Mary Reilly (3 page)

After we’d done up the dishes there was nothing to do but go off to bed and as it was ten and I was tired from my work I didn’t mind much, but I kept wishing I had some way to deliver my writing as I promised.

Then when I was in bed, I thought mayhaps Master doesn’t even remember he asked me to write out my story for him and it was just his whim at the moment so he wouldn’t have to listen to me tell it and he could have some quiet in his drawing room. This cast me down very much and I went to sleep feeling tired to the bones and sad, which shows what comes of wanting to be important and feel different from others in the same station.

T
he next morning I was washing the front steps when Mr. Poole came out the door and spoke to me very coldly. “The Master has sent for you to come to the drawing room,” he said, and I knew he was displeased and suspicious, for Master never pays much attention to the servants and hardly knows their names, or so it seems, though that may be partly due to how determined Mr. Poole is to keep Master from any bother having to do with the house and what a free rein he has over everything that goes on, including who is hired and
let go. In most houses I’ve been in this is not the case and though I know I’m answerable always to Mr. Poole, as he is above me, still I can’t help but feel that in the end I’m answerable to Master alone.

I brought my bucket in and emptied it out in the yard, then washed as best I could and put on a clean apron. My skirts was black but there was nothing to be done about that and I thought Master might not expect more from one he calls in with no more notice than he’d given me. Mr. Poole was following me about, full of disapproval and as gloomy as a cloud, but I paid him no mind. I was wondering how I would get my writing down from my room, since I felt sure it was for that Master had called me.

And so it was. As soon as I made a curtsy before him, Master put down his teacup and asked if I’d done as he requested.

“I have done it, sir,” I said. “But I had no means of giving it to you, as you was in your laboratory last night.”

“I see,” Master said. Then he took up his tea again and sat looking into the cup as if he thought the next thing to say might be written in there. I stood it as long as I could, then I said, “I haven’t got the pages on me now, sir. They’re in my room and I don’t like to go up there just now as Mr. Poole has his eye on me and is likely to ask what I’m about.”

He gave his tea a weak smile and then I stopped being nervous for myself and noticed that he looked very unwell. His face was as pale as paper and his eyes
had dark circles underneath. “And you think Mr. Poole would have some objection to your doing as I ask?” he said.

This put me in a difficulty as it could never be my place to speak ill of another servant, but particularly one like Mr. Poole who is over me and has been in this house nearly twenty years, so Cook says. “Mr. Poole would never object to anything you wished done in your own house, sir,” I said, “but it’s his place to tell me what you want and not the other way around.”

“I see,” he said, giving me his mild, amused look. “Mary, you seem to have a fairly profound view of social order and propriety.”

“It’s nothing extraordinary to know, sir,” I said. “Every servant knows as much if he’s any wish to stay in service.”

“So how do you propose we solve this problem of circumventing the indefatigable Poole without compromising your position?”

“I mun tuck the pages in my sleeve after tea, sir,” I said, “when I sometimes go up to my room, and then put them somewhere as you direct, so that you may pick them up at your leisure.”

“You seem to have given this plan some thought,” was all he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I have.”

Then he just sat looking at me in that kind, sad way he has, but he looked so tired and ill that I felt I would ask him if he wasn’t knocked up, though I wouldn’t have put it that way to him. Before I could
speak he said, “Will you be working in the library this afternoon?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll have to dust and black the grate.”

“Then you could put your pages in the book we discussed before and close it up.”

“I could, sir,” I said.

“Good, then,” he said. “That is how we will circumvent the virtuous Poole.”

I did as Master asked, but not with an easy mind. It seemed to me no good could come of it as I’ve never known a gentleman or lady either who would encourage one servant to deceive another. Order in a household is as important to us below stairs as above and though I have no liking for Mr. Poole, who is so vain of his intimacy with Master he seems to have no other cause to live, I could not feel easy about the way Master had spoken of him as “the virtuous Poole,” showing me his contempt and taking me, whom he don’t know, into his confidence. I’ve been in service ten years now, since I was twelve, and I’ve never seen such a case, though it isn’t uncommon for ladies and gentlemen to play their servants off on each other and many’s the husband who seeks to lay his wife low by showing his contempt for her to her own dressing maid.

After tea I looked over my writing and changed a word here or there, feeling proud of it all in all, pleased with the way I’d started out particularly, and anxious to have Master’s opinion, as I have always had a great respect for those as can write things up, which is why I’ve
kept my journal whenever I could over the years, though every time I’ve left a house it seems I lose them. I tucked the pages in my sleeve and in the afternoon I put them in the book as I had promised. Then I cleaned and blacked the grate, laid the fire and dusted out the room, reading as many book titles as I could without slowing my work. Many of Master’s books are scientific and I wouldn’t make sense of them if I was to open them, but there’s two shelves, one of history and one of poetry, that I would dearly like to look into.

When I went back into the kitchen, Mr. Poole was at the sideboard decanting a bottle of port and as I come in he gave me a sharp, critical look which, because of my guilty heart, I could not meet honestly, which shows what comes of sneaking about and, as the saying goes, “trying to serve two masters.”

F
ive days passed and I neither saw nor heard Master. He took all his meals on a tray and the only words he had with any of us came to Mr. Poole who sometimes found orders to chemists tossed on the laboratory stairs which he filled himself, so he was in and out, always in a bad humour. My patience was worn thin on several scores. The weather was bad, rainy and unseasonable cold, so even if I got a few minutes to myself during a day (which mostly I did not get) I spent
them standing under the eaves in the court looking out through the rain at the little garden (as it is called, though it is just a green patch with low misshapen bushes at either end) that separates the house from Master’s laboratory, and this only made me gloomier still. I’d always fancied that someday I might have a garden of my own, and it is to this end that I am always saving and live so frugal my fellow servants wonder at me, but I know I mun be in service twenty years and be not much closer to this goal than I am now, and here Master has this fair bit of earth. Though, closed in as it is by buildings, the sun has heavy work to get to it, still it seemed to me something could be done with it if anyone had a mind to. But Master is absorbed in his studies and so he crosses and recrosses this bit of garden and never sees there’s no need to leave it bare. And here’s this big house with six servants in it, all busy enough to be sure, just keeping it in order, keeping all the fires lit and the larder stocked, as if there were a dozen ladies and gentlemen expected any moment, though no one comes much and Master disappears for days at a time, so it’s like serving a ghost, who may see what you do or may not.

I brooded on these things when I had the chance and my fellows seemed not much gladder than I. Mr. Poole was like a dog told to wait at the shop door; he was anxious for his master and would jump at every footstep. Poor Annie got a lot of his sharp tongue and bore it, as was her way, silent and drowsy. Cook and I were of the opinion that hard work is the best cure for
low spirits, so we made it our project to scrub out the kitchen from top to bottom and even made the narrow windowpanes sparkle. While we was at it, she told me stories of her childhood in the country, for she was a country lass, and how she come into service first working in a grand estate at S___________, as a scullery maid, and what fine hunting parties the ladies and gentlemen had there, and how the mistress was killed falling from her horse and the master closed the whole place up forever and come up to town. That is how Cook come to be in London, which she declares is a vile, filthy place not fit for anyone to live in and she vows she will go back to the country whenever she can.

That was how we passed the days when Master could have been on the moon as across the yard, for all we knew of his doings. Then on the sixth morning Mr. Poole bustled into the kitchen early, looking as cheerful as I imagine he can, and announced that Master would have his breakfast on a tray in his own bedroom and that I was to look sharp and get a fire up in his room as fast as ever I could, for Master was chilled to the bone and the room was that damp he might die of it.

I put my cap on, as it was so early I’d hardly dressed yet, and a clean apron and hurried up to Master’s room. I knocked at the door and heard him say, “Come in,” but his voice sounded weak and peevish, so I kept my eyes down, giving him a quick curtsy as I went in and made straight for my work. Even though I scarcely looked at him I took in enough to see that he was propped up on his pillows like an invalid looking as pale
as death. It didn’t take more than a few moments to get the fire up, as I’d laid the grate three days earlier, so I was soon done and stood up to take my leave when Master said, “Mary, let me have a word with you.”

I approached him but couldn’t look at him as I felt uncomfortable to be spoken to while he was lying in his
bed
, though he seemed to think nothing on it.

“I’ve read your story,” he said, “and I found it most interesting.”

“If you did, sir,” I said, “then I’m satisfied.” I took the chance of speaking to take a quick look at him, but looked away as quick for he had his kind eyes directly on my face.

“Like many a good storyteller,” he went on, “you raise more questions in your tale than you answer.”

I didn’t know what to say to that as it didn’t seem a compliment, nor did I understand what questions I could have raised or why he’d call my writing a “tale” as I’d only told what happened, so I said nothing but stood looking at a rose in the carpet like a dumb creature.

“For example,” he said, “nowhere do you explain what your relationship to your persecutor was.”

And of course I thought, Oh, I never did, and I wondered why I’d left that out, except that I’ve never liked much to say it even to myself. “I’m sorry for that, sir,” I said. “He were my father.”

Master drew in his breath and said, “Oh, I suspected as much, but I’m disheartened to hear it.”

Again I could think of nothing to say, except perhaps that I’d heard of worse cases than mine, but that seemed out of place somehow, so I said nothing.

“Another thing you never mention, Mary, is how you feel about this monster.”

“Oh, I don’t think he were a monster, sir,” I said. “He were an ordinary man, but drinking did for him as it has for many another.”

He was quiet then, and I wondered if I’d said something I shouldn’t have. At last he said, “You don’t hate this father of yours, Mary?”

“Well, sir, it was like this,” I said. “When I come out of hospital, Father was gone and I never seen him since. Marm went to work as a semptress, where she’d a room, and I went out to service …” I knew I hadn’t answered Master’s question but he took what I said and seemed to think on it.

“And in your opinion it was only that he drank. You think that drinking caused him to abuse you?” He put this question so careful and serious, as if he really thought I might know the answer and enlighten him, and also it was a question I had thought on considerable myself, especially in the long, dark-filled hours my father put me through as a child, and even afterwards when I was safe from him in the houses of gentlemen like Master, I thought on it, so I tried to give Master my answer as true as ever I could.

“When I was very small,” I said, “Father didn’t drink so much. He had some little work at the docks,
and though he wasn’t ever a kind man, he weren’t cruel to me. Since his wanting to hurt me came on at the same time as his drinking, I naturally put one as the cause of the other.”

“But you’re not sure which is the cause of which, Mary?” Master said.

“Many a man drinks sir, and we see some of them only become high-spirited and good-natured, and others as is boisterous or wants a good fight with their fellows. With my father, when he was drinking it was as if he couldn’t get enough of seeing suffering, and as I was at hand, it was me he took his pleasure in hurting. He was a different man then—he even looked different, sir, as if the cruel man was always inside him and the drinking brought him out.”

“Or
let
him out,” Master said softly.

I had not been looking at Master from shyness to say so much, and when he spoke I saw he was fixed on me, attending on my every word, silent and anxious. I felt a terrible strangeness and scarce knew where to look when a knock come on the door and my eyes met Master’s in alarm. It was only a moment before the door opened and Mr. Poole come in with Master’s breakfast tray, but I saw many things in it: Master’s look of sympathy for me, first, and then as I turned to leave I got a full view of Mr. Poole in the cheval glass and saw his look fixed on my back, full of anger, for he could see I had been talking with Master and he couldn’t bear it, so I knew, as I hurried out of the room, that I’d best keep to myself as much as I could until that day was out.

T
hat night Mr. Poole told us Master had made himself ill from too much study and hardly touching his food, so for two days he did not leave his bed. Cook said she knew how to “bring him back,” as she put it, by starting him on soup, eggs and weak tea and then gradually bringing him to more solid foods. Mr. Poole insisted that everything must be brought in and done by himself alone, even to laying the fire, though he was good enough to allow me to bring the coals up, a bit of work his narrow shoulders was probably too weak to bear. He said nothing to me about my talk with Master, but he’d his eye upon me at everything I did and if I had a moment’s free time he invented some chore to fill it up. I didn’t mind him and was glad enough to have my hands filled, as I felt worried about Master and it seemed to me that in doing my part to keep his house running smooth, I might help him to recover his strength.