What Empty Things Are These

by Crozier, J. L. ;

  Chapter Twelve

  It was growing late, dark and clinging-cold, the lights on their poles fuzzy in the moist air when Mr Brent at long last clattered the landau to our door. He was off immediately, after handing us down, for the horses strained toward stables and their feed. Sobriety and I could hear the low rumble of Mr Brent’s murmuring to the beasts, their clattering and clopping through a pool of yellow light, and the landau grinding its great wheels into the night. Misted breath—the man’s and his charges’—rose and frayed above their heads. We two were both trembling with cold. I assume Sobriety observed of me what I noticed of her: a nose glowing pink and lips paling to blue.

  Inside the house were contrasting tempers like crosscurrents of sea or air: Mrs Staynes spoke, through tense and sharpened consonants, of Cook (‘Cook could not tell, ma’am, whether to light the stove’), and her gloved hands by turns gripped and patted one another. There were tasks, she said, that had had to be deferred—and marketing, whose details could not be discussed with Mrs Hadley,

  as would otherwise have occurred, because Mrs Hadley was gone so very long. Mrs Staynes was so out of sorts that she spoke of me in the third person. She could not look at me. The plaint continued, with her report of the arrival in the afternoon of parcels upon parcels and a lumpy shape, which could only be a machine for sewing.

  ‘It is very large, and takes up a lot of space,’ she said, and it was clear to me that Mrs Staynes dwelt on the details of this arrival in particular. Her eyes lifted at last to mine—the question in them clear, and perhaps there was a difference in her tone. Perhaps there was curiosity, a little excitement . . .

  ‘Oh, they have come?’ I pulled at the knot to remove my bonnet. The movement caused a sharp pain in my upper arms, a stinging that startled me and must have arisen, I realised, from clambering down the ladder earlier in the day. It was a pain I would nurse to myself in secret, my own private harbinger of life and adventure, a noble wound, the mark of heroic gesture . . .

  I glimpsed the latest card from Mrs Charles in the dish and felt for the moment curiously disorientated. So much had changed, and yet this former life stepped forward to tap me on my shoulder. It is as if there were some uncomfortable spectre whispering from another place…or perhaps it is we who are arrived from that other realm.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I took the liberty of having them stacked in the morning room.’ I blinked and then recalled what it was Mrs Staynes and I had been discussing.

  The housekeeper opened the door to that room, gestured at the piles of differently sized shapes in brown paper. ‘I felt we could not do more without your direction.’ Her hands, having opened the door, now gripped each other once again and I knew myself not yet forgiven.

  I am a disturber of the peace, I realised.

  The function of this small world, our house, was to travel with reassuring regularity through its cycles, with every person in it accountable and to be found in the proper place at every hour and minute. The calendar and the chiming of the clocks were the measure of the household life, a certainty in repetition, a maintenance of pattern, just so, just so. I had knocked this asunder today and brought the unknown and unknowable here, to our space. I was out of time with everything and Mrs Staynes was made nervous by it. Mrs Staynes was frightened by it. I looked at her hands—gloved fingers around each other in a tight interweaving.

  Yet I could not wish to promise never to repeat it. Of a sudden, a fizz ran through my veins. I moved my shoulder and felt its twinge.

  Still, I took especial note of where the sewing machine had been placed, for it stood by itself next to my own little side table, the parcel of a shape and size in its wrapping to be a very ill-concealed secret. Mrs Staynes, I knew, had had that placed there herself. I caught her expression.

  Really, she is as excited as a child at Christmas, and wishes she were not. Dread of change and now this—all dwelling embattled in the same breast! Mrs Staynes turned her eyes away, as if she were caught out.

  There was a movement from above. Cissy crouched on the landing outside Mr Hadley’s bedchamber, where she was plainly on sickroom duty, and pressed her face against the banister. Perhaps she thought herself hidden in shadow, as she leaned to catch what was being said below.

  ‘I think you and Cissy might unwrap the machine after supper, perhaps, and put it where you think it would best be kept,’ I said. There was movement from the landing, and then some sound escaped from the crouching child above. Cissy slipped back into Mr Hadley’s room before Mrs Staynes could properly be aware of her truancy.

  I brought my attention back to my housekeeper. ‘We will deal with the rest tomorrow.’

  Saying this, I handed my bonnet to Sobriety, and was brought back from my own distraction when she at first failed to grasp it. I looked around at her then, whose reaction had been so slow, as if dreaming; Sobriety took the bonnet as if she barely knew what it was. Her skin was waxen. All this time, she had stood there so quiet.

  My poor girl, so pale!

  ‘When these things are put away, Sobriety,’ I unbuttoned my paletot and Sobriety held it while I slipped out of the sleeves, ‘you should go early to bed and I will have something brought up to you.’

  ‘But there are our petticoats to soak else they will stain, and your own toilette …’ Sobriety’s voice was like the scratching of dead leaves, and as nearly noiseless, so that I must bend forward to hear.

  ‘A soaking is simple. Leave anything soiled outside your door… Cissy will help me again tonight.’ I took her arm and led her to the staircase. ‘Go.’ Sobriety mounted slowly. I saw that Mrs Staynes watched the muddied hem of Sobriety’s petticoats jostle with each step.

  ‘Mrs Staynes, we have had adventures today.’ The housekeeper’s eyes seemed to set, a stillness that no doubt signalled her foreboding of what tale I might tell. I knew my attempt to jolly her was too obvious. ‘And yet you may approve. You are going to the kitchen?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘I shall come with you.’

  In passing the dish on its little table, I thought how Mrs Charles’s frequent card-leaving might signify that the woman had nowhere to take her emotion but to our door, but could not yet bring herself within the house itself. And I—who had always taken care that Mrs Charles was not among guests at our dinner parties (it was a small thing I could do, being in charge of drawing up lists and always obliged at some point to perform at the pianoforte and, quavering at the attention, attempt some song. She would not, at least, be in my audience)—was surprised to feel pity.

  I could not help but wonder if there had been a true passion of some kind, between Mrs Charles and my husband. I had not considered this before, that passion might be a thing Mr Hadley had harboured—could harbour—for another human being.

  Cook was assured there was no need for anything more than a light supper, nor on any account to go to great lengths at this time of night. I sent Albert, who was mopping his own plate with bread, to relieve Cissy in the sickroom, and Cissy, when she came to the door, to carry a plate of cold meats —some left from the servants’ own meal—up to Sobriety.

  For myself, I sat where Albert had been and felt of a sudden a great draining of my own energies, as if a drawstring had been loosened around a bursting purse and all the pennies poured forth. The kitchen was warm with bustle, of cooking fire and use and people; the muscles of my neck and shoulders gave up their cold-gripped tension. I let out a slow breath.

  I had no inclination to pick myself up to dine upstairs alone in the chill, with those tiny pure sounds of silver against china, the slow sip of water, the crystal glass beautiful upon the cloth; Mr Hadley’s father upon the wall opposite the resplendent pheasant upon whose dead and hanging neck the feathers were detailed—the sheen and the frothy down—with merciless artistry. No inclination at all.

  The fire had been lit in the dining room, no doubt. Well, I did not know
if that were so. Perhaps it had. I assumed so, and knew I should feel a responsibility not to waste it, although that room always resisted the best efforts at heating. I did not really care to move. I was beyond caring very much about anything.

  ‘Cook, Mrs Staynes, I am happy to eat just here, at your table.’ Cook let out a low exclamation; Mrs Staynes had the look of someone who could not think this time how to compose her face. I smiled around at them, though it felt as if my own features creased against their will. I felt a gathering tightness about my eyes. ‘I too shall have some resurrection pie,’ I laughed a little, ‘and tell you all that we have done today.’

  Cissy appeared in the doorway, heralded a moment before her arrival by a thump-thump upon the stairs. Sobriety was asleep, she said, and so she had left the plate, with its covering, on Sobriety’s bedside chair. She had over her arm the muddied petticoat; I pointed out my own and that both petticoats would need a soaking overnight. The three serving women all bent to look, the room full of the question behind their careful silence.

  I looked up at the three faces. In my exhaustion, I felt the rising of a most uncommon affection for them, and was too full with it for a moment before I could speak. Foolish baby that I am!

  ‘I shall eat here, and then I will tell you all, and then I shall go to my bed.’

  It could not be said that all of the rituals of the house had returned to their pattern, next morning. Cissy loitered at the morning room door, pulled back there as if by a string no matter what employment she had been set to do elsewhere. It was understood—she understood—that there would be no examination of the sewing machine without Mrs Staynes, at the very least; and Cissy must spend her hours with Mr Hadley, and when she was free Mrs Staynes would then take her turn in the sickroom, and Cissy must wait still.

  Mrs Staynes, of course, was not so constrained, and spent some time with me and Sobriety, pressing treadle and turning wheel, bending to peer at the needle rising and plunging, the long point vivid as the dagger of an Italian assassin. For the moment, Mrs Staynes kept her hands by her side. Sobriety ventured a finger toward the needle.

  ‘Adequately sharp, I think,’ she said, and laughed. Yesterday’s alabaster weariness had gone.

  ‘It is a new model,’ I told Mrs Staynes. ‘Very new, indeed. It is called the Letter A. I suppose because of the shape.’

  I stepped back, better to view the machine, my head to one side. ‘Although, perhaps not.’ I smiled.

  ‘We do have a small book to instruct us, and we shall have a man come and show us how to use the machine.’

  ‘That would be best, perhaps, ma’am.’ Mrs Staynes crossed one hand over the other.

  Finally, my housekeeper smiles for me, at least a little. A small weight, that I had not realised I carried, lifted from my shoulders.

  I drew a cloth over the machine to protect it from the dust, and Mrs Staynes and Sobriety left the room. Sobriety returned with coffee for herself and me, and the morning newspaper—for breakfast had been brief that morning and abandoned quickly in favour of an examination of the machine.

  Our tale was lavishly described in The Times with expressions of horror and exclamation points distributed generously throughout the text. We could not decide (I think I may speak for both Sobriety and me in this) which emotion was uppermost in us—a sense of being laid bare, somehow, or a giddiness at being for the moment famous (at least to ourselves, for, mercifully, our names were not used). We read and read again the tale of our own adventure, (with, oddly, our cheeks the deepest and hottest red) both amused and relieved at the reference to our virtue as “unnamed gentlewoman, her lady’s maid and servant”; discovering for the first time the name of the family—that of Robert Farquharson—to whom the stolen baby was now returned. A description followed of the Farquharson family’s own virtues, amplifying the details laid out in these pages just yesterday when the theft of the baby had been first reported; of Mr

  Farquharson’s successes in the world of business and the respect with which he was held by both church and commerce; and how his wife, very young and pretty, was prominent already among the charities of London, very glad to condescend to the poor and so on.

  Sated with this story of our derring-do, we took my small scissors to the string around the parcels still piled on the rug in their brown paper, and uncovered the various stuffs—much of it in black crêpe and bombazine, Henrietta, some lawn for cuffs, cambric for handkerchiefs—all in preparation for a household in deep mourning. Some parcels I put by to be opened much later, for these were half-mourning colours of lilac and grey, and a smaller parcel of jewellery in velvet boxes: a brooch, necklace and earrings in jet.

  Sobriety gathered up the string and brown paper; I folded the newspaper at the page that recounted our adventure, for Cissy and Mrs Staynes would surely wish to see it. We each took our burdens through to the kitchen to be disposed of.

  Later, I sat unmoving for some time at my little table by the window in Mr Hadley’s room. The stillness brought with it scampering visions of women with parcels and paper and string, and that machine that was both delightful and dreadful, and then of distress—that poor mad girl, the baby…and Sobriety. I breathed quietly around it, as if I meditated like some old Indian fakir from my own Papa’s youthful adventures. For some time—it was many minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour—I sat in this way, until I began to rouse and glance at my husband to see how he did. Well enough, I thought.

  And so, what was your greatness, Mr Hadley? I gazed at him some moments more. George, what was your greatness? Then I turned my attention to pen and paper, dipping the nib into ink.

  In the evening, Sobriety and I sat for a time before the fire in my morning room, sharing between us the pages of The Times and of The Illustrated London News. Our empty cups were set aside with their saucers on my little table. We sat together on the little settee, the other chairs providing a surface for the higgledy-piggledy heapings of haberdashery that had not yet a home of their own. It made the room quite crowded, to be sure, yet to my mind there was also a sense of comfortable busyness. To tell the truth, for the moment it pleased me well.

  I held open the journal for a glance at the particular items that dealt with ladies’ fashion, but then thought there was little point in considering this season’s colour and laces, given black would be my covering for another year. I considered this. The machine for sewing would do its part in practical ways until then, once we had all learned to work it. I turned the page.

  ‘See here how the bones of another ancient creature have been found,’ I leaned toward Sobriety to give her a view of the article with its illustration.

  ‘They are inevitably of such prodigious size. They say, or at least I understand Mr Darwin to say, that there were no men about when these monsters existed.’

  ‘It is as well. I do not imagine these creatures were careful where they trod.’ Sobriety smiled at this. I sat straight once more and read another moment, before looking up. ‘Do you know, I think I can well believe there are some people who are descended from apes.’

  Sobriety laughed. She folded her newspaper on her lap.

  ‘My uncle James, when on dry land, is a naturalist. Had I told you?’

  I said I believed she had done so, some time ago. ‘Does he collect?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He has eggs of all sizes, and many kinds of feather, the skeletons of small creatures. But best of all—’ Sobriety smiled. ‘He has a piece of rock that he found by the sea, with marks upon it of some tiny, ancient creature. It is perfect in every detail, like a sketch with a very sharp pencil, pressed into the stone.’

  ‘How wonderful. I should love to see it. We must attend exhibitions of such things.’ I corrected myself. ‘That is, of fossils.’

  I closed and placed my newspaper next to our cups. ‘When I was a girl,’ I recalled, ‘there was a lady who was very well known for her finds. Great creatures like cro
codiles, found on our own beaches. When she died, my mother told me of her, and read to me about her, from the newspaper.’ I laughed. ‘I would imagine, when I climbed my tree, that some great monster of the sort had once come floundering across the field, and might still do so.’

  Sobriety smiled once more, and the silence crept back to settle between us. The fire cracked as a log collapsed; a wind buffeted the window beyond the curtains, and died away.

  Gazing a while into the flames, I felt the weight and movement of a world careless of those who survived within it. Monsters lumbered less and were not so huge as they had once been, but were a danger nonetheless, a danger to the young. To girls. Girls, as I had been a girl. Sobriety would have been a very industrious girl, in the field and in the classroom. I thought of myself up high, wrapped in my leafy cover and looking out for those floundering monsters; I thought of Ida, no less a girl than myself, who had been sent sometimes to find me. I thought of Cissy, whose childishness was so apt to burst forth at any moment.

  ‘What age do you suppose that poor girl is, who took the baby?’

  Sobriety took a time to answer. ‘Young, very young.’

  We both were quiet for a time, as the fire died back and the coals began to glow. Beyond the window, the world lashed cold.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ladies—what of the world between us all?

  By A. Hadley

  Mayhap some ladies of education, upon reading this modest article of writing, think to look first outside their window at those busy women of another class out in the world, and then consider a moment those others who serve your needs in kitchen and with polish in hand.

  May we hold, for the sake of argument, that there is a community of ours, of women, which dwells within and weaves through and yet, in a way, beyond that of men? For these men function, one might muse upon it, with different purpose, within different spaces—and must, so often, be of a different set of mind—from our own…