“No,” she agreed. “I’m good at stitchery, I could make something else as soon as I’ve earned—”
“Go to the village tomorrow. There’s a shop that sells a few things ready-made. The gowns aren’t much, but they’re better than that. Get one.”
“Yes, my lord.”
He smiled dryly. He could have said, “Get your skin flayed while you’re there,” and in all likelihood she’d have dipped her head and said, “Yes, my lord.” She was in his power, a virtual slave. The situation was unquestionably provocative, but it ought to have been more so, more stimulating. He hadn’t really gotten to her yet. She simply didn’t care enough.
“You’re tired,” he said solicitously. “We’ll speak again, but now I’ll take you back to your room.” Mild words, innocent of implication. But she colored, rising slowly, as if summoned to a punishment, and the glance she sent him was a study in resigned unsurprise. He hadn’t planned to do anything with her tonight, but her blasted fatalism was insulting. She seemed to have come to an extremely cynical understanding of his intentions. Come to it, in fact, even before he had. Fine; he would try not to disappoint her.
He’d never been in the housekeeper’s rooms. Mrs. Wade lit the candle on the mantelpiece, and by its light he was glad to see that, although they were small, the rooms were clean and comfortable. The sitting room had a desk in front of a window overlooking the courtyard, a table with two chairs, and an armchair in front of the cold stone hearth. The bedroom beyond was even smaller, and unremarkable from what he could see through the low doorway. Mrs. Wade had no visible possessions; whatever had been in her tapestry bag had been put away, out of sight.
She was standing by the mantel, watching him. He tried to imagine her in a prison cell. Locked up in it day after day, night after night. Ten years of her young life in a cell as small as this room. No, smaller. Not allowed to look at anyone. Not allowed to look at anyone.
When he went toward her, she didn’t drop her eyes, even when he drew close. But her nostrils flared when he lifted his hand and brought it to the side of her head. Her dark brown hair was silky, much softer than it looked. He sleeked his fingers into it, above her ear, watching the candlelight play over the silver strands. “I don’t like your hair in this style,” he murmured. “Don’t cut it again.” She gave a slight nod, but he thought he saw bitterness in her eyes, or humor, maybe both. “What?” he demanded softly. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Just that—my hair is longer now than it’s been in ten years. This is . . . luxuriant.” Her lips twisted with irony; she was making fun of herself.
“Have you always had the gray?”
“Not always.”
“Only since prison,” he guessed.
She nodded again. “There’s less now than before. It . . . seems to be fading.”
“Good. You’re too young for gray hair.”
Because of her reserve, touching her seemed a daring encroachment, almost like the breaking of a taboo. But wasn’t that what made her irresistible? The top of her ear peeked through the hair, pale pink and delicate, nearly transparent. He followed the dainty curve with his fingertip, pressing against its springy coolness. The hollow behind her ear was warmer, much softer. Her body shook slightly with every heartbeat. Otherwise she didn’t move, not even when he slipped his fingers inside the high collar of her dress, soothing the overheated skin there lightly. “Look at me.” She turned her head, and with the movement her throat brushed the back of his hand.
The look in her opal-colored eyes stopped his slow caress. Cooled his ardor. Nothing he could do, the look said, no matter how callous or capricious, could touch her.
Good; then they understood each other. Her attitude was hardly flattering, though. He admired her stoicism, but not when it was directed at him.
He let his hand fall away and stepped back. “Sleep well, Mrs. Wade. We’ll speak again in the morning.”
“Good night, my lord.” As expert as she was at hiding her feelings, she couldn’t disguise her relief. He would enjoy making her pay for it.
***
A faraway bell was tolling midnight. The church bell in the village, she supposed. The lingering, deep-throated peals were soothing and sad, the very sound of loneliness. Time passed slowly, was the message in the bell’s leisurely pace. But time in the world and time in a convict prison were not even in the same dimension. And the church bell’s lonely knell was infinitely preferable to the cruel shriek of a prison bell, whose dreadful note was the tonal embodiment of everything brutal and despairing.
Throwing off the covers, Rachel rose and sat on the edge of her bed. Her bare feet looked strange on a carpet. She burrowed her toes in, testing the softness. The mattress was too soft, as if a mistake had been made. The air was indescribably sweet; she’d left the window open, even though the night was chilly, so she could smell the air. Last night, she’d sat on the brick floor in the Tavistock lockup, a nine-foot-square cell, airless and lightless. A pailful of filth in the corner, left by the previous occupant, had kept her company all night.
She fumbled with matches on her bedside table and lit the candle in the brass holder. The little thrill in her chest at this elementary but powerful act—controlling light and darkness in her own room—would probably fade soon, like her awareness that the bed was too soft. How quickly one could adjust to the unspeakable luxuries of freedom.
She put her hand on her stomach, which felt queasy. She hadn’t eaten much for dinner, scarcely touched any wine, but the food had been so rich, it had made her nauseated. And afterward she’d drunk coffee. Real coffee, the taste so powerful and exotic she’d only been able to take a few sips.
Barefooted, she got up and carried the candle into the sitting room. Just to look at it again. There was a desk with a chair, and a shelf next to it with a place for books. An oil lamp on the table, and a wooden bowl for flowers, or maybe fruit. Her own window to open or close, just as she pleased, any time she liked. And a fireplace, with a soft chair, an upholstered chair, to sit in before it—those were the best things. No, the desk and the window were the best. Or was it the bowl for flowers? Something else she couldn’t decide.
Deciding things was going to be a problem, she already knew that. The day they’d let her out of Dartmoor, she’d wished the wardress had come along to shout at her, “Walk to the station in Princetown, Forty-four! Watch out for your belongings! Buy your ticket! Get on the train, Forty-four, and no looking about you!” The simplest choices could still freeze her in place, petrify her with fear of the potentially drastic ramifications of every innocent act. In Ottery St. Mary, before the constable took her up, she had stayed for two nights at Mrs. Peavey’s guest house. But she’d lurked outside in the wet street for hours first, uncertain of what to say to the landlady when she met her, how to get a room, how much to pay. And most of all, terrified that Mrs. Peavey would recognize her. She hadn’t, of course; the name Rachel Wade meant nothing to her. She’d known a Rachel Crenshaw years ago, but that girl could never be the strange, furtive, haggard woman who couldn’t even look her in the eye when she asked for a room.
She ought to try to sleep; tomorrow she’d have to be sharp and clever if she were to have any chance at all of keeping her new job. If Sebastian Verlaine had any notion of how profoundly unfit she was for the position he had inexplicably given her, he would . . . what? How could he not know? He must know. Then why had he hired her? Lord D’Aubrey was an enigma, as alien to her as a creature of another species; she understood nothing about him, could predict nothing he would say or do.
Except for one thing. But that was the strangest mystery of all. Why would he want her? A man like that, handsome and rich, powerful, a refined man with sophisticated tastes—why would he want her in his bed? Even for one night—one hour? Why?
Her head began to ache. She took the candle back into the bedroom, set it on the bedside table. She opened the shallow drawer, inside of which everything she owned fit easily, with room to
spare: a hairbrush, a piece of flannel toweling, a few items of underclothing, a packet of hairpins, a spool of black thread, and a needle. She’d bought them in a shop in Princetown before boarding the train. They had depleted her finances alarmingly, but she hadn’t seen any way to avoid making the purchases, since all that had been given to her on her release was the gray dress.
No, not quite all: they’d given back the one thing she had taken with her to prison ten years ago, in the naive belief that they would let her keep it with her in her cell. But they’d confiscated it, and over the years she’d forgotten it existed. She slipped her hand beneath the clothes in the drawer and drew out a small silver picture frame. The photograph in the frame had become, in the last few days, an object of grim fascination to her. It was a family portrait, taken only a few months before she’d met Randolph. Her parents sat side by side, stiff as staves in their straight-backed chairs, while she and her brother stood at attention behind them, Tom with his hand on his mother’s shoulder. Mother had on her best dress, the one she stored away in the cedar chest except for special occasions; looking at it, Rachel could almost smell the camphor rising from the heavy black folds. Her father had on his new spectacles—“Maybe I won’t go blind yet after all,” he said when he got them, always surprised and a little irritated when life didn’t go as badly as he expected. He looked like a schoolmaster in the photograph, which was what he was. She remembered standing behind him, wondering if she should put her hand on his shoulder, too. But she hadn’t, because she didn’t think he would like it.
And Tom—she’d forgotten how handsome he was, how much he looked like their mother. Everyone in the family had blue eyes, but Tom’s were the bluest, his hair the blackest. She’d been tall at eighteen, but he towered over her, and he looked down his nose at the camera with all the arrogance of a healthy, handsome, twenty-year-old man with his future ahead of him.
Once, in the first year, they’d come to see her in prison. But it was too hard, the conditions for visiting too painful and barbaric; none of them could bear it. She’d asked them not to come again, and they hadn’t argued with her.
Now they were all gone. Her parents had died eight years ago, first her father and then her mother, within four months of each other. Tom had emigrated to Canada, to escape the scandal and start a new life. She’d gotten prison-censored Christmas notes from him for the first few years, then nothing. The message that he wanted to forget her couldn’t have been clearer.
Sometimes she put her finger over her own face when she looked at the photograph, so she could see the others without being distracted. Distressed. Tonight, though, she wanted to look at herself. As always, her first impression of the small, sepia-colored image shocked her. Not me; oh, no, she can’t be me. The girl, the stranger in the picture was a happy child on the brink of womanhood, smiling into the camera with artless self-confidence. An ingénue. She wore her hair in thick, shiny coils on top of her head in an elaborate, grown-up style that didn’t really become her—but she’d been vain about her hair, her “crowning glory,” as someone had once foolishly told her, and, of course, she’d never forgotten it. Her face, under the stiffness she’d had to maintain so the picture wouldn’t blur, had a mesmerizing optimism bordering on complaisance. A pretty, blank, untried face. Rachel wanted to weep for that girl’s innocence, her heartbreaking ignorance of what lay in store for her.
She replaced the photograph and closed the drawer. “I don’t like your hair in this style,” Lord D’Aubrey had said. “Don’t cut it again.” She touched the short, graceless locks, remembering the way he had touched them. (Why had he done that?) Of all the indignities she’d borne on entering prison, including the surrender of all her belongings, the assignment of a number, the degrading “medical examination”—the most horrible affront to the person of young Rachel Wade had been the cutting off of all her hair. All: the matron had laid the scissors flat on her head and cut away until there was nothing left. She’d managed not to cry until then, but when she’d put her hand to her head and felt the short, bristly fuzz on her cold scalp, she’d finally broken down. They hadn’t scolded her for it—apparently it wasn’t an uncommon reaction. Over the years, her prison crop had been allowed to lengthen a little, and six months before her scheduled release they’d stopped cutting it at all. Lord D’Aubrey might despise it, but to Rachel it truly was “luxuriant.”
When she blew out her candle, the smoky smell of burnt wick stung her nostrils. A good smell. She lay down, covering herself with sheet, blanket, and crochet coverlet. Three layers of warmth: what decadence. And her head lay on a real pillow, not her own folded clothes. No one was watching her through a sliding grate beside the door. No one would jolt her awake in the night with pitiful weeping or terrible screams.
But she would never fall asleep on this absurd mattress, which felt more like a cloud than a bed. It was ridiculous, really, a luxury carried to a foolish extreme.
The church bell began to toll the half hour. She was dreaming before the last note died away.
IV
SHE AWOKE AT five, as she always did, but today no clanging bell jarred her from her sleep. She simply woke up, gently and naturally, in the soft, silent pitch dark. What time did the D’Aubrey household rise? She should have asked last night. She listened for the sound of servants stirring, but there wasn’t so much as a rustle; it was as if Lynton Hall lay under a thick blanket of snow.
When she woke up next, birds were chirping and bright light was streaming in through the gap in the blue curtains at her window. She jolted out of bed, electrified with panic. What time was it? She had no clock, no watch. She threw her clothes on with a pounding heart, dry-mouthed, hands fumbling and clumsy. She was late, they would—they would—
She rested her forehead against the doorpost, wiping her damp hands on her skirt. They wouldn’t do anything. She wouldn’t lose a mark on her record; no precious hour would be added to her sentence because of idling and sloth. She was all right. She was the new housekeeper.
Just then the church bell tolled, and she went limp with relief. Six; it was only six. Oh, thank God.
Her wing of the house was silent; no one else slept here. She walked along the stone floor of the hallway she’d barely noticed last night, peering through dark doorways at musty-smelling rooms whose functions weren’t always discernible. In the hall where her wing joined the main part of the house, there was a chapel, a small stone edifice, very cold, with dirty stained-glass windows. Next she passed an archway, beyond which steps led up and down from a stone landing. Servants’ stairs; one set must lead to the basement. Was that where she would find the kitchen? No doubt. But she wanted to explore a little first, see what else was on this level.
When she turned the corner, the floor changed from stone to wood; this part of the house must be newer. She passed the dining room, and glanced in to see what it was like—last night she hadn’t been able to take it in. It was large and formal, high-ceilinged, with chairs at the gleaming table for thirty or forty people. But in the harsh morning light the room looked tired and worn, a bit dingy. Right, then: one of her jobs would be to perk it up, give it some shine. She was good at that. Hadn’t she polished the slate landing in front of her cell door on her hands and knees every morning for the last decade?
Reading room, sewing room, billiard room, morning room. And drawing rooms, drawing rooms—there must be half a dozen on this floor alone, including the one Lord D’Aubrey had taken her to last night. And a great hall, larger than her father’s whole house, with high, smoky rafters and an enormous fireplace, stags’ heads and antlers on the walls, muskets and rifles, swords, pikestaffs, shields, lances. That was in addition to the gun room, an oppressively masculine lair with more firearms and dead wildlife decorating the dark paneling. All the northwest-facing rooms, no matter how faded or old-fashioned, had a spectacular saving grace: their view of the little Wyck, sparkling in the sunshine, as lively and fresh as this spring morning.
Back in
her own wing, descending the worn stone steps to the basement, she heard a voice coming from a door midway down the narrow corridor. Her steps slowed as she drew closer. She could hear several voices now, men’s as well as women’s, and the sound of cutlery. The servants’ hall, then. They were having breakfast.
She stopped dead, clutching at her skirts. How could she just—walk in? What would she say first? Maybe one of them would speak first. A knot in her stomach began to ache. She’d say her name, tell them she was the new housekeeper. Hello—no—Good morning. I’m Rachel—no—I’m Mrs. Wade. I’m the new housekeeper. After that . . . she couldn’t imagine anything after that. Things would just happen, it would unfold naturally. Other people would talk, she would answer. She would look them in the eye and do what she had been forbidden to do for the last ten years: speak.
She brushed at her wrinkled skirts, smoothed her hair, straightened her spine. The knot had ascended to her throat, but she ignored it. Now or never. Taking a deep breath, she made herself march into the servants’ hall.
There were too many of them. Someone’s sentence broke off in the middle of a word and silence fell over the room. She took in a table, scrubbed oak, chairs all around it, only half occupied, but—so many people. And their faces staring, turning, gaping, eyes, eyes, looking her in the face, looking her up and down. She saw them all and kept looking, engaging all the eyes, because if she looked away, if she hunched her shoulders and made herself invisible, she would fail at this post and lose her only chance at saving herself. So she looked back at them, even though their wide, curious gazes felt like pinpricks all over her skin. But she could not, simply could not speak.
The silence lengthened, became absurd. And then someone laughed—a woman, with a high-pitched giggle, nervous and mean. Rachel made herself look at her. She was young, twenty or so, dark-haired, with small brown eyes in a pointed face. Beside her, a boy in the rough clothes of a stable lad began to snicker. Over the laughter, her voice quavered humiliatingly. “Good morning. I’m Rachel—I’m—Mrs. Wade. The new housekeeper.”
Patricia Gaffney - [Wyckerley 02] Page 4
