‘Everything all right?’ I asked her.
‘Fine,’ she said, her little eyes as wide as she could make them. ‘I just had to – you know – go a place before I turned in.’
I frowned at her.
‘But Mr Faulds has locked up,’ I said. ‘If you went to the lavatory, Clara dear, how did you get back in?’
She flushed slightly, I could just see it in the light of the candle.
‘Oh well, you know,’ she said and started sidling towards her door.
‘Didn’t he lock up?’ I persisted. ‘I was sure I heard him. Perhaps I should go up and check.’
‘No!’ said Clara, taking a step towards me. ‘Don’t… I mean… I’m sorry, Miss Rossiter, but that was a wee fib there.’
‘A fib?’
‘Not a bad one,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with… what’s been happening, I mean.’
I wondered if I could carry off the command that had sprung to my mind. I decided to try it.
‘Tell the truth, Clara,’ I said. ‘And shame the devil.’
She stared helplessly at me for a moment and then, as though giving up some internal struggle, she lifted her hands and let them fall again.
‘Come in, dear,’ I said, stepping aside and opening the door wider. ‘Sit down and tell me what you wouldn’t yesterday.’
‘Yesterday?’ she said, and then she nodded, remembering.
‘Yesterday,’ I said, guiding her to the chair. She perched on its edge.
‘It’s what I said about “souvenirs”,’ she said. ‘I – I fell, Miss Rossiter. A while back now.’
‘You had a baby?’ I said. ‘To master?’
‘No,’ Clara said. ‘I mean to say, I was going to and I never told anyone. I just laced my stays tighter and let out my dress seams, like he told me to, and Phyllis never noticed and then, when it was getting nearly time, it came and it was already gone and then that was that.’
‘Your baby died?’ I said gently.
‘It never even… cos you’re no’ supposed to keep yourself tight-laced, are you, miss? Or maybe it wasn’t as close to the right time as I thought. But it was labour, Miss Rossiter, that’s for sure. I’ve seen my mammy labouring and there’s no mistaking it. Except… it seems like a dream now when I think back. It’s hard to believe it happened.’
‘Where were you, Clara?’ I asked, wondering how on earth a girl could have gone through such a thing all alone, in this houseful of people, without someone hearing.
‘Up in the nurseries,’ she said. ‘Right up top there.’
‘And what did you do with… I mean, what did you do afterwards?’
Clara frowned then and shook her head as though trying to clear it.
‘Sometimes I think I came down to the furnace,’ she said. ‘But other times I remember wrapping up a bundle. I don’t know, to be sure. Maybe…’ She lifted her head and stared up at the low ceiling of my room. ‘Maybe it’s still up there.’
It might have seemed fantastical that she did not know, but I had heard of such things before; there was even a long and ugly name for it which I had, thankfully, forgotten.
‘And so tonight?’ I asked her softly. ‘Were you all the way upstairs on the nursery floor just now, Clara? Searching?’
She lowered her head and blinked at me, then she smiled faintly.
‘No, miss. I was in the kitchen.’ She screwed up her nose, looking the very picture of discomfort. ‘Mrs Hepburn made that chocolate thing for mistress’s dinner and she hardly touched it and I asked Millie to set it aside in the scullery for me. I just can’t say no to chocolate, miss, and by the time I’ve paid into my post office book and given something to my ma and got all my doings I’ve never got a penny spare to buy myself some.’
Of course, I should have scolded her, but who would have had the heart? I opened the door for her to leave, only managing to say:
‘You should have torn yourself away from the sing-song and eaten it up earlier. You shouldn’t be scampering about at night. Or eating chocolate for that matter. It’ll give you nightmares.’
It was I, however, who had the wretched night, reeling at top speed through an endless succession of short, senseless dreams: in one I was in the wings of a music-hall stage listening to the compère announcing Mr Faulds and me, but I did not know what the act was that we were presenting and I could not speak to ask anyone; in another I was searching through the laundry rooms of the convalescent home in Perth, undoing bundles of soiled linen looking for something I did not want to find and shushing an unknown someone who was whimpering somewhere close by, telling this unknown someone that we had to be quiet, that no one must ever know; in yet another I was sitting in the flower room at Gilverton, which was as close as I could get to dreaming of Miss Rossiter’s bedroom, I think (one cannot introduce new settings to one’s dream world with swift abandon), and there were men in miners’ helmets with their lanterns lit and smoking, and they were trying the door, rattling the handle and then peering in at me through the window mouthing at me to open up for them. Great Aunt Gertrude was somewhere, I knew she was, although I could not hear her. ‘Ssh!’ I said to Mattie who was banging on a long row of boots and shoes with a drumstick as though playing a glockenspiel. ‘Ssh!’ I hissed. ‘She’ll hear you!’
I woke in the cool light of six o’clock and lay gasping, looking around at my room as though at an oasis after forty nights in the wilderness. And here came Mr Faulds to open us up for business once more, the nails in his boots striking hard against the stone floor of the passageway. He pulled back the bolts, giving slightly less than full measure, I thought; certainly it did not ring out in that bone-shaking way it had the evening before. Or perhaps it was just that sounds carried further at night; one often reads that they do. I heard him put the key in the lock, turn it and throw the door wide. This he did with as much brio as he could, sending it bouncing on its hinges.
‘Lovely day, Etheldreda,’ he called upwards and I could hear Eldry’s faint answer.
‘Tell Mrs Hepburn two eggs for me this morning,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t mind a taste of that ham just to see if it’s fit for company.’ Whistling, he turned, passed along to the stairs again and skipped up them, making a little tune with his shoes like a tap-dancer.
One of the benefits of Miss Rossiter’s life, I thought to myself as I dressed for the visit to the solicitor’s office, was the release from all concerns of wardrobe. Had I been appearing as Mrs Gilver, I should have been lucky to get away without several changes before the competing demands of sobriety and decoration were satisfied, for while one would not wish to look jaunty upon such an errand, neither would one want one’s black cape and veil to outdo the widow’s. Nothing, unless it be wearing white to a wedding, is poorer form than that. As it was, Miss Rossiter got her grey serge, lisle stockings, black shoes, felt hat and armband on in four minutes flat. I was even becoming used to the look of my scraped-back hair and shining, soap-and-water face and wondered whether I were not looking rather better than usual – more youthful, fresher somehow – a possibility I put down to the settled routines and clean living of a servant’s life until I realised that between the endless note-making, the rushing about the streets, the nightmares and the way that strong drink punctuated the hours, my two days spent below stairs in Heriot Row had been the least settled of recent memory. Probably it was only the dim light and the elderly looking-glass which gave the effect and if I glanced into Lollie’s dressing-table glass upstairs in the sunshine I should be disabused.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait until Great Aunt Gertrude gets here?’ I asked Lollie, when I got to her. She simply gazed back at me. The skin around her eyes was yellow and her hands trembled as she lifted her hat onto her head. ‘Here, let me,’ I said. I secured her hat none too firmly, for they are fearsome things to stick into someone else’s hair if one is not accustomed to it, or perhaps just if one has finer feelings than Grant, who wields a hatpin like Captain Ahab with his last harpoon.