The House of Dead Maids (3 page)

“That room you put me in,” I declared at last.
“Somebody has been in it. Somebody has been playing!”

I expected her to deny it, and I was prepared with my facts. I knew that none but a child would treasure that little hoard, or treat those feathers with such care. But Mrs. Sexton merely cinched her wrinkled lips tighter around the stem of her pipe.

A clatter of pattens in the hallway just then brought me out of the kitchen at a trot, but by the time I reached the door, the person had gone. I heard the clatter go by again just out of sight around a corner, but another empty corridor was my reward. At length, I followed the sound to a bright, clean passage. I tried a door and found a pleasant parlor there, and Miss Winter glanced up from her book.

“Have you brought tea?” she inquired. A clock on the mantel chimed five, the only clock I had seen in the whole house.

“I was looking for the girl,” I confessed. “I thought she came in here. Mrs. Sexton said there isn’t a girl, but there is. She’s been in the room where I sleep.”

“She comes and goes,” said Miss Winter. “I’m sure she’ll find you when she wants to. Tell that worthless woman in the kitchen I want my tea.”

I stood in the doorway for a bit, but she didn’t look up or speak again, and I was too cowed to ask
questions. Perhaps the other girl is simple, I thought, returning to the kitchen. Perhaps she’s not as she should be, and that makes the servants loath to mention her to strangers. It isn’t worth a quarrel, after all. And I persuaded Mrs. Sexton to let me take Miss Winter her tea, just for the pleasure of having an occupation.

We ate our own meal in the kitchen, sharing the big wooden table between us. I loitered by the fire until the heat made me sleepy, and when Mrs. Sexton saw me nodding, she took me up to bed. She tended the fire, passed a pan of hot coals between the sheets to warm them and turned the key in the lock as she left.

Late at night, the other girl returned to our chamber and climbed into bed with me. And, oh, how cold she was! The arms that twined around me were icy, and her dress was wringing wet. I grew cold to my bones as I hugged the thin form, attempting to warm it up. Vague fears troubled me, and Miss Winter’s stern figure haunted my sleep: nothing but a white face and hands, with her dress swallowed up in the night.

When morning came, my little companion was gone, but not my indignation, and I was quite short
with Mrs. Sexton when she pushed back the curtains on the bed.

“The other girl was here last night,” I said severely, “and you needn’t pretend she wasn’t. What a state she was in! She’ll catch her death, the way you let her run about in wet things.”

Mrs. Sexton only stared at me. Then she heaved a sigh and turned to tend to the fire.

“You needn’t lock the door anymore, either,” I added. “It didn’t keep her out.”

“Lock’s not for them,” muttered Mrs. Sexton. “Lock’s for you, to keep you from wandering the house at night and waking me up.”

“I can be trusted to stay where I’m put,” I answered as I climbed down the wooden stepladder. “What’s that?”

A handsome dress lay on the chair over my old one. The cloth of it was sturdy and new, and if it lacked the layers of petticoats that were the fashion in town, this did nothing to diminish my growing joy, for as I held the dress up, I could see beyond all doubt that it had been made for no one but me.

“The village finished it last night,” said Mrs. Sexton, ignoring my pleasure to scrape the ashes.

I smoothed the wide skirts, my bad temper
forgotten at the amazing news that a village had worked together to clothe me. The dress was black, as black and perfect as a crow’s wing, a miniature copy of Miss Winter’s imposing garment. “I can wear this to church today,” I said, and that put the capstone on my delight. Never had I so much as dared to dream of poor ugly little Tabby Aykroyd showing off a new dress in church.

“Church?” asked Mrs. Sexton, pausing to eye me askance.

“It’s the Lord’s Day,” I reminded her. “Oh, dear! I need to wash. What time do the house staff leave for service?”

“Wash if you like and go where you like,” said Mrs. Sexton. “I stay here.” And she picked up her bucket and left the room.

This put me in a predicament. Weekly service was inevitable, inescapable, as firmly fixed in the cycle of existence as the baking of the household loaves of bread. Now I asked myself, did I want to go to church? And the answer was by no means simple. Sometimes a curate had the gift of preaching, but more often than not, service was a contest of endurance to see whether the preacher’s voice would give out before I lost the feeling in my dangling toes.
The thought that I might choose—that I might go or not as I pleased—awakened in me guilty relief.

I did have a suspicion that the quarrelsome, untruthful behavior of the residents of this house could not be improved by their impiety and that I should seek a different course if I did not wish to become like them. Nonetheless, such is the frailty of human goodness that I soon stifled this counsel with a dozen practical suggestions. Before I had concluded washing, I had decided to remain at home. Already I viewed my absence from divine worship that day with melancholy regret, as though it were a circumstance that had happened long ago instead of an event that had yet to take place.

I blush to own that this regret was quite drowned out by another, and that was the lack of an adequate looking glass. The old one in the beaded frame returned only a suggestion of features. I longed to see my new clothes, and as I stepped into the passage, I was just turning over in my mind where I might have seen a better mirror. When first I caught sight of the small figure in black, I thought it was my reflection.

She stood very still in the dusky passage where the light was poorest. Like me, she wore the black
dress that proclaimed her a maid of the house, but where mine was new, hers was spoiled by mildew and smears of clay. Thin hair, dripping with muddy water, fell to her shoulders in limp, stringy ropes. This was my companion of the night before—and she was dead.

The dead hold no terrors for me. I have watched by the beds of those who have passed on, comforted by their sorrowless repose. But this little maid was a ghastly thing, all the more horrible because she stood before me. It wasn’t the pallid hue of her grimy face that shocked me, or her little gray hands and feet. It was the holes where her eyes should have been, great round sockets of shadow.

The dead girl opened her lips as if she meant to speak. Her mouth was another black pit like the black pits of her eyes. She was nothing but a hollowed-out skin plumped up with shadow. I had the horrible idea that if I were to scratch her, she would split open, and the darkness within her would come pouring out.

I remember that she reached out a hand towards me, and I remember running away. I remember throwing open the door to the kitchen, and Mrs. Sexton’s startled curse. I stood for long minutes by the bright, sunlit window, my teeth chattering
uncontrollably. The comprehension that this was the icy form I had held through the night sputtered across my nerves and set the room to spinning.

Then Mrs. Sexton brought a glass, and brandy coursed through me like fire. Sense returned, and with it, an over-powering fervor. This had been a judgment upon me. I needed no other sign.

“I’m going to church!” I gasped.

Mrs. Sexton didn’t hinder me with questions, which would have made me worse again. Seeing that I couldn’t eat, she tied up bread and cheese in a napkin and sent it along with me. Not five minutes later, I stood trembling in the sunshine of a breezy spring day, as glad of my escape from that dark house as I had been of anything in my life.

The kitchen garden shone with dew, and the green slope of the great ridge climbed into the sky before me, facing the rising sun. I pushed past a sheep gate in a low stone wall and came around the
side of the house. Then I discovered why I had seen no southern windows the day before. This side of the house was a long high barn with stables. Nor had the barn seen kinder treatment than the house: weeds grew in pens where the farrowing sow should lie, and the stalls stood empty, their paint peeled and faded. Only a few black-and-white hens scratched here and there in the barnyard and squawked their displeasure as the gusts caught them crosswise and sent them round like weathervanes.

Letting myself out the barnyard gate, I came to the front of the house, with a broad door in the middle of it and fancy lettering carved overhead. The village was out of sight beneath the brow of the hill, but I chose a likely path, scooped into a deep brown rut by generations of feet and littered with loose rocks. As I picked my way along it, drinking in the clean air, the gray phantom I had left behind began to lose its horror.

When I was nine, I had helped to nurse our curate’s family during a fever. We lost them over several months, first the wife and babies and finally the curate himself, but not before that gentle man had made a lasting impression upon me. He liked to talk of godly things as he lay on his sickbed, and he gladly answered any question my childish mind
could pose. He had not doubted that his family waited for him in the joyous kingdom of the Lamb, and when once I had asked him about
ghosts
, he had swiftly assured me that the dead do no harm to the living. My desire to attend worship this morning had much to do with that good man, whose conviction upon this point I longed to share, though I was in no wise convinced.

But when I entered the village on the bank below, I found no stone church, nor parsonage, nor parson, but only a little plot of graves on the green, with headstones plain and square. The village matrons were taking advantage of the sunny weather to wash their laundry and had produced in adjacent dooryards a great boiling of kettles. The brazen spectacle of work thus commenced on the Sabbath fairly took away my breath.

The children spotted me first and ran to their mothers, who left their work to watch my progress. They appeared cloddish, though I say it, who am no beauty myself; the common run were short and wide, like Mrs. Sexton, with thick limbs and sloping backs. They did not greet me, but stared, and I heard a murmur of “young maid” repeated from mouth to mouth. That woke in me the memory of what I owed these dull people; and when one of them
approached me, I endeavored to thank her for my new dress. She did not reply, but she took out her thimble and touched it to me, with the air of one performing a rite.

I turned away much astonished and continued my quest, and they followed me, pointing and murmuring; but my path soon found the bank of the shallow brook and lost itself in river gravel, where several boats lay pulled up at the edge of the water, and Arnby’s among them. I had no desire to wet my feet, so I walked back through the village accompanied by the whispering throng. I was not sorry when they halted at the little graveyard and we parted ways.

Going up the path was harder than coming down, and not only because of the climb. I had found no help for my troubles. My heart was heavy and my nerves were at a stretch; and then, there was the discouraging spectacle of the big brown house above me, brooding upon the brow of its hill, and the great green ridge rising above it and brooding over all.

Not anxious to return so soon to the haunted place, I turned aside to follow a faint trail that took me out of sight of both house and village. It ended at a doorway of arched stones set into the hillside, and a thick studded door standing open. Within I
spied a straight passage, walled and flagged with wet stones, that angled up as it bored through the hill. It came to me that this must be another way into the house, or at least into its cellars, a shortcut to save the backs of tradesmen bringing supplies up from boats. I even thought I could see gray light falling into it from the other end some distance off.

I took a few steps along it, but the gloom oppressed me, and the odor of damp earth brought back the memory of what I had seen as strongly as if the little gray corpse stood in the passage beside me. Before I knew what I was about, I had turned and run back to the friendly daylight. There I stood for a few seconds, gasping.

Boots scraped the flagstones behind me, and Arnby came striding out of the passage, with dirt clinging to his trousers and a spade over his shoulder. “It’s the little maidie!” he cried, evidently startled to see me. “And where would you be going this fine morn?”

The knowledge that even he was hard at work on the Lord’s Day sent my spirits tumbling to my toes. “I was going to service,” I told him, blinking back tears. “But I couldn’t find the church.”