The Penny Heart (22 page)

As for our tormentor, I hope it gave the wicked creature satisfaction to send my dear child’s father to his grave, and thereby deny me the support of the man who should one day have been my husband. Of my own wit, I have found myself another fellow to take me to the altar and sign the baptismal book, though I had to make heavy use of the purse Mr Ashe supplied me with. Needless to say, I am safe, if not content with my lot.

Thank you again, most loyal friend, may God bless you for your kindness.

As for the old witch – fie on her! May she be visited with the suffering she has wrought on me by ten thousand-fold. May she rot in hell and never know rest,

Your affectionate friend . . .

Well, the young mother certainly had a high theatrical style of letter-writing. Peg pursed her lips as she struggled to make out the unexpected name described by the tattered signature. Then, placing the letter and cradle back in the box, she wondered how she might put this extraordinary fact to the greatest use.

It was time to make a start on making the special Usquebaugh for the master. With
Mother Eve’s Secrets
open before her, she hummed merrily under her breath. This distillery was an unexpected boon. She was building up her hoard of pretty bottles of queer potions, alchemical powders, lozenges, elixirs, and pills no larger than pin-heads. Still, she must change the lock soon, to avoid any more unwelcome visitors. She patted the chatelaine that bounced at her waist; a plaque of steel hooked to her belt, with clips holding scissors, a pincushion, and a most useful collection of knives and hooks. It was growing heavy with keys, both those she found and those Mrs Croxon handed to her in her vague, apologetic way. Now she had keys to every part of the house. 

And Nan was proving useful. Looking at the seed pods on the drying plate, she resisted the temptation to touch them. Granny had told a tale of some children eating such stuff who had then slept for four solid days, and been lucky to wake. Besides, she had other fish than eels to fry, or was that other cordials to doctor? She assembled the great glass globe of the alembic and set it on a low fire, attaching the pipe so it dripped into another bowl. Once she had seen a picture of one of those natural philosophers and their experiments. Now that was a life she might have enjoyed if she were a man; discovering new compounds and waiting to see how those who ate them fared. Grinding up the Blistering Flies in a mortar until they were shiny crimson, she smiled to herself, for it put her in mind of the Palace.

*

Making colours had been Mary’s favourite task; squeezing green juice from spinach, or rubbing the indigo stone in water to make twilight blue. The making of cochineal red always provoked the same macabre jests. ‘A bowl of blood,’ Auntie would wheeze, overseeing the carefully stirred crimson liquid. ‘That’s what them anatomisers collect in a basin. I seen it in the
Newgate Calendar
. They cuts the corpse down from the gibbet and carry it off to the saw-bones’s house. A soul can never go to rest, once it is drained of every drop of blood.’ Wary of drips, she would carry the bowl of viscous red to Auntie to be tested. Dipping her pen in the crimson ink, Aunt Charlotte always recited the same words, to the gasps and hoots of the company.

‘“Who scribes in blood his heart’s desire – condemns his soul to the Devil’s fire.” Go on then, girl, ask the Devil for whatever you wishes for. ’Tis only your soul you must hand over in return.’

She had shrieked and jumped back from the dripping pen. ‘It’s not proper blood, Auntie!’ Auntie waited, quill pen in hand, to test the red on clean white paper. What would they ask for, they all wondered, if they could have their heart’s desires? Would a thousand pounds do? Hell’s teeth, it would not. They wanted palaces and treasures and gowns and gallant lovers. Occasionally the excited chatter took a sober turn. Miss Dora, mannish-faced and leather-belted, said she wanted only a few acres with chickens and a stream to walk by with a little dog. The rest scoffed at that and vied to describe the costliest diamonds and richest beaux.

‘Out damned spot! Will these hands ne’er be clean?’ mocked Miss Edwina, snatching at Mary’s fingers that were deep-reamed with scarlet. Edwina had once been an actress, and regaled them with the story of Lady Macbeth, who had murdered a man and could never again scrub her hands clean. And as she listened, she had sat on her stool with her chin in crimsoned hands, transported by spanking tales of ghosts and murders, blood and gold.

Every day as Peg served Mrs Croxon, her first impression of her mistress did not change: she was a fish out of water, forever with her face in a book or rambling about the grounds. She had odd notions, too. Fancy talking with that half-wit Nan? And the cold-hearted way His Nibs treated her, that was an entertainment in itself.

Still, Peg was buttering her up like a plate of hot rolls. Each morning Peg listened to her attempts to give orders, then briskly stepped in and told her what was to happen. There was some venison that would do very nicely, Peg would say, recollecting Nan’s saying she could roast a saddle.

‘Oh, would you? Well, if it is not too much trouble?’

‘For you, Mrs Croxon, nothing is too much trouble.’

Then, just as Peg felt she could swan through each day without ruffling her feathers, Mrs Croxon wafted a letter in front of her. Where had that come from? Peg oversaw all the post for Delafosse Hall. That visiting card from Miss Sybilla Claybourn, for instance – that had been a close call. It was a good thing Miss Claybourn had sent Sue over with it – the same Sue she knew from the lodging house. She had invited her in to have a good old hobnob over a dish of tea in her housekeeper’s quarters.

After Sue had gone, she had collected Miss Claybourn’s card with the others that had arrived from the Earlby gentry. Slowly, and with some pleasurable ceremony, she burned them in the kitchen fire. As she dreamily watched the cards curl and blacken, she felt the prickle of someone watching her over her shoulder. Thrusting the last card into the fire with the poker, she looked up. But it was only Nan.

‘Looking for work?’ she snapped.

Nan shook her head and shuffled off. What did she care? Even if Nan had seen her, that bag of bones couldn’t read.

Now Mrs Croxon wafted a letter before her that must have been picked up directly in the village. ‘We are to have a guest. It is my oldest friend, Anne – Mrs Greenbeck. She will arrive here on the twenty-third of November.’

That was barely a month hence. Peg hid her vexation under a bright enquiry. ‘How long will she be staying here?’

‘She has not yet said. It does depend on—’ On what? On how the master behaved himself, no doubt.

‘Well, of course she’ll be made very welcome,’ she said, wondering how she might achieve the opposite.

‘Oh, thank you, Peg. I cannot say I feel prepared for visitors yet. And the Hall, as it is—’ 

Peg gave a long, sympathetic sigh. ‘We could offer a warmer welcome in the spring. Perhaps your friend could put off her visit till then?’

‘Oh no, no. It is quite settled. You must do your best, Peg. And maybe it will do me good.’ She pressed her fingertips between her eyes in a nervous gesture that Peg knew well. For very different reasons, Peg guessed her mistress was just as reluctant as she herself, to have a guest to stay.

There was one thing about Mrs Croxon that did impress her. Every morning the mistress disappeared up to the garret, where Peg assumed she did mindless needlework, or Bible-reading, or some such flim-flam. Then one day, after her mistress had gone into town, Peg tried out a key from her chatelaine and took a five-minute sneak about her mistress’s attic room. That writing box of hers that contained all her letters, where did she hide it?

To her surprise the chamber was filled with painting stuff, and Mrs Croxon’s work was spread about for her to see. She picked up a picture of the master sleeping, ready to scoff at some wishy-washy scrawl. Instead, she looked at it for a mighty long time, unable to pull herself away. Mrs Croxon had caught His Nibs, all right. Peg didn’t know how she’d done it, but it was the spit of him – it had a liveliness to the pencil lines, and a sureness to the colour. Beside it was a magnifying glass on a stand, and a tiny copy she was making onto a disc of white stuff. 

Two other miniatures hung on the wall; one of a mournful mope, who must be her mistress’s dead mother. The other was a young lad, pale and fair, whom Peg guessed to be a younger brother, perhaps also dead, for it was wound with a plait of turnip blond hair. How fiddly, Peg thought, all that twiddling about with chopped-off hair. Morbid, too, touching stuff from a corpse. She crossed herself half-heartedly and carried on rifling through piles of papers, recognising the master pictured in lots of different attitudes. With his coat open and his linen loose at his neck, he looked a swell cove, like a gentleman in a play. The pictures were not always flattering, mind you; his wife had caught that downturned sulk to his mouth, and the way he slouched as he sat, absent-mindedly stroking his own hair. He was asleep in the tiny picture being worked upon. How apt was that? His handsome face completely dumb.

Pinned on the wall was a mighty fine picture of Delafosse Hall at twilight; as good as a picture in a newspaper, with the green creeper covering everything, save for the golden rectangles of the windows. It was like a builders’ model of a house Peg had once seen in a shop window; there was something beguiling about the tiny doors and knockers and curtains. She traced the entrance, the old parlour windows, the drawing room, the Great Hall. Up at the top, just below the eaves, was the window to this very room. A figure stood at that window. A tiny woman was staring directly at Peg. For an instant it made her skin prick, as if she were being spied on from the miniature window by – no, she wouldn’t think of that. Hurriedly, she started to put back what she had disturbed, making ready to return downstairs. Still not a sign of the writing box. But here was something useful: a folder of parchment, letter weight, and what was this? Thin transparent onion paper. She thrust a sheet in her pocket.

No, it wasn’t just the picture that had made her uneasy – it was a noise on the stair. The stair creaked again, closer and louder. Peg froze. What reason could she give for having unlocked the door and come in here? Before she could think at all, the door was flung open. Guiltily, she sprang backwards.

‘What the Devil are you doing in Mrs Croxon’s room?’ Peter Croxon filled the doorway, spite sharpening his tousled fair features. Lord! If there was one person she didn’t want sneaking up on her, it was the master’s moralising brother. He remembered her from old, she could see it in his stony eyes.

‘Tidying up,’ she answered smartly, moving the pictures about on the table.

‘I very much doubt that. Where is Mrs Croxon?’

‘Out,’ she said, eyes cast down, willing him to go.

‘She is out, sir. Or have you forgotten your position here? Oh, and by the way, I have noticed that for a housekeeper you employ remarkably few servants.’

She didn’t reply, but scowled at him as she made to leave. In answer he blocked the door with his outstretched arm. His leanness was the sort that was strong and fast. He also stood a good head taller than her.

‘Now we are alone, Peg, or whatever you call yourself these days – know this. I am watching you,’ he said in a low growl. Still he refused to budge out of the way. ‘And I am watching Grace, too. If anything should happen to her—’

She made a calculation and glanced up at him with a beseeching expression. ‘Mr Croxon, if you would be good enough not to tell the mistress I was here —’

‘Why in damnation shouldn’t I?’ 

She was standing very close to him. Her face formed a practised look of yearning. Suggestively, she parted her lips in a coquettish smile.

‘You could grow to like me if you tried,’ she said in a low, slow voice. His pale eyes were fixed upon her in a fascinated stare. Sensing no resistance, she lifted her fingers to rub the sensitive skin around his ear. ‘You see, I like you.’ He didn’t move. She lifted her mouth towards his, stoking the familiar fire of a man’s need. Her body melded against his, groin to groin. She closed her eyes.

A blow to her face sent her reeling back towards the work table. Her fingers shot up to her stinging cheek.

‘Get out, you!’

With her shoulders bowed and her hand cupping her face, she made a dash past Peter Croxon and ran half-blind down the stairs.

In her own quarters she found a mirror. There was a purple bruise spreading over her cheek, and bloodshot veins filled her half-closed eye. In half an hour she would look like any black-eyed blowsabella. Peter piss-proud Croxon, she muttered, you took a wrong step there. But she had gathered some information. She now knew the brother had a sentimental hankering for Mrs Croxon. As she dabbed Pear’s Almond Lotion onto her swelling face without great effect, she was too muddled to think of a plan. He had struck her. He had rebuffed her. Her brain was giddy with anger. When she calmed down from this blaze of fury, she would rack her brain for an answer: Peter Croxon, what was his price?