The House of Dead Maids (6 page)

“It’s her!” I cried. “It’s her. If she comes in here, I think I’ll die.”

“Who? Old Miss Wheyface?”

“Wisht! Wisht!” Then I had to battle with myself to take my own advice.

We held our breath, but even the wind was quiet. Not so much as a creak of old timber did we hear.

“The ghost girl,” I whispered to Himself. “She stood right beside me.”

He leaned past me to push the door open and looked out into the room. “I don’t see her,” he remarked, evidently disappointed. “And you told me this morning the dead do no harm.”

His words put me in mind of the curate who had spoken them, himself now dead and gone. Ghosts shouldn’t frighten us, he had said, but I could not shake my dread of this one. She seemed so ghastly, trying to touch me with those dead hands, as if we were old friends. What reason did she have to seek me out?

I crept from the buffet into the gloom of the coming night. A hand touched mine, and I jumped, but it was only Himself who stood beside me.

“Time for tea,” I said, pulling him to the stairs. “Tea, and a nice hot fire.”

Deep in the nighttime, when not a spark gleamed indoors, nor a star without, the dead maid stood by my bedside again and summoned me from sleep. She shook me as if to rouse me and take me with her, those chilly fingers sliding down my arm; I could not move for sheer terror, but shrank within myself. Then the little boy beside me stirred in the darkness, and his breath blew warm on my face. Breath, warmth, life—and courage.

“Go away!” I cried. “We don’t want you here!” The icy fingers released me, and I sat up in bed. “Go away! You mean nothing to me. I don’t know you, you’re dead, go away!”

This time, I heard no footsteps, but I could feel that she had fled.

“The ghost girl?” asked Himself quite calmly as I lay back down, and I marveled that such a young child did not cry.

When day broke, I found two altogether ordinary objects resting on the pillow beside me. So ordinary were they, in fact, that at first I gave them no notice. Two socks, of exactly the sort I had made every day for the past year or more. One sock had come from the hiding place in the clothes press, I
discovered, and the other had come out of my greatcoat pocket. It was the sock I had been working during my journey to the house—had begun, but never finished. Yet here it was, tied off and complete, in the style of Ma Hutton’s school.

And then I knew who the dead maid was.

When Mrs. Sexton unlocked our door, I was waiting for her. “What happened to Izzy?” I demanded.

She set down the ash bucket and handed me black clothes. “For the young master,” she said. “Took long enough, they were letting out the old master’s things first.”

Himself was solemn as I helped him out of his rags and dressed him. “Master Jack wears a black coat,” he observed, twisting to try to see the back of his outfit.

I felt proud of my charge. The new clothes suited his dark coloring and made him look a handsome lad; and then, he had that bearing some people have, even at his young age, of being the one who ought to be giving the orders.

“He’s still barefoot,” I observed. “With a coat like this, he needs stockings and leather shoes.”

Mrs. Sexton was running a rag over the mantel. “Nay, he’s all right,” she said.

“And why black?” I wanted to know. “You don’t wear it.” Her own dress was brown homespun.

“Black’s just for family,” she muttered.

The absurdity of this remark loosened my tongue, and high time for it too. “But we’re
not
family,” I protested. “We none of us are. I’ve never worked in a house with more awkward staffing. And what
did
happen to Izzy? She came from the same school I did, and she wore black even though she wasn’t family. She should be a young woman by now. Instead, she’s walking nights. Why? The dead walk for a reason.”

Mrs. Sexton cleared away the ashes and laid on the new coals. Then she sat back on her heels. “She was a sweet little thing. Didn’t know she was called Izzy. I don’t learn their names.”

“Who killed her?” demanded Himself, standing
by her on the hearth, an odd caricature of respectability in his fine black suit and bare feet. “Tell us who killed her. I want to watch him hang.”

Mrs. Sexton took her pipe from her belt and cleaned out its bowl into the ash bucket. “You’ll have to ask the old maid or master that, young sir. I’m not one to tell tales.”

We ran downstairs to breakfast, hearing as we went the hiss of raindrops against glass panes and the gentle plash of water dripping into shallow puddles in distant chambers of the house. When we reached the kitchen, we found a gray torrent pelting against the large windows, and the tall bushes by the garden wall bending and twitching under its onslaught as though they shuddered from the cold. There would be no chance of a ramble today, I told myself as we ate our bowls of porridge, and I contemplated the unwelcome prospect of amusing my high-spirited charge indoors.

“Old Miss Wheyface will be in her rooms,” the little boy observed. “You can ask her what happened to your friend.” Then he appropriated my porridge and started in on it while I contemplated the even more unwelcome prospect of attempting to interrogate Miss Winter.

After breakfast, I followed him to Miss Winter’s
chambers, rather wishing I were going elsewhere. Miss Winter sat on a sofa with a tea tray nearby, her finger marking her place in a book. She winced as we entered hand in hand.

“Lovely day for a funeral,” she said.

“It’s the clothes Mrs. Sexton ordered for us,” I explained, brushing crumbs from Himself’s coat. He responded by pushing me away scornfully and advancing out of my reach. “Mrs. Sexton says black’s just for family,” I continued.

“So it is,” she said.

“But we’re not family,” I pointed out.

“Indeed you are not,” she replied.

“But that makes no sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed, turning back to her book. “Is that all?”

It almost was. Miss Winter was exerting her usual influence over me. I could feel myself growing ugly and stupid. My companion diverted my attention by picking up a costly teacup. “The dead girl,” he prompted when I signaled him to put it down.

“He means Izzy, miss,” I said as she glanced up sharply. “I—we, that is—we think it’s her, and we believe she’s not at rest. Mrs. Sexton told us to ask you about it.”

“Izzy.” Miss Winter’s brow dented, and she
pursed her lips. “Izzy . . . she was the first girl from your establishment, is that right?”

“Yes, miss,” I responded.

“She died not long ago. She visits me too. I don’t think she wants to leave. She was so happy here.”

“Happy, miss?” I asked in some confusion. It wasn’t that I couldn’t picture a girl wanting to linger where she had been happy. It was that I couldn’t picture it happening here.

“I blame myself,” said Miss Winter. “She was a pretty thing, and I made a pet of her. I haven’t been myself since she died. Perhaps if I could stop thinking of her, she would rest.”

She went on like that, talking of the times they had had together, a lonely woman and her maid. Himself soon tired of listening and wandered off into the next room. Miss Winter didn’t seem to be listening to herself, either, and that distracted me; it made me wonder what she was thinking of just then, and I looked for signs of it. That handsome white face of hers never varied by much; it showed only what she wanted it to show. But her eyes showed too much, flashing and gleaming, roaming the room as if she wished I were gone.

In her tale, Izzy was growing ill. Too much indulgence, weak lungs, a delicate constitution.

Delicate like the fine porcelain teacup, I thought. That was what Miss Winter’s face resembled: delicate white plates. Expensive, perfect. Brittle.

“We shared everything,” Miss Winter said, shaking her head sadly. “She was like the sister I never had.”

“Like your own child, miss?” I asked sympathetically.

“No!”

Her glittering eyes transfixed me with a baleful glare. They gave me quite a turn. In one of my houses, the grandmother had lost her wits, and they had kept her tied to a chair. I should have liked Miss Winter to be tied to a chair just then.

Gradually, her eyes dimmed, and she composed herself.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she sighed. “I suppose she was like . . . like you say. Family. And you see now why you aren’t family yet, even though you’re dressed like family. But perhaps one day soon we’ll call each other sister.”

I could envision no stretch of time long enough to produce such an unnerving result. “Yes, miss. Thank you, miss,” I answered. “I’d best see what the young one is up to.” And I made my escape, deeply grateful
that Miss Winter was not yet prepared to take to her heart another sister she had never had.

“Tabby, come see what I’ve found,” called Himself in a conspiratorial tone, crouching next to an open drawer.

Inside lay two wax dolls as long as my forearm, crudely fashioned out of candle-tallow. They had neither hair nor clothes, and nothing but the merest hint of features, but we could tell one was a man and the other a woman. The dolls were run through and through with steel pins until they bristled with shining metal.

I spied in the bottom of the drawer the enameled miniature of a lovely young woman with fair hair, rosy lips, and round white arms—the lid, or so it appeared, of a gentleman’s snuff box. But, alas! it had been ruined, wrenched from its box and then smashed, so that cracks disfigured the charming face and white flakes wreathed it round, instead of lace. Beside the lid lay a lock of yellow hair, of such a hue and curl that I perceived it must have belonged to Mr. Ketch.

“This one’s mine,” whispered Himself as he snatched up the man. “You can have her if you want.” And we tiptoed into the passage with our treasures, careful lest Miss Winter see us taking loot.

In my whole life, I had had but one doll, a simple wooden dowel with a face of ink, and that humble creature had come to a violent end, chewed by the head groom’s mastiff. Now I carried my poor injured wax figure to the kitchen and promised the straight pins to Mrs. Sexton for a candle end, whose flame I used to aid their removal and smooth the wounds left behind. I named my new plaything Alma Augusta after a rich girl I had once served, because she had had fair hair like the pretty woman in the smashed portrait. Why this fancy seized me, I cannot tell; my bald and battered Alma bore scant resemblance to the fair-haired stranger, except that both had been badly treated.

Taking an interest in our play, Mrs. Sexton fetched her rag basket and let us choose scraps to clothe them. Himself refused my offer to make proper garments for his doll. Instead, he knotted a piece of cloth around its legs in an ingenious fashion so that it looked like a baby’s clout. Nor would he allow me to remove the steel pins that pierced his doll’s bare chest.

“Mine’s a pirate,” he told me. “They shot him full of arrows, but he can’t be killed. He’s the most frightening pirate, sailors drown themselves before
he captures them because he makes them die terrible ways.”

“Wouldn’t he rather be a lord?” I suggested, thinking that he would make rough company for Alma Augusta.

“He
is
a lord,” said Himself, waving the figure menacingly at my young lady doll, who retired modestly behind a piece of cloth. “He’s a lord because he took over a whole island and killed all the natives, and now he lives in a palace and they call him Lord.”

“King, I should think,” I corrected him.

“Lord Pirate,” he declared. “Because he’s the most evil pirate in the world.”

“And what’s his name?” I asked casually. I had a plan, you see. This pirate’s character seemed an accurate portrait of my bloodthirsty young charge, and I had high hopes his name might serve a double purpose.

Himself grew quiet to ponder this, and his pirate grew quiet as well. Then he waved the scarred warrior around in a great flourish.

“Rogue!” he shouted. “That’s his name, Lord Pirate Rogue.”

And so my cunning plan came to nothing.

A piece of patterned chintz in the basket caught my eye, white flowers with a background of red. I soon had it cut into pieces and basted together. As I sewed the tiny seams, I hummed to myself, admiring my choice. The bold pattern was just the thing for a confident, adventurous lady. She should have petticoats, though, and if I didn’t mind the work, I could make a band of lace to edge them. Ma Hutton had taught us a simple pattern. Setting the dress aside, I rummaged in the rag basket for a piece of bleached muslin to serve as undergarments.