Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (2 page)

Isabelle watches Annie Phelan recount her brief life. There is something in her face that opens when she tells her story,this story that Isabelle has heard so many times before, different versions from different Irish famine victims, but the same story. But what
is
different this time is the face of Annie Phelan as she tells her tale, how the expression shows the emotion so completely. Sadness, fear, shyness—it is all right there, all that feeling at once—and this is something Isabelle has perhaps never seen before. Or only once before, long ago, in another world entirely.

“My parents raised money to help the Irish Relief,” Isabelle says. “You have nothing to fear from me there.” She walks back over to the window. The noon light is high and harsh. Objects outside the room seem transparent. The tin pail on the flagstone path. The apple tree. “The position is housemaid,” says Isabelle. “I can pay you twenty-five pounds per annum, paid quarterly. It is what I pay the other servants. We have a cook, a laundry-maid, and a gardener. You may have an afternoon off every week and a Sunday off every month. You must make your own dresses or have them made, but we will pay for the material.” She pauses. The light is flattening the apple tree, she thinks. Stepping on it. “Can you read and write? I already have a cook who can’t, and the new laundry-maid seems stupid as a brick. Am I to be completely surrounded by imbeciles?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Annie says to Isabelle’s back. “No, ma’am. Yes I can read and write.” She almost mentions
Jane Eyre,
but stops herself. Perhaps Mrs. Dashell, like Mrs. Gilbey, doesn’t approve of novels.

“Oh,” says Isabelle. “I really can’t do this any more. Come here.” She beckons Annie over to the window. “Look,” she says, tapping the glass. “There’s Wilks, the gardener.”

Annie sees a leg poking out from behind a potting shed.

“He doesn’t do a stick of work,” says Isabelle. “He’s a terrible gardener. Cuts the heads off all the flowers. Hides all day down by the cabbages. Nothing but trouble.” She sighs, a long drawn-out fluttering sigh. “I hired him because he has a gorgeous back. All sinew, and broad as this county.” She looks hard at Annie Phelan, the grey of her eyes, the slighdy down-turned mouth. If I hired you because you are beautiful, she thinks, would I be sorry?

Annie climbs the narrow stairs to her room at the top of the house. She has never slept up high before. At Mrs. Gilbey’s she slept in a narrow room off the kitchen, on a cot. The room was once a broom closet. In the early days, when there was a Jane, Annie would be up and in her morning dress by six a.m. to clean and blacken the kitchen range and grates. Later, when Mrs. Gilbey could no longer afford to keep both a Jane and a Mary, Annie would be up even earlier as she now had to take on all of Cook’s responsibilities, in addition to her own.

Annie is to share an attic bedroom with Tess, the new laundry-maid, who started work with the Dashells the week before Annie. The room is large, has two dormer windows. Annie puts her carpetbag down on the bed by the right hand window. The bedroom is at the back of the house, and when Annie looks out the window she can see down into the garden, all the way to the orchard behind the old stone wall. She sees Isabelle hurrying along the path, her arms full of black cloth. She disappears into a glass henhouse near the garden wall and then Annie can see the cloudy shape of her moving about inside. From above, through the glass, Isabelle looks like the dark shift of flame in a hearth.

Annie unpacks her belongings, hangs her other morning dress and her maid’s black afternoon dress in the vast wardrobe, stuffs her underthings into an empty drawer. She picks up her Bible and goes down to the kitchen. Cook is making bread, her hands and forearms are coated with flour.

“You sort yourself out all right?” asks Cook.

“Yes, missus.” Annie stands against the larder. The Bible is a box of words she holds against her chest.

Almighty Everlasting Grace

Cook looks up again in a few minutes, surprised. “What are you doing still here?”

“I’ve come for the afternoon prayers.”

“Prayers,” Cook snorts. “That’s a rich one. Prayers, indeed.”

“Did I miss them?” Annie is confused. “Were they earlier?”

Cook rests on her knuckles, leans over the table towards Annie. “There are no prayers here,” she says. “It is not allowed. The Dashells are not believers in such foolishness. That’s what they call it, ‘foolishness.’ No going to church. No God. Now, out with you. The Lady wants you to take the afternoon to get acquainted with the house. You’ll have no cleaning duties today.” Cook pounds a fist into the slab of dough on the table. “And mind,” she says. “You are not to go into Mr. Dashell’s library and disturb his work. And neither are you to go near the glasshouse in the garden.”

Annie climbs slowly back up the staircase to her room. She sits on her bed holding on to the Bible, the hard brick of it solid in her hands. At Mrs. Gilbey’s, God was everywhere. There were morning, afternoon, and evening prayers. On Sundays there was church and three evenings a week Annie would copy out Bible verses from memory to practise her handwriting and Mrs. Gilbey would correct her spelling and grammar. It was God who taught Annie to read in the first place. The reverend of the nearby church gave reading and writing lessons to maids, and Mrs. Gilbey had sent Annie there when she was a young girl. There was safety in those words she grew up reading. They could be depended on.

God was the sky. With no words to keep the world together, the sun would burn through, brighten everything to black. The lace of apple trees. The flicker of Isabelle moving inside the glasshouse.

“What are you doing?”

Annie looks up to see a plump, red-faced girl in the doorway. The girl walks over and stands right in front of Annie, glares down at her. There is sweat on her forehead and upper lip. Her hands, on her hips, are bright red. “That’s my bed,” she says. “That one you’re sitting on.”

Annie gets up quickly. “I didn’t know,” she says.

“Well, you should have known.” The girl doesn’t move, remains solidly in front of Annie.

“Tess?” Annie feels that it is a bit hopeless now to ingratiate herself with her new roommate, but she has to try. “I’m the new housemaid, Annie Phelan. I am pleased to be meeting you.”

Tess doesn’t alter her stance or expression. “My bed,” she says.

Annie retreats to the other bed and carefully puts her Bible under the pillow. “There,” she says, because Tess is still watching her suspiciously. “This is my bed. This one. Over here.”

The Dashell house is full of rooms attached, each to each, through other rooms, as though the builder needed new space immediately and desperately, had no time for such niceties as hallways. The farther away from the main part of the house, the plainer the rooms become, some are even steps down from the level of the preceding rooms. Annie realizes that some of them were perhaps once even outbuildings.

Annie wanders through the strange, unfolding rooms, each one like a pause in a long, rambling story, a place to draw breath before continuing on. The dark furniture, the lavish velvet drapes, the paintings and rugs all seem vaguely sinful compared to Portman Square.

At the very back of the house, in one of the farthest rooms, Annie finds a collection of baby equipment—carriages, cradles, a trunk full of clothes, a rocking horse. She puts her hand on one of the carriage hoods. The carriage sways in great, squeaky wheezes. When she takes her hand away her flesh is coated with dust. No one has spoken to her of children. She has seen no evidence of them in the house. Why is there this room full of dusty prams and moth-eaten receiving blankets? It feels to Annie as though she has been the only living thing in this room for years and years. She pokes at a doll lying tangled with other dolls in a box on top of a steamer trunk. The doll’s eyes snap open and Annie jumps. The eyes flick closed again.

Annie is unlikely ever to have children of her own. She is unlikely, if she remains in service, even to marry. Sometimes it is possible for a maid to take a male servant in the same household as a husband. Annie thinks of Wilks, of the leg poking out from behind the potting shed. She shakes the leg of the doll again and the eyes fall open and stare at her, unblinking, blue as a morning sky.

The rest of the house is not as sinister. Rooms for dining. Rooms for receiving visitors. To the right of the sitting room where Annie first met Mrs. Dashell is a long hallway, a wing that, like everything else, seems to have been built on as a kind of rash afterthought. Annie wanders down the hallway, hands out to touch the cool walls on either side of her. At the end of the passage a door is ajar. Annie pushes it slowly open, enough to peer inside. Books are layered from floor to ceiling. The density of them like strata in a glacial bluff. Annie has never seen so many books in one place. The small library in the reverend’s house in Portman Square was no match for this one. Near the end of her time in London, Annie was afraid that she’d have to start again in the reverend’s library, start back at the beginning, at the first book she’d borrowed from him.

There is no one in this forbidden library and Annie pushes the door completely open and enters. A huge oak table piled up with sheets of paper dominates the centre of the room. There’s a desk near one set of bookshelves, and a free-standing globe, almost as tall as Annie, beside the desk. But it is the books Annie is interested in. She stands in front of the shelves, greedily reading the titles of these volumes she has mostly never seen, or heard of before.
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The Last Days of Pompeii.

At Mrs. Gilbey’s, reading was Annie’s secret. Mrs. Gilbey wanted Annie to be literate, wanted the convenience of a maid who understood written instruction, but she would not have appreciated Annie’s feverish passion for words, would not have tolerated passion of any sort within her household. Annie’s reading at Mrs. Gilbey’s was always done with the same bursts of clandestine intensity that one would use to pursue an illicit encounter. Hiding a book in a cupboard and reading phrases in between changing the bed linen. Putting a book, open, inside the large silver tureen so that she could read and polish the silver at the same time. Luckily the reverend supported her romance with reading and kept her supplied with books from his personal library. But they were largely books on religious matters, or at least with religious leanings. There was not the range that there was here, in Mr. Dashell’s library. Annie runs her hands lightly over the soft leather spines of the books. All those words, just waiting for her.

“Never mind what I told you,” says Cook, when Annie appears back in the kitchen. “I need you to take these to the Lady. She’s in the glasshouse. Down the garden.” Cook thrusts two goose wings at Annie. The feathered wings are fully extended, and very stiff. They have crude leather hoops sewn onto the underside of them, two on each wing.

On the path in the garden that leads to the glasshouse, Annie meets Eldon Dashell. He is tall and thin, with a straggly reddish beard and glasses. Hurrying towards the house, looking down at the pattern of stones and grass between his feet, he doesn’t see Annie until he is almost upon her.

“Excuse me.”

He looks up, delicately sidesteps her, sees her armload of wings and then her face. “Angels,” he says. “You must be the new maid.”

“Annie Phelan, sir,” says Annie, bowing her head. She has said her name so often this day that it is finally starting to feel as though it does belong to her.

“Well, I’m pleased to meet you, Annie Phelan.” Eldon bows his head as well, and smiles. “But don’t let me hold you up. The genius doesn’t like to be kept waiting.” He nods his head again. “Good day.” And then he continues walking the path to the house.

Annie stands outside the henhouse. Through the glass she can see the murky shape of Isabelle, floating around like a dark, underwater bird.

Angel

Over the grey, stone wall the apple trees make a puzzle of the sky.

Where does God go to if he can’t stay here?

When Annie enters the glasshouse she sees a large wooden box on stick legs at the far end. Isabelle is in front of the box, bending over a small child lying on a bench. The bench is covered in black cloth and black cloth is also hung from the ceiling to create a curtain against the end wall. Another child stands listlessly off to one side of the box. He is naked. The child lying on the bench has a white sheet draped over him.

“Ma’am,” says Annie, but no one hears her. She advances into the room. Sunlight makes bright flowers on the stone floor. She can hear muffled birdsong from outside. “Ma’am,” she says again, and this time Isabelle turns around.

“Thank God,” she says, with such relief in her voice that Annie looks behind her to make sure that there isn’t someone else in the room whom Isabelle is addressing.

Isabelle takes the goose wings from Annie and gives them to the standing, naked boy. “Now, Tobias, put these on. Quickly, please.” The boy looks at the wings scornfully and slowly starts to thread an arm through the leather straps.

“They’re on loan,” says Isabelle to Annie. “My cousin’s children. Silly little beggars,” she says, under her breath, just loud enough for Annie to hear. “There.” She looks at Annie in triumph. “I’ve made you smile. I didn’t think you knew how. Oh, Tobias, pick it up.” The standing, naked child has dropped one of the wings and is fumbling around trying to grab ahold of it with his feathery arm. Isabelle goes to help him. Annie watches them. The Lady doesn’t seem so fearsome here. Her movements are tamer. The light flooding through the glass roof softens the whole scene. Annie feels almost as if she could cup her hands around it and contain it safely there, the gentle push of its heart against her fingers. Beat, it doesn’t beat, it drops. It falls to earth, slowly, like a word after it’s been said.

Dearly beloved

“Now, Tobias, come and lean over Alfred and look mournful.” Isabelle moves behind the box on sticks and looks through a hole in it. The standing, naked boy obediently moves closer to his brother and slumps over Alfred.

“You don’t need to smother him,” cautions Isabelle.