Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (10 page)

Isabelle doesn’t say anything, and Annie suddenly feels afraid that she has spoken too freely. “I didn’t mean to suggest…” she says.

Isabelle cuts her off. “I spend so much time with people like Letitia Hill,” says Isabelle. “I forget that one can speak from the heart.” That’s how it will be for Ellen, she thinks. Wherever she is, her world is small and getting smaller. She will never be able to equal the freedom she had when she was ten. “What was your last mistress like?” she says. “That one in London.”

“She didn’t trust anyone,” says Annie. She thinks of her one act of defiance in Mrs. Gilbey’s house. “She used to try and trap me to see if I was stealing from her.”

“How?”

“She would hide coins under the carpet, as though they’d accidentally spilled there. Taking them would not necessarily be stealing, as she did not supposedly know they were there, but it would be an act of dishonesty. It would be a reason for her not to trust in me.”

“So you were supposed to go to her with the coins and say, ‘Look what I found. You must have lost these?’” says Isabelle. She is always amazed at the time some employers spend trying to trick their servants into behaving badly. Don’t they have anything better to do?

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And did you do this?”

“All but one time.” Annie smiles, remembering the guilty satisfaction she felt from what she had done. “Once I got angry with her for doing this so often. It was like a battle between us. She was trying to force me to take the coins so she could punish me. I kept giving them back to her and giving them back to her, and then once I didn’t.”

“You took them?” Isabelle is surprised that Annie would be so foolish.

“No. I didn’t take them.” Annie chuckles out loud, she can’t help herself. “I glued them to the floor.”

Isabelle puts her head back and hoots with laughter. “Oh,” she says. “That is very good.”

“And it worked,” says Annie. “She couldn’t confront me because it would mean she would have to confess to putting them there in the first place. For a couple of weeks they were still there and then she managed to pry them up and they never appeared again.”

“I must remember never to try and trick you,” says Isabelle. She laughs again, thinking of Letitia Hill as Mrs. Gilbey, kneeling down in a good dress, trying to pry shillings off the floor with a butter knife.

They reach the Dashell house. It is darkened except for a carriage lamp in the drive. The flame like a whisper, a soft voice calling for Isabelle as she runs through the woods to meet the Cook’s daughter. She remembers the light hanging in the trees like green lanterns above her head, the rush headlong through stasis, the sound of her heart in her ears like the whirr of a grouse, beating up from the alders.

“Annie?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A reason, Isabelle needs a reason. “I know it’s late, but would you bring me up water for a bath?”

“Of course.” Annie no longer feels tired. She no longer feels as though she’s worked hard all day. “Right away,” she says, and, disentangling herself from Isabelle Dashell, she goes round to the kitchen door.

Cook has gone to bed. The kitchen is dark and cool. The range has been shut down for the night. Annie will have to start it up again to heat the bathwater. This means that she will let it burn out and then have to rise before Cook in the morning to get it swept and cleaned again for the day ahead. She takes off her shawl, rolls up her sleeves, and gets to work. She lights an oil lamp, fires up the range, then takes the two largest kettles outside to the pump to fill them with water. The pump is not far from the kitchen door, halfway between the kitchen and the laundry. After a few hauls of the handle, the banging, rusty voice of the metal pump softens and water gushes out from the spout. Annie puts her hand under the cascade. The coolness of the water prickles her skin like nettles.

It is when she is filling the second kettle, stooped over the pump, lost to the sound of the water spilling into the tin, that Annie hears the noise. It is close by, on the other side of the laundry building. A grunting, hurried noise. An animal, she thinks, out there in the darkness. Something enormous. She lets the pump handle rise into its moorings and the remaining water from the vacuum slosh out. Carefully she makes her way over to the laundry, sneaks around the side of the building. Sure enough, there is a dark tangled shape up against the bricks. It takes a moment for her eyes to catalogue and identify the shape. It is not an animal. It is Tess and Wilks. Wilks has his trousers down, his bare arse white in the moonlight. He has Tess pinned up against the wall of the laundry and Annie’s first thoughts are that she must rush to Tess’s aid, that this is what Mrs. Gilbey was always warning her about. But Tess puts her hands down on Wilks’s arse, goading him on. She is obviously not struggling to get away. Annie stands there. She can hear their breathing, the sounds they make. How their breathing overlaps, knits together in rough, raw gasps, their bodies pushing through each other. It seems to Annie that they are so intent on each other that even if she said something or made a noise to show she was there, they would not stop.

They have left themselves, the selves that say “yes, ma’am” and fetch and carry for Cook. Who they are now is something that belongs only to them. Annie is surprised to find that she envies this. She envies the urgency of these selves they have become.

Annie has never even kissed a man. Once, the butcher’s boy at Portman Square asked her to come out with him for a walk, and before Mrs. Gilbey put a stop to it, they walked around the Square at night and he held her hand. His hand had been sweaty, cold as a piece of beef liver, and Annie had been glad he hadn’t tried to kiss her. He was too nervous of her to be appealing.

She stands in the shadows, watching Tess and Wilks writhe against each other, and she realizes she has never thought of this. She has known about it, from downstairs talk, but she has never thought of it for herself. There was no one’s body she could imagine herself pressing up against with such a fever. Only Jesus, but that is a wrong thing to think, and she does not allow herself to think it often.

Annie starts retreating backwards, carefully trying to put her feet in the exact steps she made when she had crept forward. But her foot rolls on stones, there is the noise of it sliding, and Tess’s eyes, which have been closed, snap open. She stares, over Wilks’s shoulder, right at Annie, for the moment before Annie shadows around the corner and runs back into the yard to collect her kettles from the pump.

“What’s the matter?” asks Isabelle, when Annie comes into her bedroom breathing fast and carrying two steaming kettles. “You look”—she stares hard at Annie—“different somehow.”

“They’re just heavy, ma’am.” Annie empties the kettles into the tin bath which Isabelle has brought out into the room from her dressing area. It is bigger than the hip bath at Portman Square, looks like a big shoe, with the covered-in toe part long enough to stretch one’s legs out in. “I’ll be right back with more hot water, and the cold,” says Annie. She is slightly annoyed that Mrs. Dashell is still in her evening clothes. By the time she has shed them the water will be cold. “You had better get undressed, ma’am,” she says.

“Yes, yes.” Isabelle was looking at a book when Annie first entered the room. She picks it up again now. “More hot water,” she says. “I want it to be a nice, deep bath.”

It was a struggle for Annie to clamber up the stairs with the two huge and heavy kettles. More hot water means an additional two trips, as well as having to go back out to the pump to get more water. What if Tess and Wilks are still out there? What will she say to Tess?

“Yes, ma’am,” she says, and covers the opening of the bathtub with a towel, to help keep the heat of the water from escaping so quickly.

By the time Annie has brought all the bathwater upstairs she is exhausted. She is sweating and breathing quickly, her arms ache from the heaviness of the kettles. She no longer feels very kindly towards her mistress, wishes only now to go to bed and sleep. As it is, she will have to rise early to see to the kitchen range, and it is already past eleven o’clock.

“Right,” says Isabelle, when Annie has emptied all the water into the tub. “Take off your clothes.” She snaps her book shut.

“Pardon, ma’am?”

“Take off your clothes. The bath is for you.”

“But I would have had a bath in the kitchen. Where I usually have my baths,” says Annie, meaning that she would not willingly have hauled water upstairs for her own bath.

“But I want you to have a bath here,” says Isabelle. “Undress.” She is using her commanding tone. This is not the same voice she had when she was at a loss to explain to Mrs. Hill why Annie Phelan had come to fetch her home.

Annie just stands there. She does not know what to make of this. Her heart is still beating quickly from her labours. She can hear it as though it is in the room beside her.

“Oh,” says Isabelle, softer now. “I see. You’re bashful. Well, I need to go and fetch something anyhow, so I’ll give you your privacy. But when I’m back”—she waves her finger at Annie—“I want to see you in that tub. And,” she says from the doorway, “stoke up the fire so it’s burning bright. We’ll need it.”

Annie heaps coal onto the fire, makes sure it is drawing properly. She takes her clothes off slowly, laying each item in a neat pile by the tub. When she is down to her shift she hesitates. Surely Mrs. Dashell didn’t mean
all
her clothes? She climbs into the tub with her shift still on. The water is deliciously hot, and as she slides her body down into the comfort of it her bad humour lifts from her skin, like steam. She closes her eyes. A face floats above her.
Mother,
she thinks. The features are hazy. It takes Annie a moment to realize that she has fallen asleep and that it is Isabelle kneeling beside the tub, leaning over her.

“You look lovely when you’re asleep,” says Isabelle. “No need to blush. It’s the truth.”

Annie has slid down into the tub, pulls herself up straight and sees that her hair is down, lying on her breasts. Isabelle must have loosened it while Annie slept. As she’s sitting up she sees something out of the corner of her eyes, something that wasn’t in the room before. The camera, on its legs, standing by the fire.

“You want me to model?” asks Annie. “Now?” Surely Mrs. Dashell can’t want to photograph this late at night?

Annie looks down at herself in the tub, at her legs disappearing under the cuff of tin. “Ophelia?” she says.

Isabelle smiles. Her hand on the edge of the tub is inches from Annie’s bare skin. “No,” she says. She thinks that she was almost happy, watching Annie Phelan sleep, watching her face collapse its sorrows, become peaceful and sweet like a child’s face. There could be nothing else to want, Isabelle had thought. If I wasn’t who I am. “Not Ophelia,” she says. “No more of Ophelia. I’ve thought about what you said. About all my tragic heroines. We’re going to try something different now. From now on, things will be different.”

“Who?” asks Annie. Isabelle has sad eyes, she thinks. That is their natural resting state, sadness.

“Sappho.” Isabelle takes it for granted that Annie won’t know who she is talking about. “A great Greek lyric poet, although what has survived of her writing is mostly fragments. It is said she was a lover of both men and women. Here.” Isabelle fetches the book she was looking at from her dressing table. She pulls a chair over to the bathtub and flips through the pages. “Listen,” she says, needlessly, as it is only Annie there to listen. Isabelle reads:

She looks up at Annie. The words hang still in the space between them. “You see?” she says.

“No,” says Annie. “I don’t.”

Of course not, thinks Isabelle. Of course Annie isn’t Ellen, is only a maid, cannot be expected to understand the higher orders of art and cultural thought. She is not smart like Ellen,schooled with Isabelle until the age of ten because only then would Isabelle try to learn literature and geography. Ellen, matched to Isabelle in a way no one has ever been since.” “I thin flame runs under my skin,’” she says, carelessly now. What does it matter? “‘They are only breath, words.’”

That makes Annie think of Tess and Wilks, not of them so much, but how she felt standing in the darkness watching them. The words of the poet slide right into her heart, lodge under her skin. And they will stay there, she thinks, these words, until something urgent and entirely present sets them free. That’s what Tess and Wilks were doing, letting the words out, bleeding the words’ fever from their bodies. Words like these that had found them somehow and wouldn’t let them go.

But it was sin. All of it. Tess and Wilks in the garden, this poet who loved both men and women. Annie knows it is all sin, as surely as she knows anything, but somehow what in her mind is sin has been translated by her body into pleasure. She doesn’t know what to do about this.

The water is getting cold around Annie’s stomach. The wet shift is sticking to her skin. “Ma’am?” she says. “What about the bath? What use is it?” She doesn’t see how her having a bath has to do with Isabelle photographing her as Sappho.

Isabelle closes the book. What has happened to her tonight that she has allowed such sentiment? She leans forward, the book on her knees. What is the truth? she thinks. What is the thing to tell Annie Phelan? The light from the fire behind Annie throws itself out into the room, pulls back again. “I have to feel something to see it,” she says. “And, the other way around.” She is suddenly doubtful, grips the book hard with both her hands. “Sappho is better than Ophelia, don’t you think?”

“Much better,” agrees Annie. She is glad not to have to die for love, or be sorrowful for its absence.

“I need to feel the scene I want to fix,” says Isabelle. “And this—the bath, the fire, your nakedness—is how I can feel what I want to see.”

“Like prophesy,” says Annie. She is quiet for a moment. There is no sound from outside this room. The rest of the house sleeps on. “What do you want me to do?” she says.

The moment Annie asks this, Isabelle feels her careful staging of the scene fall away. Sappho wouldn’t be so tentative, so shy with her body. Hadn’t she told this maid to remove all of her clothes? Why was she still wearing her shift?