of press inquiries and investigator requests and beseeching tracts from mourners arrive weekly. Their lives have swollen to twice their natural size, but Leah, whom Ma has entrusted with the administration of their fortunes, persists in promising something larger still.
The excitement is hard to bear, but in its midst, ordinary life must go on. There is never enough money, fame and popularity notwithstanding. Ma and Kate keep house while Leah traipses about teaching piano (and spreading word of wonders). Maggie is elected to join Lizzie, who cooks and does light housekeeping for pay in the home of a neighboring family. “He’s an old English gentleman,” Leah assures. “A friend of Amy Post’s. Lizzie’s done very well with it.”
Maggie doesn’t care for being a servant or for being away from Kate. She doesn’t fancy the idea of things happening at home without her, not one bit, and hems and haws, but Leah is adamant.
“Another student quitted me last week.” Leah glares as if it were Maggie’s fault, as if Maggie might have done something to prevent it. “You’ll fix lunch and do a touch of cleaning after is all. It’s three days a week. Lizzie will see to it the other days.”
Kate can’t resist the chance to speak a truth no one else will. “So we’re serving-class now? I thought we were improving our prospects, not …” She winks at Maggie, warming her through.
Maggie holds Kate’s gaze, playing along. “Won’t he make his daughters cook?”
“He has one, all right. But she’s mad and won’t leave her room,” Leah complains. “Our second day there, she scratched Lizzie like a monkey on her face. I thought to put the wretch over my knee, but now we leave the tray outside her lair. Mr. Gill is too mild to punish her.”
The notion of a madwoman draped over Leah’s broad lap, crushing her petticoats, is delicious. “Does he beat her?” Maggie begs. “And does she run all up and down the river at night with flowers in her hair like Ophelia?”
“I’ve said, haven’t I? Mr. Gill’s the mildest kind of gentleman. But you remember Mrs. Bray? She’s hinted, in strictest confidence of course, that the Gills have suffered and leave behind some scandal in London….” Leah sighs, adding with barely concealed satisfaction, “Now, go introduce yourself. See what Mr. Gill has for you. Lizzie has an errand for Mrs. Little, but she’ll come along tomorrow and instruct you fully.”
Leah marches Maggie to the door, facing her toward Sophia Street. “It’s just six doors down from the Posts’. The Gill residence. Ring, and they’ll let you in and show you your work.”
He leads her to the kitchen, pointing her amiably here and there as she inspects columns of bone china in the cabinet. The front row sparkles, but all else sports a fine fuzz of dust that Maggie wagers is tacky to the touch.
The wallpaper is formerly grand, grim, you might say, if not for the pictures. Some are fine and delicate, ink-and-watercolor in gilt frames, others just pencil sketches tacked up at random and tending—like that baboon with the murderous shine in its eye—toward morose.
By the time Maggie finishes her inspection, Mr. Gill has a tea tray all done up for service and is shakily portioning out his own sandwiches, shifting his plate off to a sideboard. “Come,” he says, waving her to the doorway.
They stand side by side in musty shadows, and he gestures down the long hall, then back at the tray, watching her face anxiously as if she might object. “Third door on the left. Clara likes a whole pot. We’ll make me another when you’ve done with her. Find me in the drawing room.”
Does she, now … and will we?
Maggie can’t abide being addressed as a servant, especially in view of her newly elevated status. She imagines a girl like the baboon from the drawing leaping onto her back, but curiosity wins out. It usually does. “You’d like me to pour it for her?”
“Please. If she’ll allow.”
Not if you please but if she’ll allow.
Flashing that frightful smile, he returns for his plate of bread-and-butter sandwiches, heading down the hall with it in the opposite direction. Maggie looks warily after. Mr. Gill seems unduly satisfied about something, brave in his mild way, which bodes ill. But Maggie remembers Lizzie—fearless here before her—and won’t be bested. Lizzie can’t triumph, especially with Kate in the balance.
“And you’ll see she opens the drapes if needs be?” he calls over a bony shoulder.
For the fun of it, Maggie dips into a dainty curtsy. “I will, sir.”
A shock of silvery hair hangs in lank splendor down Mad Clara’s back, but her satin gown is simple and clean, old-fashioned, nearly the shade of her skin. It’s a color like absence. She’s all watery insubstantial, it seems, till she hears Maggie and turns, leveling those shocking eyes on her—fierce, intelligent eyes in a gaunt face. That’ll cut glass, that look.
“Hello, miss. Your father said to open the drapes.”
Mad Clara only stares as if to say, Try.
“I won’t if you prefer not.”
“I prefer … not.”
“Where will you have this?” The tray’s a strain on Maggie’s wrists, but she won’t sigh in complaint.
“There on the table. Push those papers aside.”
Maggie does with her elbow, and drawings float to the floor like leaves. Birds, mostly. Lovely ones. Maggie recognizes a thrush, a catbird, others that are mere skeletons, spare and shining as spider-webs. She sets down the tray and kneels to gather up these strange likenesses, which invite the same dazed ingratitude live birds do when Maggie chances to notice them. They might be hard at work stitching the world together with their beaks, for all she knows, holding the stuffing in, but such work is theirs to do.
Setting the drawings down, Maggie crosses to the window. She has no wish to be scratched and already knows to forgo pleasantries. She jerks the curtains open to a tangle of garden, remembering the flawless nest she found on David’s lot, now concealed in a hatbox in Leah’s closet.
Mad Clara’s too self-possessed to wince or protest, but some scarce-visible part of her stiffens in a crouch.
Maggie
