Ace, King, Knave (43 page)

‘I don’t know where she got these carrots,’ Eliza remarks, holding one up. ‘Soft as an old man’s sugar stick.’

Soft, a sugar stick? One of his tasks is to grind the sugar loaf and that is hard enough for anybody: it is a strange thing to say. But then, Eliza is a strange young woman. She once told him that she came with the house. He was struck by this and thought perhaps there were such things as English slaves, but then the next day she told him that she could leave whenever she wished and find work elsewhere. She said, ‘I’ll see life before I’m done, believe me.’ He is not sure what she meant by this. Does not everybody see life? He smooths his buttered hands over his face to oil the skin there.

Eliza grins. ‘That’s better.’

He nods: speech is full of traps. Whenever he answers a question, Mrs Dog Eye corrects him – ‘Now repeat! Repeat!’ – though mostly he is unable to perceive the difference. It is there, however, since others also react: with laughter, with frowns of perplexity, with contempt.

Eliza says, ‘I s’pose you heard them milling out there?’

‘Milling?’

‘Beating, fighting.’ She raises her fists as if to box with him. ‘I’ve seen
him
hanging round before. Ten to one he’s a dun.’

‘Done?’

‘It’s loss of breath talking to you, Blackbird. A dun comes looking for money.’

‘A poor man. A beggar.’

Eliza laughs. ‘A devil, more like. When you borrow, Titus, and you don’t pay it back ―’ She breaks off as Fan enters. ‘Did you tell her about the woman?’

Fan looks towards Fortunate and frowns. ‘Little pitchers, Liza. Tell-tale tits.’

Fortunate says, ‘A dun is a devil?’

‘Hear that?’ Eliza answers, not to him but to Fan. ‘Innocent as a babe unborn.’

‘Later.’ Fan picks up a carrot, wrinkling her nose. ‘Are these the best you could find?’

‘Launey bought ’em. She must be riding the market man. Time she was back, if you ask me ―’

There is a loud slam: the front door.

‘Talk of the devil,’ Fan exclaims, causing Fortunate’s stomach to turn over. She and Eliza become very busy peeling and chopping, but no Mrs Launey appears. ‘I’m not losing my wits, am I?’ Fan demands of her heap of carrots. ‘It
was
the door I heard?’

It was. The dun-devil has entered. It is in the passageway even now, snuffling its way towards him.

‘Unless it was the mistress going out,’ Eliza suggests.

‘Can’t be, those Lechery people are still here.’

Eliza goes to the kitchen door. ‘Come on, Titus. Let’s have a look.’ She catches hold of his sleeve and pulls him towards the corridor.

‘Scream out directly if you meet a robber,’ Fan calls.

‘I’ve got Titus to protect me.’

He would rather Eliza protected him, so he keeps to the rear, listening out for the snarl of the Spirit. All he hears, however, is a murmur of conversation from behind the Blue Room door, proving Fan correct: the visitors are still within the house. Fortunate and Eliza go from room to room, searching behind curtains and sofas and inside wall cupboards.

Taking up a candle, Eliza suggests they should check the cellar. Down they go, Fortunate sweating like an overdriven horse, into a darkness smelling of cesspits where he is forced to breathe through his mouth. Eliza holds out the candle to each corner of the brick vault in turn.

‘Nobody here. Let’s try upstairs.’

As they mount to the first floor, he is comforted by the knowledge that he was able to hide his fear from the maid. He has not disgraced himself. Eliza goes to the mistress’s room and searches there while Fortunate, bolder now, knocks at the door of the study and when Dog Eye does not respond, pushes it open.

‘Eliza!’

The girl hurries to him. ‘You’re not fooling me, are you?’

It is no foolery. The desk is torn like a deer after the kill. A leg has been ripped off and the drawers dragged from its belly, one thrown against a wall, another lying charred near the hearth. In the grate lies a grey feathery nest of burnt papers. Eliza, like Fortunate, stops at the doorway, her eyes wide.

‘Dear God,’ she says. ‘Dear God.’

She whirls about and runs along the corridor to the master’s chamber. Fortunate has a happy inspiration. He goes to the box of pistols, sets the safety catches and slips one of them into each of his pockets. They are just concealed. There is a smaller box of powder and one of lead balls. These, too, he takes before following Eliza, his belly tight with anticipation.

Clothes are flung about the bedchamber; the master’s razor and other personal items have vanished from the closet. There is a sharp stink on the air. Eliza looks round, lifts the lid of the commode and lowers it with a grimace of disgust.

‘He’s heaved up in there. Nice job for somebody, and don’t I know who!’

‘Dun,’ Fortunate suggests. ‘Afraid of Devil Dun.’

‘Could be.’ She flops onto the bed and sits there, gnawing at her thumb. A disrespectful action. She would not dare if the master were present.

‘He’d a soft spot for
you
,’ she says with a sly look at him. ‘Did he never drop a hint?’

He shakes his head.

‘You know what this means, don’t you? He’s gone.’

‘To Romeville?’

Despite everything, she laughs. ‘Who taught you that word?’

‘Him.’

‘And he didn’t teach you what it was? We’re in Romeville now, you simpkin. But you can’t call it that in respectable company. You must say,
London.
’

She’s teasing him. This dreary house, with its sour mistress, is London. He hasn’t forgotten Romeville: a savage, marvellous place, where the people live by night.

‘I wouldn’t be in your shoes,’ Eliza says, her face softening. He knows this saying about shoes: in the kitchen, it means a cake is sunken or a sauce curdled. ‘She’ll get rid of you now, you may depend upon it.’

She begins a story about a housekeeper she once knew, dismissed by the mistress of the house while the master was away in Italy but Fortunate, plunged in misery, barely hears her.

Dog Eye has abandoned him.

43

The Pinched Wife stands a long time staring at the ashes. Before fetching her Eliza hurried to Fan, who now stands at the door, fingers twisted in her apron. All three women are the colour of watered milk.

The Wife murmurs something. Fortunate is unable to understand what she is saying, and perhaps the maids also, since they exchange furtive glances.

‘If I may speak, Madam.’ For once, Eliza is solemn enough.

‘Yes?’ The Wife does not look at her.

‘The drawer’s been sticking lately. Something wrong in the lock. I heard the master pulling at it yesterday.’

‘I see,’ the Wife says, looking not at the desk but at the ashes.

Fortunate says, ‘He’s taken his pistols, Madam.’

The Wife says, ‘They’re on the shelf.’

‘The case is, Madam, but it’s empty.’

‘Why would he leave the case?’ The Wife goes to it and opens it up. Folding back the lid, she stands a moment with her hands on the leather, staring out from the study window. To Fortunate she looks as if she is trying to foresee what will come of this. Only now does it come to him that the missing pistols change everything. They mean a duel. He should have held his tongue.

‘Tell Mr and Mrs Letcher I’m indisposed and must beg to be excused. Offer them more refreshment before their journey. Fan, I shall want you. Come to me in half an hour.’

Within her closet Sophia takes out her favourite writing paper, a gift from Mama. Extraordinary, the comfort afforded by such an inert and flimsy substance, and at such a time – in those very moments when one might fancy it beneath notice. The inkstand she brought with her from Buller Hall, her rose-scented sealing wax: each speaks to her as a friend, reassuring her that present troubles represent an eruption of anarchy soon to be repressed, after which life will continue to conduct itself
comme il faut
. The very curves of the inkstand insist upon it.

And yet,
comme il faut
is precisely what her life has never been. Always there have been spots of rottenness, maggots deep in the core: Papa’s vanity, her ‘little weakness’, the dishonesty of her parents in concealing it before the marriage, her craven, reprehensible feelings for Edmund. Perhaps misery and uncertainty are, after all, the way of the world and everything else mere surface.

What would a poor woman say? Surely if anyone understands trials and tribulations it is a widow without means. Could she but find some decent but penniless creature, spotless in her person (since otherwise Sophia could not endure to sit with her), she would have someone to consult with. ‘Speak frankly,’ she would say. ‘Do you consider our existence to be made up entirely of suffering?’

The conversation can never take place; her acquaintance does not extend to paupers. Nor could she bear to uncover her own wounds, to respond to questions probing, lancet-like, into the inflamed and infected body of her marriage. Thank God she sent Hetty away! – and yet, she realises, her husband’s departure is a development of which her cousin must be told. She may require the assistance and protection of Hetty’s husband: who knows what debts, what secrets, what crimes Edmund has left behind him? Suppose that degraded hulk of a man should return in search of him, force the door and find Sophia unprotected?

If only it were possible to quit this house. Mama always maintained that a wife who ‘bolts’ puts herself entirely and irrevocably in the wrong, but may not a woman flee when her husband has already done so? In what sense does this leaking ship of souls – four females and a black boy – constitute a marital home?

The closet surprises her by its warmth. She pulls the curtain aside – no risk of Edmund spying on her now – and wipes her brow, the skin of which is unpleasantly greasy.
Dearest Hetty
, she imagines writing. What follows?
You are doubtless wondering ―

Supposing she writes her letter now. Will there be another, a worse one, to write tomorrow? On the face of it, a duel seems inconceivable: what honour can Edmund possibly imagine himself obliged to defend? Yet every day men take up arms, knowing themselves in the wrong. Even so, it is difficult to imagine Edmund so engaged. He takes far too good a care of himself.

Best write now. She pictures the words on her fine paper, sealed with the pink wax. This letter will require some delicacy of phrasing. Really, how warm the closet is for this time of year! More than warm, it is stuffy, quite intolerably so ―

Something strikes her nose, filling her eyes with water. There is a voice, flat and toneless: ‘Madam.’

Then a scratching sensation in her fingers. Another voice, toneless likewise: ‘Told you.’

Sophia is unable to distinguish the words that follow. Her closed eyelids appear to her as blood-coloured curtains. The sensation in her hand softens, is now a patting, while the jumble of speech swells, gathers depth and nuance and becomes recognisable at last as the familiar voice of Fan, saying, ‘There, you see?’

Sophia raises the red curtains of her eyes on a puzzling scene: the two maids standing over her, one on either side.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You asked me to come for a letter, Madam.’ Fan’s manner, calm and respectful, suggests there is nothing in the world the matter. Sophia, recalling the blow to her nose and the shock of pain that resulted, is about to ask what happened when she observes her vial of hartshorn lying upon the toilet table.

Fan says, ‘Mr and Mrs Letcher left word they’d be back tomorrow.’

The dead weight Sophia escaped in unconsciousness promptly rolls over her again, crushing her: Edmund, gone. She sits motionless. Everything that suggests itself to her, even rising from the chair, strikes her as futile.

‘You fainted, Madam. Shall I help you to bed?’ Fan suggests at last.

‘I meant to write to Mrs Letcher.’

‘Your delicate health . . .’ Eliza allows her voice to trail off insinuatingly.

Indignation lends Sophia strength enough to snap, ‘I wasn’t aware I’d discussed my health with you.’

For all that she bows her head, the girl’s face is sly rather than humbled. She is a coarse creature, and has the insolence one might expect in a household where servants are told more than the wife.

Fan tries to soften the thing down. ‘Pray excuse the impertinence, Madam. Eliza meant well.’ Yet she, too, has a curious way of looking at Sophia, as if she has glimpsed new lights in her. Without a master, the household has begun to dissolve: Sophia senses its dissolution as she might a physical, palpable process.

‘Eliza,’ she says, ‘go to the kitchen.’

To mark the punishment, Fan, the favoured, may remain. She regards her employer with such an expression of preparedness, of faith in her own abilities, that it is a comfort in itself.

‘Does Mrs Launey know Mr Zedland is out?’

‘I can’t say, Madam.’

‘Then tell her to keep something hot for him.’

‘What I mean, Madam, is that she went out after dinner and hasn’t come back.’

‘After dinner?’

‘About three o’clock. I pray God she hasn’t met with thieves. She has a gold brooch, and other things.’

Sophia considers this. ‘Could we send Titus to ask?’

‘Ask who, Madam?’

‘The watchmen, of course.’

‘The Charleys won’t have seen anything.’ Fan is emphatic. ‘They never do.’

‘Well. Let us hope she soon returns. In her absence, do you think you and that silly wench could put together a cold supper?’

‘Of course.’ The maid goes to the door, hesitates, and turns back. ‘If I may ask, Madam. When you are finished, might we also serve ourselves?’

‘Certainly,’ Sophia answers. ‘Take whatever you wish.’

Left alone, she stares into the mirror, a sibyl intent on divination. Does she detect a sickliness – a pallor? Could a woman of her complexion conceivably look any paler?

Eliza’s mention of delicate health has struck terror into her. Mama has told her, more than once, of the faintness that comes from being
enceinte
, how Mama herself was prone to it, and how Aunt Phoebe’s swoonings were notorious. Once, when four months gone with Hetty, Phoebe was admiring a bed of roses when she toppled headlong into it. The gentlemen ran to lift her out; finding her face barely scratched, everyone cried out upon her good fortune and said it was a mercy she hadn’t lost an eye.