The Governess (3 page)

So she reconciled herself to the loss of another headless sugar-mouse. And so, after a little persuasion, did Pelham.

But when after his supper they went out on to the landing and found his unprotected treat had once more been made away with she could not resist leaning over the banisters and whispering fiercely ‘Just you wait.’

‘Just you jolly well wait,’ Pelham echoed, more loudly.

The next day’s Object Lesson was ‘How to Make A Cast with Plaster of Paris’ and by the end of that day Miss Unwin and Pelham were in possession of a fine representation of a headless sugar-mouse that had been carefully filled with gluey toffee and
as carefully dusted with icing sugar brought up with Pelham’s bread-and-milk by Vilkins, whom together they had sworn to secrecy.

Not many days later Miss Unwin was to look back on that giggling, cheerful ceremony and contrast it bitterly with pledges she had to ask of Vilkins in a matter a thousand times more serious than the theft of any number of sugar-mice.

But now the new trap was ready to be sprung. The plaster-mouse was carefully put in the exact place that the sugar-mice had hitherto occupied and Miss Unwin and Pelham retreated to the schoolroom and all but closed its door.

There they waited, Pelham’s bread-and-milk this time gobbled up in two minutes.

Then, at the precise moment Miss Unwin had expected, shortly after Vilkins had gone clumping down the back stairs to collect her second pair of hot-water cans for Pelham’s bath, there came from the front stairs just a few yards away a single, ear-splitting roar of outrage. A roar oddly stifled and muted.

Pelham slipped down from his chair and darted for the door. But Miss Unwin was quicker. She swept the door wide but at the same time protected Pelham with her skirts from any unexpectedly disconcerting sight he might see there.

But she had no need to worry on that score. The culprit, standing half-way down the first flight of the stairs with only his face showing through the banisters, was the second footman, Joseph, someone who had never been even remotely a favourite among the servants with Pelham. From the little she knew of the fellow, he was not much of a favourite with herself. She suspected him of more slyness than she had actually seen in him and she had heard him once, somewhat to her amazement, tell young John that one day he would be butler in the house.

She looked at him now with distaste. His long, bold-featured face was dark with rage as his teeth, large and yellow as a horse’s, stayed clamped on the sticky toffee inside the now broken plaster-mouse whose soft string tail was dangling from his lips.

‘Well, Joseph,’ she said, ‘you’re caught red-handed, are you not? How could you have played such a nasty trick on Master Pelham night after night?’

Through the banisters Joseph glared back at her, working his big teeth to free himself. At last, tearing off one of his white gloves, he managed to get a finger into his mouth and eject most of the sticky mess.

‘You could always have fetched the boy a new one, couldn’t you?’ he snarled unexpectedly. ‘You got him one soon enough the first time. I was watching you. But you didn’t dare face ‘em in the drawing-room again, did you?’

Miss Unwin felt a small jab of shame. It was true that she had not wanted to ask more than once for new mice for Pelham. But, she told herself, her share of the blame for depriving the boy of his treat was tiny compared to Joseph’s.

She turned to Pelham now.

‘Run along to your room then,’ she said to him. ‘I must have a word with Joseph, but you go and begin getting ready for your bath. Mary will help you when she comes back.’

Pelham crossed the landing to his bedroom, went in and shut the door without a word. Miss Unwin felt that her fears that confrontation with the sugar-mouse thief would not be as much of a pleasure as the boy had thought had turned out to be justified. But this was something she would have to try and put right at some other time. Now there was Joseph’s sullen face looking at her defiantly from the other side of the banisters.

‘I had hoped that this was something that could be settled here and now,’ she said to him. ‘But if you take that attitude I shall have to tell Mrs Arthur what you have done.’

Joseph looked at her for a little in silence.

‘Don’t do that, miss,’ he said at last. ‘I might be dismissed.’

There did not seem to be a great deal of repentance in his tone. But Miss Unwin seized on it. She could not easily bring herself to say anything which would cause the dismissal of even as sly a servant as Joseph. Anyone dismissed without a letter of reference faced a bleak future.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘We will say no more about it.’

Joseph’s long teeth, still with brown toffee smears on them, showed in a brief smile.

‘Thank you very much, miss, I’m sure,’ he said.

He came up the remaining stairs to the landing, slouched over to the green baize door to the servants’ stairs and vanished.

Miss Unwin went to watch over Pelham’s bath, feeling uneasily that the encounter had not been exactly satisfactory. Pelham had got into a fearful muddle trying to take off his undervest and it took her a full two minutes to sort it out and rather longer to put the discovery of Joseph’s mischief into a light in the boy’s mind that he could deal with. She felt, when at last she sat down in the schoolroom with her own supper, more than a little exhausted.

So it was all the more infuriating, next evening, when going with Pelham to collect his new headless mouse from the table by the banister she found that once again the sweet treat had disappeared.

Miss Unwin felt outraged and at the same time more than a little afraid. She had no doubt that Joseph had stolen this mouse just as he had stolen all the others. All his talk about losing his place had been so much dust to throw in her eyes, and it was the fact that he was calmly prepared to ignore her that filled her abruptly with doubts. How could she go on in this house if she was being treated with such contempt? Yet go on she must. She would not easily get another such chance in life again.

Little Pelham, however, plainly felt rage unclouded by any doubts at all. His cheeks were getting moment by moment redder and redder preparatory to some furious outburst.

‘Now Pelham,’ Miss Unwin said hastily, ‘I am going down this moment to your Mama, and if you are a good boy and make no fuss I dare say she will let me have another mouse for you.’

‘Yes please, Miss Unwin. And, Miss Unwin, you will tell her to send Joseph away, won’t you?’

‘What I tell your mother, Pelham, is something for me to decide. Now, you hurry along and begin getting ready for your bath, and, remember, when you come to your undervest, cross your arms over, take it by the bottom edge and pull it off you like a rabbit skin.’

‘Yes, Miss Unwin.’

Pelham went briskly across to his room and his waiting bath. Miss Unwin made her way down to the drawing-room with much less determination.

It was not braving the assembled family and the dinner guests she knew were there this evening that made her steps slow. If something had to be done, it had to be done. But she found herself now reluctant, despite Joseph’s blatant snub to her, to condemn him to dismissal, something she thought more than likely if Mrs Arthur was told of this repeated offence. She could not quite contemplate the idea of anyone in much her own hazardous
circumstances trudging the streets, basket of belongings on shoulder, looking for a bed in some servants’ lurk while begging and scraping for a new chance somewhere without a ‘character’, that necessary letter from a previous employer.

But if she kept silent about Joseph, would not that be neglecting her duty towards the family who had entrusted their child to her? To know that one of the servants of the house was an habitual thief, to have proof of it, and to say nothing: that would be to commit a crime herself.

So once again she turned the heavy brass knob of the drawing-room door and entered.

There were tonight some half dozen guests sitting among the many chairs of the big room, elegantly dressed, talking and laughing. Mr Thackerton was standing in his customary place in front of the ornament-crowded mantelpiece. Mr Arthur was present too, leaning over one of the lady guests, his long face intent in its frame of fashionable Piccadilly Weeper sidewhiskers. His wife was where she too usually chose to be, on the ottoman at the far side of the room, reclining languidly and playing with the heavy amber necklace round her throat as she listened to what one of the gentlemen guests was telling her.

Miss Unwin crossed the room, unobtrusively as she could, and, waiting her chance, intervened and asked if she could have a word in private.

‘I’m sure, Miss Unwin, you can have nothing to say to me that cannot be said here. Or, rather, cannot it in any case wait until tomorrow?’

‘No. I am sorry, but I do not think that it can.’

‘But dinner will be announced at any moment. I’m sure I hear Mellings at the door.’

‘I do not think so. It is only twenty to seven by the clock on the mantelpiece. There is a full quarter of an hour, and I shall not need more than two or three minutes of your time.’

Miss Unwin’s heart beneath her calmly respectful exterior was beating like a tattoo. Was she being too insistent? Would the gentleman standing now a little aloof put her down as a subordinate showing something like impudence? But Pelham must have his treat restored to him, and Mrs Arthur must learn why that was necessary.

‘Oh, very well.’

With a sigh and a pout Mrs Arthur rose from the ottoman, murmured something to her cavalier and led the way out to the hall.

‘Well? What is it then?’

Miss Unwin pulled the drawing-room door closed.

‘You will remember,’ she said hurriedly, ‘that not long ago I had to ask you for another sugar-mouse for Pelham when the one you had given him had mysteriously disappeared?’

‘Yes, yes. Has the same thing happened again? Do you want another one now? I don’t see why you could not have quietly fetched that without taking me away from my guests to tell me about it.’

Miss Unwin hurried on.

‘The same thing has happened a good many times since that first incident,’ she said. ‘But I have discovered who was the person responsible. It was Joseph.’

‘Well, if you have found that out, well and good. But I still do not see why I should be bothered over it.’

‘I had hoped that catching Joseph in the act would be enough to bring the business to a halt. But this evening he has taken yet another of the mice.’

Miss Unwin waited for her announcement to receive its due. It was Mrs Arthur’s duty to deal with Joseph now.

But Mrs Arthur remained silent.

‘Shall I tell Mellings that Joseph is to come and see you in the morning?’ Miss Unwin asked at last.

‘Yes. No. No, Miss Unwin, I really cannot have all this nonsense put upon me. Joseph has done this, Joseph has done that. I don’t know what to believe. And there are our guests, let me remind you. You are keeping me away from them.’

‘I can assure you that Joseph has stolen Master Pelham’s sweets,’ Miss Unwin said, with more firmness than she had thought herself capable of. ‘I caught him doing so last night, and he did not deny that he had done so each night before.’

‘No, really, I cannot understand all that rigmarole. I am sure Joseph is not half as much to blame as you seem to think. Now, come and fetch poor little Pelham a fresh sugar-mouse. I cannot
understand why you have kept him waiting so long. The poor lamb.’

Miss Unwin recognised that she could do no more. Meekly she followed Mrs Arthur back into the drawing-room, took a new mouse from the chiffonier and carefully carried it upstairs. But inwardly she resolved that the matter was not going to end like this. If she let it, her position in the house would become yet more intolerable.

But she had no immediate opportunity of putting matters right. Before she could act at all she had, indeed, to experience the humiliation of having Joseph almost openly triumph over her.

The encounter took place just after Morning Prayers next day. The whole household habitually gathered for this short ceremony at a quarter to nine each morning, with only Mrs Thackerton senior, the privileged invalid, absent. By that time the servants had got through all their first duties. The three fires of the kitchen range had been lit, and in winter fires in all the downstairs rooms as well. Hot water had been taken up to all the family bedrooms. The front steps had been holystoned to dazzling whiteness and the brass doorknob and the bells polished to a glitter. The table had been laid in the breakfast-room, and the servants’ own hasty meal eaten. Promptly at the quarter hour then they all filed into the dining-room and took up their positions in a line against the far wall – where in winter a sharp draught was apt to come in at the windows.

Mellings, broad and solemn-faced, stooping slightly with age and long service, headed the line. Next to him, plump and comfortable, stood Mrs Breakspear, red-faced already from bending over the hot range. Next, forming a curious contrast by her withdrawn paper-pale face, came Simmons, as yet unwanted by Mrs Thackerton upstairs in bed. Then came Peters, fresh from having seen his master dressed, reserved as ever. Beside him stood Henry, resplendent in his green plush and white waistcoat, plainly conscious of every inch of his six feet. And next to Henry, and noticeably shorter in height in his matching livery, was Joseph, who when Miss Unwin had entered the room with Pelham clutching her hand had given her a long, cool stare, his boldly featured, waxy face a mask of blandness.

Miss Unwin had felt able to ignore that look. But she guessed it was only a foretaste of what was to come. Nor would there be insolent looks from Joseph alone before much longer. There would be such glances from every single one of the servants, except poor Vilkins, as well as deliberate failure to accept the orders she was bound from time to time to give.

Next to Joseph in the servants’ rank stood Hannah, the first housemaid, already little inclined to do what she was asked. Vilkins, standing next to her, a drip on the end of her big red dab of a nose, would not be support enough if all the house was set against her. Even Nancy, the scullery maid, would no doubt find occasion for some display of contempt, and lubberly John, last in the line in his tight-fitting, button-sparkling uniform, could well play some trick or other on her.