The House of Dead Maids (2 page)

“Shut up, old fool,” snapped Miss Winter.

They were like that the whole journey, silent or quarrelling, and I was sorely puzzled how to take it. At first, I had cast Miss Winter in the role of housekeeper and Arnby as a servant, but seeing him speak so free, I thought he must be the farm steward and she a maid or cook. Soon I didn’t know what to think, nor what their relation might be. I couldn’t imagine steward and housekeeper taking such a frightful journey together, and that just to fetch home a new maid.

The matter must have weighed on my mind, for as I dozed, I dreamt a strange thing. “Just you try it,” I thought I heard Arnby say, and his voice was as soft as silk. “I’ll grab you before you take two steps and smash your skull like pie crust. Why else do you think I brought my staff? We don’t need you, you know. Not the maids.”

I sat up in a great fright at this, sure I’d fallen in with robbers, but the two of them were silent, sitting side by side on the cart bench the same as they always did.

Arnby heard me move and smiled over his shoulder. “The little maidie’s been winking,” he said. “Did you have good dreams? Take care you don’t catch cold.” And he reached back to tuck me up warm in some sacking.

Partway through the second day, we left the horse and cart at a farmhouse and proceeded in a little open boat. Arnby plied the oars vigorously to make progress upriver. I found that mode of travel more interesting at first, for the fog couldn’t hold to the surface of the water where the current flowed, but tore into streamers or hung above us like a flimsy ceiling. When I looked to the shore, I could make out a few feet of steep bank here and there, or a line of trailing underbrush. Now and then I caught a glimpse of cliff walls.

But it was very gloomy on the river, with cold drops sliding down our hair and wetting our clothes; I soon was damp through and wished the endless bumping about would end. Then the river narrowed to a stream, shallow but fast, and Arnby had hard work to pole along the bottom. The night drew in, and Miss Winter began to fuss and scold, and I curled up in my greatcoat and tried to sleep to get away from them both.

How it ended I barely knew, but I remember
the light shining on a small beach of shingle and Arnby carrying me along, while Miss Winter held the lantern before us and looked like nothing but a white face and a pair of hands with her black dress swallowed up in the night. I didn’t want to be held and would have liked to get down, but protesting the point seemed so like their bickering that I did not know how to do it politely, and at the last I felt so tired and unhappy that I did not do it at all.

And that is how I came to my new house, carried in like a wax doll, and a bad business it was then, and a worse business to follow.

I woke from a heavy sleep to the sound of a person shaking down the ashes at the hearth, but when I opened my eyes, I saw only the dense shade of a little cloth room. A moment later, a woman pushed back heavy green folds beside me, and light streamed in and lit up twinkling motes of dust. I was in a curtained bed so large that I could stretch out both arms and not reach its sides, and so high that I had to climb down a wooden stepladder drawn up beside it. I might have hurt myself tumbling over the edge.

“Whose room is this?” I ventured to inquire, awed at my surroundings.

“Chamber for the young maid,” muttered my companion. “Come to the hearth. You’ve got to be measured.”

She took a string from around her neck and held it at my collarbone while she bent to check its length to the floor, marking the intervals on it with a chunk of coal. She had a broad, dumpy figure and freckled arms with dimples at the wrists, sparse grizzled hair, gray eyes that studied the world with sour disinterest, and a seamed mouth cinched up tightly like a miser’s purse.

“Where is the other girl?” I asked, turning around so she could find the span of my shoulders.

“We got no other girls,” she said. “Just the old maid and you.”

The morning light shone through a small window set with uneven diamond panes of blue and amber glass, throwing a harlequin pattern onto the wooden floor and brown gritstone walls. In the corner towered a great oak clothes press decorated with puffing faces and roaring animal heads. By the bed, a little table held an earthenware pitcher and washbowl, and next to me at the hearth stood an upright chair, with my garments laid across it to dry. A very
old mirror hung by the door. Fashioned into its bead-work frame were fanciful scenes of fighting birds, but the glass was so smoky and streaked that it returned little by way of a reflection.

“I heard the other girl in my sleep,” I said. “I heard her get up and wash. See, the other pillow’s dented.” And I pointed at the bed.

The woman didn’t stop to look. She worked her pursed mouth into a frown until she looked like a pug dog. “We got no other girls,” she said stubbornly. “Just a few silly village lasses, and they won’t come in at this season.”

She lapsed into silence, and I held up my arms so that she could measure my waist. When she was finished, she checked her marks, grunted, and straightened up. “Name’s Mrs. Sexton,” she told me. “I keep the house. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, the master’s coming back with a child for you to look after. Till they arrive, you can do as you like.” She wrapped the measuring string around her neck and turned to quit the chamber.

“A child!” I said, surprised. “A little one? I’m to be nursemaid?”

“I don’t know his age,” she muttered. “When you want food, come to the kitchen.” And with that, she was gone.

After washing and dressing, I ventured out to find the kitchen, a harder task than it would seem. I went down the dark passage outside the bedchamber and found a little back staircase, but it led into a part of the house that wasn’t used. I wandered there for some time from room to room, trying locked doors.

If I liked, I could look ahead in my tale and declare that the house felt sinister, but all I knew at the time was that I didn’t like it. It was large and labyrinthine, and, owing to its harsh setting, very poorly lit. The wind was its most active visitor, prowling about ceaselessly, rattling the casements and sobbing in the chimneys; thus, the stone walls were strong and thick, and the windows small and few. Fortunate was that chamber which held a double casement of clear lights. Most held, as mine did, a few small panes of amber glass. The corridors might as well have been passages in a crypt, for they had no windows at all.

I could believe that the house had no maids, as dirty as the chambers were. A froth of dust covered their surfaces. The furniture was muffled in canvas sheets, looking more like some pale shrubbery sprouting in the corner than a chair or table fashioned for the use of men. Many rooms were bare of
ornament save a few grotesque old paintings and the omnipresent covering of grime.

In the end, I rediscovered my narrow stair and went back up, took another turning, came upon a second little stair, and found the kitchen at last. A clean place it was, too, I was happy to see, with a big bare wooden table and a great roaring fire. Mrs. Sexton was settled before the glowing hearth on a bench, her mending basket beside her and a clay pipe clamped between her teeth. Not another creature was there to enjoy the glorious warmth except the poor plucked fowls who lay next to the stew pot.

She served me oatcakes and butter in silence, but her portions were generous, and my feelings towards her mellowed.

“Where is Miss Winter?” I asked as I ate.

“You mean the old maid, don’t you,” she muttered. “She’s in bed. No telling if Her Majesty means to get up this fine day.”

The kitchen was blessed with two large windows through which I could see a bit of vegetable garden, a rock wall, and some ragged bushes bowing low before the wind. Behind these rose a steep green slope, with shadow and sun sweeping across it as unseen clouds hurried by.

“Shall I take her a tray then?” I asked as I rose from the table.

“If the old maid wants food, she can come here for it, same as you,” said Mrs. Sexton. “She’s naught to you, and she’s not your friend. Don’t be doing her favors.” And she turned away from my questions, leaving me more confused than before.

I found myself at liberty once my breakfast was done. Mrs. Sexton steadfastly refused to set me a task. At one of my old houses, the master’s return would have meant a troop of twenty maids chattering and laughing and cleaning everything from top to bottom. Here I was the only maid, and yet it seemed I was no maid at all, only a nurse for visiting children. Not for as long as I could recall had I been without employment of some kind, and the prospect of a day of idleness rather daunted me. Not wishing Mrs. Sexton to think me stupid, however, I resolved to return to the bedchamber assigned to me and puzzle out what to do.

Back I went into the dim passageways, a tangle of turnings as twisted as a lover’s knot. With my belly full and no employment to hurry me along, I rambled at my leisure. Room let onto room in inconvenient arrangements, and steps ran up or down in the most inexplicable fashion. Some chambers
exhibited great extravagance in the form of elaborate stained glass or magnificently painted ceilings, but the entire place seemed to belong to a bygone age.

Here is the answer, I thought: the master has better houses and comes here but seldom. Probably he’s close with his money and resists paying wages to maintain such a monstrous old castle. He’ll stay locked in with his agents while he’s here, turn a blind eye to the dust, and leave as soon as he can. And what will I do then? For surely he’ll take his child with him.

Dismayed by these musings, I found myself liking the place less and less. There was little of cheer or comfort about it. Such decoration as I came upon breathed a predatory spirit, dominated by the steel relics of war. Pikes and halberds, chain mail, and crossed arrows adorned the walls. Upon one heavy sideboard clustered a trio of cannonballs in little hollows, and on a chest of drawers sat a cavalier’s helmet. Everywhere were hunting trophies in the form of animal skins, or antlers, the weapons of the beast.

To fix my bearings, I looked out the windows whenever the glass would permit a view. To the west, the great green ridge rose up behind the house and loomed over us like a frozen wave, but it gave
no shelter, for the house stood on a mound or hill far enough out from it to catch the winds that came tumbling down its slope. To the east, and well below us, I caught glimpses of the silver curves of the stream that had brought me there, and close by its bank, the dark roofs of a small village. North lay stark moorland, rising into blunt, rocky crests and falling into treeless valleys, a desolate place devoid of shelter or human habitation, the haunt of the fox, the plover, and the solitary crow.

No window looked south.

I found when I returned to my bedchamber that someone had been in to tidy it, and the green curtains around the bed were tied back. This hardly seemed like the work of Her Majesty, Miss Winter. Mrs. Sexton must have come in to take care of it, but she had left the work half done. The door to the bottom cabinet of the clothes press was standing open. Next to it on the floor ranged a neat line of small objects. I came close and found that they were feathers.

A board that formed the bottom of the clothes press had been tilted up to reveal a shallow compartment between it and the floor. Within that compartment were a great many objects of charm but little value. One by one, I took the items out
and arranged them next to the feathers. There were any number of curious buttons, as well as two striped snail shells and the tiniest bird’s egg I could imagine, five foreign coins, a cracked game piece fashioned like a horse’s head, and a pebble as round as the moon. Beneath them lay several slips of paper and two small worked samplers. The ink on the pages had faded and the paper darkened until the pen strokes were all but indistinguishable, and the samplers were stiff and brittle with age.

Then I had a surprise. At the back of the compartment lay a sock, an old friend in a crowd of strangers, for it was the style we knitted at Ma Hutton’s school. I pictured the girl Izzy, who had come to this house before me, chancing upon this delightful little hoard. I looked at the neat line of feathers. Then I put the objects back into their hiding place, jumped to my feet, and ran downstairs.

I found Mrs. Sexton in the kitchen, chopping carrots for the stew. “A person has been in that room,” I told her.

She gave me a sidelong glance. “What room?” she asked, and this silenced me for a few troubled moments. On no account could I bring myself to call it mine.