Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle

by Helen Humphreys

  They have come to an inn. Beyond them is a small village, the sudden noise of people and horses.

  Annie’s first thought is that he means she is Irish and he is English, that is the difference between them. She looks around at the dozen or so people sitting at the tables outside the inn. Coach drivers. Farmhands. No one so obviously gentry as Mr. Dashell. No one so obviously a servant as herself. Certainly never those two types of people together.

  Annie has not been to a public house in a long time. She used to go sometimes with one of the Janes from Portman Square. One of the kind Janes. Annie divided the many cooks who passed through Mrs. Gilbey’s kitchen into kind Janes and mean Janes. Mean Janes seemed to stay longer. This kind Jane took Annie out several times. Her name was really Mary Ann. One night she drank too much and stood on a chair by the bar and sang a song about her underthings. Everyone had applauded and they were each given a free drink.

  Mary Ann hadn’t lasted long at Mrs. Gilbey’s, and Annie missed her more than she ever would have suspected. She missed the unexpectedness of her, how Mary Ann could climb onto a chair in a crowd of loud, drinking patrons, and sing a bawdy song. Annie could be so shocked by Mary Ann that for one cool, delicious moment she would forget to judge her actions according to the higher authorities of Mrs. Gilbey and God.

  “If we were different people, sir,” says Annie, “who is it we would be?” She has often thought how accidental her life has been in some regards. If Mrs. Gilbey hadn’t plucked her from the workhouse when she was a child, if she hadn’t been converted into a servant, would she have gone to work in the coal yards or in a factory? Would she perhaps have been working in a public house? If some woman had stood on a chair in the bar where she worked, and sung about her under-things in a voice loud with beer, would Annie have laughed along with the others? Would Annie have been the one to offer her a free drink?

  Eldon looks at the patrons of the public house. The working men. What he wishes at this moment is that he were one of them, not that Annie was well bom like himself, but that he was her equal. “Let’s go back,” he says. “I should return to work.”

  They walk back along the road. Around them the noise of summer, thin and insistent, like a whisper. Neither speaks.

  “Thank you for venturing out with me,” says Eldon finally. “It is nice to have company on my afternoon outing.”

  “Mrs. Dashell never walks with you?” asks Annie.

  “Isabelle? No, she is too busy with her photography. She doesn’t like to break her day into pieces with other activities. I used to walk a lot more,” he tells Annie. “In my younger days. For my health. I had wanted to be a great adventurer.” He tries to say this lightly, as though it is silly, trivial, absurd even, but his voice falls and stumbles. “Not to be,” he says. “I was a sickly boy and a sickly young man. I couldn’t even lift a basket of apples, how would I have been at sea, or climbing some mountain? How would I have been tramping through the icy Arctic?” For this is where he had wanted to go. To the top of the world. To stand in the white bowl of heaven. He can remember, easily, how he wanted this, feel it as though it is an icy shard of grief sliding through him, slick and clean and all the way in. “That is the story of my life,” he says.

  “Not all of it, sir,” says Annie.

  “No. Not all of it.” Eldon already feels as though he’s said too much because he has told this stranger a truth about himself. But she is right. “Isabelle,” he says. He looks down at the ground, down at his hands. They are not the thick knotted hands of a climber or sailor. They are the clean, thin, weak hands of a man who reads books, a man who never had to work with his hands. “You have wondered why it is that we have no children?” Don’t say this, he thinks, but he is already saying it.

  Annie guiltily remembers the room with the cradles and prams, the dusty stillness of it. “You have such a large house,” she says.

  “Yes. A house large enough to be full of children.” Eldon looks over at her. There’s a steadiness to her gaze that soothes him. It is as though she has laid a cool hand on his burning skin. “It’s my wife’s house, you know. Her father was a Lord. He gave it to us when we married.”

  “It is a fine house.”

  “Yes, it is. A fine house.” Eldon thinks of his library, the cosiness of that room full of his books and maps. When it is cold outside and there is a roaring fire in the grate, he can think of no better place to be. “Isabelle,” he says again. “I gave her the camera. It was my idea. She has always been possessed of an artistic nature. She tried painting but the results did not satisfy her. I gave her the camera after the third.”

  “The third?”

  “The third baby.” Eldon spreads his fingers as though he is searching for a handhold in an outcrop of rock. “The third dead baby. Stillborn. All of them. Two boys and a girl. The first one, it was a girl. I never even held them.”

  Two boys, Annie thinks, Connor and Michael. The merciful Lord will take care of them, she wants to say, to him, to herself, but she remembers, just in time, that Mr. Dashell doesn’t see the world her way. No God. Foolishness, Cook had called it. Annie looks down at Eldon’s hands, fingers spread. They are smooth and white, gendeman’s hands. Annie looks at her own hands. They are thick and red and the skin is cracked and rough as tree bark. They are working hands, the hands of a maid. How can she possibly know anything of his loss? His children are not the same as her brothers. His world is not the same as hers at all.

  Annie and Tess he in their narrow beds at the top of the Dashell house. There is a wind tonight. A tree creaks outside their window, its thin upper branches brushing the glass, sounding like the scratch of a broom sweeping flagstones.

  Annie lies on her back, listening to the wind. So quickly, she thinks, she has become used to having a room in the treetops. She wriggles down further under the covers, feels something sharp against the back of her head. Her Bible. She traces the contours of it with her fingers, hoping the words will leak out, swim into her body. What would Mrs. Gilbey say about the state of her soul?

  Pray for your sinning ways, Mary. The enormity of this imagined rebuke brings the first shaip stars of tears to her eyes.

  “Annie,” Tess calls out from the other side of the room. “Are you still awake?”

  “Yes.” Annie takes her hand out quickly, guiltily, from under her pillow. What has happened to her, she thinks, that she is now ashamed of the Lord?

  “What do you think,” says Tess, “of Robert and Betsy?”

  “Who?”

  “Lord Robert Montagu,” says Tess. “The one what married his housemaid, Betsy. Did you not hear of them?”

  “No. I led a quiet life in London.” Annie says this and, as she says it, thinks that it sounds as though she was convalescing from a serious illness. “I was not allowed out much,” she says, which sounds even worse.

  “You poor wretch,” says Tess, who cannot conceive of a life spent in forced solitude.

  Annie feels impatient with Tess’s pity. “What about Robert and Betsy?” she says.

  “Well…” Tess stretches her body out, liking the feel of it pulling tight. This is her favourite game now: supposing. It feels delicious to lie in the warm dark and send her questions out across the room, floating away from her like big, coloured balloons. “He saw her washing steps and was so taken with her looks that he had to have her. Betsy already had a sweetheart, but she married Lord Robert without a thought to that. Would you do that, Annie? Would you toss your sweetheart for Robert?”

  Annie knows how this game works. Tess is really asking the question of herself. Annie is only a way for Tess to think about the situation out loud. Still, there is pleasure in being included, and Annie, who has never really thought of such things before, tries to imagine both a sweetheart and an amorous Lord. “I don’t know,” she says. The thought of too much attention makes her feel uneasy. Having a sweetheart would be like the Lady Isabelle looking at her when she took that photograph. It would be that close, the scrutin
y. She is not sure she wants this. In Mrs. Gilbey’s house she often felt invisible, and this, she thinks now, is sometimes a better thing.

  “Well, I would,” says Tess, getting tired of waiting for a satisfactory answer from Annie. “I would get rid of my sweetheart quick as anything.” She says it with such force that Annie can almost believe it will happen, that Lord Montagu will swoop down out of nowhere and carry Tess off, away from the laundry and the Dashell household. Away from this night, from Annie and the whispery trees outside this window.

  “Tess,” says Annie. “What are the Dashells like to work for? To live with?”

  “They’re mad, aren’t they?” says Tess. “Mrs. Dashell dressing us up in bed sheets, making us stand around in that draughty henhouse. The Master and his mouldy old maps.”

  “Mr. Dashell,” says Annie carefully. “He’s not interested in servants, is he?” She thinks of her walk with Eldon, how both wrong and pleasant it felt.

  Tess is quiet for a moment. “Oh,” she says at last. “Has he been after me for a kiss? Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re mad,” says Tess, “but I think they’re harmless. But then I haven’t been here that long myself. Just got here before you.” She’s quiet for a moment. Annie can almost hear the slow tick of her thinking. “They aren’t out to bother us,” says Tess finally. “The Lady isn’t wanting to catch us up. The Master isn’t chasing after us. Not like my last position.” There’s the shuffling noise of Tess turning in her bed. “Shall I tell you about that?” she says.

  “No,” says Annie quickly.

  “Well,” says Tess, “you’ll know soon enough.”

  “Why?”

  “Thought you weren’t interested?”

  “I just…” How to explain that listening to Tess’s story would make Annie judge her and that this is something Annie wants to avoid. “I’m not interested,” she says, and goes back to listening to the wind searching the trees outside the window.

  Soon there is the shuddering noise of Tess’s sleep from across the room. Annie lies in the dark. She is afraid to fall asleep, afraid to fall into her dream of the road. The sound of the shovels and axes chipping at the hard ground is already playing in her head, a rattling, sombre tattoo, like the sound of bones knocking together.

  Tess is a sound sleeper, doesn’t wake when Annie rises and leaves the room. The stairs creak as Annie walks slowly down to the front hall, her candle flickering in the draughty night air of the house.

  Eldon’s library is as she remembered from that first day. Annie shuts the door carefully once she is safely inside. The candlelight stutters along the shelves. Cartography. Geology. Annie slides Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages, Trafiques, and Discoveries of the New World from its seat on the shelf, tucks it against her chest, and goes back upstairs to her bedroom.

  Sitting up in bed, reading about perilous ocean voyages, Annie is able to stop imagining her family on that road in Ireland. The words of the book cover her as comfortably as a blanket on a cold night. She can wrap herself in the warmth of them. She can rest here. The noise of the shovels and axes is replaced with the sweet drop of words falling from her mind into the empty chamber of her heart.

  At breakfast the next morning, when Tess and Annie are hurrying through their cups of tea at the table, Cook suddenly bursts through the kitchen door with a kettle of water in either hand. “Would this do?” she says.

  Tess looks up, looks down again. “Why is that interesting?” she says.

  “It’s my work.”

  “One chore, out of all the work you do. Is that how you want to be? Forever?” Tess looks over at Annie. “Am I right?” she says.

  Annie has no idea what is happening, why Cook has turned into a water-bearing statue on the kitchen stoop, why Tess’s opinion is required on this. Mad, she thinks. They’re all mad here. Every last one of them.

  “Annie!”

  Annie looks back, stops hurrying along the path to the glasshouse, and waits for Tess to catch her up.

  “Where are you going?” Tess is puffing, bends forward to catch her breath. Her face, when she looks up, is red from being in the laundry all morning and from sprinting up the path after Annie.

  “Mrs. Dashell wants me to model for her again today.”

  “You haven’t stripped the beds.” Tess stands up straight.

  “I know.”

  “I’m supposed to wash those sheets today. Now.”

  “I’ll do it when I get back.” Annie glances down the path to the glasshouse. She doesn’t want to keep Isabelle waiting. “Just leave them.”

  “I can’t do that.” Tess works to a strict schedule. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are for washing and rinsing. Thursdays and Fridays are for mangling, starching, and ironing. She washes linen on Mondays, muslin, coloured cottons, and woollens on Tuesdays, bed sheets and kitchen cloths on Wednesdays. Today is Wednesday. If something isn’t washed on the correct day, it changes the entire week’s schedule and throws the household management into confusion. “I’ll have to do it myself, then,” she says, waiting for Annie to change her mind. Annie says nothing. “Well, then,” says Tess. “I’ll do it myself, but I’m none too happy about it.” She turns and stomps back down the path towards the house. Annie watches her go, feeling regretful. Tess has enough work of her own to do without taking on extra. They have been getting along so well together, too. Annie enjoys the companionship at night in their attic room, how they talk to each other when the lamps are blown out, lying in their beds, calling softly across the dark. Stories of Mrs. Gilbey’s meanness, of Tess’s family struggles in the north of England.

  Annie resumes her journey to the glasshouse. She needs to speak to the Lady about how she is to do her duties and do this modelling, too. Annie has only been here a few weeks. She cannot let Tess do work for her again. It is not fair.

  But when Annie gets to the glasshouse, there is no talking to Isabelle about her maid-work. Isabelle is fussing around, all quick and cranky.

  “What took you so long?” she says, when Annie hurries into the studio. “I sent for you ages ago. We’re losing the good light. Here.” She shoves a wooden box into Annie’s arms. “Carry this. And follow me.” She has folded up the legs of the box camera, clasps the length of it to her bosom, and pushes through the door of the glasshouse, out into the afternoon sun.

  Annie struggles to catch up as Isabelle strides through the orchard. “Where are we going?”

  “To drown you,” says Isabelle. She doesn’t sound as though she’s joking and Annie has to tell herself that it can’t really be the truth. Maids are useful. They aren’t just casually disposed of by murder. Still, she has never found out what had happened to the last housemaid, the one whose place she has taken.

  They walk through the orchard, across a field, and down a wooded slope. There, at the bottom of the slope, flows a small brook, pale with sunlight.

  “All right,” says Isabelle. “This will do.” She lays her camera gently on the bank. “This is a good spot to drown you.” She takes the box from Annie, smiles when she sees the look on her face. “Ha! You’re frightened. You think I’m serious.”

  “No, ma’am.” Annie can feel herself blush.

  “You’re lying,” says Isabelle.

  Annie is lying. She feels a fool. “Well,” she says defensively, “I thought that you wouldn’t. But I felt that you might.”

  Isabelle laughs. “Good girl,” she says. “Now go and sit on those rocks over there and look distraught.”

  Annie obediently squats on a narrow shelf of stone by the water’s edge. She squints up at the sun, watches Isabelle arrange the camera on the bank.

  “Field darkroom today,” says Isabelle, attaching a black cloth hood to the back of the camera. “Doesn’t always work, but never mind.” She fusses around in the wooden box, laying things out beside it. She hums, seems to have forgotten about telling Annie to sit on the rocks.

  “Ma’am,” says Annie, after a w
hile. “Is this right?”

  Isabelle looks over. “No,” she says cheerfully. “All wrong. Just a moment and I’ll be right there.” She pushes at her camera to make sure that the legs have embedded properly into the ground of the bank and that it’s stable. “Good,” she says, and stepping carefully over the paraphernalia she has laid out on the bank, makes her way to Annie. “Loosen your collar.” Annie tentatively undoes a few buttons at her neck and Isabelle impatiently reaches down and undoes a few more. She pulls one side of Annie’s dress away from her neck. “I need this line,” she says, and touches Annie’s collarbone.

  Even though Mrs. Dashell’s touch is brazen and careless, Annie shivers at it. She has not been touched by anyone in so long that she is startled by the feeling of Isabelle’s fingers trolling her collarbone. Isabelle doesn’t notice Annie’s reaction. “Those rocks are a catastrophe,” she says. “You must be lower down than that.” She scans the bank and, finding nothing to her liking, bends down and scrabbles through the dirt herself, rearranging the stones until they suit her.

  Annie takes her seat on the new rocks. She is closer to the water now, can almost feel the jump and tumble of it beside her as it shoulders through the narrow streambed, rolling from hollows, dodging rocks.

  “Your hair,” says Isabelle, and Annie reaches up and takes out the pins that hold it up in its neat bun. She shakes it briskly, like a dog that has just stepped out of the water. She remembers, from last time, how the Lady prefers her hair to be loose and unruly. She shakes her head again, and Isabelle absent-mindedly reaches down and touches it with her fingers. “Good,” she says.

  “Who am I?” asks Annie.

  Isabelle crouches down beside her. “Ophelia,” she says. “Do you know the story?”

  Annie shakes her head.

  Isabelle’s voice is soft. “You are Ophelia,” she says. “You’re in love with Hamlet, but he doesn’t love you back. Your father and brother have advised you poorly on this matter. Hamlet is preoccupied with his own demons. He doesn’t even notice you, certainly doesn’t guess that you love him.”