaking. Her whole body is shaking. Suddenly it seems that the world is a place where nothing is as simple as it had once seemed; a place where she has little understanding, of anything. And she knows that she ought to be outraged by these admissions of Cat’s, but somehow she is not. She is shocked, and she is worried, and she is … not
envious
, surely? Could that be what is causing the lump in her throat, what is making her long to fly into Albert’s arms? But she is not outraged. She is afraid. Swallowing, she begins her descent, and realises that she had paused for a specific reason. She needed time to think of an argument, to think of a way to persuade Albert to let Cat stay on. Because, suddenly, the thought of her going, of one more familiar thing transforming, of one more failure, is more than she can bear.

But nothing she says has any impact on her husband. She promises him, in spite of what Cat said, that the girl will never go out at night again. She lies, and says she has Cat’s word. She does not mention the bicycle at all, nor Cat’s sweetheart; she swears that Cat had not been gambling, that night or any other, and that she had merely wanted to exercise a little freedom from the constraints of her position, and to explore her new surroundings; something to be expected in one so young, and one who has seen so much trouble in her short lifetime. She even argues that they would not be able to afford to replace her, since a less troublesome girl will command a higher salary. But the vicar is every bit as adamant as Cat. He hardly seems to listen, sitting with an impassive expression on his face, his arms and hands limp in his lap as she speaks, on and on, presenting the same argument in three different ways. When she finishes, and grasps his hand in supplication, he merely pats her hands, absently.

‘You are a good and charitable soul, Hester. But she must go. At once. She is a
spot of blight
upon this house, at a time when it is utterly crucial that there be
no stain
here. No pollution. Do you
see? Do you see, Hester?
Everything
depends on this!’ he says, with such a strange light in his eyes that Hester feels a wave of desperation crash through her.

‘Albert, please. Please do listen to me. There is no stain on our house! This theosophy has skewed your thoughts, my darling … Haven’t I always run a good household? Shouldn’t I know best about what servants to keep, and how such things should be done? I must insist that this matter be left in my hands!’

‘Hester, your eyes are blind. You do not have the proper understanding,’ Albert says, resolutely.

‘I have not been … altered, you mean. I am not controlled by the teachings of Robin Durrant!’ she says, her voice a strained whisper.

At this Albert merely smiles. ‘And for that very reason, Hetty, you must do as I say.’

‘Albert,
please,’
she implores. Albert pats her hand again, as though she is an unthinking pet of some kind, whose bewilderment is lamentable but to be expected, then rises and goes to his study, shutting the door behind him. Her words are quite lost upon him. In the deceptive calm of the house the clock ticks like a dusty heartbeat, and Cat’s light footsteps, as she makes the bed that Hester will lie in, cause the floorboards to creak.

Hester is still perching on the edge of a chair in the parlour when Robin Durrant returns. She turns at the sound of his lively footsteps, sees him make his way to the door with a purposeful stride, let himself in like a resident, not a guest; and then hears him putting down his camera to hang up his coat and hat, all unconcerned. His buoyant walk makes locks of his hair bounce against his forehead, like a boy’s, and he hums, ever so softly, just under his breath. A tuneless staccato which might have been formless words, bubbling irrepressibly from within him.