I was speechless, although a chorus of amens rumbled out from everyone else readily enough. Mr Faulds’s prayer, if I understood it, could be paraphrased as: thank you for Pip Balfour’s death. Please look out for us during the investigation, show Lollie that she’s better off without him, make sure no one gets punished and, anyway, he deserved it.
‘What happens now, Mr Faulds?’ said Phyllis. She was already dressed for her afternoon out in a coat-dress of daffodil yellow and a straw hat, and looked the picture of springtime despite the black armband. ‘What will the police do next?’
‘Nothing that should be discussed at the dinner table,’ said Mrs Hepburn. She had passed a loaded plate up to Mr Faulds at the far end and now turned to me. ‘How many slices, Fanny?’ It was boiled mutton of all things and I could not help thinking of the knife as Mrs Hepburn forked a thick slab onto my plate for me. ‘And take plenty tatties,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a draining time of it and you’ll need your strength.’
‘But d’you think we’ve seen the last of them?’ Phyllis persisted.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘that we’ll be seeing quite a lot more of them, don’t you, Mr Faulds? Mrs Hepburn?’ A few glances flicked towards me. ‘They’ll keep going until they find out what happened.’ A couple of the younger servants glanced uncertainly towards the butler. ‘The best way to get rid of them and get things back to normal for mistress,’ I went on, ‘would be if we could tell them something to help them “crack the case”. Help them solve it.’ I looked around the table brightly.
‘Come up with a story, you mean?’ said Stanley. ‘That’s a thought, Mr Faulds, isn’t it? And I could give you some good ideas for it.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean anything of the kind. I meant tell them anything we actually know to help them find out what actually happened – tell the truth and get to the bottom of it all.’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying, lass,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘It maybe hasn’t struck you yet, new as you are, but there’s only two ways it can be.’ I waited while she dished out potatoes to Eldry, Millie and Mattie and nodded at them to start eating. ‘Either it was mistress, and we’re none of us wanting to see her clapped in jail and the house broken up with all of us on the street, or it was someone sitting round this table. So you just mind what you say.’
I gazed at them alclass="underline" Mrs Hepburn quite impassive, pulling her meat into shreds with her fork; Mr Faulds watching me with an unreadable look upon his face, one hand around his beer glass; Clara, pale and solemn, sitting with her head bent; John with a little twist of a grin on one side of his face, enjoying the scene; Phyllis in her straw hat looking as though she had not a care in the world; Stanley staring at Mr Faulds, waiting for guidance; Eldry eating quickly but with little enjoyment, jabbing the food up on her fork and snapping it off again with her teeth; Harry, uncomfortable, shifting in his seat and toying with his knife, food forgotten; Millie mashing butter into her potatoes with a small smile; Mattie watching her, grimacing at the sight, or perhaps the sound, of the lumps of butter being squashed through the tines of her fork as though it were something disgusting. Before the silence could grow any more deafening, I spoke up again.
‘Are you really saying – all of you – that you would remain under suspicion yourselves to protect… whoever it is?’ I said. ‘Everyone? No one will speak up?’
‘No,’ said Harry. ‘It’s not that bad. At least, for me it’s not. I don’t know who it was.’ There was a murmur of agreement to this point. ‘But I don’t care who it was either.’ At this the murmurs rose almost to a cheer.
‘And that’s enough,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Phyllis, where are you going in that hat, eh? What’s his name and what does his dada do?’
Phyllis giggled, John took up the tease with gusto and the rest went on wolfing their food or picking at it as their habits or current moods took them.
Presently, Mr Faulds turned to me.
‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d be so kind as to go through to the kitchen and get the pudding. Mrs Hepburn looks dog-tired and we like to help each other. Clara, you go too and fetch in a pot of tea.’
I had only half cleared my plate of mutton but I had no appetite for the rest of it and so I rose and followed Clara out of the room. She walked stiffly, quite unlike the easy, willowy girl who had greeted me at the area door less than a day ago.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ I said to her as we entered the kitchen. Clara took a cigarette out of her apron pocket and held it against the hot bar of the range to light it.
‘Better than what?’ she said, putting the cigarette to her lips. ‘Want one?’ I shook my head.
‘Eldry said this morning you were indisposed.’
‘Oh!’ she said, smiling faintly. ‘That. Aye, well, it wasn’t a good time for me to go into his room, that’s all.’
‘Forgive me, dear, but what do you mean?’
Clara gave me a shrewd look out of her little eyes.
‘I’d have put you down for a woman of the world, Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘I’d have put money on Miss being just for politeness like Mrs Hepburn is.’ She drew deeply on her cigarette and blew out the smoke in three long plumes. ‘Phyllis and Eldry and me took turns of when we had to go into his room, that’s all. To make sure we wouldn’t come away with no wee souvenirs, see?’ I could feel myself blushing.
‘Good grief!’ I said, and then a fresh thought struck me. ‘Phyllis told me that she had escaped his attentions.’
‘She was lucky,’ said Clara. ‘She never got caught by him in one of his moods. Don’t ask me why, because… I’m not meaning to be nasty but if he went for Eldry he’d go for any-… Well, I don’t want to be nasty. It must have just been the luck of the draw. He’d have got her in the end.’
‘But why didn’t you stop going altogether? Harry could have stepped in, surely? Why didn’t you tell Mr Faulds and ask him- Well, no, probably you wouldn’t have cared to tell Mr Faulds, but why not Mrs Hepburn?’
Clara laughed a bitter laugh. ‘Aye, why not just tell everybody everything, eh?’ she said, and the way she spoke reminded me of Harry; the same troubled confusion on her face and in her voice too. There was surely more here than she had hinted at so far.
‘I do think,’ I said carefully, ‘that perhaps the worst of what master did was managing to make everyone else ashamed instead of himself.’ Clara looked up sharply at me. ‘To make everyone keep his grubby little secrets for him.’ I paused and smiled at her, trying not to look as though I were holding my breath, waiting. Clara’s cigarette burned forgotten in her hand, the ribbon of smoke rippling a little in the waves of warmth from the stove.
‘You’re right, Miss Rossiter,’ she said, speaking in a soft and wondering sort of voice. ‘That’s just exactly right, the way you said it.’
‘When in fact you have nothing to fear from speaking of your troubles to your friends,’ I said. ‘They all knew him. They know the fault was his and you did nothing wrong.’
With this, though, I had gone too far. Clara came out of her dream with a harsh intake of breath and blinked at me.
‘Did I not now?’ she said. ‘If only.’
‘You mean you did do something?’
Clara laughed again but there was no humour in it.
‘I didn’t stick a knife in him if that’s what you mean. You don’t really think that, do you?’
Before I could answer there was a knock on the half-open kitchen door and Mattie put his head around it.
‘Mrs Hepburn says she’s not chivvying you and to say sorry and something else I’ve forgotten, but John and Harry are ready for their puddings, so I’ve come to get them.’