The Servants (11 page)

Even though this door was still closed.

“Mrs.
Wallis,
” the man in the suit said, in an airy tone.

“I wonder if I might
borrow
a moment of your so-valuable time.”

“If you make it quick,” the woman said. “And try not to be infuriating.”

“This young gentleman was in the
kitchen
.”

“Well, well.” The woman looked down at Mark. “Good afternoon, young sir. And where did you come from?”

“Upstairs,” Mark said, again. It was about the only thing he was sure of, and he’d decided he would just keep saying it.

“He entered the quarters from the
front,
Mrs. Wallis. From
your
area of influence, to be plain.”

“Did he, now?”

“He did. Do we find this is acceptable? Do we run an
open
house
?”

“Didn’t see him.” The woman shrugged. “And now, if that’s all, Mr. Maynard . . .”

“No, it is
not
all,” the man said, and Mark realized he was becoming very angry. “We have spoken about this
before
. If

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t h e s e r va n t s

someone like the young gentleman can make his way in here, then any
vagabond
or
thief
might do the same. Is that a state of affairs we wish to encourage?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Wallis said. “But I didn’t see him. I told you.”

The two then started to argue, along what sounded like familiar lines. Mark was distracted, however. First by noticing that the smoke, when it finally made it to the ground, was settling in wet-looking clumps. Then by the sound of footsteps. He turned to see someone hurrying out from the side passageway, perhaps summoned by the sound of a new bell, which had started ringing in the kitchen, a bell with a low and ominous tone.

It was the girl he had seen when he’d been here before. The one with red hair. Once again she glanced at him in passing—and this time she stopped dead in her tracks.

“Good afternoon, sir,” she said hesitantly. Both Mr. Maynard and Mrs. Wallis turned to look at her.

“Emily—do you
know
this young gentleman?”

“No sir, Mr. Maynard,” the girl said.

Mark knew she wasn’t quite telling the truth. He knew she recognized him—that she, alone of all of them, had somehow glimpsed him when he’d been here the other night.

“Well, hurry on then,” Mrs. Wallis snapped. “I hear bells—don’t you? Run along.”

The bells were indeed still ringing, but that wasn’t the only thing that Mark could hear. There was another sound, too. It was like . . .

It was the sound of a police siren.

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Far away, but getting closer—as if a patrol car was zipping along the seafront road. Mark realized that he couldn’t hear Mr. Maynard and Mrs. Wallis as clearly anymore, though they were still talking heatedly to each other, their dispute escalating. The air seemed to be getting in the way, deflecting the sound of their voices and sending it past him in a way he couldn’t catch.

It didn’t feel as warm in the corridor now, either, and the glow that had been warming the walls since the man in the suit had snatched the spoon from Mark—walls that, he saw, were stained from where the smoke had clumped on them, to slide down toward the ground, leaving dark smears behind—

was fading, as everything became more dark once again.
Oh no,
he thought, his stomach dropping.
The siren
. . . He knew he had to get out of there—
now
—before the siren disturbed the old lady. He’d left the drawer in her room open, to make it easier to drop the key back in when he returned. She’d see that as soon as she woke, and know immediately what he’d done.

“Excuse me,” he said urgently. “Excuse me? I’ve got to go.”

Neither of them seemed able to hear him anymore. The woman was making a point by poking the man in the chest with her finger. He was not taking this well. Mark said

“Excuse me” once again, even louder—still with no response. He couldn’t get past them: they were blocking the whole of the corridor.

The siren got louder still, as it passed the bottom of the square—and Mark decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He stepped forward, prepared to squeeze between Mr.

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t h e s e r va n t s

Maynard and Mrs. Wallis, just push his way past, if necessary. But as he drew level with them, the temperature in the corridor suddenly dropped, and then . . .

. . . they just weren’t there.

The momentum he’d built up was enough to send him straight through the space where the man in the suit had been, to collide with the wall. He turned, bewildered, and looked back down the corridor. He was alone now. The light had returned to a soft gray. The smoke was gone. He grabbed the handle of the main door, suddenly convinced it wouldn’t open, that the rules of the world would have changed and he would be stuck in the corridor forever

. . . but it turned smoothly and he stepped quickly out the other side. He locked the door and hurried straight into the old lady’s room, as the sound of siren started to fade. She was shifting position, making a soft, wet sound with her lips. Mark dodged straight over to the drawer and dropped the key inside—slipping it shut afterward and then darting over to land as quietly as possible in his chair. He made it, heart thumping, just as her eyelids started to slowly rise.

“Dear me,” she said. “I was just . . . resting my eyes.”

“That’s okay,” Mark said, keeping his voice level with an effort. “You said you were tired.”

She levered herself upright. “Did I miss anything?”

“Oh no,” Mark said. “Nothing at all.”

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thirteen

Mark drank another cup of tea with her—strangely, the pot was still warm, though he knew he must have been in the servants’ quarters for at least twenty minutes, maybe longer—and then left.

He went straight down to the promenade, walked down one of the short flights of stone steps and onto the pebbles and continued for a few yards before abruptly sitting down, his back to the wall.

After a few minutes, he slowly raised his hands to look at them. Then turned to look at the left shoulder of his jacket. Though the man in the suit had taken the spoon from Mark, he had come out with a souvenir after all. Both his hands and his jacket had smudges on them, remnants of the dust and smoke he’d seen in the basement.

It was impossible to deny that he’d been in there. He sat until his behind hurt, and then got up and walked. He headed over the humps and dips of the pebble drifts to within a couple of feet of the waterline. The tide was out, and t h e s e r va n t s

when he’d walked a few hundred yards he was very close to the rusted supports of the West Pier. He stood with his hands pushed into his pockets and looked out at the twisted spider of lopsided metal, looming over the water. The last time they’d been to Brighton with Mark’s real father, a lone wooden hut, perhaps a ticket booth, had still been clinging to life, a final remnant of the way things had once been. Since then it had disappeared, the victim of some storm, fallen apart and into the water. When you walked along the line of the Brunswick houses, if you glanced down into the little basement courtyards you sometimes saw pieces of wood or metal down there, pieces of the old pier—often quite large—which had been washed up onto the shore and which people had picked up and brought home. Souvenirs, perhaps, as if people were trying to keep the memory of it alive.

Mark was in a daze. He was going over and over what had just happened, trying to make sense of it. Somehow, after he’d stepped through that door,
something
had happened. What that actually
was
he didn’t yet understand—but he no longer believed that the other night had been a dream. Not all of it, anyhow. It was clear from the way the girl—Emily—had looked at him that she recognized him, as he had recognized her. Somehow, unlike the other people he’d encountered, she’d seen him the first time he’d been there (or the second, if you counted the time the old lady had shown him around). There was something else in common between the last two visits, too. The more Mark pondered it, the more he realized it simply made no sense that the tea in the old lady’s pot could still have been warm. It had been sitting there for at

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h least ten minutes after she’d last topped it up, before she even fell asleep. Okay, the room was warm—but if you added the time he’d been in the . . . other place, it just
had
to have gone cold.

But he remembered something about his previous visit now, too. When he’d woken in the old lady’s room, it had been twenty-five minutes past eight. Yet after being in the back area for at
least
ten minutes, then returning the key to the drawer, getting back up to his room, and getting a drink from the kitchen, it had only been eight thirty-five. He was sure of these times. It was one of the things he’d used to prove to himself that the experience could only have been a dream.

Now it had happened again, and he knew what had just occurred could
not
be a dream. Dreams did not leave dust on your hands, or smudges on the shoulders of your jacket. Whatever he’d just seen, wherever he’d just been, it had been real.

As he walked back along the waterline, oblivious to the wheeling sea birds and whisper of the waves, Mark knew there remained another unresolved problem. If his previous visit had been real too, then it implied everything about that visit had been real. It meant that he really
had
slipped off

the sill of his window, broken his descent by grabbing the fence railing, and landed heavily in the basement courtyard. So why didn’t his leg hurt the next morning? Why didn’t it still hurt now?

He’d taken a lot of tumbles over the last three—almost four—weeks. He was used to ignoring them. But that was

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t h e s e r va n t s

just it: he had become accustomed to
ignoring
the aches and pains. With the knock he’d taken falling into the basement, there was nothing to ignore. How could that be? He remembered finding it hard to get up from his chair in the old lady’s room, limping hard when he got back to his bedroom, and waking in the morning fully braced for it to hurt like hell. But it had not.

It was a small mystery, in the face of everything else, but it gnawed at him all the way back to the house. When he closed the door behind him, he noticed something straight away. A faint smell, slightly sour. He sniffed, trying to work out what it was. It reminded him of the odor he’d encountered below-stairs. But he also knew, now he’d noticed it, that it had been present up here before. He went into his room and sat on the bed for a while. He didn’t feel like reading—not that he had anything new, of course—nor playing a video game. He just sat, much as he had on the beach, staring out of the window. Though what had happened earlier had been strange, and magical, it had left him with an uncertain feeling. It could have been that he was questioning his own mind—he’d heard of people going bonkers, starting to think they were seeing things that weren’t there. One of his own grandmothers had gone a little that way at the end, he’d been told—but that wasn’t it. It was more that although nothing bad had happened, the afternoon’s events had left him with a sense of heaviness. The image that kept returning to him was the change in the cook: the way she’d looked as she laughed, then later, as she stared

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h at the range. The change in her face was as irrevocable as the difference between being able to go on the West Pier or not. At six o’clock, he left his room, intending to head upstairs. He’d remembered they were going out tonight, and that was something to look forward to. He hesitated in the corridor, however, and before going up, he turned and walked past the kitchen.

He looked back toward the front of the house, judging the distance. When the girl in the gray dress had disappeared, she must have been about where he was now—though a floor below, of course.

He peered carefully at the other end of the corridor. After a moment, he realized there was a return in the side, just before the door to the bathroom, which created a small alcove. It held a coatrack now, on which his mother’s coat had hung without being disturbed for quite some time. But maybe . . . He went and stood in the space. Yes, you could just about fit a small staircase here. The old lady had said the servants had their own, weren’t even allowed to use the main one. The man in the suit had also mentioned a back stairs. The girl in gray had disappeared somewhere about here. He looked up, trying to picture the landing on the floor above. He could not, so he went up the real stairs and had a look. There was indeed another little alcove here. This must have been where it went.

Though it was not, of course, here now.

So what had happened to the girl? Where had she gone, and how?

Before he went through into his mother’s area, he noticed

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t h e s e r va n t s

something else, on the wall to the right of the door. Though the surfaces had been painted white recently—part of the redecoration David had instigated before they’d moved down here—if you looked closely, you could see a horizontal band a couple of feet long and half an inch thick. As if there’d once been a shelf there, where trays would be left and picked up. Mark looked back at the alcove. Two flights of a tiny staircase. Pick up the tray, then vanish back down again to the world below. If you moved fast, and timed it right, no one would ever know you’d been there. For just a moment Mark wondered if that still happened, and it was just that no one happened to be watching at the right time.

He shook his head. It was a silly idea.

David smiled briefly when Mark entered, but didn’t say anything. His mother was in the armchair, wearing a dressing gown over her nightdress. Mark knew right away that something was up. She took forever to get ready. She should have started by now.

Mark felt the speed go out of his feet. He drifted over to the couch and perched on the end closest to her. “How are you feeling?”