‘Hester! You poor creature… tell me what the matter is,’ Robin commands. He puts out his hands and moves towards her, as if to offer an embrace, but Hester rises hastily from her chair.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she cries. ‘It’s your doing!’ Her pulse races, makes her fingers shake; but the words are out now, and she cannot take them back.
‘Then you must immediately tell me how I have troubled you, so that I can apologise and be sure never to do so again,’ Robin replies carefully. His words are smooth and unhurried. As seamless as the rest of him.
‘My husband… saw our maid Cat at a tavern last night. It seems she has been keeping late-night trysts with a sweetheart, and now he says she is to go and he will not hear another word on the matter. Such notions of purity he has now, you see.’ She shoots the theosophist an angry glance. ‘Such notions that he has half lost his… sense of proportion, and will brook no argument.’ As Hester speaks she looks up, just briefly, and is shocked by Robin’s expression. It veers here and there between shock and anger and consternation for some seconds before he manages to wrestle it back into his control. Hester catches her breath. ‘Did you know something of this before, Mr Durrant?’
‘I… no, of course not,’ he says, but without conviction. Hester stares at him, her eyes widening. ‘That is, I had seen her, once or twice. Going off in the evening. Just for walks, I assumed.’
‘I see. And you did not think to mention this to Albert or myself?’
‘My apologies, Mrs Canning. I had thought no harm could come of it,’ Robin replies smoothly, and all expression in face and voice is gone, masked behind a careful neutrality.
‘Well, harm has come of it, Mr Durrant. I wonder if that was all you knew about it. I wonder if you might not have some inkling as to the identity of her gentleman friend?’ Hester says quietly, her voice shaking with nerves. Robin Durrant watches her, a new expression forming on his face. One of slight surprise and amusement. One of new understanding. Hester looks away, down at her hands. His eyes are too familiar, suddenly; they seem to laugh at her.
‘Hester, how has your opinion of me changed so much of late that you no longer trust me to speak the truth?’ he asks; a touch of soft menace in the words.
Hester fidgets, twisting her handkerchief tightly one way, then the other. ‘I have seen the two of you… speaking together. In the evenings,’ she stammers.
‘What of it? You don’t mean that I am her mystery man, surely? A few polite words exchanged between guest and maid, over a cigarette, and you have construed an affair from this?’
‘That’s not what I saw. It was not… polite,’ Hester whispers. Robin Durrant crosses the room towards her with a slow, deliberate step, and she fights the urge to back away.
‘You must have been mistaken, I assure you. There is nothing whatsoever between me and your maid,’ he says, standing so close to her that she can feel the warmth of his body, the moist touch of his breath as he speaks. She turns her face away, heart racing in her chest, and endures the silence for a long moment, until she thinks she might scream. ‘Still, if you’d like me to speak to your husband on behalf of the girl, I would be happy to do so. Perhaps I can persuade him to let her stay on, if that is what you wish?’ Robin murmurs, so close now that she can hear his every breath as it rushes gently in, between his parted lips, over teeth and tongue. Her eyes well again, tears splashing messily onto her cheeks. Without hesitation, the theosophist puts out his fingers and brushes them away. Hester is rooted to the spot, too shocked to move.
‘I don’t understand what power you have over my husband,’ she says, her voice so constricted she hardly knows it.
‘Don’t you? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Unbesmirched as you are. Virgo intacta, a lily whiter than white; so kind and clean and innocent,’ he says, his mouth twisting to one side in cruel amusement. Hester’s jaw falls open in shock.
‘How do you…?’ she whispers, inadvertently.
‘Albert told me. One day whilst extolling his own purity to me. He could hardly boast of his own virginity, and not by default proclaim you to be in the same state, could he?’ Robin says, with a lupine grin.
Hester shuts her eyes, her face burning. In the darkness behind her eyelids the room seems to spin, and her thoughts to match it.
‘I think you should leave this house. Leave and not return!’ she says.
‘Hester, Hester. You and I need not trouble one another,’ Robin says calmly. ‘We must not trouble one another,’ he adds, making the statement a command, a warning. The hand that gathered her tears lingers, moving softly over the skin of her cheek, along her jaw and from chin to neck, neck to collarbone, until the air freezes in her lungs and she can neither protest nor move nor turn away. ‘Dear Hetty. I’ll speak to Albert. I’ll convince him. You can keep your maid – a gift from me to you, to make up for whatever I have done to turn you against me,’ he says, his eyes alight and savage. His hand stays a second longer on her skin, his fingers warm, wet from her own salty tears. They seem to burn her, and his light touch is like a yoke of iron, fixing her to the spot. Then he is gone, across the hallway to knock softly on the study door. Released, Hester heaves in great gulps of dizzying air and flees the room with blind, faltering steps.
Mrs Bell opens each hamper of laundry as it comes back from Mrs Lynchcombe, lifts out each item and checks it off the list, her eyes screwed up with the effort of reading her own cramped handwriting.
‘That should be six pillow slips – did I count six?’ she mutters; this and similar comments. Cat has seen this process many times, and knows she may as well ignore the remarks. Mrs Bell, despite a close and apparently friendly acquaintance with the laundress, seems convinced that the woman will one day conspire to rob the household of a napkin or a nightdress, and cannot be satisfied without checking the hampers herself each time. She blows out her cheeks, wipes her sweaty brow, puts her hands on the vast slabs of her hips and studies a lace-collared blouse, pressed and neatly folded in front of her. Is this the one that was sent away? Or has it been switched with one of lower quality?
‘Your own suspicions must tire you out,’ Cat observes.
‘What’s that? Don’t mumble behind my back, if you please,’ Mrs Bell grumbles.
‘I said you should be commended, for such thoroughness.’ She smiles briefly. Mrs Bell laughs a short bark of a laugh.
‘Ha! You never said that in a month of Sundays!’ She goes back to her examination of the hampers. Cat shrugs. She is breaking up the salt, which comes from the grocer in a large, hard block. She uses a round pick with a smooth wooden handle, so smooth that the effort of keeping her grip on it cramps her hand. The muscles in her forearm burn. She stabs repeatedly at the block, at just the right angle that small, usable chunks are broken off; not big pieces that must be broken again, not small gritty pieces that she will struggle to collect from the worktop. The right-sized pieces are packed into earthenware jars and sealed until they are needed. They will be ground by hand, as the need arises, to fill the silver cruet. There is some satisfaction in the repeated stabbing, the controlled violence of the job. Precise work is needed; blows of the correct weight and speed, over and over again. Cat’s mind clears as she does it; some of the odd, cold rage that has filled her all morning starts to dissipate. An odd rage indeed, hard and numbing. She hardly knows who it is directed at. The vicar, for seeing her? The theosophist, for sending him out on crusade? Hester, for forbidding her to go out again? George, for insisting that she wed him? Or just because her secret has been found out. Because she has no secret any more: the one thing that belonged to her alone, now taken. She stabs, she breaks the block, her muscles burn, and she grows calmer. Cat kicks off her shoes, lets the cool of the flagstones press into her aching feet.