by Wendy Reakes
Suddenly, the back door slammed shut and everything went quiet once more. She leaned her head against the two small doors and sighed for as long as she saw fit. Then, without debating whether she should or she shouldn't, Marley took hold of the rope and began pulling on it so that she moved up the shaft inside the dumbwaiter.
Up and up she went. She wanted to close her eyes to shield herself from what would surely happen next. She would undoubtedly come upon a person, a servant perhaps, and they would scream when they saw the contents of that dumb waiter. Instead, since she couldn't afford to close her eyes, she silently prayed she wouldn't be discovered and that she would bump into Celia any minute.
Up and up she went. She'd passed two sets of doors already. The first was surely the floor where they all lived and dined, took tea and played the piano. Twenty feet or more after, the second was on the upper landing where they slept and changed their fine clothes, and now, twelve more feet up, she was almost upon the third.
She gave one final tug of the rope and the dumb waiter stopped abruptly as if it had crashed into a brick wall above her head. She took a single breath and then slowly opened the double doors. She stepped out into a long dark corridor with a dozen or more doors going off it, all closed with no noises within the rooms to frighten her back into the dumbwaiter where she might freefall to her death.
Hopping out of the hole in the wall at the top level, Marley cast her filthy feet onto the clean wooden floor. She inched along the corridor that turned and went down two steps. The landing shifted in another direction but in the corner, was another small set of stairs.
She walked on the tips of her toes towards the wooden balustrade at the side of the staircase and as she looked upwards in the dim light, at the top, in the gloom, she saw the attic door.
Her penchant for trespassing was not an endearing quality, but despite thinking all her life she had been a good girl, now, in her fifteenth year, she was breaking all the laws of the land. Ashamed, she pinned herself to the wall and saw a tiny mouse scarpering along the other side of the corridor. Like Marley, the midget vermin was searching for a place to hide, having a better chance than she. As it ran under a door nearby, Marley decided that was the door she should try too. Then she thought, fancy taking advice from a mouse! Perhaps she wasn’t so canny after all.
She crossed the landing as if she were traversing a river via a bridge about to crumble and fall, as her hand went straight for the brass knob on the door leading to goodness knows where. It could have been a closet, but she was praying for something else. Without making a sound, she turned the handle and pushed it open, squeezing her head inside the jamb. The room was void of life, as she’d hoped, so she slipped over the threshold and closed the door behind her.
Inside, were two small beds, not made up, but with white linen sheets in a pile at the end, atop a bare striped mattress and a pillow. Between the two cots stood a small table with an oil lamp, and along the side wall, an eight-drawer dresser displayed a white bowl and pitcher. Above it on the wall, a small wooden crucifix hung, reverently.
Praying the floorboards wouldn’t creak, she crept up to the window where short, brown muslin curtains hung. As she pinned herself against the wall, she moved them aside to peer out.
The morning light was up now. The air was clearing from a foggy mist and birds were flying down from the trees to the grass, searching for the early worm. It had suddenly occurred to her, with sincere remorse and culpability, she was looking down upon the gravelled drive to the fountain situated at the front of the house. Despite the emptiness in her belly, she felt like spilling the contents of her stomach, for all that was in it. What was she doing? What had she done? What a nerve of her! What brazenness!
It was time to give herself up. She should go down to the groundsman and confess how she had got inside the house without invitation and gone above her station, just because she was afraid of her lot at home. Yes, it was time.
Before she let go of the drapes protecting her from being discovered by anyone who happened to look up, she heard the wheels of a cart grating upon the cobbled drive. She gasped when she saw her uncle and brother, and her stomach lurched so bad, she ran to the pitcher on the dresser and removed it from the bowl. She stopped herself in time. She couldn’t vomit in the bowl. She would surely be discovered, if not by the sound of her retching, but the calamity of where she could dispose of the contents?
So, she held it in.
With her stomach still churning like it was making cheese from old milk, she went back to the window. The cart had turned about, and the groundsman was walking out from behind a cluster of trees with his dog behind him, barking as if it would never stop. The man roared his name. “Ace! Quiet.” The sound of his voice floated on the lingering mist, drifting all the way up to the top of the house.
Marley saw her uncle tie the reins and suddenly she was filled with disgust and fear. He was looking for her, that was obvious, and at his side was her brother Brent, who had no knowledge of what had occurred the night before.
the sound of her uncle’s voice calling her name made her remember with sincere loathing his dirty dealings with that black-haired lout.
“Marley!”
The air she was about to breathe got caught in her throat, so surprised was she at the sound of someone calling her from down below in front of the fountain, at the front of the big house. Then she heard it again, as if she was dreaming, the sound of her brother shouting, “Marley, Marley.”
She wondered for a moment if uncle and Brent could see through the walls, with her back flat against it at the side of the window. If they had, would they have recognised her from the back? She was still covered in mud from the storm last night where the thorns of bramble bushes had torn her flesh and her dress. It had been a pretty dress, one she had sewn together out of one of Mrs. Franklin’s old frocks.
She’d given it to her when she saw her bulging out of her old one and said she couldn’t go to the fair dressed like that. “Why doesn’t that uncle of yours buy you something new? You’re a young lady now, Marley. You need clothes for a young lady, not that other thing you’ve been wearing for two years or more.” She told her that uncle wouldn’t see fit to buy her a new dress and that he said clothes were a waste of money. “Yes, shoes too, I notice,” Mrs. Franklin had said when she looked at Marley’s old worn slippers; the ones she’d tossed into the river last night. “Well, that uncle of yours needs a word in ‘is ear he does. And I’m the one to do it,” she finished.
Uncle refused even Mrs. Franklin, so that’s when she gave Marley one of her old frocks. “It might be a bit old fashioned for a young girl like you,” she’d said. “But I reckon you could do something with it if you’ve got a needle and cotton.”
The dress she’d finished up with was long enough to cover her old shoes, and since no one could see them, she’d felt good and proud when she went off to the fair yesterday to sell her jams and compote.
“Marley, Marley …”
She edged towards the curtain and took every ounce of courage she could muster to peer out through the window. She could see Brent pulling the horses around to lead them to the other side of the house, and uncle was standing talking to the groundsman whose dog had already run off somewhere else. The groundsman held his shotgun under one arm, broken and pointing towards the gravel on the drive. The sight of that gun made her shiver even more and she wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing her skin to fend off the chill. Uncle had his arms akimbo and he was looking at his feet as he spoke with vehemence with the groundsman. She could only guess what they were talking about. Perhaps that his ungrateful and sorry niece had run away from home and that the big house was the place she would be heading, since he knew she had a friend there. A friend!
She had so needed a friend last night.
Chapter 3
Hiding under the bed in Wilbury house like the snivelling wretch she’d become, she lost sight of her uncle and Brent and the groundsman and his dog.
They had probably been searching around the outbuildings at the back of the house, seeking a stowaway.
Marley had no other choice but to wait to be discovered or to bide her time until she thought of a plan that would get her as far away from there as she could get. She’d crawled under the bed only an hour before. She would have liked to have lain down on that comfortable looking mattress, but if they’d searched all the rooms, she would have been discovered in a heartbeat. Instead, she sneaked under it, and with the curling springs above her head, she devised a plan just before she dropped off.
She awoke to hear not a sound from the house below or from the grounds outside. Could it be possible she’d dodged the search and now they had given up and gone home?
She slipped out from under the bed and went to the small window where she once more pulled aside the brown curtains. There, down below, she watched her uncle and brother ride away on the cart with their backs to the house, to the end of the drive and beyond. They were gone! Her heart ached to see Brent searching for her. He must surely have wondered what on earth had happened to make his little sister run away, but Marley knew if he found out, he would have killed that darn rogue and uncle too, she reckoned.
She still felt ravenous, but she needed to put her plan into action before thinking about food. She had a plan for that too. Wretch that she was!
She couldn’t hear a sound when she pressed her ear to the door, and no one was around when she opened it slowly and searched the landing. No one. Not a soul. She wished she knew where she could find Celia, but if she was abroad with the family and household, then Marley knew her friend would help her on her return. In the meantime, if she bided her time, she could wait it out for a couple of days. If she was canny.
It was with much trepidation she went from the safety of the small room to the end of the corridor where that small set of stairs she’d seen earlier led up to the attic above the servant’s quarters. The stairs were hardly used, judging by the dust on them. That suited her. The less it was used, the easier it was for Marley to hide for a couple of days.
She crept up the stairs, keeping to the side, careful not to leave footprints in the dust. When she came to the top, she turned the handle and opened the door. She closed it behind her and found herself in a small space surrounded by wooden balustrade with three more wooden steps running upwards to the main level. It was dark up there, but she’d expected that. A trickle of sunlight came from two or three slatted vents on the far wall, allowing a small shaft of light to guide her.
When her eyes adjusted to the dark, she was staggered by the vastness of the attic. She could see the space separated into three sections, each one as large as the next. She could tell how big it was only by the expanse of the roof, since the floor was packed full of old furniture and crates of bric-a-brac, broken paintings and dusty blankets, sheets draped over fabric covered chairs, all clearly discarded and turned out by the house in past decades, shoved out of sight.
Forcing her way through the furniture of wardrobes, chairs, tables and dressers, she made her way to the next section after stepping over a beam running along the floor. Old packing cases and trunks were piled high next to a child’s broken rocking horse and various forgotten toys, a cradle and an old pram, old dusty books, a dressmaker’s mannequin and bolts of fabric, rolled up carpets, chipped china and empty bottles. Dust had settled into every angle, crease and fold. The attic was an oasis of messiness. A perfect place to hide.
She climbed over an old brass bed, disassembled, with a headboard and a footboard and a spring base, leaning up against the wall. The final section of the attic, with its triangular pitched roof, was, more or less empty, apart from a few boxes in the corner. It got her wondering why… that whoever started storing things up there…why hadn’t they started there, at the back, to utilise the space. Then it occurred to her, that whoever started storing the forgotten items wouldn’t have cared and judging by the age of everything, that person was long dead by now.
At the end wall, pitching to a point in the ceiling was a green glass wall with a door in it. When she pushed the door outwards, a hundred or more pigeons scattered into the sky when she stepped out onto a flat terrace with the sun beating down on her face like a welcome ray of yellow energy.
The lead slate surface was bordered by four-foot walls where below them, gullies allowed rainwater to drain out of holes in the floor. She went to the side and peered through a turret where the backs of gargoyles looked down to the grounds below. She could only imagine the water spurting from their ugly mouths when it rained. She turned and looked back at the door she’d exited from. At the side was a massive chimney stack but the rest of the triangular side wall of the attic was made of small square panes, filthy, with years of dirt, weathered with black and white bird muck streaked all over it and sheets of moss blanketing one side.
She went back inside the attic and closed the door behind her. God help her for intruding. She had no right being there amongst the possessions of the people who owned that great house. What a miserable little trollop she was. But despite her guilt, she admitted to being pleased that she’d found a place to hide until Celia came back.
She left her place of refuge reluctantly, but the desire to fill her empty stomach motivated her to sneak down to the house like a thief in the night.
Outside the attic door, she crept along the hall in the servant’s quarters as if her feet were covered in glass slippers, unable to put all her weight onto the heels, for fear of shattering them. On pointed toes she rushed to the end and placed her back flat against the wall, peering around the corner to stairs leading downwards. She took them tentatively with her heart beating so badly it must surely have sounded like the ticking of a grandfather clock. Her hands shook like quivering tree branches and the sound of her own pulse pounded her ears.
At the bottom was a door. She stopped to listen, to detect any noise behind it as she turned the handle slowly. She stepped out onto another landing. Compared to the one upstairs on the servant’s floor, the décor there held such beauty, she thought she’d stepped into another world. Fine furniture lined the hall with tall elegant doors going off it from a precious dark green and gold patterned carpet running up its middle to the end.
Suddenly she realised her mouth was as dry as an empty water barrel. It was one thing to intrude on the servant’s quarters and the downstairs, but to be sneaking around the main house filled with untold riches was something else entirely. Her instincts told her to turn back, but the emptiness of her belly got the better of her. So, she carried on. If she got caught, it would be her own fault and she deserved to be hanged for such a crime. Wretch that she was!
Along the corridor she padded. She felt like an orphaned waif as she regarded her filthy feet against the beauty and richness of that soft rug. She was ashamed, and she wanted more than anything to roll into a ball and cry out, to dispel the self-pity she felt in her heart. But she didn’t. It wasn’t strength of mind; it was just an aching belly that spurred her on.
Reaching the end of the landing, creeping along it like a pensive doe in the wilderness, she decided there and then to accept her fate and be done with the drama. It was time to show what she was made of and that any position she had been put into by that cowardly black-haired lout, would not dictate the rest of her life. No! One day when she was able, she would return to Wilbury house and confess her crimes and repay every penny she had taken without consent. Yes! she decided resolute. That was what she would do.
Turning a corner, she came to a grand staircase. She was struck dumb when she saw that circular flight of stairs. The walls were lined with paintings of great nobles and in the centre of the landing was a chandelier with dripping crystals hanging above a hall where a floor of parquetry detailed the shape of a pentagon.
She shouldn’t have come that way! Despicable girl that she was!
She fumbled her way to a door that led to a back stairwell. She left the grand hall then, thanking God for the door, because
she could never, in all conscience, have taken that grand staircase in the main house.
Surrounded by plain décor now, and feeling more comfortable for it, she continued her trek down to the servant’s hall in the basement.
Quietly, as if she wasn’t there at all, she opened the glass case, running her eyes quickly along the labels and the keys hanging there. Pantry, one said, and that was the one she snatched.
The door to the pantry was near the entrance she had entered the night before when she had felt so lost and desolate. She knew it was the pantry because it had a mesh panel on the front to allow ventilation. They had the same sort of thing in uncle’s house, but their pantry was just a small bolt hole.
Stepping into the room played havoc with her stomach.
Inside, slatted shelves offered an array of packed cheeses, pates and cooked meats with dried herring and hams and large sausages hanging from hooks above. Jars of pickles and jams, sauces in bottles, sacks of flour and sugar and salt, and large jars of stewed fruit of every combination. Onions and garlic and dried herbs hung from racks and bottles of oils and vinegars and cereals and pulses stood proud. At the far end amid two crates stamped on the side with coffee and tea respectively and next to a sack of potatoes and another of dirt covered carrots, stood a large rack holding bottles of wine for cooking.
She had hoped to scavenge a piece of pie or something similar, just so that she could quickly stuff it down her throat and settle it in her stomach, but everything she saw was packaged in big sizes and any small piece cut from a block of cheese or pate and suchlike, would easily be detected and missed. She saw a sack of potatoes, open at the top. One or two pilfered would surely go unnoticed. She found a cloth bag and put four large spuds inside while she looked around for something else. The salami sausages looked tempting. Maybe taking one would be okay if she arranged the others into the space it left. She picked up an empty jar and scooped some tea into it. There was whole sack of it, a treasure indeed. That was what the master dealt in, her uncle had said. Tea, from a place called Ceylon.
