The Housemaid

by Sarah A. Denzil

  “Aren’t these figurines frightful?” She wandered over to a glass cabinet and took out a porcelain monkey head with large black eyes and bared teeth. “It’s a Meissen from the seventeen hundreds. Ugly thing.” She picked up a large dinner plate decorated with vines and cherubs and fruit. “This is Italian. Very expensive. Stupid things really. What’s the point?”

  My heart was beating hard as she put the porcelain back in place. I’d been told not to touch any of the antiques behind glass. If Lottie broke a figurine, would I be blamed? Would I be assumed to be the culprit? Would Lottie own up to her own misdemeanour, or would she throw me under the bus?

  “There’s so much around this house that makes no sense whatsoever. I keep telling Daddy to at least send it to a museum or gallery, but he never listens to me. It’s rather obscene, don’t you think? Us owning all this.” The glass door rattled as it closed.

  I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying to me. Perhaps she thought she was on my side because she saw her family’s riches as unfair, or perhaps she wanted to remind me of my position in the world. Either way, I saw no correct answer to her question without committing to some sort of an opinion about it. She could be testing me.

  “I wonder why someone sent you that box,” she said out of the blue.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, wanting nothing more than to leave. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “No,” she said, dragging out the word. “I suppose it doesn’t. If anyone’s going to be threatened in this house, I’d imagine it would be Daddy.”

  “Oh, why is that?” I tried to hide the interest in my voice.

  “Well, because he’s rich of course. We’re hated for it, you know. I mean, I don’t blame some people; life is rather unfair at times. But all the same, we’re hated for a part of us that we can’t change.” She sighed and closed the cabinet.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She waved a hand as though it was nothing. Soon after, I made an excuse to leave. Perhaps the arrival of the diorama had made me paranoid, but her toying questions made me wonder: Did Lottie send me the box? She’d brought it down to the kitchen after all.

  Chapter 13

  After lunch, Roisin made a start on the bathrooms. There were seven altogether, but we regularly cleaned three—the downstairs powder room, Lord Bertie’s en suite and Margot’s en suite. The weekend cleaners tackled the rest. But for some reason Alex requested my assistance in his office. He wanted me to help him file documents. Mrs Huxley said the words between her teeth. When I asked her where his office was, she told me to look at the map.

  It turned out that Alex worked in the converted stable block outside the main house. I folded up the map and stuck it in my trouser pocket on my way to the servants’ door, but before I reached it, Alex appeared from around the corner, a devious grin stretching his full lips. He lowered his chin and raised his eyebrows as though he’d put some sort of cunning plan in action.

  “We’re not going to my office,” he said. “I wanted to get you away from Huxley for an hour.” He leaned against the wall, the shadows of the dark servants’ corridor transforming his blue eyes into charcoal pools.

  “Oh. Then what—?”

  He beckoned me away, and we strode past the kitchen towards the main part of the house. “I wanted to give you a tour. The thing is, I know our housekeeper pretty well—I was a toddler when she joined us—and I know she doesn’t tend to show anyone around. Therefore, I’ve taken it upon myself to treat any new staff to a personal excursion with someone who knows this place like they grew up here. Come on.”

  He skipped up the main staircase, and I hurried along behind, not quite mustering the same energy. I caught up with him halfway up the stairs where he stopped and pointed to an oil painting. “Look, I’m not the best historian. Daddy would eat me for breakfast if he knew I couldn’t remember which duke is which and which ancestor died of syphilis, but I can tell you the nicknames Lottie and I made up when we were younger. This is Oleg the Vampire. Lottie decided that he was a friendly vampire, but I told her he ate children. Look at the teeth. That’s a killer if ever I’ve seen one.”

  The toothy, stern man frowned down at us from the wall. “I suppose only a murderer would frown and show teeth in a portrait.”

  Alex waggled his eyebrows. “Oh, most definitely. And this rather strapping young woman”—he gestured to a portly older woman in a powdered wig—“is clearly Catherine the Countess of Cats. Lottie made that one up I’m afraid. Not quite as scary. Unless she had a scary number of cats.”

  “How many cats would it take to reach frightening proportions?” I asked.

  “Oh, at least a hundred.”

  “A hundred cats would be terrifying,” I agreed, aware of the sardonic smile forming on my lips. Alex noticed it too, and his own twitched at the corners. “That’s over a thousand claws and many, many teeth.”

  “Indeed it is,” he replied. He leaned closer, and I could’ve sworn a jolt of static electricity bounced from his blazer to the bare skin of my collarbone. Frazzled air filled the space between us, and I held my breath. “This way.” He bounded up the stairs two by two until we reached the landing.

  Then we took a right and walked a few paces along the corridor. Alex rapped his knuckles on a panel. “This is where you can spy on Mrs Huxley.” He pressed the wood, and a mechanism sprung it back towards us. I gasped in surprise. The door was tiny, about half the size of a regular door. You had to bend down practically on your knees to get into the opening. Alex gestured for me to go first.

  “You want me to go in there?” I gave him my best dumbfounded expression, slightly mocking but also genuine. I’d never considered myself claustrophobic, but even I balked at the tiny space.

  “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  He leaned closer again. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You’re lying to me,” he said, lifting a finger and tracing the shape of my eyes in the air. “I can see it, the fear. Your eyes just changed colour from brown to deep maroon. I think it’s because you’re scared. But it’s also very… becoming.”

  My instincts told me to take a step away from him, but I didn’t, and we stayed there, staring at each other, breathing a little deeper, lost somehow.

  “I’m not scared,” I said, proving it by stepping into the hole.

  He squeezed in beside me. The warmth of his breath caressed my neck. Sage and bergamot—the scent of his expensive aftershave—lingered in the air between us. Everything around us smelled of wood and varnish, like we’d been transported to another time. He reached across my body, his gaze penetrating, and gently slid a peephole cover to one side. The movement was slow, like he wanted to drag the moment out, like he wanted to be there with me, close to me, for longer than necessary or appropriate.

  “If you peek through the hole, you’re actually looking through the large portrait hanging over the stairs. The one of the duke in the wig.”

  I leaned forward and pressed my face closer, intoxicated with the thought of observing people without them knowing.

  “The thing about voyeurism is you don’t know how powerful it makes you feel until you try it,” Alex said.

  His words took me by surprise. They were intense, private. A confession. Again, I wasn’t sure how to feel. I turned to him in that tiny space where our noses almost touched. He wasn’t smiling any longer. Instead, he breathed heavier, his lips parted, the barest gap between them.

  “Do you watch people a lot?” I asked. It was bold. Everything about it stepped over a line. Alex was my boss, at least part of the boss’s family, and I shouldn’t have been in that cupboard with him at all. I waited for an answer, not moving, not daring to.

  “Sometimes.” His blue eyes were in shadow again, dark pond water, murky and opaque. Time stretched as we held each other’s gaze. I didn’t breathe for several heartbeats.

  A door slammed and the moment was broken. Alex glanced behind us before
easing himself back into the hallway. He was gentlemanly enough to reach through to help me out.

  “I’m so sorry, but I actually do have to do some work now. Would you mind if I showed you the rest of the hall another time?”

  “Of course not,” I said, baffled by his sudden change of heart.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow anyway,” he said. “At the music room.”

  “That’s right,” I replied. “I’ll see you then.”

  As he walked away, I noticed that he held himself somewhat oddly. His back and gait were stiff, and his head was lowered. He held something within himself, I thought, something he’d been keen to let out when we were pushed together in that tiny viewing area. But now he repressed it, folded it, tucked it away. If I was right, and if that were true, then I knew all about folding up a desire and ignoring it. I did the same thing every day. In that quiet corridor, I watched him walk down the stairs, open the front door and leave, and then I noticed that my hands were shaking.

  Chapter 14

  I waited for Alex outside the music room at seven p.m. as he’d asked. He was wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I felt as small as a child as he came closer, sinking down into the sensible shoes that went with my maid’s uniform, gazing up at the easy smile on his face. He was slightly breathless when he said hello to me and unlocked the door. There was one thing I’d noticed about the Howards and rich people in general—the confidence. The ease. The way they moved, talked and existed was different. They looked like nothing could touch them, they were invincible, and this world was made for them.

  “I thought I’d play for about an hour, if that’s all right,” he said, swinging the door wide open to let us both through. “That way I should be able to get through the whole piece. Can you play an instrument?”

  I shook my head as we entered yet another large room tucked in the folds of Highwood Hall. It was clear that this one had hardly been touched since the house was built, with a faded fresco of salmon-pink flowers running along the ceiling. Someone had added striped wallpaper to the walls that seemed out of sync with the intricate roses painted above our heads. In the middle of the room stood a grand piano, nothing like the chipped upright my old primary teacher had used for nursery rhymes. The walnut curves gleamed beneath the chandelier, polished to a mirror shine. I heard a thud behind me and turned to see the door close.

  “You’ll soon pick it up,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll show you the ropes. Would you like a drink?”

  I hesitated. Was it a test? I’d ask for an alcoholic drink, and he’d fire me for drinking. If I don’t ask for a drink at all, I’m being rude. “No, thank you.”

  He strode over to a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and a crystal glass. “I find it helps loosen me up. But don’t tell Daddy.” He grinned again.

  “I won’t. Don’t worry,” I said, sensing my own anxiety in the tremor of my voice.

  We walked together towards the piano, and I stood behind him while he arranged the music, hovering like a person who doesn’t know what to do with themselves. Finally, his papers were in order and he lifted the lid to reveal the ivory keys. When he sat down on the piano stool, he gestured for me to sit next to him.

  “It might be a bit of a squeeze,” he warned, “but it’s the best place for you to see the music.”

  He was right about both. Our hips grazed when I took a seat next to him. I thought about the way we’d been pressed close together in the cupboard above the stairs. The bergamot aroma swelled around me, intoxicating, along with the whisky providing that edge, the slightly sour note.

  It felt wrong, and yet right, to be so close to him, to this man, this heir. I couldn’t speak, I was so nervous. I crossed one leg over the other and then dropped it back to the floor. I placed my hands on my lap and then on the stool and then held them together, squeezing the flesh between my thumb and forefinger. I wondered if he could smell the bleach on me. He placed his Scotch on top of the piano, and I worried about condensation on such a beautiful instrument. My fingers twitched, longing to remove it or fetch a coaster.

  “I’ll nod to you when you need to turn the page. It’ll be easy.” He flexed his fingers over the keys, hesitating. “I need to warm up first. I’ll play a few simple pieces, and we’ll move on to the sonata later. There’s a fiddly bit I haven’t got the better of yet.” He smiled. Was he nervous too? It seemed unlikely, but he appeared to be rambling slightly.

  The moment between him talking and his fingers hitting the keys stretched. My breath caught in my chest, waiting, anticipating what would come. And then he began to play.

  I couldn’t pull my gaze from his fingers. His strokes were soft, quiet, and the music rose from the piano, spreading out until every note resonated throughout the room. It was a melody that built from devastatingly quiet to powerful, resounding chords, gradually sweeping me away with every bar. I could be standing in the ocean, pulled by the tide, my chest swelling to double the size as the music filled my lungs. He stopped abruptly, and I gathered myself, not wanting to let my feelings show.

  “That wasn’t the sonata?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “A Chopin waltz to start things off.”

  “Wow. But that was so beautiful. And… fast.”

  He laughed. “You haven’t heard much classical music, have you?”

  My cheeks warmed with embarrassment. “I’m a philistine.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re just not used to it, that’s all.”

  “Taylor Swift’s more my thing,” I admitted.

  He laughed and then played a few bars of Love Story with a smile.

  “Seriously?” I said, the nerves finally ebbing away.

  “All right, I’m going to start for real now.” He stretched his arms out, examining the page before him. And then he began to play again.

  The piece had a melancholic tone. It was more complex too. He reached past me to hit the high notes before nimbly working his way down to the low notes. I stumbled on the first nod, and it meant he had to slow down his playing, but he took the time to flash me a smile to let me know that it was all right. And then we carried on. He played for longer than an hour, but I didn’t notice at all.

  I’d slipped into another world. A world with no dioramas dressed up inside a white box with a red ribbon. A world where I hadn’t been left by a young mother two decades ago. I forgot about her, about her history with Highwood. The music room became another world to me. It was me and him here, with no one else. I watched Alex play, and I convinced myself he would always be like this, talented, amusing, and someone who truly saw me.

  When I got back to my room and climbed into bed, Roisin whispered, “What was it like?”

  “Everything I’d hoped for,” I replied.

  We laughed at my corny answer and talked about ex-boyfriends until the late hours. She had an ex back in Sligo who’d hit on her mum. I’d spent a year getting high on uppers with a guy who dumped me when he got sober and went to university. I was his past, he’d told me. The dirty past. The magic of the music room slipped away. Reality hit hard. Whatever Alex had made me feel in there, I didn’t deserve it.

  Chapter 15

  The next morning, the pandemonium of breakfast time echoed down the corridor. An unusually frazzled Huxley threw an apron at me and informed us that Pawel was off sick. A clamber of bodies and limbs hurried to scramble eggs and fry bacon. Oven doors opened and slammed. Hot oil hissed. One of the assistant cooks yelled that Margot would throw eggs out the window if they overcooked them.

  In an attempt to be useful, I tried to pass utensils around, but still groggy from the late night, a heavy-bottomed pan slipped from my fingers. Someone yelped behind me, and I turned to find a man hopping on one leg, clutching his foot.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t see you.”

  “Bloody hell, what’s that pan made out of? Concrete?”

  “Sorry!”

  “Will you please get out of the way,” Mrs
Huxley snapped, forcing herself clutching a bowl of chopped tomatoes.

  I helped him limp over to the table to rest his foot. He had a London accent, slightly cockney but softer, and a deep, velvety voice to go with it. When he sat down and glanced up at me, two dark brown eyes caught mine. They were lined by thick eyelashes, his eyebrows heavy too. “I guess that’ll teach me to be in the kitchen. I brought some radicchio in from the vegetable patch.”

  That was when I realised he was Ade, the gardener. For some reason I’d expected someone older. Ade was no older than thirty, his skin a rich umber brown and kept his black hair in tight cornrows close to the scalp. I stepped away as he pulled off a Wellington boot, wanting to give him some space. Even in a sitting position I noticed how tall he was, and broad, presumably from the gardening.

  “I’m so sorry about the pan. It just slipped out of my hand when I wasn’t paying attention. Is everything all right? Nothing’s broken is it?” I gripped my hands together, the sinking sensation of guilt tugging at my abdomen. Ade needed his legs to work. If someone broke my wrist or sprained my ankle, I’d lose out on income. I felt sick.

  “Just a bruise,” he said. “Hurts like a bitch, but I’ll live.” He pulled his sock back on and pushed his foot into his boot. “I’d better get back to the garden before you throw any knives at me, new maid.” He grinned, but I saw steel in his big brown eyes.

  “At least I wasn’t carrying the meat cleaver,” I replied. “Though at least you’d have more room in those boots.”

  He stuck out a hand and introduced himself. “Maybe next time we can avoid physical violence. The radicchio is excellent, by the way. Make sure they add a balsamic glaze and serve it with the fish tonight.”