The Housemaid

by Sarah A. Denzil

  “Will do.”

  Ade stood up opposite me, ready to leave, when his eyes widened and his lips pulled together in an exaggerated grimace that made me think he was about to give me a warning. And then I heard a throat clearing behind me.

  “Have you finished flirting?”

  My skin flushed hot. I turned abruptly. “I’m—”

  Mrs Huxley’s demeanour showed no humour whatsoever. Her face remained as strict as a school mistress in a Dickens novel. I added the cane in my mind, slapping down on the palm of her hand as she leered at me. Her, Miss Trunchbull, me Matilda.

  “Then it’s time to serve breakfast.” She thrust a silver tray into my hands and turned sharply on her heel.

  When I glanced over my shoulder, Ade was gone. Perhaps he wanted me to avoid the embarrassment of being scolded in public.

  We were running slightly late, and Margot slid a pair of glasses down her nose as we arrived through the servants’ door to set up breakfast. Lord Bertie was sipping tea, an open newspaper by his coffee cup. Lottie was reading her phone, and next to her sat Alex, also looking at his phone. He didn’t raise his eyes to meet mine when I walked in the room. He did nothing. Despite the hot food I carried in my arms, a chill washed over my skin. Silently, I placed the tray down in the centre of the table and began lifting the plates from it. They rattled in my shaking hands.

  “I’m so sorry we’re late, sir.” Huxley’s voice was sickly sweet. She let her sycophantic side reign whenever we were even a few minutes behind schedule. It made the scrambled eggs seem completely unappetising to me. “Pawel let us down this morning. He has a stomach bug apparently.”

  Lottie grimaced. “Well, at least he’s not making our food.”

  “Not to worry,” Bertie said. “These things happen.”

  As I backed away from the table, I couldn’t help but watch Alex. However, he still hadn’t so much as nodded in my direction. Instead, he buttered his toast, avoiding me altogether. I moved over to Roisin by the hot plates set up along the far wall. She gave me a sympathetic smile, and I realised she’d noticed too. I hadn’t told her about Alex taking me to look through the peephole above the stairs, but she was intuitive enough to know something was going on between us.

  We stood there waiting for Mrs Huxley to finish and let us go. We should’ve started the linens at that point. When the doorbell rang and Huxley hurried out of the room, I wondered whether we could make our excuses and leave. It’d be an opportune moment to try Mrs Huxley’s office door, though I expected that she kept it locked at all times.

  “Coffee.” Margot lifted an arm, clicking her fingers.

  Roisin rushed over to the coffee pot. I backed up closer to the hidden door, dropping a not-so-subtle hint.

  “This is barely lukewarm, girl,” Margot complained.

  “S-sorry, Mrs—”

  “Don’t be silly, just go and warm it up.”

  Now Alex’s eyes finally met mine. I expected to find amusement in them, but they were penetrating, cold. He quickly glanced away. I noticed his leg dancing up and down beneath the table. Was he upset? I’d known him barely a week, and yet it already felt as though he had two personalities. Alex, who was eager to give me a tour of Highwood, who told me about the silly names he’d given the portraits as a child, and then Alex, crammed up next to me in the cupboard, revealing intimate thoughts, an aura of intensity surrounding him.

  “Miss Howard, you have a parcel.” Mrs Huxley glided back into the room, carrying a cardboard box around the size of a tub of biscuits with a bright scarlet bow tied on top.

  A prickling sensation spread over my scalp, and I inhaled sharply as the walls of the room seemed to close in around me. My diorama had arrived in an almost identical box. Lottie had clearly forgotten, as she clapped her hands together and let out a squeak of excitement. Mrs Huxley’s expression remained grim while she placed the box down on the table, and my heart hammered against my ribs. I wanted to look away, or flee. My eyes flicked over to Alex, who stared intensely at the box, frowning so sternly that tiny dimples of tension appeared on his chin. Everyone in the room stayed quiet and still, apart from Margot, who slurped on her lukewarm coffee. I instinctively took a step closer, wondering what sort of threat poor Lottie was about to receive.

  When Lottie untied the ribbon, the front of the box dropped, just like it had when I’d received mine. I slowly began making my way around the table, hoping no one noticed me moving to get a better look. I needed to see the scene for myself.

  “Well, is there a note?” Margot asked, not sensing the tension in the room or completely ignoring it.

  “No, Mo-mo,” Lottie said.

  She was moved by the gift—I could see that—but not by happiness. It was more like fear. Any trace of the little-girl act she liked to play faded away, and for once she appeared older than her years. Her eyebrows were drawn together, creating a skinny crevice between them. She chewed on her bottom lip; eyes fixated on the box. I continued edging around the table until I stood behind her shoulder, dangerously close to Alex. He stared at the box, not saying a word.

  Another diorama. This time without any blood and no broken doll at the bottom of a staircase. The depiction showed a child sitting cross-legged in the middle of a large room. I recognised the library at a glance. Every detail had been re-created with care, from the ladders that leaned against the shelves to the glowing fire painted onto the back wall of the box. The little girl had her face resting on her hands as though she was in deep concentration, reading the book on her lap. It was pretty and not at all sinister like the scene I’d received.

  The rug beneath the child was covered in tiny torn pages scattered around her like confetti. The child hadn’t been reading the book at all. She’d been destroying it. I glanced at Lottie’s profile and saw a shadow of pain move across her features.

  “This is getting ridiculous now.” Lord Bertie lifted the box flap to conceal the scene. He picked it up, cradling it against his chest. “If the police won’t do anything this time, I’ll find out what’s going on myself.”

  Chapter 16

  Two dioramas had turned up at Highwood Hall in my first week. But I wasn’t the only target. Whoever sent these strange, creative threats had decided to terrorise Lottie, too. But why? I couldn’t figure it out.

  Back in the kitchen, as we ate leftover pastries and toast from the Howards’ breakfast, we suffered through a silence enforced by Mrs Huxley’s presence. I saw the strain on Roisin’s face, the furtive glances between the kitchen staff, and the unsmiling expression of the housekeeper daring us to gossip. That was one of Mrs Huxley’s greatest flaws—she couldn’t read people. She didn’t understand what her staff needed. We needed to blow off steam, but her ramrod posture and pursed lips prevented us from it.

  “Do you know why Lottie received that scene?” I asked the housekeeper, breaking the silence.

  I hadn’t realised how lost in thought she was. She jerked sharply in my direction and appeared to pull herself back to reality. “Why would I know?”

  “Alex— Mr Howard mentioned that you started working here when he was a toddler, so you must have been here when Lottie was born.” I shrugged, ignoring Roisin’s wide eyes. “I just assumed you might know what event it referred to.”

  “No,” Huxley muttered. “No doubt I was too busy with work.”

  “Who delivered it? Was it in a separate box? Was it the postman?”

  “It was on the front doorstep,” Huxley said. “No outer box.” She stood, her chair scraping back, and left the room without another word.

  Roisin shushed me when I opened my mouth to speak. Instead, we listened to Mrs Huxley walking up the stairs.

  “She’s gone up to his office,” she said.

  “Lord Bertie’s office?”

  She nodded. “Do you think it’s to talk about the… thing?”

  “The diorama?”

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  “I think so.”

  R
oisin replaced a spoon. “I wonder who’s going to get one next. Maybe it’ll be me. Maybe they’ll send me a pale-faced doll dead on the kitchen table or hanging from the rafters.”

  I tutted. “Don’t.”

  “Sorry.” Her guilty smile flashed shyly. “Well, I suppose we should clean the silverware.”

  I helped her tidy away the breakfast dishes and collect the three large carriers of silverware we needed to polish. I folded my legs underneath me on my chair and picked up a fork.

  “Did you see it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t get a decent view of it.”

  “It wasn’t scary like the one sent to me. At least there wasn’t a bloody murder scene or anything. It’s of a little girl sitting on the floor in the library with pages of a book scattered all around her. Do you know what that means?”

  Roisin frowned deeply and put down her rag. “I don’t know. Maybe it was Lottie when she was a child. It had to be personal to her; otherwise, she wouldn’t have gone so white.”

  I thought of Lottie’s frozen expression, the wariness in her eyes. Yes, she’d been afraid. And perhaps it meant the diorama was more threatening than it seemed. What was the history there?

  “Whoever sent the dioramas must’ve been involved with the Howards for a long time, right?”

  Roisin shrugged. “Unless they heard about whatever happened secondhand. What if Lottie told them a secret?”

  “You mean someone like a maid. Someone who worked with her.” I thought about Chloe again, the maid I replaced. “Or… think about it. Apparently the parcel turned up on the front step, with no outer packaging. That means they got through the gate, unless…”

  “Huxley.”

  I nodded. “Huxley.”

  “What about me?”

  I dropped the fork to the table and winced as it clattered noisily against the rest of the silverware. In the doorway she stood, tall enough to fill the space, her shoulders hunched because she clenched her hands together in front of her torso. Roisin let out a gasp.

  “I… um…” I sat there floundering, mouth flapping open stupidly. How had she come down the spiral staircase without either one of us hearing? How had she appeared so quickly? I took a deep breath before changing the subject entirely. “Has Lord Howard managed to find anything out about the mystery gifts?”

  Inside I prayed that she hadn’t heard the first half of our conversation in which I accused her of being the mysterious sender. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I wanted to sink into a hole in the ground and never emerge. Someone could bury me in it as long as I didn’t have to stare into Mrs Huxley’s jet-black eyes ever again.

  “That’s none of your business. I suggest you get back to work, girls.”

  Despite everything, I couldn’t help myself. I stood. “Wait a minute. It is my business. Someone sent me one of those packages.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that,” she snapped. “The answer is no; Lord Howard doesn’t have any news for you. Is that better? Are you happy now?”

  “Not particularly.”

  She took a step into the room and clasped her hands together. “I’m not sure what you were expecting. Did you think that the world’s best detectives would flock together to uncover the mysterious case of the creepy dolls? Did you think that Lord Howard, a man with much better things to do, would be able to find the culprit within forty-eight hours? Do you honestly believe you are special enough for all these things to happen because someone sent you a Barbie doll at the bottom of some stairs? Now, I suggest you distract your overactive little mind and get on with your job, unless you would like to work elsewhere. Would you like to work elsewhere?”

  My cheeks burned red-hot. I hadn’t felt such embarrassment for a long time. And yet all I could do was shake my head as I sat back down.

  “Good.”

  Roisin didn’t dare look at me until she’d left.

  I picked up the fork with trembling fingers. As I carried on with my work, I kept glancing back at the door as though expecting her to appear again, but she didn’t. Neither I nor Roisin dared to speak, but inside, my thoughts were loud enough to drown out the silence. I felt an infinitesimal shift that day in my attitude, in the way I regarded Mrs Huxley. A new, burgeoning anger budged my embarrassment out of the way because I didn’t want to be spoken to like that ever again. And more importantly, I realised I didn’t trust her. Not one little bit.

  Chapter 17

  Highwood Hall fizzed with subdued excitement for the rest of the day as we dusted and hoovered and polished. I held more money in my hand when I dusted an ornament than I’d ever earned in my entire life. It made my heart skip a beat, but Roisin was much less nervous as she manoeuvred around the hall with her vacuum cleaner.

  I was surprised when Lottie pulled me out of the dining room to ask me to help her organise her closet. She sniffed a lot as we walked up the stairs to her room, and along with the red-rimmed eyes, I realised she’d been crying. But when I asked if she was all right, she glanced upwards at me from beneath her pale eyelashes and said, “Just peachy.” It felt like an attempt to shut down the conversation. I closed my mouth and didn’t speak again until she initiated the conversation.

  Her bedroom was messy enough with discarded books strewn across the floor, candy-coloured underwear dangling out of open drawers like a boudoir in a film noir, and her dressing table covered in half-empty bottles of make-up. An abandoned mascara wand lay on the surface of the table amongst black and tan smudges I’d cleaned away just a few days ago.

  She led me into a separate room I could easily use as a bedroom on its own. It wasn’t huge, but it was certainly enormous for a glorified wardrobe. But the place was chaos. Dresses, shoes, jewellery, jeans, blouses, coats and more had been piled on top of each other, almost every hanger, drawer or shelf was either empty or stuffed full of screwed-up clothing. Despite trying not to react, an “oh dear” slipped from my lips.

  “That bad?” Lottie grimaced. “I’ve always been a tad untidy. Daddy says I should live in the stables.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. We’ll just need to work systematically, that’s all.”

  She clutched my arm dramatically. “Oh, thank God you’re here. I wouldn’t have a clue where to even start.”

  For the first hour, she was smiley and sweet, working just as hard as I did to bring order to the chaos. We filtered out all the dirty washing first and then started folding her woollens. She had so many cashmere cardigans it made my head spin.

  “I guess we have something in common now,” she said. “We both have a secret admirer.”

  I let out a hollow laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.” My heartbeat quickened. I’d wanted to bring up the subject of the diorama, but held back in case I overstepped my role as a servant. Now that she’d broached the subject herself, I wondered if I could get some information out of her that might help me piece together what happened.

  “Not a very flattering admirer,” she said, sniffing again.

  “No,” I replied, wanting to tread carefully. “It felt awful, opening that box and seeing what was inside. It was… disturbing. I can’t think of any other way to describe it.”

  She nodded.

  “Look, Miss… Lottie. What you saw inside the box is your business, obviously, but I suppose if it is the same person, maybe the two are linked in some way. And perhaps we should talk about it. Help each other.”

  She gestured for me to sit with her on the floor, and we crossed our legs and faced each other like two girls bonding at boarding school. A mound of colourful scarves lay between us, a mountain made from silk.

  “Was yours personal to you?” she asked.

  “I think it was more of a threat,” I said. “The doll on the floor looked like me.”

  “Does it connect back to anything that’s happened to you? In the past I mean. Like… I don’t know, an event from your childhood?”

  Gently I shook my head. She hoped that it did. I could see that. She needed comfort fr
om me, a reassurance that we’d both been targeted for the same reason.

  “Okay,” she said, staring down at the scarves. “Nevermind then.”

  When she climbed to her feet, I hesitated for a second and then decided not to let this moment pass. “Did you want to talk to me?”

  She sat back down and sighed. With one hand cradling her chin, she stared up at me with her large, shining eyes, and I remained patient, sensing that she was working up to a confession. I imagined Lottie getting her own way often by utilising those big, soulful eyes. Perhaps they were the reason for her childlike persona. The slight lisp, the way she said daddy, the lack of focus and direction. Had Lottie been shaped by those who treated her like a child? Or was it the other way around?

  “Not many people know about this, which is why I’m so confounded by it all,” she said. “I was ten years old, and it was all so silly.” She flapped a hand. “It was nothing more than a big misunderstanding, but I’ve felt terribly guilty about it all these years.” She picked up a silk scarf, pulling at the corner. “Alex is the genius in the family. He’s the one who’s going to carry on the family business and make Daddy proud, of course. I’m not like him at all. I’m the opposite, the idiot.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “Well, maybe I’m not an idiot, but I was never a fast learner like Alex, and it took me a shamefully long time to learn how to read. Mummy hired my first tutor when I was five, and I was so naughty that I went through a string of them until she found one that stuck. The one that stuck was the one I hated. Imagine Huxley, but psychotic.”

  “Wow,” I said, and she laughed.

  “I called her Lumpy behind her back. Not terribly original, I know. She heard me, of course, and then she was even stricter. She’d have me in the library every day for hours during the school holidays. I’d tried to run away, and that was when she started locking me in.” She smiled sardonically. “We had a maid then—I forget her name—but she was kind, and she sneaked my favourite sandwiches into the library through the servants’ door. Sometimes she’d even stay with me and let me listen to her CD player. But I was furious with Lumpy. You know the kind of angry you get as a child, the kind when you feel like everything is unfair and grownups are horrible? I was so mad that I took the one thing she loved more than anything in the world. It was a first edition of Little Women that my father had given her as a thank you for torturing me until I could read as well as any other ten year old. In my head she didn’t deserve it. She was mean. A monster who yelled at me and made me write the same sentence three hundred times.