The Unseen (6 page)

‘Very good, madam,’ she says quietly. Hester’s face falls a little. Cat notices that the woman’s gaze darts past her and around her, and down at the letter. As if she fears to make eye contact with her new servant.

‘You know the way to Thatcham, do you?’ Hester asks.

‘No, madam,’ Cat admits. She had not thought to ask. Would have quite happily set off from the house directionless.

‘Well, the quickest way on a fine day like today is to take the footpath opposite the house – there’s a little stile you must climb – then follow that across the river at the footbridge until you reach the canal, which won’t take you ten minutes. Turn left and follow the towpath for two miles and there you shall find Thatcham. It’s a charming town. Please consider yourself at leisure to take a little extra time to look around. It will be useful in future for you to be familiar with the location of the butchers and the grocers and the like,’ Hester says. Cat’s heart lifts at the thought of the excursion.

‘Thank you, madam,’ she says, with more feeling, and Hester’s smile widens.

Unhindered by corsets, Cat swings easily over the stile and sets off across the field. She steps lightly around the cow pats, examines the
new oddness of the turf beneath her feet. She has never walked on grass so long, on ground so unmade. In London the garden had a lawn, but servants were not allowed to walk on it. The Gentleman was quite specific about this – there were paths to be kept to, neatly laid flagstones, or raked gravel hemmed with miniature box hedges. Here there is long ragged grass and other plants too, things she has not seen before. Wild flowers. Tiny blue ones the colour of the summer sky; purples, yellows, spiky white clouds of something she cannot name. In the bright sunlight she feels the day’s warmth seep into her skin, chasing out the lingering chill of the prison cell. She carries Hester’s letter and the coins for the cakes in a purse on a string loaned to her, grudgingly, by Mrs Bell. Dangling it from her fingers, she swings it to and fro, twirls it around, makes it whoosh through the air. A skinny black-haired girl, walking a meandering path across a meadow.

The canal is a wide, lazy channel of murky water, crowded in by weeping willows. Boughs of young elder lean out over the far bank, flowering with acrid enthusiasm. Clouds of midges careen across the surface, and they soon come to crowd infuriatingly around Cat’s face; to nip at the backs of her hands. Cat reaches the towpath, and looks right. All the way to London, this path leads. She could follow it; walk until her feet were ragged and bloody. How long would it take? She has no idea. And what would she do when she got there? Nowhere is home any more. But she could look for Tess. She could make sure Tess was all right, she could bring her here. To this alien place, so green and quiet and different. But Cat turns left and starts walking, more slowly now, swatting at the midges and dodging the piles of muck left by the barge horses.

Soon, buildings come into view. Warehouses, small boatyards. She passes two locks, watches a boat pass through one of them, fascinated by the workings of it. As water foams through the sodden beams, it sends up clouds of scent: moist, rank, somehow alive. The breeze ripples the water’s surface, makes it appear to
flow. Experimentally, Cat picks up a stick to test whether this is so. She throws it into the water, but the purse string comes loose from her wrist and flies in after it.

‘Damn and blast it!’ she mutters, looking around her. The canal banks are steep and the water looks deep. There’s a long, wide boat moored nearby, and even though it looks empty she daren’t trespass on it. She casts her eyes around, picks up a fallen sycamore branch and reaches out to the purse, which, mercifully, is floating. She struggles to balance, to hold the branch steady, hook a twig around the purse string and begin to tow it towards her. It works for a moment but then she over-balances, has to drop the branch to steady herself. The purse swirls gently in a circle. Cat edges down the bank, crouches precariously, reaches her fingers for it. It is two inches beyond her fingertips. Two inches, no more, but no matter how she stretches she cannot reach it. ‘Why, you stinking, cursed sprog of a pox-addled whore!’ she shouts at it, standing up in a fury.

A laugh startles her, makes her step back and stumble.

‘Whoa, steady there, miss. You don’t want to follow it in now, do you?’ a man says. He is half emerged from a hatch in the deck of the barge moored beside her. Cat gets an instant impression of tawny brown, of warmth. Weathered skin the colour of the scrubbed boards of the boat; rough hair, undyed clothes.

‘Who are you?’ she demands, suspiciously.

‘George Hobson. And more importantly, I’m in possession of a grappling hook, should you have need of one.’

‘What’s a grappling hook and why should I need one?’ Cat snaps, feeling that she is being laughed at.

‘This is the item, and I’ll fetch that bag out for you if you’ll give me your name,’ the man offers, picking up an evil-looking metal claw attached to a long pole from the deck of the boat.

Cat frowns at him and thinks for a moment, then says: ‘I’m Cat Morley, then. Do fetch it, will you, before the letter inside is soaked completely.’

The brown man comes all the way out of the hatch, crouches on the edge of the deck and sweeps the purse, drizzling water, out of the canal. He shakes it a little, folds the string into a neat bundle in his palm and squeezes it. His hands are like shovels, wide and square, the knuckles lividly bruised, ridged with scars. He jumps onto the bank and approaches her, and Cat squares her shoulders, stands up to him although she does not meet his shoulder height. He has more than twice her width; the solid look of a tree trunk.

‘I’d thought you a lad in a long shirt, until you spoke up,’ he says.

‘Thank
you
, sir,’ Cat says, sarcastically.

‘Now, I meant no offence by that. Only the lasses round here, and I can hear you’re not one of them, they all wear their hair long,’ he explains. Cat says nothing. She holds out a hand for the purse, but when he keeps hold of it she folds her arms, eyes him calmly. ‘And I never heard a lass round here curse like you just did, miss. No, I never heard that,’ he laughs.

‘May I have that back, please?’ Cat asks at last.

‘You may.’ George nods, passing it to her.

Cat scrabbles it open, tips out water, weed, coins and the letter, which she blots hurriedly against the front of her skirt. ‘Oh, blast it. You can scarce read the address it’s to go to. The ink is quite washed away,’ she murmurs, half to herself. ‘Perhaps there’s hope – I could write over it, perhaps, if somebody would lend me a pen. Here – do you think it’s readable, still? Can you make out the name?’ she asks, holding out the letter to George Hobson. The big man flushes, looks at the letter with a frown of bafflement.

‘I don’t rightly know, Miss Morley,’ he mutters.

‘Is it ruined?’ she asks. George shrugs one shoulder, noncommittal, and Cat understands him. ‘Can’t you read?’ she asks, incredulously. George hands the letter back, shrugs again, frowns at the look on Cat’s face.

‘Not much call for a bargeman to read,’ he says. ‘I’ll bid you
good day, then.’ He turns back to his boat, is aboard in one wide, assured stride.

‘Well now, you can laugh at me but I can’t laugh at you, is that the way of it?’ Cat calls to him from the bank.

George pauses, smiles a little. ‘Well, you have me there, Miss Morley,’ he admits.

‘My name is Cat,’ she tells him. ‘Nobody calls me Miss Morley except—’ She breaks off. Except the policemen who took her, the judge who tried her. She shrugs. ‘Nobody does.’

‘You’ll be about town, will you, Cat?’

‘Now and then, I dare say.’

‘Then I shall look out for you. And that sharp tongue of yours.’ He smiles. Cat eyes him, tips her head to one side. She likes the sparkle in his eyes, the way she abashed him like a schoolboy. With a quick smile, she walks on into town. After the post office she buys the madeleines, which she carries carefully, still warm and sticky; the scent of vanilla oozing from the paper wrapper. She buys herself some cigarettes, and a copy of
Votes for Women
for a penny from Menzies. She will hide it under her skirt when she gets back, spirit it up to her room, and read it after hours.

One Thursday, Hester and Albert eat an early supper of lamb steaks as evening falls outside and bats replace the birds, wheeling across the lawn. Cat serves them, walking from one end of the table to the other with the soup tureen, then the plate of meat, then the vegetables. In London she was to be silent, invisible; servants were not acknowledged at table. But each time she puts something on Hester’s plate, Hester smiles and thanks her softly. Cat was startled the first few times this happened, and did not know how to respond. Now she murmurs ‘madam’ softly, each and every time, like a gentle echo after Hester speaks. Albert seems not to notice any of this, eating his dinner with a diffuse, faraway look punctuated now and then by traces of a frown, or a smile, or an incredulous lift of his eyebrows. He is quite captivated by his own
thoughts, and Hester watches him fondly as they proceed across his face.

‘What is the subject of tonight’s lecture, my dear?’ Hester asks, once Cat has withdrawn. ‘Albert?’ she prompts him, when he does not reply.

‘I do beg your pardon, my dear?’

‘Tonight’s lecture. I was wondering what it was about?’ There are lectures once or twice a week in Newbury, and Albert tries to attend at least one of them, especially if they deal with matters philosophical, biological or spiritual.

‘Ah – it should be a most interesting one. The title is “Nature Spirits and their place in the Wisdom Religion”. The speaker is a rising star in theosophical circles – Durrant, I believe his name is. He hails from Reading, if I remember correctly.’

‘Nature
spirits? What can he mean?’ Hester asks, puzzled. She doesn’t ask the meaning of
theosophical
– is unsure that she could pronounce it right.

‘Well, dear Hetty, that is what I intend to discover,’ Albert says.

‘Does he mean hobgoblins and the like?’ She laughs a little, but stops when Albert frowns slightly.

‘It does not do to laugh simply because we do not understand, Hetty. Why shouldn’t the figures of childhood stories and myth have some basis in reality, upon some level or another?’

‘Well, of course, I didn’t mean—’

‘After all, we all know the human soul exists, and what is a ghost but the disembodied spirit of a human soul? Surely none could argue against the wealth of evidence for
their
existence?’

‘Indeed not, Bertie,’ Hester agrees.

‘The conjecture, I believe, is that plants, too, have spirits, of a kind – guardians to tend them and guide them in their growth and propagation,’ Albert goes on.

‘Yes, of course, I see,’ Hester says, quite seriously now.

They pause for a moment, silent but for the clink of their cutlery, the sounds of their own eating.

‘And you are off to Mrs Avery’s, for a game of bridge? What time shall I see you back here again?’ Albert asks at length.

‘Oh, I expect I will be back before you, dear. We shall only play until about ten,’ Hester says hurriedly, knowing that Albert does not approve of her playing bridge, and wanting to move on from the subject as quickly as possible.

‘And will Mrs Dunthorpe be joining the party?’ Albert asks evenly, and that small frown of disapproval that Hester can’t bear puckers his brow again.

‘I … I really don’t know, Albert. I doubt it, as she didn’t come the last time …’

‘She really is not the right kind …’

‘I know, dear; I do know. But even if she does come along, I can assure you that we’ll only be playing for matchsticks, nothing more,’ Hester assures him. Mrs Dunthorpe’s love of gambling is widely renowned. Over Christmas last, she lost so much in a hand of poker that her husband was forced to sell his horse.

‘It’s not only that which troubles me—’

‘Oh, don’t be troubled, Bertie! Mrs Avery’s character is unimpeachable, after all – and I hope you have some faith in my own mettle?’

‘Of course I do, dear Hester.’ Albert smiles. ‘You above all people have proved the uncorrupted nature of your soul to me.’ A telltale blush creeps up from the neckline of Hester’s dress.

She hasn’t actually lied about anything, Hester reassures herself, as she waves Albert off on his bicycle. He is to pedal the two miles to Thatcham, then catch a train into Newbury for the lecture. With him safely out of sight, she wraps herself in a lightweight coat and fastens her hat with the pins Cat hands her, patting her hair into place all around it.

‘I’ll be back by half past ten, when a little cocoa will go down a treat,’ Hester says brightly, eager to be away.

‘Very good, madam,’ Cat mutters. Hester notes the dark circles under Cat’s eyes, the fact that she has not yet, many days after her arrival, filled out at all. She makes a mental note to talk to Sophie Bell about it as she sets off along the garden path. There are angry purple and black clouds on the northern horizon, bulging up towards heaven like vast and ominous trees. Hester doubles back for an umbrella.

Albert’s real objection to Mrs Dunthorpe lies less in her gambling, though that is bad enough, and more in the fact that she is a medium, and has more than once led a seance on a night that had begun as a game of bridge. And however much Hester tells herself that she doesn’t know for
sure
, the fact remains that she spoke to her friend Claire Higgins after the service the previous Sunday, and Claire had hinted in the strongest possible terms that tonight might be just such a night. Hester feels a thrill of anticipation.

Mrs Avery’s house is the largest in the village, and well appointed, as a rich widow’s should be. Her husband had invested heavily in the railways, had seen his money grow tenfold, and had then been cut down by the very thing that made him, when his cab was struck by a train as it crossed the tracks late one night. The driver had fallen asleep at the reins, and his passenger, by all accounts, had drunk himself to falling down. He left Mrs Avery very well off and very bored, so that the widow has become the centre of society in the village, and indeed in the whole district of Thatcham – outside the realm of the truly grand houses, of course. She spends a lot of time visiting friends and family in London, is always quite on top of the latest fashions; and Hester finds her more than a little frightening. But, as the vicar’s wife, it would not do to be excluded from Mrs Avery’s company, and so she makes every effort to maintain her good standing with her. On nights when Mrs Dunthorpe is present, it is no chore.