Emily's House

by Amy Belding Brown

  For the first time since I stepped through the door, I spoke. “Thank you, ma’am.” I knew I ought to be saying I was happy to be working for them, but my tongue wouldn’t gather the words.

  “You will find we live quite simply.” Her tired eyes cast a wave of pity through me. “My daughters and I are used to doing a good deal of the housekeeping. But we need someone to keep us organized.” There was something fluttery about her. Made me think of a trapped bird, she did. “To help us put our best face forward, if you will.”

  “I’ll do my duty, ma’am,” I said. “Best as I can.”

  “Very good,” she said. “Have you made arrangements to have your things sent?”

  “My nephew’s bringing my trunk round directly,” I said, hoping young Michael wouldn’t forget. He was Mary’s eldest boy, but only eleven and not overfond of keeping his promises.

  “Excellent.” The fluttery smile again, and then her lips thinned. “You may have Thursday afternoons and Sundays off,” she said. “I believe that’s standard. Mr. Dickinson comes home from his office every day at noon, and likes his dinner ready when he walks in the door.” She fluttered her hand toward a tall cupboard. “There’s a ham already in the safe for today. I brought it up from the cellar earlier.”

  I nodded. “Very good, ma’am.”

  “Lavinia will show you to your room so you can settle in before starting dinner. We eat promptly at noon.” She turned and slipped away.

  Vinnie gave me a wink and led me through a pantry, up narrow curving stairs, and along a hall. “You can use the back stairs if you want, but these are more direct. And don’t let Mother alarm you. She means well. If you please Father, you’ll please her.”

  Lucky I was behind her, or she’d have seen me rolling my eyes. Didn’t matter if I pleased any of them. I’d be gone from this house by the end of April.

  She opened a narrow door and stepped back. “Here you are,” she said, and there she left me—in a gray room plain as a monk’s cell. It had a quare shape, for it was wrapped around a chimney. Sure, the warmth of it was welcome on this winter day. It had two little windows, a bed and chair, a little chest of drawers, and three pegs on the wall. I was glad to see there was room for my trunk—the same trunk that had crossed the water with us Maher children when we emigrated, with all our worldly goods packed in tight together. Da, it was, gave me the key to it the day we left, and I still wore it around my neck.

  I peered out a window at the snowy yard and the long picket fence going down the street toward the railroad tracks. It was a comfort knowing my sister was a short walk away. I poked around the room, sat on the chair to try it, opened and closed the chest drawers, and tested the bed—it was lumpy and sagged in the middle. It would take some getting used to, but I could endure it. I’d slept on worse, surely. I crossed myself and said a quick prayer for patience, then looked out the window again. There was no sign of my nephew—only a stray dog trotting down the street, minding his own business.

  Standing there, I felt the house folding itself around me. It was so quiet I had the feeling nobody but myself was in it, though such a thought was nonsense, surely. I’d seen Vinnie and Mrs. Dickinson with my own eyes—and surely Emily was somewhere in the place. I waited long as I could bear, then slipped into the hallway and crept down the stairs I’d come up, quiet as I could over the creaking risers. I heard no sound except myself. But when I stepped into the kitchen, there was a woman standing at the west windows, looking out. A woman with red hair tucked into a brown net at her neck and wearing a dress white as the snow in the yard.

  To be sure, I didn’t move forward nor back, just stood like a stone watching the woman everybody’d heard of but never saw—the Myth of Amherst herself. It was like standing in a dream waiting for what would happen next, everything misty and strange.

  After a minute she turned. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. “You’re Margaret, aren’t you?” Her voice reminded me of the low notes of a fiddle.

  “I am,” I said.

  She wasn’t as pretty as I expected—not half as fetching as her sister—though I couldn’t for the life of me have told you what I was expecting. But she wasn’t plain either. Uncommon-looking, with that thick hair curling around her pale face. And her eyes—they weren’t brown nor gray but a quare mixing of hazel wood and maple together, and maybe a bit of darker oak. Don’t know why trees came to my mind, but so they did.

  “I’m Emily,” she said, still looking at me. The little hairs rose on my neck. For sure as it was sleeting outside I knew I was being seen through and through. She was taking the whole of myself in at one glance. The feeling was so strong I looked away.

  My eyes lit on the sink with its stack of pots. “Excuse me, miss,” I said. “I was just coming down to see if my nephew has delivered my trunk yet.” A lie, for I’d been watching and seen no sign of him. A double lie because it was the confinement, not the trunk, that drove me from the room. “Sure, I’ll be doing the washing up now while I wait.” I hurried into the washroom.

  “Be off with you, then,” she said, pronouncing her words in an Irish way. Her laugh followed and my back went tight. I don’t like being mocked, not even if it’s my betters doing the mocking. I pumped water into the sink and let the splash of it drown her voice. The soapstone was smooth and cold under my fingers.

  * * *

  Young Michael soon came knocking with my trunk in his arms and his mouth full of excuses for being late. I told him I didn’t want to hear his blather and made him carry the trunk upstairs. “Mind you don’t bump the walls,” I warned.

  “It’s uncommon cold out,” he said, following me into the room and plunking the trunk down. His chest was heaving—and no wonder. The trunk was packed full and not an easy thing to be carrying. But I had to smile—it was plain he was trying to prove how manly he was.

  “It’s an awful quiet house,” he said.

  I thought of Kelley Square with all its coming and going and happy family noise. In truth, he was saying what I thought myself. “ ’Tis how the gentry live,” I said. “Quiet and proper.”

  “I’m glad I’m not rich, then,” he said. “Would give me the spooks. Have you met her yet?” He was standing by the trunk, his hands on his bony hips and his elbows poking out like tree knots.

  “Met who?” I said, pretending I didn’t know who he was asking after.

  “The quare one,” he said. “Emily.”

  “ ’Tis no concern of yours,” I said. “Now go on home before the mistress finds you sneaking around her house.”

  He dug in his pocket and pulled out an envelope. All wadded up and crumpled, it was. “It’s for you,” he said. “Came in today’s mail.”

  It was from Clarinda Boltwood—another letter begging me to hurry back to Hartford and going on about how sad the house felt without me in it. She wrote a whole page about her boys. Missing me, they were, little Georgie driving her to distraction asking where I was. Felt a pang of guilt for not telling her my plans.

  When I looked up Michael was snooping around the room, peering under the bed like he was hunting treasure. I slid the letter into my pocket. “Go along now, lad,” I said. “And tell your mam I’ll be seeing her on Sunday, same as always.”

  * * *

  It was quick work putting my room to rights—in truth, there wasn’t much to be done. The trunk was a grand fit under the window. I hung my brown calico and extra shift on the hooks and put the rest of the clothes in the chest. I made up the bed with the sheets and blankets folded at its foot and tried to fluff the pillow but the down inside was so old it wouldn’t puff, so it just lay on the bed flat as a flounder. I propped my daguerreotype of Michael and Tommy on the little chest of drawers and slid my rosary under my pillow for safekeeping.

  It was Mam gave me the rosary before the crossing from Ireland. Said it was given her by a kindly friar when she went on pilgrimage to S
aint Patrick’s Well in Clonmel. Made of goat’s horn and she’d no idea how old it was—it could have been carved in the time of Saint Patrick himself, she said. A beautiful thing, it was. The wee little beads so pale they looked like pearls. The day she slipped it into my pocket, I promised myself it was the only one I’d ever use.

  I went back downstairs to have another look around before starting dinner. I poked through the cupboards and shelves, finding all the necessaries for doing my job: bowls and pots and skillets, bread pans, ladles, and a big covered butter crock. A flour barrel stood in one corner of the pantry and a cone of sugar sat on a shelf beside a jug of molasses.

  I was taking the ham out of the cupboard when I heard footsteps. I turned to look but no one was there. The house was too quiet, to be sure. Tom had warned me the Dickinsons kept themselves to themselves even in their own house, but this was quare strange. Michael was right—the place was spooky.

  Working in that silent kitchen as the gray morning bled away toward noon, I felt a wave of sorrow I couldn’t account for. It was so deep I wondered if a ghost had crossed the threshold. God’s truth, the only thing keeping me from leaving the Homestead that minute was my own pride.

  Chapter Four

  What a fuss and flurry the Dickinson family made when the Squire came home for dinner. You’d think they’d not laid eyes on himself for weeks. I was in the kitchen spooning mint jelly into a glass bowl when I heard the front door open and shut. Then a great swishing of skirts and slippers as the family rushed to greet him. Next the Squire’s voice rumbling through the wall and Mrs. Dickinson’s chirpy responses.

  My hands were buttery from nerves. But I picked up the serving tray with its platter of ham and bowls of potatoes and parsnips, took a deep breath, and went through the pantry into the dining room. It was jumbled with heavy furniture—a black sofa and a sideboard topped with a soup tureen stuffed with papers. The dining table was in the midst of it all, covered in the linen and blue china Vinnie had told me to use for setting.

  The family was already sitting down, except for Emily. Her plate and silverware were waiting but she was nowhere to be seen. I set the platter in front of the Squire.

  “Thank you, Margaret.” He picked up his napkin and patted it over his knees.

  I looked at the empty place. “Should I be taking a tray up to Miss Emily, then?”

  The look Mrs. Dickinson gave Vinnie put me in mind of a scared rabbit, but Vinnie smiled and flickered her fingers. “Sometimes she’s late. You go on and eat now, Margaret. If she doesn’t come down, I’ll bring a tray up to her later.”

  The Squire gave me a stiff nod, so I went back and ate my meal in the kitchen, listening for Mrs. Dickinson’s call to clear things away and bring in the pudding. I wondered what was wrong with Emily. Maybe she was peevish or had a headache. Maybe her sister and herself had a spat.

  I’d seen enough of the world to know rich folks are petty and small as anybody. They can squabble and storm over the littlest things, no matter how grand they are entertaining their friends. But usually they do things proper when it comes to dinner and socials and such. So it was curious the careless way they took Emily’s not being there.

  Her chair sat empty all through dinner and dessert, and by the time I cleared things away, Vinnie had made up a plate of food and carried it upstairs.

  * * *

  After I finished the washing up, Vinnie showed me through the rest of the house. It was an unsettling place that winter afternoon. From the dining room off the pantry, we went down a hall full of shadows and hard angles to the front part of the house. There were two parlors, front and back, fussed with chairs and tables and settees. A square piano stood in one corner, like a beast in the gloom waiting to be noticed. The walls were covered with portraits and landscapes and etchings in great gilt frames. Heavy green draperies covered the long windows.

  The library was across the hall—a dark room with shelves of books stretching all the way to the ceiling. It near took my breath away, all those pages and pages of words to be reading. In the middle of the room was a great desk, so solid it looked like it might have been lodged in that spot before the house was built.

  “Father’s desk,” Vinnie said when I ran my hand over the shiny top. “You must not touch anything on it. Mother’s the only one allowed to dust here.”

  It surprised me, Mrs. Dickinson doing housework. It was a task neither Clarinda nor Fanny Boltwood would ever have stooped to. I followed Vinnie back into the hall and up the front stairs. Something made me stop when I reached the top—a quare pinched feeling as if the air had all been sucked out of the second floor.

  “Margaret?” Vinnie’s voice brought me back to myself. She was standing at the far end of the hall. “This is my bedroom,” she said, opening a door so I could see. “Emily’s is across the hall, but we won’t go in. She can’t bear interruptions.”

  Interruptions from what? I wanted to know, but all I did was nod.

  “First thing in the morning you’re to light the bedchamber fires,” she said. “Except Emily’s. If she leaves the door open a crack, that’s her signal that she wants her fire lit too. But if the door’s tight shut, you’re not to go in.”

  “Not even if I knock, miss?” I couldn’t fathom anyone wanting to lie in a cold room on a winter morning when a fire’s easily laid by a maid.

  “Never,” she said firmly.

  There was a guest room next to Emily’s and the master bedchamber down a short hall. Vinnie showed me a linen closet and storage room and the narrow stairs up to the attic and cupola. “You’re not to go up there unless you’re told,” she said. Sure, I didn’t ask why, though it puzzled me. I was always running up to the attic to fetch something at the Boltwoods’ and Mrs. Talcott’s. “And use the back stairs to the servants’ wing when your duties take you up and down.”

  I didn’t tell her I’d be using whatever stairs were handy to my task. When a job is new, it’s best to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.

  In truth, I think it was the house itself kept me quiet that first day. Holding my tongue doesn’t come natural to me. It’s a rare day I’m not speaking what’s on my mind. But the place made my lips pinch tight over my teeth, till by the end of that day it was all I could do to whisper, “Yes, ma’am,” when Mrs. Dickinson sent me off to bank the fires for the night.

  Took me some time to go to sleep on that lumpy bed. The house felt too big around me. Too many empty rooms and too much shadowy air. Too much space for ghosts.

  * * *

  It took me a week to settle in at the Homestead. Like any place, it had its own peculiarities. Outside the kitchen door there was a flagstone patch the Dickinsons liked to call a piazza. And I quick learned the porch on the west side wasn’t a porch at all, but a veranda. The house itself was full of hidden nooks and crannies. I once opened a cupboard to get some crockery and found a little door in the back stuffed with papers—laundry lists and medicine receipts and registers of expenses. In the room next to mine, there was a big crate of old frocks. Fancy, they were—made of velvets and fine wools—but long out of style. And one dreary afternoon when Vinnie and Mrs. Dickinson were out, I crept up to the third floor and poked round the attic.

  The next day I climbed the twisting stairs all the way to the cupola, and stepped up into a room so small it could hold no more than two people. Nothing was in it besides an old chair, but God’s truth, the place took my breath away. Four pairs of doubled windows washed the place in light and every inch of the room—walls, casings, even the floor—was painted pure white. I stood marveling, till I thought to wonder why I wasn’t supposed to be up here. Who’d be caring if a maid took a few minutes for herself at the top of the house? It was a quiet, peaceful place, and the only room where I could be seeing Kelley Square.

  For all the Homestead’s mysteries, one thing was sure—being maid there was a sight easier than at the Boltwoods’. The wage
s were better, there were no little ones to be minding, and I wasn’t the only one doing chores. Vinnie swept and dusted the dining room and parlors while Mrs. Dickinson aired the bedrooms. Emily mended clothes and did most of the baking. Vinnie told me the Squire favored Emily’s bread so much he wouldn’t eat any other. It lightened my work, surely, since I was the Dickinsons’ only house servant.

  One of the chores Vinnie set me was playing with her cats. A nuisance, to be sure, and foolish besides. She was forever taking in strays. She had near a dozen—most of them barn cats. But her favorites spent all their days indoors. Five of them there were, and she’d given them names. Tabby and Tootsie were good mousers, so I didn’t mind them slinking about the pantry. But the rest didn’t do a thing to earn their suppers and were always underfoot, mewling and rubbing against my skirts to trip me up. Made me grumble, petting them, for I surely could have been putting myself to better use. Later I learned Emily had no liking for them either.

  Emily was as Tom said—there and not there. I never knew when I’d be seeing her. Some days she kept to her room from morning till night. Others she was already in the kitchen when I went down to kindle the fire. I’d find her measuring flour into a yellow mixing bowl or sitting by the west window, writing on scraps of paper, murmuring to herself.

  Didn’t say much to me. Saved her talking for others. Times I had the feeling she was listening to a far-off conversation in the air—or maybe just hearing whatever was in her own head.

  Most afternoons she flitted about the house or worked in her conservatory—the narrow room off the library full of plants and windows. Vinnie said the Squire had it built for her, and I think it was a kind of hiding place, for nobody else went in or out without herself inviting them. Once I heard her singing little tunes in there—sounded like a bird in a forest.