Such unrelenting drudgery, the lives of the servants.
Aunt Clara is nowhere in sight. For this, I breathe a calming sigh as I slip around the side of the house in order to enter through the back. If Aunt were awake she’d expect everyone to rouse and tend to her. Which would have made it quite impossible for me to sneak into the house and then pretend I’d been here all night.
Through the pantry, silent at the boot jack, I steal in stockinged feet up the back stairs, where I overhear Uncle Henry in the foyer requesting a sausage pie and brandy in the library. But I am battened down safe in my attic room before he has taken the second flight of stairs.
At last. My heart is knocking in my chest. I build up the fire from its embers and unfold Will’s letter, which I read on my hands and knees by the scant heat.
Even before I begin, I can see that it’s been written under hardship and duress. Will’s letters tremble and slant backward confusedly. What’s more, the paper is water damaged, the last passages a wash of ink.
When I am finished, I close my eyes, which burn with the effort of reading this final, agonized missive from the grave. Wherever Will’s body is buried, too much of my heart is there, too.
“It doesn’t matter, William,” I whisper. “None of it matters anymore. For I will always love you, no matter what this war forced you to become. Always and ever, dear heart.”
For what else could I say? What else could I ever possibly say about a senseless death and a war that I do not understand?
15.
My dreams are bursts and jolts. I see the bloody steel blade of a bayonet. I hear the drum beat to the sound of soldier’s boots and feel cold earth, cold hands, a chain, choking me.
I awake into a glare of morning and the sound of a voice.
“Saints above, Miss, what’s done you in drink a bottle of your uncle’s spirits last night?”
I sit up, wheezing for breath, my fingers stroking my neck, reassuring myself that it’s not broken as my bleary eyes find Mavis staring down on me.
“You think I’m drunk?” I ask faintly, as the horrible dream ebbs away.
Her grin is teasing. “How else could you sleep through breakfast and all this arguing?”
Sunshine streams through my window. It’s rare for me to oversleep, particularly now, on this lumpy horsehair mattress. “Arguing about what?” But I hear it. My bedroom door is ajar, and the voices below are angry. Quinn and Aunt Clara. When I stand, my sore muscles resist. “What about?” I repeat.
“Everything!” Mavis enthuses. “It’s been more delicious than toffee cake. Oh, has Mister Quinn been giving her an earful. It started as something to do with the dressmaker’s bill. Old Mister Pritchett will never raise his voice about Missus Pritchett’s wastefulness, but it seems Mister Quinn’s taken her to task.”
I can’t resist. I clamber to the banister, the better to hear the voices pitching back and forth below. Quinn’s tenor is clear and flat, barely raised at all. “…drowning in costs…well over our annual… damn fripperies… and pay for the household expenditures!”
And while Aunt squeaks like a mouse defending her cheese, her words are mysterious. “If you would only assert yourself…you are paralyzed…to make a decision one way or another…”
A decision about what? But next comes the slamming of doors, another of Aunt’s childish gestures, and now their conversation is muted.
Mavis clears her throat. “Speaking of household particulars and it’s awkward to ask of you, Miss Jennie but Missus Sullivan sent me up to see if you’ll lend an extra pair of hands. It’s brass and silver day. She says t’would only be ’bout an hour or two.”
“Of course.” Closer to four or five hours, but I don’t mention this.
“It’s another reason Mister Quinn’s upset.” Mavis’s eyes glint with gossip. “There isn’t enough in the ledger to hire more than one day girl. Missus Sullivan spoke with your uncle last night. He said hired girls had been pre-considered in the annual household budget and what a donkey laugh that was. There isn’t been a household budget in months, anyway. Missus Pritchett spent the whole lot on clothes and gimcracks like fancy sun parasols and watering cans from London, England.”
Mavis can’t disguise her annoyance. I sense that Uncle Henry’s fumbling inattention has been a topic of servants’ talk before. “Quinn mentioned you, too, Miss. He says you’re in need of new boots.”
I color, surprised that Quinn would have noticed. It lifts my heart that he did.
“And he said you’ve got no position here,” Mavis adds, more quietly. “He didn’t say it unkind, Jennie. But he said it.”
My heart skips a beat. “He means well by me. He’ll set things right,” I say, though new doubts shake awake in my head. Does Quinn want me gone? With a new pair of boots for the journey out?
Mavis still looks shy. “Missus Sullivan’s holding your breakfast. You better claim it before she gives it to Lotty.”
I nod. My mind is a whirl. It will be impossible to get to Geist today. It had been all I wanted to do after last night’s revelations the arrow marked in a wreath of irises that had led me to Will’s scrap of letter.
Before I dash to rescue my meal, I open my scrapbook again and rub my fingers against the stained paper. The ink is blotted, the handwriting looks weak. I can almost feel the ache and fatigue in his words, so different from the determined cheerfulness of his other letters.
In bold daylight I am better able to register that Will’s last letter is in fact a confession. He had killed. He had stolen. He wrote of suffering and injuries. His last days were not as I’d imagined, cut down in the heat of battle. He died a prisoner. His story is a cry of shame.
Nate carries part of this secret. And so, I am sure, does Quinn.
Something is not right here. I must make sense of the confusion. What sort of raging monster had Will become in the end? What does Quinn intend to protect in his silences and lies? I yank so hard at my bootlaces that my feet feel the pinch as I hasten down the back stairs to the kitchen.
For of course Quinn is protecting his brother. Will’s end must have been so wretched that Quinn had to pretend he fell in battle. Quinn didn’t see his brother die otherwise Will surely would’ve given him my locket. I’m speculating, but I’m on the trail of the truth. And I want all of it.
Yet today I’m tasked with servant’s chores. There’s nothing I can do until they’re done. Under Mrs. Sullivan’s regime, the polishing of the brass and silver is a tedious matter, set in motion when every item is carried into the dining room and placed on the table. Each object is checked against her ledger before bowl, candlestick, or piece of tea service is transported down to the kitchen, where the day girl, Lotty, is given the lowest job of alclass="underline" tarnish scrubber.
The scrubbed silver is then rinsed and re-rinsed, polished and buffed, carried upstairs, and set back upon the table for Mrs. Sullivan to inspect before it’s all replaced, safe and sparkling, in its designated position on whatever dreary sideboard, table, or corner cupboard. No amount of sparkle could lighten the gloom that lies over Pritchett House.
We work steady as carpenter ants, the mood of the morning’s fight lingering like an acrid burning after the fire’s stamped out. Aunt Clara has slunk off to her rooms, and Quinn has locked himself in his. I catch nobody’s eye for fear I might blurt out the whole incredible business of the last twelve hours.