Kept (16 page)

“Now, Esther,” William said again, “you are going to dance yourself, I hope. I can’t abide those girls who sits in the corner and drinks negus and blushes whenever anyone comes near them.”

Esther smiled an answer, but in truth she was somewhat perplexed about the evening that lay before her. She could dance, after a fashion, yet she feared to make herself conspicuous. At the Hall, prior to the party’s departure and in celebration of it, she had been induced to drink a glass of wine, the first she had ever taken. This, too, had contributed to the expectant but vaguely troubled manner in which she regarded the world. Abruptly, she looked back to where Sarah and Margaret came trailing behind her, wondering whom they would find to dance with. She would dance with William, that much was certain, who had sworn to escort and protect her for as long as the evening continued.

At the end of the high street, where the road bent round towards the churchyard and the almshouses, they came to their place of entertainment. Here lights blazed in the windows, and a noise of music and
resonating feet could be heard from within. A knot of idlers standing at the roadside regarded them incuriously. “There’s a nice-looking girl,” Esther heard a man say to his fellow as they passed in through the gilt swing doors. Pleased at this acknowledgement, which she knew must refer to her, Sarah and Margaret still being some way behind her, she quickened her pace and arrived, more rapidly than she had intended, in a vestibule full of girls and women divesting themselves of cloaks and hoods. Within she glimpsed a room whose atmosphere, allowing for certain incidental changes, was familiar to her from her girlhood.

At its further end, adjacent to a roaring log-fire, a banner proclaiming the Volunteer Movement had been ceremoniously unfurled and leant against the wall next to a table on which rested a framed daguerreotype of Her Majesty. On a raised dais by the near side, variously disposed in cane-backed chairs, three rustic musicians sat over a fiddle, a bass viol and a little drum. Through an archway on the further side could be seen a circular buffet and a trestle topped with a cloth at which waiters in white jackets presided over an urn and a tray of punch glasses. Of the persons in these two rooms, whose number amounted to perhaps four dozen, Esther calculated that she knew nearly half by sight: tradesmen from Watton and their wives, a squire or two standing talking at the bar, other servants from the neighbouring houses. Correct ideas of female evening wear being no means standardised in the locality, she marvelled at the varieties of apparel on display. Some of the servant girls had merely put on their best pinafores and caps. One girl wore her grandmother’s wedding dress. A plethora of improvised black gowns testified to the ingenuity of the local seamstresses. Looking at the crowd, as the fiddler struck up his tune and the men at the bar glanced up hastily into the other room, Esther felt a sudden satisfaction at the nature of the thing and her place within it. The others had come up by this time, and they stood in the doorway exclaiming at the room and its decorations.

“Now, Esther,” William began, but she shook her head. She would not dance yet. Instead she walked with Sarah to the end of the hall, stepping over the feet of those dancers who strayed too far from the circle, and admired the banner, alive as she did so to the spectacle around her.

Margaret Lane was sulking, Sam Postman having arrived with his intended, a large young woman in a canary-yellow dress who clung to his arm with such vigour that he cried out, “Mary! ‘Tis all very well to hold on to me, mawther, but I can scarce move with your clinging!”

It occurred to Esther that she ought to say something good-natured to Margaret Lane, so she caught hold of her hand and remarked, “Why, Margaret, how nice you look in your dress.”

Margaret’s small pinched face broke out into a smile. “Why, you are a good sort to say so, Esther. It is my mother’s dress, that she gave me when I went into service.”

There were several young men standing around the buffet, grooms from the gentlemen’s houses and the like, who asked Esther if she would dance, but she shook her head. There was an exhilaration within her that made her quite content to stand here in sight of the white-coated waiters and the buzz of the other room, waiting for such time as William should come to claim her. Sarah, approaching through the crowd with her game leg dragging a little, stopped when she saw her and gave an inquisitive look.

“Why, Esther, are you not dancing?”

“I am waiting—that is,” Esther said hurriedly, “nobody has asked me yet. But what is the matter, Sarah?”

“Oh, it is nothing. It is only that there is that goose Margaret Lane quaking in her shoes because Sam Postman’s young woman shook her fist at her and called her a hussy. But look, here is William come to fetch us.”

Plunging through the buffet room, full half a foot taller than the men on either side of him, William assumed an air of conspicuous gallantry. Seeing Esther, he brought his heels sharply together and bowed. There was a waltz beginning. Would she waltz? Esther did not waltz, but she consented to be brought a glass of lemonade and admire the fierce look and the sharp rebuke that William directed at a man who knocked into her as she bent to receive it. However, William’s good humour was not abated. This was capital lemonade, but would she try something stronger? Esther would not, but she listened to William’s account of the wine’s inferiority to that served at the Hall with interest.

“The master may be an old screw,” William declared, “but there is
no wine in the county like that served at the Hall, old Randall says, and he should know.”

The memory of her conversation with Sarah strode into Esther’s imaginings, and she glanced up shrewdly at him.

“William. If I ask you a question, will you answer it?”

“If it’s in my power to do so, Esther, I shall. Fire away.”

“Who is the woman in the upstairs room?”

William laughed. “Why you are a-hoaxing me, Esther. Which woman in the upstairs room?”

“The one that has her meals taken up to her. That you bring down.”

“Now see here, Esther. This is some stick you have the wrong end of, I can tell.”

“No, I have seen her. A woman sitting at a window. Dark-haired and with a staring face.
I have seen her
.”

Esther realised that in repeating these words she had raised her voice above the ordinary level of conversation in the room and that one or two people were looking curiously at her.

“You’d best be quiet,” William said, almost roughly. “Indeed you had, Esther, and not mind things that don’t concern you. What would the master say if he knew his affairs were being talked of in Watton High Street?”

“Then there is a woman?”

“There is nothing. Nothing and no one. As to the tray, you must have seen me coming from Mrs. Finnie’s room.”

“But Mrs. Finnie does not live in the west wing. Besides…”

“Besides what, Esther?”

“The other morning when Sam Postman knocked on the door and gave Mr. Randall the letters, he was called away sudden and left them on a tray, and I looked at them.” Esther did not say that her principal object had been to spy out any further communications regarding Sarah’s brother. “Who is Mrs. Ireland?”

William’s eyes, Esther saw, were smarting with anger. “The last cook had that name.”

“And Mrs. Wates in her place these ten years past. I think you must take me for a fool, William Latch.”

There was a sudden skirl of music from the room beyond and a whoop of laughter as a fat woman in a pink dress tumbled over, bringing her partner with her. William glanced nervously over his shoulder.

“Now see here, Esther, you’re not being fair to me. I came here to dance with you, truly I did, not to have you asking me questions that you should know better than to think of. A fellow should be better treated, I tell you.”

Esther found that words altogether failed her. A part of her wished to dance with William, to be carried up in his arms and borne away past the admiring glances of the people around them. Yet another part of her resented what she saw as his dissimulation, the keeping of a secret that she could only guess at. Crossly she said, “If you’ve a mind to dance you had better ask Sarah. When I last saw her, she was warming herself at the fire.”

Without answering, William turned on his heel. Esther watched him go. In his absence she was quite at a loss as to what she should do. The people standing next to her at the refreshment tables, seeing that she had had some disagreement with the tall footman, regarded her sympathetically, but she would not meet their glances. There was a window at the back of the room over which the shutters had not been drawn, and she moved instinctively towards it, arms folded before her, and looked out absently into the little street, down which occasional groups of revellers bound for the ball came moving swiftly, and at a great gibbous moon which lay above it, irradiating the fronts of the houses and the shop windows with eerie red light. How long she remained in this attitude, oblivious to the noisy traffic of the buffet, she did not know—it might have been ten minutes or even twenty—only that it was a period of time brought to an end by a vague awareness that the music in the ballroom had descended first into raggedness and then into silence, that this descent had been punctuated by a scream, or rather a series of screams, and that someone had come running towards her through the crowd and begun to shake her by the shoulder. Gradually, the trancelike state into which she had subsided began to pass, and she saw that the person before her was Margaret Lane.

“Oh, Esther! You must come quickly! Sarah has had a dreadful accident.”

Scarcely hearing her words, but knowing only that she must do as she was bidden, Esther ran before her into the ballroom. Such was the speed of her entrance that what she saw presented itself to her eyes in a series of fragments: one of the musicians, rising from his chair with his bass viol clutched under his arm; a look of alarm in the face of a young girl standing with her hands held up to her chin; a gentleman in a shooting jacket and long stockings saying something behind his hand to a waiter; and beyond them all, at the very end of the room, a yard or two from the glowing fire, a group of people bent over a recumbent figure that lay awkwardly across the floor with one arm over its face and did not move.

“She was a-dancing with William,” Margaret stuttered, “a-dancing of a polka, and then her leg seemed to give way beneath her and she pitched forward into the fire.”

The Easton Hall servants knelt or stood at Sarah’s side. William, Esther saw, had positioned himself a yard or so beyond them and, very white-faced and sober, was staring at the tips of his boots. A medical man in a black coat, in fact the doctor who attended the Volunteers, was examining Sarah’s hand and forearm across which ran a deep scorch mark. Sarah herself had fallen into a dead faint.

“A terrible thing to have happened,” a man standing nearby and wearing the scarlet sash of the Volunteers remarked to William. “There ought to be a rail before the fire to prevent such accidents.”

Mrs. Wates pulled herself to her feet from where she had been squatting at Sarah’s side. “Accident,” she said. “You may call it an accident, I suppose, with him a-taunting of her and calling her names. I heered him do it, indeed I did, let him deny it if he will. It’s my belief that she threw herself in the fire a purpose.”

“It’s a lie!” William exclaimed, still not lifting his eyes from the tips of his boots but with his face flushing scarlet. “I won’t stand here, Mrs. Wates, and have you say such things about me. The master shall hear of it, indeed he shall.”

“The master shall hear of a good many things,” Mrs. Wates briskly retorted.

By this time quite a group of men had gathered around the fireplace, several of them regarding William with looks of hostility. The medical man, feeling now for the pulse on Sarah’s forehead, said, “This is all very well, but the girl must be taken home. She isn’t badly injured, I daresay, but the shock has to be considered. Someone had better get a stretcher.”

“I tell you, it’s a d——d lie,” William said again, “and anyone who says otherwise had better tell me to my face.”

“I’ll tell you,” Mrs. Wates said. “And the master, too. But we had better do what the gentleman says. Look, the girl’s stirring. Take a hand, will you, Margaret Lane. Esther! Go to the wagon and ask the man to drive up to the door.”

With some difficulty, for her legs dragged heavily beneath her, they brought Sarah to her feet and half propelled, half carried her to the vestibule. Turning around to look for William, Esther saw that he had disappeared. Hastening back along the street as Mrs. Wates had directed, she found the wagon driver and his cart and explained the situation to him. A quarter of an hour found them trundling back in the rickety hold through the pitch-dark, silent back route. Lying next to her in a resting place improvised out of shawls and travelling blankets, with her arm done up in a sling, Sarah cried quietly to herself.

“Oh, Esther,” she said once. “I’ve gone and brought him into trouble, isn’t that it?”

“No one has brought him into trouble but himself, I think,” Esther replied. Nonetheless, she was conscious of a great disappointment, of some scheme in her life, momentarily grasped at but unfulfilled. How splendid it would have been, she thought, if she and William could have danced together in the brightly lit room before the crowd of ball goers. Calling the scene into her mind for a moment, she remembered a particular air that had caught her fancy and softly hummed it under her breath. The wagon trundled on. From time to time, when they moved out of the avenues of trees and hedgerows to a crossroads where the moonlight fell directly onto the path, she peered into the gloaming, searching for the sight of a tall figure plodding in the wagon’s rear, but there was nothing there, only the black trail of the trees and the mist rolling in across the distant fields. A church clock struck the hour,
the wheels creaked beneath them, the carter coughed stertorously into the dark, and by degrees they made their way home.

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XI
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