27
After lunch, when she returns to the records office, Jane discovers that the servant ledger nestled in the back of the bowed leather Register of Employment for Inglewood House lists a Nora Hayling in service, starting the 22nd of August 1877. Some of the other staff entries have end dates inked in a different hand, and notes about termination or retirement, but Nora does not. The only entry that coincides closely with the date Nora was hired is a reference to a Mary Margaret Teems, who was let go on the 26th of July that same year for pilfering flour and sugar.
During her dissertation research years ago, when Jane first discovered N and the story of the trio’s long walk to Inglewood, she’d leafed through the Whitmore patient casebooks looking for an N name, though she hadn’t searched at that time for Eleanors or Honoras, names that could be shortened to Nora. So now she fills out a request slip for the Whitmore women’s book from 1877, prepared to start again, even though she is feeling dubious about the possibility of Nora from Inglewood being connected to N from the Whitmore. While Jane knows that patients at convalescent hospitals like the Whitmore could be a mix of professionals and paupers, the educated and the working class, it was unlikely a patient like N — especially because she was a woman — would be able to transition so quickly into a maid’s position. Though John Hopper, she suddenly remembers, was released that December and almost immediately went to work as an apprentice clockmaker.
When the Whitmore’s women’s casebook disappoints — turning up nothing but Marthas, Frannies, Alices and Emmas — Jane decides to clear her head by taking Sam, who has been waiting patiently in the car, for a walk up the high street of one of the nearby villages. Even in those childhood summer months when she and Lewis would go and stay with Claire in the cottage at the Lakes she had never travelled far, and so she feels pleasure in the idea of an excursion, in driving for twenty minutes and arriving somewhere new.
At the top of the main square in one of the Dales’ villages there is a cenotaph. It’s surrounded by the requisite gaggle of fifteen-year-olds dressed in heavy black boots and duffel coats. Jane parks the car and wanders past them toward an old-fashioned sandwich and pastry shop. It’s the sort meant to appeal to tourists, where the girls who work behind the counter are allowed to have nose rings and wear blue nail polish, but still have to tie their hair under white caps with lacy fringes and scoot around in long black dresses with floor-length aprons. There is an espresso machine in the window, the beautiful old-fashioned kind that makes great coffee, so Jane loops Sam’s leash around the empty bike stand out front and goes in to wait in the queue of locals on breaks from work and tourists with time on their hands.
The girl who makes Jane’s coffee has a thick brown fringe and a pretty face, the idiosyncratic kind high-street clothing shops use in their adverts — naturally beautiful but with one flaw, a gap tooth or wide-set eyes, but always young. She smiles at Jane and asks if that’s her dog outside.
“Yes, is he okay there?”
“He’s all right. I just wondered if he needed some water; we usually have a bowl out.”
“Sure, thanks.”
The girl slips into the narrow sink area at the end of the counter. Jane watches her, thinking that she’s probably Blake’s age. She wonders briefly if they know each other, have some sort of history he’d call up if Jane described meeting her. She studies the girl, not jealously but curiously: watches her reach up over the metal sink by the dishwasher, grab a plastic bucket off the shelf of pots overhead and fill it with tap water. The girl’s dress is a mass-market version of what the female servants at Inglewood would have worn as they washed teacups and scrubbed pots in the deep sinks in the kitchen where she’d met Blake, girls who would have ascended the narrow stairwell that went up to the attic rooms at the end of very long days, who would have slept on the far side of a baize door that separated one world from another.
On the drive back to the records office Jane is thinking about N, about how little time she has left to find her, about what Blake will say when she tells him she’s leaving, and about the girl in the servant’s dress with the brown hair, who she now, for whatever reason, imagines as the type of girl Blake should be with. Her thoughts swim in circles, and the same phrase, the one that always comes with thoughts of N, rises again: Patients C. Leeson, H. Morley, and girl N— missing.
Jane taps the car’s brakes without meaning to and her body jerks forward. Sam slides with a small thump into the back of her seat. She glances up at her rear-view mirror, thankful the woman in the VW wasn’t following too close behind. And girl N— missing.
N wasn’t a patient at the Whitmore; she worked there, was so expendable no one bothered to cite her full name. And she didn’t “escape” the women’s ward; she saw Herschel and Leeson take off, and took it upon herself to follow them.
• • •
Freddy brings the Whitmore Hospital’s Servant Engagement and Discharge Book back up from the basement and in its fusty pages Jane finds a Nora Hayling. She is fifteen years of age when she is hired in 1874 as a laundress. No previous engagements are cited, though unlike most servants of her class, she’d been educated at a local school. In 1876 she was promoted, with the strike of a pen, to assistant seamstress. Unlike the other women listed in the book — the assistant nurses, housemaids, and women’s attendants — there is no discharge note, no left to be married, no resigned or retired on pension, no died in hospital or death date. There are also no references to her or her position in the Whitmore’s logbooks, except ones that reference the seamstress proper — a woman called Humphreys; notes such as the seamstress requires and then an order for twenty yards of cotton or a reel of lace. The Engagement book reveals that Humphreys would already have been in her fifties when Nora was hired, which means she might have wanted to find someone to foist fine work on, a young girl with sharp eyes and nimble fingers, one who was educated to a reasonable standard, easy to work with, willing to learn.
Jane draws a line down the centre of a clean page and writes Nora Hayling’s details from the Whitmore on one side, and from the Inglewood servants’ book on the other. She allows herself to imagine the possibility that Nora Hayling is N: that it is late August 1877, and N has been missing for more than a fortnight, and suddenly she is there at Inglewood, being hired as a housemaid. That she is working for the Farringtons at the time of the outing by the lake where Norvill and Charlotte are flirting and George is soliciting funds for his expedition, and Leeson is shot.
But even with all this, there is a gap: if she did not go up to the door that night of the escape from the Whitmore with Leeson and Herschel, as George’s letter suggests, then where did she go? And why did she make her way back to the estate?