No smile now. Her hand had closed round the top of her cane, as if she were trying to squeeze sap out of the long-dead ebony.
‘Somebody has already died,’ I said.
‘All the more reason to stop it then. What are you waiting for? Hurry.’
I went. When I looked back from a bend in the road there was only the oak tree, no sign of her.
There was a letter for Celia at the stables that Monday morning, but nothing from Mr Blackstone. On Tuesday, when Mrs Beedle came up to see the children at their lessons, she gave not the slightest sign that she regarded me as anything but the governess.
‘I notice that you haven’t been coming down with the children, Miss Lock.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but there is a great deal to do for Mrs Quivering.’
In fact, the place cards were all written and she probably knew that, but she gave me a nod and corrected a spelling mistake on James’s slate that I’d missed.
‘Sharp eyes, Miss Lock. Sharp brains are all very well, but there’s nothing like sharp eyes.’
On Wednesday morning I made my usual journey to the livery stables, but the crows were sitting on the dead oak tree as usual and there was no sign of her. There were two letters that day, a thin one for Celia and a thinner one for me. I opened it on the journey back.
You have done well, Miss Lock, Your duties are at an end. You need not communicate with me any further. I shall see you again when this affair is over, or provide for you as best I can.
I crumpled it in my hand, furious. So Blackstone thought I could be dismissed with a pat on the head, like an unwanted hound. He had a debt to me – everything he knew about my father’s death. I intended to collect that debt, however long it took me.
Just one phrase of his note interested me: when this affair is over … It added to the sense I had of things moving towards a crisis. It increased all through the day as house guests began arriving in advance of the weekend. Every hour brought another grand carriage trotting up the drive and the children wouldn’t settle and kept jumping up to look at them. It was a relief when Mrs Quivering summoned me downstairs again.
‘Miss Lock, do you understand music?’
She had a new pile of papers on her desk and a more than usually worried expression.
‘Understand?’
‘There are musicians arriving tomorrow who, it seems, must have parts copied for them.’
‘Will they not bring their own music?’
‘It is something newly written. Sir Herbert ordered it from some great composer in London and is in a terrible passion … I mean, is seriously inconvenienced because the person delivered it late and with the individual parts not written out.’
‘I’ll do it gladly,’ I said, meaning it.
It was just the excuse I needed for keeping behind the scenes on the servants’ side of the house for the next two evenings. I’d often done the same service for my father’s friends, so it was a link too with my old life.
She dumped the score on my desk and left me to look at it. A few minutes were enough to show that Sir Herbert’s ‘great’ composer was a competent hack at best. The piece was headed Welcome Home and came in three parts: a long instrumental introduction, rather military in style, scored for woodwind, two trumpets and a side drum. Then a vocal section for woodwind, strings, baritone and high tenor, with pinchbeck words about past glories and future triumphs, followed by an instrumental coda with so much work for the trumpets that I hoped they’d demand an extra fee.
I wondered if Mrs Beedle had proposed me for the copying work and, if so, what I was expected to gain from it. As the afternoon went on, I guessed that it had nothing to do with the music, but very much to do with keeping me in a convenient place for spying. Everything in a household, from kitchen maids with hysterics to guests mislaying their toothbrushes, came to the housekeeper’s room.
There was one particular incident that afternoon. The assistant housekeeper came into the room and whispered something to Mrs Quivering, who followed her out to the corridor. She left the door half open and I saw one of the under footmen leaning against the wall, pale-faced, with tears running down his cheeks. I knew him slightly because he sometimes brought coal and lamp oil to the nursery kitchen. His name was Simon and he was fourteen years old, tall for his age but childish in his ways. I believe he owed his promotion from kitchen boy to under footman to the fact that his shoulders were broad enough to fill out the livery jacket. Mrs Quivering gave him a handkerchief to mop his eyes and listened with bent head to what he was saying. I couldn’t hear him, but her voice carried better.
‘It is not your fault, Simon, but you must not talk about it. While he is here, you will go back to working in the kitchen, then we’ll see. But if you talk about it, you will be in very serious trouble.’
Her assistant led the boy away and she came back into the room, heaving a sigh and not looking very pleased with herself. Soon after that, the butler came in, a sad-faced man named Mr Hall. They carried on a conversation in low voices, heads close together, with Mrs Quivering doing most of the talking.
‘I will not tolerate it, Mr Hall. The servants are under our protection. A word must be said.’
‘He won’t take it well.’
‘I am almost past caring how he takes it. I had Abigail in tears this morning too. She said Lord Kilkeel swore at her most vilely when he found her in his room. She’d gone in there to clean and make the bed, and he told her nobody was to set foot in there, for any reason, without his express permission. The poor girl was so terrified she’s been quite useless since. And now the other one and Simon. If you won’t speak to him about the two of them, then I shall. And if I lose my position through it, there are others.’
The butler said yes, he’d speak to him as soon as he had the opportunity. I could see Mrs Quivering didn’t quite believe him, but they parted on civil terms and she went back to her lists.
Towards the end of the afternoon, I grew tired of having to draw musical staves with Mrs Quivering’s knobble-edged ruler and went up to the schoolroom for a better one. I found Charles and James arguing, Henrietta sulking and Betty so worn out with having to cope with them on her own that it was the least I could do to give her an hour’s relief by taking them for a walk in the grounds. We went out by a side entrance because they were in their plain schoolroom clothes and not fit for being seen by company. With that in mind, I guided them quickly towards the flower garden, for the protection of its high beech hedges.
‘Celia? Celia, where are you?’
Stephen’s voice came from the other side of the hedge. Henrietta stopped. I whispered to her to go on, but she put her eye to the hedge.
‘He’s with Mr Brighton,’ she said in a loud whisper.
I caught Henrietta by the arm and fairly dragged her along a gravel path to the safety of a little ornamental orchard behind the flower garden, with the boys following. It was a pleasant acre of old apple and pear trees with a thatched wooden summerhouse in the middle, too far from the house to be much used by adults. Once we were safely there, I helped Henrietta tuck her skirts up to the
