“It doesn’t look bad,” she said with a slight lift in her voice. “Let it dry a minute or two, then iron it. Mrs. Pitt won’t find fault. You’ve got a good place. You’re lucky.”
Suddenly Gracie put Finn Hennessey from her mind and remembered the moments of unhappiness she had seen in Doll’s face, the deep, searing loneliness and sense of pain, not fleeting, but there all the time, breaking through in an unguarded instant.
“In’t you lucky?” she said very quietly. She nearly asked if Mrs. Greville found fault, but she did not think that was the answer. It seemed too surface, too insubstantial. And although one could not judge someone’s private treatment of their servants by the public face they presented, she had not felt that Eudora was of that nature. Mr. Wheeler was not in the least nervous in his duties. He was deeply shocked at his master’s death, and aware of at least some of what murder meant, but that was not the same thing.
Doll’s back was stiff, her shoulders set as if all her muscles were locked.
“In’t you lucky, then?” Gracie repeated. It was important; it had suddenly come to matter very much.
Doll started to move again, reaching up to the cupboards as if she were looking for starch, or blue, or some other laundry aid, although they were all there in labeled jars, and she took none of them.
“You been very pleasant to me,” Doll said, choosing each word, then delivering it as if it were of no importance. “I wouldn’t like to see you hurt.” She moved a couple of jars around to no purpose, still keeping her back to the room. “Don’t go falling in love, Gracie. Kiss and a cuddle’s all right, but don’t ever let no one take it further than that. There’s grief in it you wouldn’t think to imagine … for the like of us. Don’t take offense. It isn’t my business. I know that.”
“I don’ take no offense,” Gracie said softly. Although she felt the hot blood surge up her face, it was embarrassment. If Doll could read her so well, maybe everyone could. Maybe even Finn could! She must concentrate her mind. She should know how to be a detective. She had had enough example. “Did you fall in love, then?”
Doll laughed, a bitter, tearing sound close to a sob.
“No … I never fell in love. I never met anyone … anyone I felt like that about, not as’d be likely to look at me.”
“Why wouldn’t anybody look at you?” Gracie said frankly. “You’re one of the prettiest girls I seen.”
Some of the rigidity eased out of Doll’s back. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “But that’s not all a man wants. You’ve got to be respectable too, have your character.”
“You mean your reputation?” Gracie asked. “Well, I s’pose so, mostly. But it don’t always count.”
“Yes, it does.” Doll’s voice was flat, allowing no argument, as if she had already hoped and been beaten.
Gracie was almost sure she must have someone in particular in her mind.
“Is that why you stay, even though it in’t a good place?”
Doll froze. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a good place!”
“I in’t goin’ ter go an’ tell anyone you said that,” Gracie protested. “Anyway, maybe she’ll change now. Things is goin’ ter be different now Mr. Greville’s dead, poor creature.”
“He wasn’t a poor creature.” She almost choked on the words.
“I meant ’er. She looks terrible pale and scared, like she knew ’oo done it.”
Doll turned around very slowly. Her face was white; her hands gripped the marble ledge of the sink top as though if she let go she might fall.
“ ’Ere!” Gracie started forward. “Yer goin’ ter faint?” She looked around but there was no chair. “Sit on the floor. Afore yer fall over. Yer could hurt yourself rotten on this stone.” Against Doll’s will, Gracie clasped her and threw her inconsiderable weight to catch her and made her ease downwards instead of falling.
Doll crumpled, carrying Gracie down with her. They sat together in a heap on the cold stone floor.
Gracie kept her arm around her, comforting, as she would have one of the children. “You know ’oo done it too, don’t yer?” she pressed. She could not afford to let it go.
Doll started to shake her head, gasping to catch her breath.
“No! No, I don’t know!” She gripped Gracie’s hand, holding it hard. “You have to believe me, I don’t know! I just know it wasn’t me!”
“Course it wasn’t you!” Gracie kept her arms around Doll. She could feel her shaking as the fear ran through her and seemed to fill the air.
“It could have been,” Doll said, clinging to her, her head bent low, her fair hair beginning to straggle out of its pins and its cap. “God knows, I wished him dead often enough!”
Gracie felt the chill take hold of her, as if something dreaded had become real. “Did yer?” She had to ask. She needed to know for Pitt, who was in bad trouble, and anyway, Doll could not keep it all tied up inside her anymore. “Why were that?”
Doll did not answer but just wept quietly as if her heart would break.
Gracie thought of the maid she had seen in the passage near the Grevilles’ bathroom. She hurt almost physically with her desire that it should not have been Doll and her fear that it might have been. She did not want to remember, but the question of denying it did not arise. Apart from the fact that she had seen her, she had told Pitt. He would not forget. Not even if she could let him.
She did not even want the picture cleared in her mind, but she had to see it if she could.
Still Doll said nothing, just huddled there, consumed with pain and fear.
Gracie tried hard to remember, to recapture the picture in her mind. Perhaps there would be something to prove it was not Doll? Nothing came at all. The harder she tried the more elusive it was. She took a deep breath.
“Why did you wish ’im dead, Doll?” she said with far less fear than she felt inside. “What’d ’e do to yer?”
“My child …” Doll said in an agonized whisper. “My baby.”
Gracie thought about all the babies she had known, the living ones and the dead, the unwanted, the loved and cherished who still got sick or had accidents, the ones she cared for at home in Bloomsbury, although they were hardly babies now, only in moments when they were tired and frightened or hurt. Perhaps everyone was then.
She held Doll as if she too was a child. There was nothing absurd in the fact that Doll was taller, older, handsomer. In this instant it was Gracie who had the strength and the wisdom.
“What’d ’e do to yer baby?” she whispered.
For another long moment there was silence. Doll could not bring herself to say the words. Gracie knew what it would be before Doll did at last manage to say it.
“He made me … have it killed … before it was born ….”
There was no possible answer. The only thing she could do was hold her closer, rock her a little, nurse the grief.
“Were it ’is baby?” she said after a few moments.
Doll nodded her head.
“Did yer love ’im, afore that?”
“No! No, I just wanted to keep my job. He’d have thrown me out if I’d said no to him. Then if I kept the baby he’d have put me out without a character. I’d have ended up walking the streets, in a whorehouse, and the baby would probably still have died. Least this way it never knew anything. But I loved that baby. It was mine—just as much as if it’d been born. It was part of my body.”
“Course it was,” Gracie agreed. The coldness inside her was now a hard, icy anger, like a stone in her stomach. “ ’Ow long ago were it?”
“Three years. But it doesn’t hurt any less.”
That was some small relief. At least it was not so very recent. If she had been going to kill him in revenge, she had already had three years and not done it.
“ ’Oo else knows about it?”
“No one.”
“Not Mrs. Greville or the cook? Cooks can be awful observant.” She nearly added “so I hear,” then realized that would give away that Charlotte had no cook.