Mulgrave said and did nothing that did not relate to his own duties. He waited for Holdsworth’s orders, and when he received them he obeyed them swiftly and fairly efficiently. He avoided being left alone with Frank, though Frank ignored him as he ignored Holdsworth. Mulgrave was a good servant and a worthless ally.
The only other living thing in the house was the ginger cat. Unlike the three humans, he appeared entirely unconcerned by the strangeness of the occasion. He approached each of the men with the same impersonal enthusiasm. He demanded to be petted and fed. To Holdsworth’s embarrassment, he found himself stroking the animal when it leaped on to his lap, and he even fed it with a scrap of meat from his plate. When Holdsworth pushed it away, the cat leaped on to Frank’s lap, and Frank absent-mindedly stroked it just as Holdsworth had done.
On one occasion, when the cat had again been on Frank’s lap, it grew weary of him and jumped down. It sauntered into the kitchen where it plagued Mulgrave. Mulgrave did not want its attentions and kicked it. The cat squawked with pain and surprise. It was this that unexpectedly affected Frank, who had been watching events through the open door.
He stood up suddenly, and his chair fell over behind him. The cat ran round the kitchen in momentary panic.
‘Let him be,’ Frank said, his voice sounding thick and rusty from disuse. ‘Let him go freely wherever he wishes, do you hear me?’
Mulgrave bowed. He came forward and righted the chair. Frank frowned. He looked puzzled, as if wondering what had happened. He sat down on the chair without looking behind him to see if it was there. The cat jumped on to his lap again and purred loudly.
24
You never knew with Mr Whichcote.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, Augustus slept fitfully for nearly two hours in a chair drawn up to the dying glow of the kitchen fire. Even in his dreams he heard the jangling of the bell over the kitchen door. He was not summoned, however, and he dozed until the scullery maid came down at five o’clock.
The girl, who was the next best thing to a halfwit, coaxed the fire into life and made an almighty clattering as she set pans of water to warm. One by one, in order of seniority, the other servants appeared – the wall-eyed maid, the old man who had tended the garden with gradually decreasing efficiency since the time of Mr Whichcote’s great-uncle, and finally the cook, a majestic but sour-faced woman who was at present working out her notice. None of the servants liked the day after a club dinner. The day itself was hard work, but it was a break in routine, undeniably exciting, full of strange faces, and with the tantalizing possibility of discarded trifles or unexpected tips. Afterwards, though, came the unpleasant task of clearing up.
A little after eight o’clock, Mr Whichcote’s bell rang. Augustus took his jug of warm water upstairs. When he returned, thirty minutes later with tea and rolls on a tray, he found the jug had not been touched. Mr Whichcote was still in his dressing gown, sitting up in bed and making notes in his pocketbook. He gestured towards Augustus to leave the tray on the night table. As he did so, the footboy glanced down and saw that the master was adding up a column of figures, against which he had made a number of entries.
An hour later, there was a knocking at the front door. Augustus opened the door to Mrs Phear. Her maid Dorcas was two paces behind her.
Mrs Phear advanced into the hall, as implacable as a small black cloud in a clear blue sky. She addressed the air in front of her. ‘Where’s your master?’
Augustus hastened to open the study door. Mr Whichcote was already rising to his feet. Mrs Phear said that she had brought her maid with her: the girl was so idle at home that a little work would be good for her.
Whichcote turned to Augustus and held out a key for him to take. ‘You and the girl will make the pavilion neat again. I wish to see it clean and swept and garnished, with everything restored to how it was.’
Augustus bowed and turned, believing he had been dismissed.
‘Stay. Come here.’ Whichcote towered over the footboy. ‘Only you and the maid are to work down there. I hold you responsible for that, as well as the rest. Now go.’
Mr Whichcote kept the pavilion locked. According to Cook, this was because the building was reserved for the master’s obscene and blasphemous activities, especially those that occurred on the nights of club dinners, so the master’s caution was entirely understandable. Cook said that she herself would not go in there alone for all the tea in China. Mr Whichcote, she said, was a gentleman who made your blood run cold, which was one reason why she had handed in her notice; the other reasons being the death of her late mistress (God rest her soul), the impious activities of the master and his friends, and (worst of all) his inability to pay his servants on time. Cook also said that if Mr Whichcote made your blood run cold, then Mrs Phear made it freeze in your veins and turn your very heart to a block of ice; and Cook was right.
Augustus took Dorcas through to the service side of the house, where they collected the brushes, mops, cloths and buckets. He carried the key of the pavilion in his pocket and was conscious of its weight and the responsibility it signified. Dorcas, who was half a head taller than he was, stared straight ahead. She had a white and bony face with freckles like flecks of mud on her skin.
‘We’ll do the big room upstairs,’ he said as he unlocked the pavilion door. ‘Then the little room they used downstairs and the staircase.’
‘You please yourself,’ the maid said, still without looking at him. ‘I want to see the bedchamber first.’
Augustus stared at her. ‘How do you know there’s a bedchamber?’
‘Because the girl told me. The one who had to lie in there last night all trussed up like a bird for the oven.’
‘You’re making it up,’ Augustus said uncertainly. ‘I was here last night.’
‘But you weren’t in that bedchamber, were you?’
‘No more was you.’
‘That girl was, though. She had to pretend to be a virgin. But she’s no more a virgin than my grandmother. She had this fat young gent come to her. He was too drunk to do it but he gave her three guineas.’
‘Where’s she now?’
‘Gone back to London.’
Augustus opened the door, thinking that Dorcas must be telling the truth because she knew it had been the fat young gent, Mr Archdale. She pushed past him into the lobby and looked about her.
‘Where is it?’
Without waiting for an answer, she opened the nearest door, which led to the passage running the length of the pavilion’s ground floor. With Augustus at her heels, she walked briskly along it, trying the doors until she found the bedchamber.
With a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other, Augustus stood in the doorway and watched Dorcas inspecting the room for all the world as though she were the mistress of the house looking for evidence of her maid’s shortcomings. She tutted over the puddle of wax at the foot of one of the candlesticks on the table. She sighed loudly as she replaced the cork in a bottle of cordial. She raised her eyebrows at the heap of bedclothes on the floor and touched with her forefinger one of the silken white cords that were still attached to the bedposts. She studied the red stains in the middle of the sheet on the bed and wrinkled her nose.
‘Up to all the tricks, that one.’
‘What?’
She stared at him not unkindly. She was three inches taller and nine months older yet her expression hinted that in her superiority to him she might just as well have been as tall as King’s College Chapel and roughly as old too. ‘She lay with me last night and she wouldn’t stop talking. That’s how I knew all about the young gent being unmanned. Happens a lot, she says, and they have to pretend. It’s worth their while, mind you.’