The sun had only just set and the lamps not yet been lit, so the fire sent shadows capering up the walls like devils.
‘Will you do it today, Starling? You know how bad he was yesterday,’ Dorcas burst out. The skinny housemaid, with her horse’s teeth and her narrow, lashless eyes, was sweating, though whether that was from discomfort or the heat of the cook fires, Starling couldn’t tell.
‘Is that anyway to talk about the master?’ Starling was too cross to make it easy for Dorcas. Let her beg me, she thought.
‘Don’t play me the high and mighty, Starling. You know what I’m talking about,’ said Dorcas. Starling studied her, and saw real fear in the girl’s eyes. She hardened her heart against it.
‘What I don’t know is why you expect me to do your work for you, Dorcas Winthrop. I don’t see you down here chopping endless onions for the soup.’ Dorcas’s nostrils flared in distaste.
‘I’m upper housemaid. I don’t do kitchen work.’
‘You’re the only housemaid, so go do your own work and leave me be.’ Starling turned back to the onions, feeling the other girl’s impotent rage as she backed away.
The kitchen of the house on Lansdown Crescent, in Bath, had a vaulted ceiling and tall windows to compensate for being below street level. The windows looked out onto a narrow, shadowed courtyard, and let in little light. It was a space nestled amongst the foundations of the building, carved into the ground, supporting the house above in more ways than one. Starling sometimes thought of it as like an animal den, a warren through which the servants moved, day in, day out, with grime under their nails and dried sweat in their clothes, blinking at the light of day. The cook, Sol Bradbury, chuckled as Dorcas finally slunk reluctantly up the stairs.
‘You’re wicked, you are, Starling. It’ll end with you going up, and you know that.’
‘Perhaps. But she nips at me like a flea, that one. I can’t find the will to make it easy on her,’ Starling replied.
The gentleman of the house, Mr Jonathan Alleyn, had indeed been worse than usual in the past few days, for which Starling felt gratified. It was her doing, after all. He was ruled by his moods and dreams and the pains in his head; the disarray in his dark and cluttered rooms reflected the disorder in his mind. Starling had many ways to goad him. Earlier in the week she’d learnt, from an old soldier drinking in the Moor’s Head, the exact tattoo of French marching drums. She’d beat out this rhythm on the hearth as she swept it, ostensibly to knock the ashes from the shovel and brush. When she’d finished, Jonathan Alleyn had been sitting with his eyes tight shut and his nostrils white, his whole body wrought hard with stress, so tightly that it shook. No more than you deserve, Starling had thought, pleased at this result, and that he went downhill the rest of the week. Yesterday, Dorcas had been pale and goggle-eyed when she finished in his rooms. Starling curled her lip at the memory. The girl was as gutless as a rabbit. She tucked the offending strands of hair more firmly under her cap and went back to the onions. Sol beat the batter for a plum cake, quietly singing a bawdy song.
In minutes Dorcas was back, tears streaking through smudges of soot on her cheeks.
‘He’s gone mad! This time he’s gone quite mad!’ she cried, all shrill and staccato. Starling couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘Don’t you dare laugh at me, Starling! No decent person should have to go into those rooms! It’s worse than anything the devil could devise! And he’s like a demon himself… I think his soul must be black as tar! As black as tar!’ Dorcas clamoured.
‘What is all this now?’ It was Mrs Hatton who spoke – the housekeeper; a small, brisk woman with iron-grey hair and a careworn face. The three women in the kitchen stood up straighter, and buttoned their lips. ‘Well? Out with it, one of you.’
‘It’s Mr Alleyn, ma’am. He… he… I went to set up the room for the night and he…’ Dorcas dissolved into tears again, stretching her mouth into a wide, upturned crescent.
‘Saints preserve us. There now, Dorcas! I’m sure he didn’t mean you any harm.’ The housekeeper fetched out her handkerchief and handed it to the housemaid.
‘But I’m sure he did, ma’am! I think he has gone mad this time! He snatched up the smuts bucket and threw it at me! If I hadn’t ha’ dodged it might ha’ knocked all my teeth out…’
‘Perhaps no bad thing,’ Starling muttered. Dorcas shot her a look of pure venom.
‘Starling, nobody asked you to speak,’ said Mrs Hatton, exasperated. Dorcas wept on.
‘And… and he called me such names! I shouldn’t have to hear such things. And I did nothing to deserve it!’
‘That’s enough. Now, calm down. You have work to do, and-’
‘No! I won’t go up there again! Not now and not tomorrow neither! It’s not natural, what he gets up to! He’s not natural, and no decent person should be expected to… to… have to see him, or serve him! And I won’t, even if it means I’m dismissed!’ With this Dorcas ran from the kitchen. Sol Bradbury and Starling exchanged a look, and Starling fought hard not to smile.
‘Lord, not another one running out,’ Mrs Hatton muttered; for a second, her shoulders sagged in exhaustion. ‘Starling, stop smirking. Go up to Mr Alleyn, if you please, and make his rooms for him. You’ll need to bank the fire well, there’s a nip in the air tonight. He’ll ask for wine but I have it from the mistress that he’s not to have any – the pains in his head have been bad this week, poor soul. Any one of us would be as volatile, had we to live with such suffering. Now, please, Starling – I don’t want to hear any argument.’ She raised one finger in warning, and then walked out in pursuit of Dorcas.
Starling smiled at her retreating back. It served her well to let Mrs Hatton believe that she was reluctant to go into Jonathan Alleyn’s rooms. It would have caused suspicion, after all, if she seemed keen to go in, though keen she was. A strange kind of keen, because her pulse always raced and her breathing came faster, and on some level she knew she was afraid of him. Not afraid of the look of him, or the contents of his rooms, or of his rages, like the other girls; she was afraid of what she might do, and what he might. Because she had known Jonathan Alleyn since she was a little girl, and she knew things about him that the other servants didn’t. Things nobody else knew.
She found the supper tray that Dorcas had abandoned on a table in the hallway outside his rooms. He had two adjoining chambers on the second storey of the house, on its west side, sharing a wall with the next house along the crescent. The room where he slept was towards the back of the house, plainly furnished but dominated by an enormous canopied tester bed, its wooden posts all gilded, its drapes of heavy crimson damask. Linked to this via double doors, the room at the front of the house was supposedly his study, and had an enormous bay window arching over the street, giving a far-reaching view of the city and the hills around it. A view almost always hidden by closed shutters. This room had filled a succession of housemaids with horror. Starling paused and strained her ears for the sound of Mrs Hatton’s footsteps, or anyone else who might be near, before adding a bottle of wine to the supper tray. A bottle she’d got especially, from Richard Weekes; dosed in secret with extra spirits to make it stronger. Mr Alleyn would drink it, she knew, even if he realised it was doctored. He didn’t seem to be able to stop himself. Perhaps – she almost smiled to herself at the idea – perhaps he even thought she did it to please him.