Untitled (3 page)

   Mrs. Johnson wipes her hands on a cloth and snaps back, "With you out all this time, just when did I have the chance? It's an early dinner upstairs tonight, as I've told you a dozen times—we've been all in a rush."

   Sarah gives a laugh. She whisks off her coat and tosses it over Jane's, lifts off her hat, and takes her cap and apron from where they're hanging behind the door. "Well, here I am now, ready and willing," she announces. She takes the soup tureen from Mrs. Johnson, then sweeps out of the room and up the stairs.

   Mrs. Johnson runs the back of her hand over her forehead, and it comes away glistening with sweat. "Elsie," she calls. Then again, "
El
sie. Get in here."

   Elsie comes through the doorway from the scullery and leans her hip against the table. A smell of soap and hot grease hangs about her.

   "Now," says Mrs. Johnson as she nods at Jane, "let's get your box upstairs." By which she means that Jane and Elsie must carry it, large and heavy though it is. For a moment Jane suspects that Elsie will do nothing more than look down at it with her hands knotted together, for she stands like that until Mrs. Johnson swats at her bare arms with a cloth and says, "We can't be waiting all day."

   Jane reaches down behind her back for one end of the box, and Elsie picks up the other. She expects that the girl will not be much help, but all of a sudden she feels the other end lifted high. Of course, she thinks. For although Elsie is thin, like her she must have spent years carrying scuttles of coal and buckets of hot water.

   Together they follow Mrs. Johnson out of the kitchen and up the narrow stairs at the back of the house, up past the main floor, past the first floor, on up to a dimly lit corridor that must be right under the roof. Mrs. Johnson opens a door at the far end and tells her, "You're sharing with Sarah. Your bed's the one beneath the window." She steps back to let her in. "You'll want to tidy yourself up. I'll see you downstairs in ten minutes."

   Between them she and Elsie get her box to the end of her bed. Jane dusts off her hands and opens her mouth to thank the girl. But already Elsie's skirts are disappearing around the door, then she's gone.

        
E
ven with her knees hugged up to her chest, Jane can't get warm. She pulls the sheet over her head to hold the warmth of her breath close to her body. It isn't just the cold that is keeping her awake, though God knows, with a draughty window above her bed and no fire in the hearth, this room is icy. Nor is it the ache in her ribs from when she fell against the railings. No, what keeps her awake is the quick-quick squeezing of her heart. Her muscles—in her arms, her legs, her neck—all feel stiff, ready for her to flee this place. She wonders if the Saunderses would have her back. Maybe their new girl isn't working out. Maybe she's already broken some of Mrs. Saunders's best china tea set.

   They'd keep her, though. That's the point—to train up girls and make them useful. It's Mrs. Saunders's favorite word: girls like Jane need to be
useful,
and they need ladies like Mrs. Saunders to make them
useful. Ma
ybe, thinks Jane, that's the only way in which Mrs. Saunders is
useful,
because she wouldn't dream of carrying a tray or putting coal on the fire, or even washing out her own teacup.

   I'm ungrateful, she tells herself. If the Saunderses hadn't taken her on, what would have become of her? The thought of it makes her feel smaller and more miserable.

   She would stretch out her legs to relieve the cramp in them but she's only now begun to feel warm. So she holds herself and listens to Sarah's soft breathing in the bed only a couple of feet away. She doesn't seem ill at ease. In fact, she seems content in this strange household. But if everything here is as it should be, then is she the one who is all wrong? She has tried telling herself so since she lay down in this cold bed an hour ago, but she can't make herself believe it.

   Her last evening in Teignton—only yesterday!—Mrs. Saunders asked her into the parlor. Jane stood on the edge of the rug, careful not to block the warmth of the fire from her mistress. Mrs. Saunders said, "You be a good girl, now, you hear me? I've given Mrs. Bentley a fair idea of your character, and your history. She must be a true Christian woman to bother with you." The words hung there, like a cobweb between them. "Now, you listen to your new mistress, you obey her in everything. And when you are not in her presence, you must obey the upper servants because they are her surrogates." The word sounded new on Mrs. Saunders's lips, straight out of one of her books that told her what to say to her servants, as though if only you talk in the right way you can persuade them into working more hours than there are in the day. "And if," continued Mrs. Saunders as she looked into the fire, "things are not as they should be, you must stand firm." She shifted her gaze to Jane. "Do you understand me? Because your character, Jane, will be at stake."

   She'd thought she had understood. Now, though—now things are less clear. The Bentley household is not what she expected, yet what does she know? Only the orphanage, the vicarage, what little Mrs. Phelps told her of her previous positions. Still, this is what she has noticed so far, and this is what keeps her awake: there is something upside-down about this place. After the early dinner upstairs, the servants sat down to their own meal. Mrs. Johnson served them some of the soup meant for the family, but that wasn't all. They had thick slices of the roast, too, and mashed potatoes with gravy.

   This is not how things should be. Didn't the servants have their dinner at midday? Wasn't an early supper of bread with cheese and some cold meat more than enough in the evening? And to eat the same food as upstairs—to Jane this is beyond decadent. It is almost obscene.

   As she lies curled into the warmth of her own body she wonders: here in London are servants not a different class of people from their employers? Maybe Mrs. Saunders was wrong for having made her and Mrs. Phelps eat two-day-old bread and cold, boiled mutton, while the good food—the roast veal and new potatoes, the milk puddings and jellies—that Mrs. Phelps made and Jane carried upstairs was kept for her and the Reverend.

   No, she tells herself, that's not right. Mrs. Phelps would have known if they were being hard done by, and Reverend and Mrs. Saunders were religious people. Even having such a thought is unforgivable. Still, she remembers the words she caught one afternoon as she closed the door behind her, Mrs. Saunders saying to her niece, "I just love silk—how could one not?" The hallway was empty—the Reverend in his study, Mrs. Phelps plucking chickens down in the kitchen—so she'd pressed her ear against the door. There was talk of Mrs. Vincent's ugly new dress, of Miss Foster, who'd just got married and could speak French and play the piano beautifully but who had not the slightest idea how to run a household, let alone manage her servants. "They'll rob you blind," Mrs. Saunders trumpeted. "They get through tea and sugar like nobody's business. People of their class simply do not understand it all has to be paid for and . . ."

   Jane's hands had clenched into fists, her nails had bitten into the flesh of her palms. "You bitch," she said softly. "I'll get you back, I will, even if you never know it."

   There was a cough, and she turned to find the Reverend standing a few feet away.

   "Is there something the matter?" he said. "No? Then I'm sure you have better things to do than standing around listening at doors." She'd hurried off, holding down the urge to cry, because God had intervened, hadn't He? Hadn't He brought the Reverend out of his study to catch her?

   Outside a cat is yowling. Its cries echo between the high walls as though it's trapped in a well. There are voices, too, small and far away. Pulling down the covers, she listens, but from up here it's hard to tell if they belong to men or women. Plus the coldness of the air clings to her skin now that she's warmed herself under the blankets, so she buries herself beneath them again.

   It's late and she should sleep—she's tired out and tomorrow she'll have to be up at six. She tries to still her mind, but it courses back through the evening. After dinner was finished she was sent upstairs with a tray to clear the dining room. She hoped to see her employers, to catch a glimpse of them, to hear their voices at least. She opened the door an inch or two and listened to the sounds in the hallway. There was nothing save for the dull ticking of a tall clock by the stairs. No voices, no music, no laughter, no creak of feet on floorboards. She wondered where they had gone out to. Were they sitting in a crowded drawing room under chandeliers? Were they playing cards, or listening to music? Isn't that what ladies and gentlemen did?

   She had set down the tray on the sideboard and loaded it with the dessert plates and glasses, removed the candelabra, the fruit bowl, the top-heavy glass tazza of nuts in the center of the table, everything from the tablecloth. There'd only been two people for dinner, sitting at opposite ends of a table that could have sat six. One of them— Mrs. Bentley, she thought, for it was at the place setting where the bare branches of a small sprig of grapes were left behind, not the broken shells of nuts—had laid a napkin over a spill on the tablecloth. The stain of red wine already showed through it. Somehow this made her feel for this lady she had not yet met, whom she knew only through the sinuous handwriting of her letter. She imagined her graceful in a green silk gown, with her hair piled up on top of her head, laughing and listening to her husband. A couple, she thought, as elegant as this room with its high ceiling and molded plaster cornices, its intricate Turkey carpet, its dark red wallpaper and curtains so long and wide they looked like the folds of a dress.

   By the time she'd cleared the table and folded the cloth and swept up the crumbs from the carpet, she was sweating. The fire had died down to embers, but the embers were fiercely hot. Maybe it was the heat, maybe the tiredness that gripped her suddenly, but as she lifted the tray it knocked the tazza, and with the tray in her hands she could do nothing as it tipped off the sideboard. By a miracle it missed the bare floor and hit the carpet. And there it lay, apparently undamaged.

   She set down the tray and crouched to pick up the tazza. A warning, she told herself, and she deserved it—oh yes, because she was a liar. A miserable, sinning liar who had already deceived this new mistress of hers. It hadn't seemed like a sin. There was Mrs. Saunders's letter on the hallway table, and in her large, loose hand across the front she'd written, "Mrs. R. Bentley, No. 32 Cursitor Road, London." Jane's character. The shape of her future folded into an envelope, a malignant genie about to be released. Almost without thought she'd slipped it into her pocket and hurried downstairs. Mrs. Saunders was off visiting in the village, the Reverend in Exeter until the next day. She'd told Mrs. Phelps she was going to see to a hole in the study curtain and fetched needle and thread. She couldn't help knocking, though she knew the room was empty—the autumn sunlight dreary, the fireplace cold. There was paper in the top drawer of the desk, and pens, and pencils, and India rubber, and she set them all out on the top. Then she eased a knife under the seal of the envelope. She had to read the words over and over to convince herself of what they said. And though a cold hard fury swept through her, she wouldn't let herself tear up the letter. Instead she beat her fists against her legs, over and over, until they stung. Then she set to work, the letter held up against the window, each line traced in pencil onto a fresh sheet of paper. Each line except "the child of a brutal murderer" and "her unfortunate parentage, from whose influence, one can only hope, Jane has been saved." There her pencil paused. After staring beyond the plump letters into the garden with its forlorn bushes, she simply left them out. She moved the paper over so that the words lined up differently and the stain of her past was gone. Then she sat at the desk to trace over the words in ink, and gently erased the pencil marks. At any moment Mrs. Saunders would be home, so she hurried— finishing the letter and folding it back into the envelope; ripping a hole in the curtain that she could repair because Mrs. Phelps might check; slipping outside and running to the village to drop the letter in the pillar-box without asking Mrs. Phelps. Afterwards she was blamed for being gone when she was needed, and for making a slipshod job of the curtain. She hung her head, not from guilt but to counteract the heady sensation of having been relieved of a burden she'd carried for as long as she could remember.

   In the heat of the Bentleys' dining room she had closed her eyes and whispered, "I'm sorry for what I did. I won't deceive again, I promise, Lord; oh yes, I promise. You'll see. I can be a good and faithful servant to my new mistress, and to You." However, when she glanced at what she held in her hands she felt a rush of panic: the pedestal of the thing was intact, but the glass dish had broken in two. Where was it? Her skirts were in the way, so she moved, stepping to the side, her foot coming down just as her eye caught the shiny surface. Too late. It cracked beneath her boot like an egg. Not into two big pieces that might have been fixed, but into a hundred jagged bits. She got down on her knees and there, in the shadow of the table, began to sob. So much for bettering herself. So much for making a fresh start.

   A creak of the door handle and she jumped—Sarah, her smile falling away as her eyes caught Jane's. She saw the remains of the tazza and said, "Oh my—what's happened here?" With a glance over her shoulder she pushed the door shut. Coming close she said, "Oh dear. Not much we can do to fix it, is there?"

   "I've ruined everything."

   "You've ruined the tazza, that's for certain." She crouched down.

"Don't worry—it'll be our secret. I know where Mrs. Bentley buys her tableware. We can get another."

   "How can I pay for it? I don't have enough."

   "You have something saved, don't you?"