Untitled (21 page)

   A fortnight to come up with a plan. She must think. The fire switches shadows across her face. She leans towards it though the heat prickles her skin. When she touches her cheek it feels too hot to her fingertips, and the crisp smell of hot fabric drifts up to her nose.

   There's a knock at the door, and she turns quickly. "Yes?"

   It's Jane, her body tilted against the weight of a bucket of coals gripped in one hand. She closes the door, then comes over to the fireplace.

   Mina sits back a little and watches her. She still has that thinness of a young girl not quite a woman, and a certain softness in her face, but her hands are red and swollen, the skin cracked. For a girl like her, cleverness makes no difference. What counts is her ability to turn her body into a machine that cleans and carries. What, she wonders, does this girl think about when she is scrubbing floors and laying fires? Where does her mind go when her hands are busy?

   She says, "Did you find out anything?"

   "No, ma'am. At least, nothing you'd call found out exactly." She doesn't look up, as though even here with just the two of them in this room she must be careful.

   "What did you learn, then?"

   The coals rattle against the scuttle as she tips them in. "Well," she says, wiping her hands on her rough apron. "She's got a notebook, and in it is the address for Mr. Henry here, and addresses of people in India."

   "What sort of people?"

   "I don't know, ma'am. Just names and addresses." She sits back on her heels and looks at the fire. "It's been in water. The ink's run at the edges of the pages, but you can still read most of it."

   "Is that all? Only names and addresses?"

   "No," she says. "At the back she'd been doing her accounts. Her aunt couldn't have given her much of an allowance—she was working out if she could afford a new dress. They couldn't have been well off, could they? Maybe that's why she's not used to having a maid waiting on her. I'd say she's been in the habit of doing things for herself. Not just getting dressed and doing her hair, but keeping her room tidy."

   "Has she been doing it herself ?"

   "Yes, ma'am." The bucket is empty, but Jane stays on her knees on the hearth rug. "There's something about her, ma'am, that's odd." She looks up. "If someone won't meet your eye, that means trouble. To me that's what it means, anyway."

   "You've begun well." Mina nods. "Now you must be her friend— she'll tell you things about herself."

   "She doesn't like me helping her."

   Mina folds her hands together. "She's lonely and miserable. Be kind to her and she'll talk."

   "Yes ma'am." She gets to her feet. "But if I don't know what I'm waiting to hear—"

   "Tell me everything. That's all you need to do." She looks up into Jane's face and catches something—a flicker of distaste? Or at least of dislike? Of course, that's to be expected: she has caught this girl in a trap and she wants to wriggle free. But she's too useful to be let go so easily.

Chapter 13

H
is head feels big and unwieldy—all that wine last night. But he must think—think carefully of the words that will ask the question delicately, concisely, clearly. He takes a sip of his coffee and grimaces. Then he shifts a pile of papers to the side and takes up a pencil.

   
Cyril,
he writes,
urgent query re Henry's widow
.

   Should he direct him to find the aunt? Or simply acquaintances? From so far away, it is not easy to know the consequences of what he is requesting—and from a man he was at school with fifteen years ago and has not seen in more than eight.

   His pencil hovers above the words, ready to dash a line through them. This whole business sickens him, to suspect the poor woman when she has been through so much. Where has this suspicion of Mina's come from? It worries him, for she won't let herself be talked out of it. Now it has worked its way into him, too. Last night at dinner he couldn't look at his brother's widow for more than a few moments at a time. She watched him with those pink-rimmed eyes of hers, a handkerchief clutched in her hand. A young woman caught up in a terrible grief.

   And yet.

   And yet, he cannot get past the fact that there
is
something odd about her. A slipperiness to all that she's told them. A way of looking off at the wrong moments.

   He brings his pencil back to the paper.

* * *

A half day off, though it is hardly worth the name, for Jane has had to hurry through her morning's work, and the evening's work will be waiting for her when she comes back. Even so—it is bliss. To put on her coat and hat and wrap her muffler around her neck, to come up the area steps and into Cursitor Road, where the snow has been trodden into an ugly slush, to be out of the house at last. At the top she hesitates: Which way to go? She has no idea, for in the month since she arrived she has barely left the house, and then only to come into the area. The world is so vast before her that she almost believes she can feel it curve under her feet as she turns to her right and takes off through the wet snow. How cold it is—melting snow leaking into her boots, the wind blustering up between the rows of houses and blowing into her face. She strides along; even in this weather it is a pleasure just to be able to walk when for so long she has been cramped inside the house. Down to the end of the street she goes, and into the next with its bare trees and a baked-potato man at the end with his cart. She turns again, this time into what she discovers to be a busier street. Not far away stands a row of shops, and she hurries across the road to them.

   All she finds is an ironmonger's, a draper's, a butcher's, a baker's with cakes and buns and pies laid out in the window and the heady scent of hot bread escaping through the door. In her pocket she pinches the paper she wrapped her money in to hide it at the bottom of her box. The doorway offers a little shelter from the wind, and there she unwraps it. A sixpence, a couple of pennies. Nothing more. No half-sovereign. Shifting her feet, she looks at the ground, as though it could have fallen without her noticing. Nothing. How can that be? She tips the coins out of the creased paper and into her hand. And then she sees it: just above the fold is a crudely drawn noose, and inside it letters that spell M
artha Wilbred
.

   Sarah. She has been through her box. She has stolen her money. And she has found out about her mother. Her mother, who was hanged before Jane was ever old enough to know her. Her mother who never had a husband, who worked in an inn, who plunged a kitchen knife into the chest of a Mr. Philip Granger, then ran for her life to the moors, and was only found after a week. It was all in the clippings the matron showed her—so Jane would know to govern herself more strictly than the other girls, she'd said, so she'd know she had the burden of bad blood to ask the Lord to help her overcome.

   Now Sarah has found her out.

   Not from the photograph, she's certain, for it is merely the picture of a young woman with a stern gaze. Not from anything she has let slip. She holds onto the wall, her head buzzing like a wasp nest at the end of summer. From Cartwright. From the warning he gave her that day when Sarah was going through Mrs. Robert's desk. Sarah overheard. She made him tell her more—and he did. Of course he did—Sarah has been gathering all of their secrets: hers, Cartwright's, Mrs. Johnson's. Out of them she's weaving a comfortable life for herself. Cartwright and Mrs. Johnson might snap at her, but they do nothing more. They are frightened of her.

   She pushes herself away from the wall. She must find herself a new situation. No matter that the tazza cost five pounds, she will have to pay Sarah, and pay her, and pay her. There will be no end to it.

   Her belly is still tight with the expectation of something from the baker's. It's not as though she is hungry, or that she hasn't eaten well at the Bentleys'. No, but to choose something to suit her fancy, to buy it herself and eat it when she likes—that is what she is hungry for. That was what she had intended when she stopped in this doorway.

   Damn Sarah, she thinks. Damn the filthy, thieving bitch.

   Her fingers touch the coins she has left—cold now. Enough to afford something, though the anger in her mouth will sour the taste of whatever she buys. She walks slowly to the window and lets her eyes linger on the trays of buns and pies and small cakes, half of which she's never seen the like of before. The wind threatens to tip off her hat, so she clamps a hand onto it. There is someone behind her, but she doesn't care; she takes her time before she makes up her mind and pushes the door open.

   Someone follows her in—a man who stands behind her. But her eyes are on the baker's wife, a sallow woman with a turned-down mouth and thick eyebrows. She's polite enough, though. She looks to where Jane is pointing and picks out a Chelsea bun for her—not the best, for who knows if she'll be back?—but all the same, not one of the harder ones baked in the corner of the tray. Jane follows it from the woman's hand to the paper she wraps it in. Already saliva is pooling in her mouth, for she's imagining that glinting sugar and those plump raisins between her teeth. She pays and carries the bun outside, where the wind is a little colder than she remembered, and looks about her. Which way to go? Certainly not back towards Cursitor Road. So left then, into the wind, and towards the church that's tolling the hour, walking fast with her heels ringing out against the pavement.

   She doesn't notice the man who comes out of the baker's shop glancing up and down the street, then takes off in a long-legged stride in her wake. In one hand he holds a bun wrapped in paper, but you'd think he'd forgotten all about it the way he weaves in and out between the people coming up the street towards him. He skips around a perambulator pushed by a nursemaid, knocking her shoulder, making her stumble. She sends a resentful stare at his back as he hurries off around a tall gentleman, then an old woman stabbing at the ground with her cane.

   He's close behind Jane as she turns the corner into a broader street, and has to stop when she comes to a halt. There are more people here, but she stands in the midst of them like a branch caught in a river, and peers in both directions. She has a wrapped bun in her hand and this, he knows, is the problem. Where to eat it without walking along the street taking mouthfuls? After all, even a young servant like her has some sort of reputation to consider. This street does not look promising. Not even the smallest patch of green that would suggest a park where she might find a bench and, surreptitiously, bite into the bun. Nonetheless, she takes off across the road, and he has to dart in front of a carriage to keep up with her. The houses are more elegant here, and she walks awkwardly, staring up at them as though she has never seen buildings so tall.

   He has been waiting for her to tire, or to tire at least of this searching for a quiet place to sit. Instead he finds himself beginning to flag, and wishes with all his might that the shabby little hat with its faded fabric flower that he has been following all this time would come to a rest.

   They go another two miles before she shows any sign of despair, past a public house loud with the shouts of men that she turns her head away from, past vegetables trodden into the frozen mud left by a morning market. The wind has picked up and sends stinging specks of snow into her face and his, yet only when they come to a bridge does she slow.

   In a couple of strides he comes abreast. He glances at her, then says, "Miss, I couldn't help noticing that maybe you need a place to sit down." He smiles—not too widely, he hopes—and tips his hat to her. "I'm not in the habit of approaching young ladies on the street, but if you would like directions to a park. It's not too far . . ."

   "Well," she says, and blinks at him. She is cold, and feels emptied out by her anger. This city is not what she expected. It goes on forever in streets that resemble one another in that none of them provides a place for her to sit, as though stepping out of the doorway of one's house one cannot stop until one reaches one's destination. There are no grassy verges, no seawalls, no quiet churchyards, no hedges that one can sit behind.

   She looks up at him, this young man with his gentle smile and long-lashed eyes. He is not a gentleman, but is too well-dressed to be a servant like her.

   "Or perhaps you're too cold to sit in a park on a day like this. There's a tea shop close by, a very respectable place." He points, as though he has no intention of walking with her.

   "Oh," she says, and follows the direction of his finger. She can see nothing promising in that direction either.

   "I could accompany you." He notices that she stiffens at that. He lowers his head a little. "I know what it's like to come to London and not know anybody and not know where to go. I came here five years ago to be a gentleman's valet. I didn't want to stay, it's not a friendly place. Not like Devon—"

   "Devon?" she says eagerly.

   "Yes," he tells her, and he knows that he has got her now.

        
M
other?" Robert sits in the chair by her bedside and pulls her hand from under the covers. It lies cold in his, so he lays his other hand on top. "Can you hear me?"

   Her face is gaunt, as though the weeks of lying on her back have allowed gravity to leach the flesh from her nose and cheeks, to leave one beaky and the other hollow.

   He leans towards her. Her breath is thick and stale, and this close he hears a crackling as her lungs fill and empty, fill and empty. "Mother?" he says again.

   This time her eyelids lift enough for him to see her eyes swimming beneath them. She blinks, then her lips move and she swallows. He brings his ear close, but no words come. When he sits back her eyes widen, as though she doesn't understand who he is, or how she has come to be lying here like this.