Ashenden (21 page)

“What do you want to stop there for?” he had said to her. “They pay you next to nothing. They make you wear a uniform as if you’re in the army, and if they happen to see you taking away their chamber pots, you’re supposed to pretend they don’t have to relieve themselves like common people.”

“I don’t empty chamber pots. There’re water closets at the house. Mr. Henderson put them in years ago.”

“They changed your name.”

At the big house Dulcie was Mary.

“That doesn’t mean I forget who I am.”

When Dulcie was angry, the burnished frizzes of her hair sparked and her eyes, which were no one color and many, darkened. It excited him and he imagined his fingers on the hidden white places of her body.

At the far end of the upper road was Prospect Place, where the Stainers lived. They were new to the village and widely talked about. Two years ago they had leased a pair of abandoned farm laborers’ cottages from the estate, knocked them through, put in drainage, laid quarry tiles over the beaten earth, and filled the place with country furnishings they had bought in London. They had no children but many weekend visitors. At one Sunday meeting at the Ploughshare Frank Stainer had been moved to speak against the use of violence in the struggle for social justice. His wife, Agatha, had subsequently talked about the rights of women, although no women were present apart from herself, which she said proved her point. They hadn’t attended since.

As soon as the waits began to sing, the door opened. “Ah, ‘Masters in This Hall,’ ” said Mrs. Stainer. “One of our favorites. Do come in, all of you, and have a cup of punch.” It was flavored with sloes gathered from Ashenden hedgerows, she said.

The punch was strong and there was a dense fruitcake to go with it. Mr. Stainer admired the shawm and was told the story of the
shawm. Then he said to the vicar that he had heard the village had Roman origins.

“Indeed, yes,” said the vicar.

“We have always found this part of the country to be quite uncanny,” said Mrs. Stainer. “The old lore, the pagan ways. One senses it particularly by the river.”

“Mmm,” said the vicar, and announced they must go.

The waits emerged into the cold and walked up the dark road to the Park. Passing between the gatehouses, they came out onto a graveled drive, which crunched under their boots and bore them up a shallow incline towards the house. Bare branches scraped against each other and evergreen needles shushed and whispered. From the stable block nestled down in a hollow came the sweet odor of warm horse and the knock of hooves against stalls. Jack Pierce had meant to excuse himself and turn back before they came this far. Now he was inside the domain, there seemed to be little choice but to go onwards. The gates clanged behind them. Then the trees thinned out and suddenly there were stars.

Dick Steadman whistled as the house came into view. Great hanging lanterns framed in brass flooded the frontage with light and turned stone into gold. The house was a vast treasure chest set on a hill, an unreal thing.

“My word,” said the vicar.

They went along in silence, straightening collars and cuffs, tugging at caps, wishing they had newer trousers, better boots, cleaner hands and fingernails, worrying about their manners.

Billy said, “You’d think we was going to a funeral,” and got a laugh.

The butler, Mr. Williams, let them in and indicated where they should wipe their feet. A maid came out of a room midway down the long corridor and disappeared into an interior gloom. There was a faint smell of nutmeg and cooked apples. The waits wiped their feet and stood to one side by a marble pedestal, caps off.

“We’re quite ready,” said the vicar, fingering the shawm. “Let us know when we should begin.”

The butler was balding, and amused. He had an air of the city about him, a slick veneer, and was said to have an eye for the girls. It was hard to imagine him leading the household in prayers.

“No, not here. Follow me. We have been waiting for you.”

“Of course,” said the vicar, clearing his throat with a little “ahem.”

Now they were abashed. Now they felt like fools.

They followed the butler up a twisting flight of stairs, turned a corner, and came into a soaring space with another staircase in it. A dark fir tree glowed with colored glass and blazed with candles. Above its star the hall rose up and up. It shrank them down to ants, to specks. This wasn’t a hall, as they understood a hall, or a room, as they understood a room, or a stair, as they understood a stair. It served no purpose except to be a lavish emptiness within the house. Under their feet was matting laid over carpet, on the walls were pictures, and set against the walls were carved chairs, cabinets, and side tables bearing cargoes of ornaments and bowls of fir cones. The whole household was there.

The vicar was the first to recover himself and went over to speak to the family grouped around the tree, the tall, stooping elderly man with side-whiskers, leaning on a stick, who was Mr. Henderson, the smiling elderly woman who was Mrs. Henderson, and the stout elderly woman who was Miss Henderson, the founder of both the original village school and some sort of mission in London. Flanking them was one of the married Henderson daughters and her husband, along with a grinning fellow and a pale young lady, who would be the son and his wife. A number of children ran about, liberated from bedtime.

Jack Pierce was looking for Dulcie but could not spot her among the other maidservants ranged on the stairs, neat, pert, obedient, and grateful in their black uniforms, white caps, collars, and cuffs. That was a disappointment and also a relief. He didn’t want her to see him singing to a family he wouldn’t work for, or deal with the nagging afterwards.

Billy leaned over and murmured in his ear, “She’s not here. Mr. Williams gave her leave to sit with her uncle. He’s on his last legs.”

The old man had been dying for months, taking his time about it. When the bugger was dead and gone, he would dance on his grave. His eyes drifted to the tree, the pictures and ornaments. How much money was there in this one room? Thousands.

Billy edged closer. “At least that’s her story.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s not well. The girls say she’s sick in the mornings, off her food. She fainted in the pantry last week. Mr. Williams was asking the other day whether she walked out with anyone. Your name might have come up.”

A hint of alarm trickled down his back. “She’s said nothing to me about it.”

“Most likely she’s waiting for you to make an honest woman of her. Or perhaps that’s against your religion.”

“What are you saying?”

“Put two and two together. Looks like there’s a nipper on the way.”

The vicar beckoned them. “ ‘Angels from the Realm of Glory,’ ” he said, putting his lips to the shawm.

Jack Pierce opened his mouth and not a sound came out of it.

*  *  *

As hard as she tried, Dulcie could no longer maintain the fiction that the worst hadn’t happened. Every morning she retched and all day tiredness hung like a heavy velvet curtain between her and the world. Her breasts were sore and swollen. She hadn’t bled for months. It would be all right, she told herself, the child would slip away, like the two her mother had lost. A mess on the sheets and it would all be over. It wouldn’t be all right, she told herself, remembering the three that tugged at her sister’s skirts. She had told no one, first because that would make it true and second because of the consequences.

“Well, he’s still with us,” said Mrs. Jakes, as she came back upstairs. “You were a good while. Find what you were looking for?”

The old crone. “Call of nature.”

Which was true, after a fashion. She couldn’t do up her waistband anymore. What was inside her was stubborn, as stubborn as Jack Pierce. He was not going to find employment, honest or otherwise, and marry her. She had been a fool to think it. He would sooner marry Arthur Young.

When her sister had fallen with her second, she had tried to get rid of it. A woman in the next village could bring it off, so they said. Failing that, you wanted to jump out of a hayloft or drink gin. Dulcie’s sister had drunk the bitter tea the woman in the next village made from the rue she grew in her garden, she’d thrown herself down the stairs, and she’d made herself sick on cider. They called the baby Bertha, after her mother, and the next one was Fred.

Go away! Dulcie told the baby growing inside her. Die!

You love them once they’re here, her sister had said, as careworn as a woman of forty. You wouldn’t be without them.

Dulcie twisted her hands in her lap. It was only a matter of time before Mr. Williams turned her out. The other girls were already talking, whispering to each other under the bedclothes and on the back stairs. She couldn’t lay another burden at her mother’s doorstep.

Her father, Fred Godwin, hadn’t left his bed since he had slid off their roof in a hailstorm when he had been trying to mend a hole in the thatch. They’d given him a makeshift bench to slope across his lap, an old pallet sawn in half, and when he was propped up, he could work for a while. The last time she was home, he’d been plaiting willow wands. Down on the river, they cut the withies from the willows that grew on the eyots, the midstream islands, tied them into bundles, and planted them thick end down by the water’s edge to shoot. Once they had grown tall enough to harvest, the old women and children would cut the rods and strip them of their bark, whipping them through pieces of iron bent into the shape of a Jew’s harp. She’d done it herself, on occasion. “People will always need baskets and chair seats, Dulcie,” her father had said, reaching for another white wand. “I like to keep useful.”

Before the accident her father had been a carter. The basket was
poorly woven, good for nothing. “You have to humor him a little,” said her mother. The cheer she tried to give their surroundings—the threadbare rag rugs, the cracked jug on the windowsill filled with holly berries—was pitiful and shaming. A sour-sweet musty odor, the smell of poverty and sickness, clung about the place. “Thank you.” She pocketed the coins Dulcie handed over. “You’re a good girl. That’ll help. Bless you.”

*  *  *

“What’s that awful noise?” The rasping made her think of woodcutting, the saw going back and forth, catching on the bark.

“Dab his mouth with the flannel,” said Mrs. Jakes. “I’d get up but my knees ain’t what they were.”

Dulcie moistened her great-uncle’s lips. They pursed and sucked on the wetted cloth. She’d seen a newborn peck and root for a nipple like that. People were childish in death.

The wrinkled eyelids fluttered open. “What time is it?” said her uncle.

She gave a violent start and dropped the flannel. “Late.”

“Who put the grass on the ceiling?”

“No one, Uncle.” She stole a glance at Mrs. Jakes, who shook her head.

“I’ll have him, whoever it is,” said her uncle.

Then the wrinkled eyelids fluttered shut and the rasping began again. She sank back on the bed and pressed her hand to her heart, which was racing. A little later and her uncle’s breathing was a dry, papery whisper.

Mrs. Jakes put her knitting to one side and yawned. “Long night. Let’s hope them waits pass by and liven things up a bit. You want to step out with your Jack awhile, it’s all the same to me. They do say a wedding comes after a burying.”

“I told you, Mrs. Jakes, there’s no wedding planned.”

Most girls in her predicament would rush their fellows to the altar on the strength of it. Dulcie was damned if she’d do the same. She wouldn’t spend the rest of her life yoked to her own gratitude
or someone else’s resentment and disappointment. She’d rather shift for herself.

That morning she had been dusting in the staircase hall when the doorbell rang. Mr. Williams was called away and left one of the cabinets open. What came next was the work of a moment and she didn’t realize what she had been thinking to do until she had done it.

The cup was about five inches high and had a look of age and foreignness that suggested value. It was a curious thing. One side was modeled into the face of a youth with a straight nose, smooth brow, and curly hair; turn it over and you saw a wrinkled, balding, and bearded old man. Gold, all the same, not too big, not too small. In a flash it went into her pocket, where it knocked against her leg. Then she rearranged the contents of the cabinet, an inch to one side, an inch to the other, until there wasn’t a gap.

Dulcie had never stolen anything before. Her dishonesty was the cowardly kind. There had been occasions when she had done something wrong, kept her mouth shut about it, and a brother or sister had taken the blame. Such deceptions had always lain heavy on her. This act was so reckless she could almost convince herself that someone else had done it, or that the cup had been hers all along.

She was unnecessarily dusting the mahogany sideboard in the dining room when she heard Mr. Williams come back into the staircase hall.

“Mary?”

“Yes, sir.”

She stood in the doorway, her knees trembling against each other. He locked the cabinet and put the keys away.

“Leave the dusting for now. I’d like you to lay drugget over the hall carpet. We’ve the waits coming in tonight and I don’t want dirty boots all over it. You’ll find the rolls in the stores downstairs. Ask one of the footmen to help you if they’re too heavy.” He paused. “We don’t want you fainting again.”

Was she imagining the threat? “Yes, sir.” She could feel the weight of the cup in her pocket.

“Off you go.”

It was now or never. “I beg your pardon, sir. May I ask a favor?”

“What is it, Mary?”

“I wonder if I might sit with my great-uncle tonight. He’s dying, sir, and I have been told that he will not see the morning.”

“Your great-uncle was steward here.”

“That’s right, sir. He was. For many years.”

Mr. Williams consulted some interior authority on domestic management, which he did by closing his eyes for a time. “Very well. We’ll take your next half day in lieu.”

She dipped her head.

“I shall expect you back first thing, in time to lay the fires.”