‘A knife, sir,’ Billie said, in a cautious voice, but as if she was used to being asked odd questions.
‘What kind of knife?’
‘A fish knife.’
‘And this?’ He pointed to a groove incised the length of the blade.
Billie hesitated.
‘Yes?’ Lord Hallowhulme said.
‘I believe it’s a gutter of sorts.’
‘Ah. And what would you call it on a ship?’
Billie seemed puzzled. ‘A knife, sir.’
‘No. A gutter –’
‘Oh. I think maybe the scuppers.’ She smiled faintly. Perhaps she was thinking of the drunken sailor.
James Hallow stooped, peered at her hard, then straightened and asked her if she could point to something in the room which could be described as a vertical.
Billie Paxton took a few steps and touched the window frame beside the silk bellpull.
‘What about upright?’ James Hallow said.
She dropped her gaze, then turned her eyes up briefly and glanced through her lashes at Murdo Hesketh. She looked for long enough so that it seemed, when she looked away again, that he’d been patently rejected. She pointed at a standard lamp.
Minnie was laughing.
Lord Hallowhulme said, ‘It is difficult with people, of course, when you have to take moral qualities into account,’ explicating her joke – as if it was his joke, as if he could see that what she’d done was funny, but not that she’d meant to be. Hallowhulme gathered himself again, held his breath, and concentrated on the young woman in front of him. He directed her to the large, dingy, pastoral landscape above the mantelpiece. Murdo moved out of her way. James Hallow followed her and actually tapped his finger against the small gold mound of a painted haystack. ‘What is this?’ he said.
Billie Paxton looked, her eyes darted from the haystack to the many other objects around it. Her jaw set. ‘I can’t think,’ she said, after a time. ‘I know what is, but I can’t think of the word.’
‘It’s a haystack, dear,’ Lord Hallowhulme said, kindly. Then, ‘Can you find the harrow in this picture?’
She found it straightaway.
James Hallow cleared his throat. ‘I shall have to write to Dr Morgan Pringle,’ he said.
Billie was defensive. She said, ‘I can’t always think of the name of the thing if I’m shown its picture.’
‘And you’re quite a bright girl,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am!’ Billie fired up, passionate, with the first sign of tears anyone had seen. For a moment Geordie had a sense of her enormous frustration.
Lord Hallowhulme told Miss Paxton that she was a scientific puzzle, which was to say that science had recognised her problem but knew neither its cause nor its cure. ‘However,’ he said, in a remote, regretful tone, ‘it is considered congenital.’ He gave her arm a conciliatory squeeze. Then he told her that a letter had come for her, from Cornwall. Had he her permission to open it?
Billie nodded.
Lord Hallowhulme used the fish knife to slit the envelope, shook the letter open, and some other papers dropped into his lap. He read, and his neck coloured up. ‘Cousin,’ he said, and held the letter out to Murdo. ‘Could you read Miss Paxton’s letter to her?’
Clara said, ‘James.’ She put her cake fork and her as yet untouched wedge of cake back on the table and held out her own hand for the letter. James Hallow seemed neither to hear nor see her. Clara slowly lowered her hand – she cooled, grew dull, a dying coal under a forming skin of ash.
Murdo took the page from his cousin.
Clara told Rixon and Elov that they needn’t stay – since they’d finished their cake. Elov leapt up, brushing crumbs from his front. Rixon joined him. Clara told Minnie and the Tegner twins that, if they also wished to go –
‘I’d like another piece of cake. Thank you,’ Minnie said, loudly. It was a sort of bugle call, Geordie thought, not a charge, perhaps a call to muster. The Tegners hesitated, looking at Minnie, then, checked by a gesture from their mother, they left the room. Minnie cut herself another fat slice, conveyed it to her plate, sat back down, sighed in contentment, and tucked in.
Was the letter improper? Geordie wondered. Billie Paxton looked more alarmed than embarrassed. Geordie saw her steel herself, as though she expected an attack.
‘I’m afraid that at least one newspaper was inaccurate in its reportage of the accident,’ James Hallow said. ‘Miss Paxton, you have friends who believe that both your sister and brother-in-law are drowned.’
‘Who?’ Billie asked. ‘Henry has friends. Edith and I only a very few.’
‘Read Miss Paxton her letter, Cousin.’ Lord Hallowhulme took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes. His cousin and wife watched this, sceptical.
‘The letter is from a Reverend Vause,’ said Murdo. ‘It is dated this Monday.’
‘And the fellow has overpaid the post,’ muttered James Hallow. ‘In his concern, no doubt.’
‘The Reverend Vause writes: “My Dear Miss Paxton. I cannot say with what shock and sadness my sisters and I read the report of the unfortunate accident which has claimed the life of my former classmate Mr Maslen and your sister. Please accept our sympathy and our regrets for your loss. To be deprived of a family in so sudden and summary a way! But, Miss Paxton, you have friends, and your friends – Mrs Wood and Miss Vause – join with me in asking you to accept an offer of protection, comfort, and assistance. We entreat you to come to Mulrush, where you can rest and recover yourself with people who wish only to assist you. We’re deeply concerned for your well-being, and do hope you will write directly and draw on the enclosed order …”’ Murdo broke off.
‘There’s a bank draft – the sum would cover a sea voyage and second-class rail, I presume,’ Hallowhulme said. He held the order up to his secretary’s eyes. Gutthorm nodded. ‘And there is a further page, with times and connections copied from railway timetables. So you see, Miss Paxton, the Reverend Vause has done all he can to do your thinking for you, if not your reading. Is there any more, Cousin?’
‘“In expectation of your reply … sincere condolences …” and so forth. Which newspaper was it, James, mistaken in its facts?’
‘That’s only an assumption of mine, Cousin. I can’t otherwise imagine how such a misunderstanding could arise.’
Murdo handed Billie her letter. ‘I’m sure Clara can write to this Vause and tell him that you’re still in possession of a protector.’
‘Yes. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear Mr Maslen was spared,’ Clara said. ‘And how he does.’
‘Who is he?’ Lord Hallowhulme said, waving the money order. ‘This Vause of Mulrush?’
‘I was in service. Mulrush is his sister’s house. A Mrs Wood. That’s the real connection – but it’s true that Henry was at school with him.’
‘Mrs Wood and her brother were kind to you?’
‘No, Lord Hallowhulme, they were unkind.’
James Hallow took this in his stride. ‘Do they mean to make amends then? Or do they want another opportunity to be unkind?’
‘I’m sure the Reverend Vause’s offer is meant kindly,’ Billie said. Then she asked Lady Hallowhulme if she would help her reply. ‘In the best way.’
Geordie, watching all this, was making more of it. Billie was frank. ‘They were unkind.’ And she was a good girl ready to make the right reply. She confided in Lord Hallowhulme, and then conceded, asked Clara’s help. But there was something unmalleable under it all – and he imagined her backed against a door with her teeth bared. The image shocked him, it seemed to belong to no feelings he had about her. It was as if the image was an infection, something he caught from someone else’s bad air. It was something Murdo might have seen – but Geordie believed Murdo was now in sympathy with Billie Paxton, as far as he was able; at least he didn’t cast her as a culprit anymore. Geordie looked around. Gutthorm was watching the girl, with the look of a lean dog on a short lead. Clara was refreshing the girl’s cup. Murdo was co
nsulting the coals in the fireplace. Minnie was picking cake crumbs off her front and putting them in her mouth. While Lord Hallowhulme – well – Hallowhulme, like a lock-keeper turning his lock key, was opening up, letting in a cloudy flood of talk that thickened gradually, gained speed and volume. He suggested to Clara what she should write. Said that the contact made should be maintained; Mr Maslen and Miss Paxton should cultivate these alert and generous friends. It was as if she had never confided their ‘unkindness’. It was as if Hallowhulme hadn’t demonstrated something, grief or mortification, on reading the letter, hadn’t been unable to read it out himself or entrust its – his actions suggested – improper communication to his wife. Was Lord Hallowhulme such a sentimental man? Geordie wondered. Or was it that he just must manage everything? Hallowhulme talked, and they all bobbed up, unharmed, to a higher level of the waterway. Hallowhulme opened the second lock. He changed the subject – said something about a visit to his salmon hatcheries – moving them all on.
7
Theft as a Servant
AT SIXTEEN, impatient with her dependence on Edith and Aunt Blazey, Billie had demanded to be allowed to do what she could. She couldn’t teach, but she could go into service. Aunt Blazey advertised, and Billie found a place, only eight miles inland, among the staff of twelve belonging to the household of a widow, Mrs Wood. Mrs Wood lived with her two daughters, and an unmarried sister, Miss Vause. Billie left Aunt a week after Edith had gone to take up her own post. Though she missed her family – and the sea in the cove beneath the cliff – Billie wasn’t unhappy. She’d had more than her share of strange beds – top and tail with Edith on some rustling horsehair pallet in a room on the back streets of French or Italian towns in the Ligurian Bight. She wasn’t afraid of change, and had never yet been lonely so was unafraid of loneliness. Her work wasn’t hard; she’d been engaged as a sewing girl but did other upstairs work. She ran to answer the bells in the top row, she carried trays, made beds, corked stains on woodwork, packed away furs in their cedar boxes, and wool dresses with packets of camphor, snuff, and Persian insect mix. She cleaned mirrors with blue powder, and polished them with the deceased Mr Wood’s tattered silk handkerchiefs. Billie liked to be earning as Edith was, and learning some of the skills of managing a household. She couldn’t hope ever to manage to marry the figures in the cashbook and daybook, as the Woods’ housekeeper did in her big black ledger, but she did learn how to dress leather shoes with castor oil and wash hairbrushes with hartshorn. As she came into practical knowledge Billie felt herself increase. She was satisfied, and felt herself satisfactory.
But something went wrong. Afterward, when she talked it all over with Edith, she tried to uncover her first error, what it was she did or failed to do that caused Mrs Wood, or Miss Vause, to lose confidence in her. It seemed to Billie that her trouble started the moment any of them first looked at her for longer than the duration of a request or instruction. It was Olive Vause who first noticed her – one morning when Billie was busy replacing a chipped crystal button on the back of Miss Olive’s rose silk dress.
It was a sumptuous dress, heavy, overornamented with machine-made frills, ruffles, and superfluous tucks. A dress so sculpted that it could almost stand up by itself. It was all one fabric – its saving grace, perhaps even its glory – a heavy silk, which spoke whenever it moved, sighed and whispered. Olive Vause had come back into her bedroom from the dressing room with more mending for Billie, who sat in the best light in the bay window. Billie broke the thread with her teeth, put the needle in her pincushion, and stood to carry the rose dress back to its hanger. Quite unconsciously, she pushed the frock’s waist against her own, and put out one leg to look down the cascading frills. Miss Vause asked Billie if she liked the dress. ‘Yes,’ Billie said. Miss Vause said she wasn’t sure that she did – it didn’t do much for her. ‘I doubt you’ll see me in it,’ Miss Vause said. ‘People don’t see me in it.’ And then Miss Vause said to herself that she should give the dress to Billie. ‘Yes, I think I will,’ she said. ‘If I haven’t put it on before the end of summer, it will be yours.’
But the very next day Miss Vause scolded Billie, quite rightly, for using the wrong brush on a velvet jacket and taking the nap off a patch on one sleeve. The hard bristles were for topcoats only. Although Olive Vause corrected Billie sharply, she didn’t go on. But Billie would tell Edith later that it might have been from then – the wrong brush – or from her momentary careless admiration of her own foot emerging from under the frothy hem of the rose dress. Or – or perhaps the trouble dated from the previous Sunday when the Reverend Vause spoke to her.
They had met already. He’d been there when she’d first arrived. She remembered him saying that he hoped she’d be comfortable with Mrs Wood, and then he had given her a little book, an illuminated Scripture textbook, with a quote and a tiny coloured panel for every day of the year.
Billie got out the book and showed Edith, who found her way to the date of Billie’s dismissal, the 11th of August, and Hebrews, chapter thirteen, verse five – the picture of a sad individual hiding in the shelter of a high hedge: ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.’ ‘Humph!’ went Edith. Then she found the date Billie’s employment began, the 24th of May, and St. Luke, chapter 12, verse 15. The picture was of a pile of money bags, as orange as pumpkins. The text: ‘Beware of covetousness.’ Edith shook her head, closed the book and said, ‘So – the Sunday he spoke to you … ?’ to prompt her sister.
The whole Wood household had gone to church. It was the Reverend Vause’s parish. He was the younger brother, younger than Miss Olive. His sisters were rather proud of him – Trinity College, Cambridge; three years in East Africa. The girl he’d meant to marry had tuberculosis of the bone. They were still waiting – Billie thought – when Billie met him. ‘He had her picture on his piano.’
‘And when did you have cause to see his piano?’ Edith inquired.
Billie was once sent to the rectory with a message – that was sometime after she made the fan of rook feathers in the churchyard – and he’d offered to let her play his piano. She’d never had cause to linger in the Wood parlour – though there was a Sunday afternoon when it rained so hard and they’d all stayed away from church. The widow Wood had read to the assembled household – a few chapters of Paul to the Greeks – and Billie had played hymns. The Wood girls knew nothing so pedestrian as hymns, and couldn’t play without a score. ‘That was the only time I was allowed to touch the Woods’ piano.’ Billie said.
‘The rook feathers?’ Edith reminded her sister.
It was just as well Edith was interested in each incident, not in the order in which they came. For, once she’d begun to consider a cause of her trouble, Billie was beset by memories of irregular incidents. But with no sense of progress – like the progress of a disease from infection to crisis.
It was in the churchyard that Billie first spoke to the Reverend Vause. ‘Properly – not just to say “Thank you, Sir, for the little book”.’ She passed him greeting his parishioners in the church doorway after the service. She bobbed, tapped his palm with her gloved fingers, and drifted away from the knots of talkers. She was to go back in the trap with the other maids. But they weren’t yet ready to go, so Billie walked among the graves and found a feather from a pheasant cock, then, under the tall elms, a scattering of rook feathers. Billie sat down on a headstone to make a fan with the feathers and a piece of straw. She took off her hat and slid the straw-wrapped shafts of the feathers in behind her hatband. The Reverend Vause appeared before her. He asked her what she was doing.
‘And?’ Edith, expectant.
‘I said I was only fiddling.’
‘And I don’t suppose you thought to get up off the headstone?’ Edith asked.
‘No.’
The Reverend Vause made conversation. Billie couldn’t remember its content, but he was pleasant to her. ‘Then his sisters came to carry him off in the carriage, and I ran after the trap.’
‘Oh, I
can see that,’ Edith said. ‘You, with your hat off, running after the trap.’
Billie wondered whether her occasional unconsciousness was a fault, or merely an irregularity? Edith always said that if Billie had been able to remember their mother, she would have learned to check herself. Edith always checked herself – in the mirror on the wall at the foot of the chandlery stairs, at the street door. She’d check her hair, her hat, that she hadn’t transferred printer’s ink from the newspaper to her chin by propping it with her fingers as she read. Edith said: ‘I can remember mother telling me, “Look at yourself!” when I’d made a mess on my pinafore, or had mud on my shoes or twigs in my hair.’ Edith said that Billie had to learn to rein herself in, to hear a voice saying ‘look at yourself!’ when she was about to run after a trap, waving her hat and scattering feathers.
Billie continued to do her work, diligent, alert, and her attention wandered only occasionally. But she was being watched. After the rook feathers, or her misstep with the rose dress, or the wrong brush, Billie felt eyes on her. Her odd lapses didn’t escape notice. There was a day when, cleaning the mirror, she turned it a little at each pass of the cloth till, noticing the light in the room magnified, she saw she’d turned the glass to face another, on the far wall, so that she could see herself, crouching, arms upraised, infinitely repeated, like a motif on wallpaper, a figure that someone had got right and was worth repeating. Studying herself, she inclined her face against the glass, and her cheek made a cloudy imprint, smooth but slightly furred.
Olive Vause, watching from the doorway: ‘You’ll have to do that over.’
Billie imagined Olive complaining to Mrs Wood: ‘So many lapses. Just think of all those she’ll have made unobserved.’
The housekeeper had Billie into her office to warn her that she wasn’t giving satisfaction. And Billie was moved to remark that on the contrary, her lapses seemed to give Miss Vause and the Misses Wood enormous satisfaction.
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