Mary Reilly (14 page)

“The fire first, Mary,” he said at last. “And then you shall give me any message you have from Soho.”

So I went and knelt down at the grate, which suited me well enough as it gave me a few moments to compose my thoughts and my face. Still, I did not know
what
I was going to say when Master asked for Mrs. Farraday’s answer or if I would have the courage to give him the handkerchief, yet I knew I could not keep it one moment longer than I had to. The grate was hot enough to take the new coals quick and so in a moment I was done. I stood up and turned to Master, who had finished his wine in the few moments it had taken me to do the fire and was now pouring another from the bottle.

“You found Mrs. Farraday at home?” Master asked without looking up from his glass.

“I did, sir,” I said.

“And you gave her my letter.”

“Yes, sir. She read it in front of me.”

Master smiled and tasted his wine. It was the smile he often gives me when he is pleased by my way of speaking, though I did not see that I had said anything to merit it.

“And her response?” Master said.

My heart began to pound in my chest, so that I could scarce speak, and it was very odd for it was as if I had been frighted when really I had nothing to fear. I slipped my hand into my pocket and drew out the handkerchief.
Master watched my hand with such a quizzical look I felt sorry for him, and when he saw what it was I held out to him his face went white of a sudden. “She sent you this, sir,” I said, “by way of reply.” Master took the handkerchief and turned it over in his hands, folding the monogram under so he could not see it. Somehow I found my tongue. “She said all will be well, sir,” I said, “but that this is such linen even she cannot clean for you.”

Master closed his eyes at these words and hid the handkerchief between his hands. I could not tell what he was thinking, but some feeling was surely strong upon him, for he sat clutching the handkerchief, his eyes closed, while his face took on a look of such pain he seemed to struggle not to cry out. So I felt he was mastering his feelings and did not speak or try to comfort him in any way. When he opened his eyes there was tears standing in them. Then he opened his hands and the handkerchief, which had been crushed between them, seemed to leap up at him and I saw the corner with the monogram unfold as if to taunt him. He jumped up so quick it startled me, went to the fireplace and dropped the handkerchief on the coals. I stood looking at his back while he waited for the fire to catch, but it seemed to take a long time, yet Master did not look away. The room was that quiet I felt I could hear it when at last the edge of the cloth curled up in a line of flame and then, all at once, the rest of it went up in a puff of fire and smoke.

“Mrs. Farraday is right, Mary,” Master said, going back to his chair. “All will be well. I’ll see to that.”

I stood looking at the fire for I couldn’t seem to take in that the handkerchief was gone so easy and sudden, as it had cost me such trouble, and I felt in the next moment Master would say that I might go back to my work, which I thought I could not do. The question that come to me at Mrs. Farraday’s house come again and I said it out loud, though again more to myself, for I felt I knew the answer but had missed it somehow. “What does it mean?” I said.

Nor did Master reply. I know not if he even heard me. When I turned to him he had settled back in his chair, his glass in his hands, his eyes closed, looking peaceful. “Sir?” I said, and Master looked up as if I’d startled him, but then he spoke in much the same way as he does when we talk of the garden or of his school. “A woman of Mrs. Farraday’s character,” Master said, “seldom has the opportunity to be squarely in the right.”

“That would be her own choice,” I said.

“Yes, of course. To some extent. Though such choices as she has had to make may have been limited by her circumstances.”

Then I said nothing, for it seemed to me a wonder that Master would seek to defend Mrs. Farraday to me. I couldn’t think why he would, or how he could.

“To such a person,” Master went on, “the sensation of being right carries with it a wealth of indignation,
what we sometimes call righteous anger, often out of all proportion to the seriousness of the situation. Dramatic gestures, overstatements, even some confusion about the truth are not uncommon in such a state.”

“She was main angry,” I said, “sir.”

“Yes,” Master said, taking up his glass and giving me a searching look. “I don’t doubt that she was. Did she say anything else to you?”

I wanted to reply, not what she said, but what she
showed
me! Though I could see the bed, the twisted bloody sheets, the blood-soaked gown and especially the line of bloodstains on the wallpaper which I knew was made by a hand dragging along, all this was before my eyes as I tried to answer Master, yet I could not speak of it. Instead I said, “She said you thought you could buy your way out of anything, sir.”

Master smiled at this as if he expected to hear it. “It would be foolish to expect gratitude for charity,” Master said. “Those who need it most often despise the hand stretched out to help them.”

Then it seemed I truly would cry out, for I couldn’t believe Mrs. Farraday was one of Master’s charity cases, for she seemed to be doing well enough and to think Master owed her, and not in the way he described, because she needed it so badly, but because she had earned it by protecting his name, and though I hated the thought of how that might be, I could not take this new picture Master made for me and fit it over what I knew. It would not fit. Still, I have been too many years in service to speak out—indeed, I felt I had already been
so bold I could hardly look at Master—so I said nothing but stood looking at the carpet while my poor head seemed to buzz with all it was holding in.

“Mary,” Master said. “I am sorry to have to send you out as I have, on such errands, to such a place as that house. I cannot go there myself.”

I looked up and saw Master was near pleading with me. “I must trust you,” he went on, “to do as I ask and to say nothing of it to anyone.”

“I shan’t speak of it, sir,” was all I said.

Then Master gave me a long look, but not as I have so oft enjoyed, full of kindness and interest, but rather anxious, even fearful, and I thought, what is it he fears? That I should speak, or that I should know?

That was all our conversation, not much to be sure, but it has plagued me all this day and I have gone over it until I think I cannot go over it more, but as I can make no sense on it there’s nothing to do but try again. I have made up some stories that might explain this part or that, but none that satisfy me. How can Mrs. Farraday be in a position to save Master’s name unless
he
has done something to injure it, and what could he have done if he cannot go to that house but must send me in his place? My first thought, that Master may have helped some poor girl in distress, either to have a babe or perhaps to save her life after she made some foolish effort to get rid of one (for this happens often enough in such a place) would mean that Master had gone there, but if he could go to help, why would he not go on the second errand, which was clearly to make sure Mrs. Farraday
would keep his secret? And if he did not go, then how did his handkerchief go? And if he helped some person in distress, why would Mrs. Farraday be so angry and send such a message as she did? And how can Master say that Mrs. Farraday is angry because she is in the right and then that she is angry because she don’t care to accept charity?

No. I can make no sense on it and feel as if I am stumbling deeper and deeper into a web of lies. If I trust my own senses, and it seems I may as well, whatever happened in that room had naught to do with charity. A hundred times I have called up the marks on the wall, a hand dragged along, smearing blood as it went, and the shudder that went through me, as if I heard a woman scream. The young girls weeping, looking for someone, and Mrs. Farraday saying “they” had just taken her, and also the words that keep ringing in my ears though I have tried not to hear what they say, “him and his bloody favourite he has set loose among us here like a mad dog,” all this must go into the accounting as well.

No, I would have to be blind, and I wish I might be, not to see that there is one story as explains all, that Master’s assistant—who has such free rein here he comes and goes as he pleases, and if he may help himself to a book or a cheque, then why not a handkerchief—that he has committed some crime and Master has sent me to Mrs. Farraday to plead and to pay, not just to save his own name, but also that of Mr. Edward Hyde.

W
e have had a quiet week but a busy one and I have been up so early and done so late I have not writ, nor hardly thought. Master had one dinner party as well as a string of visitors in the afternoons, and has been out to his club, coming in with Mr. Utterson to sit and talk before the fire until very late. He has worked in his library a good deal, only going to his laboratory for an hour or so in the mornings after breakfast.

The weather has been cool but fine, so I have taken the chance to air mattresses and take up some of the carpets upstairs for beating. Cook and I have found a little time for the garden. She says it is time to put up some jellies, mint, thyme and rose geranium, which is one she learned at her country house to serve with butter cake. We hung out some orégano and parsley, which does grow with such a will it is constantly to be cut back so it has any shape at all, to dry in the little garden shed. This is the month to plant garlic. Mr. Bradshaw told us a story that the Queen’s cook chews a clove of garlic and then breathes over the royal salad, which made our cook shout with laughter.

I have not spoken to Master, though I see him much. He is always with company or has his head in a book or is going in and out. He tells me good day, might ask for this or that or bid me carry a message to Cook or Mr. Poole, but no more, and I feel when he
sees me I remind him of the house in Soho, which, it seems, he wants to forget.

As do I. I want to tell him, but how can I? I know he has said all will be well, but how can I believe it when I know that between us, nothing will ever be as it was again.

A
fter dinner last night I went in to get the fire up in the drawing room and as I was working Master come in from his own meal in a great rush it seemed to me, going straight to the decanter on the side table, pouring out a glass and swallowing it down in a gulp before he even spoke to me, when all he said was, “Mary. I didn’t see you there.”

“I’m just done, sir,” I said, getting up. “I won’t disturb you.”

“Disturb me?” Master said. He took up a book that was lying open across the wide arm of his chair, snapped it closed and set it back where he had found it. “Disturb me at what?” He threw himself down in the chair, rested his forehead against his hand and looked up at me with an expression of challenge, so I saw that he expected an answer to his question, though he did not think I could give a satisfactory one.

“At your studies, sir,” I said.

He gave me an odd smile, as if I amused him, but
only as a dog might, by some unexpected trick. “How do you do it, Mary?” he said. “I wish you would tell me the secret.”

“How do I do what, sir?”

“Live as you do. Always at your work, day after day, never complaining, but not like so many, not like a dumb animal in harness, but always so quick with an answer, so calm, so observant. I have the feeling you don’t miss much, though you say little.”

Now it was my turn to smile and I felt my relief must show too, for it seemed here we was back on our old terms as we have not been these two weeks. “You’re in an odd mood, sir,” I said, “to be thinking on my life.”

“But I’m thinking on
my
life, Mary. My routines, my acquaintances,” here he tapped the book he had closed, “my dry studies of an evening with a glass of port and a good fire.”

“Study is your work,” I said, “as cleaning is mine.”

“Study is not my work,” Master said coldly. “My work is in the laboratory.”

“Of course, sir,” I said, feeling chided, for Master seemed to know what he wanted me to say so I wondered why he asked. “That is your work as well.”

Then Master sat looking at me without speaking, but I did not feel he wanted to go. “Are you ever frightened, Mary?” he said suddenly.

“Of course, sir,” I said. “Everyone as is, sooner or later.”

“What is it that frightens you?”

I tried to think and of course the first thing that come to mind was standing in the doorway to that room in Soho and how I felt I would run until I dropped to get away, yet I stood there, and truly there was something that held me that was not fear but wanting to set that fear at rest with some explanation, for I thought there must be one. I could not say this to Master, I knew that, so while the picture crossed my mind I said what I could. “All manner of things, sir,” I said. “Bad dreams, noises I might hear when no one is about, anything as is sudden, the horses in the street.” I stopped, for Master looked annoyed, as if he wanted to brush away my answer.

“Yes, yes,” he said.

“Being hurt,” I said. “Being locked up, shut away.”

“Yes, of course,” Master said, but more gently. “You would be afraid of close places.” Then he fell silent.

“What is it you mean, sir?” I said, for I felt he was disappointed in me.

He gave me a long look, as if he could read what he wanted to know in my eyes, which made me feel so unsteady I wanted him to stop, yet I did not look away, even as he spoke. “Are you ever afraid of yourself, Mary?” Master said.

The room was silent about us, but for the clock ticking, which seemed to me loud of a sudden. I thought a long time might pass before I answered but Master and I would not know it, for we was both of us waiting to hear what I would say. At first I thought I would
say no, for it seemed a strange thing to be afraid of myself, but then I thought he must mean afraid of what I
might
do, or
might
say, rather than what I am and what I see in the mirror. And it was true that when I feel afraid it is what I imagine that frightens me most, which is, in a way, a fear of what is in my own head. So while Master sat looking at me I went over a great deal and at last, almost as a surprise to me, I heard myself say, “Yes.”