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It looked like a picture she remembered from the Sunday school Bible: Mary Magdalene kneeling before Jesus. Mrs Furniss wasn’t kneeling, but she had the same dark hair as the woman in the illustration, the same expression of fierce tenderness. Eliza felt like she was intruding. Like none of the rest of them should be there.
‘Here we are, pal.’ Thomas came in, oblivious, and handed Jem a glass with an inch of amber liquid in the bottom. ‘Not quite Sir Randolph’s finest, but Mrs Gatley’s best cooking brandy.’ He puffed out a breath. ‘Doesn’t look like you’ll be fit to come to London now. Not with a shiner like you’re going to have.’
Eliza looked away, following the trail of crimson splashes on the flagstones, and realised with a sick thud of disappointment that he was right.
Ever since they’d found out about going to London, she’d been looking forward to it, for all that what Jem said was true and it was just scrubbing in a different kitchen, toiling up a different set of stairs. But she’d thought that, away from Coldwell, she might be different too. Someone he might notice.
She was so sick of this old place. Of the drudgery and the sense that life, in all its colour and excitement, was happening somewhere else. Going to the London house at coronation time had seemed like an opportunity to glimpse it for herself and she’d felt sorry for Mrs Furniss, being left behind. Stuck at Coldwell with miserable old Mr Goddard.
Now, watching the housekeeper gently sponging Jem’s bloodied cheek, she felt cheated. Tricked. As if she had been winning at a game when the rules had suddenly changed. And once again, she found herself the loser.
That night there was thunder.
Sleepless beneath the sheets in the airless footmen’s attic, Jem listened to the rain on the window and the throb of his blood in his pounding head. Thomas had offered to take the bed in the silver cupboard, and every now and then the lightning lit up Joseph’s sleeping face a few feet away.
It reminded him of Jack.
His plan had paid off. In a dark corridor with no one watching and the perfect excuse, Henderson hadn’t been able to stop himself from letting fly with his fists, punishing Jem for his disrespect. Jem had sensed that in him—the need to control and subjugate, that instinct for violence. He’d met men like Henderson before. Too many of them. He’d known how Henderson would respond and predicted that he wouldn’t realise until it was too late that he’d played right into Jem’s hands.
He’d been right.
Everything hurt. But an ember of triumph burned in his heart.
There are plenty men here who do what I did that summer. There are lots of ways to injure yourself just enough to be taken out of the line, or—if you do it properly—get sent home.
You have to be clever though. The officers are wise to an ‘accidental’ gunshot wound to the foot or the hand. They’ll court-martial you, if they suspect. They’ll put you in front of a firing squad and shoot you at dawn.
Chapter 10
The servants’ basement was eerily still in the aftermath of their departure.
The silence was as thick as cream. Going to the larder in the middle of the afternoon, Kate poured a glass of lemonade from the jug and listened.
Amos Kendall and his men were working in the late Lady Hyde’s rooms—known as the Jaipur Suite—installing a bathroom in the old dressing room. Mr Goddard had opened up a long-disused door below the nursery corridor, once used by nannies to take the children out to the gardens, and Mr Kendall’s invading army had decamped to the back of the house, removing the worst of the disruption from the servants’ basement. Sipping her lemonade in the cool of the larder, Kate could just make out the rhythm of their saws and hammers, like an echo from another time, made by the ghosts of the workmen who had built the great mansion more than a hundred years before.
But there were other noises too, closer and more worldly. The stable lads were clearing out the coach house and a block of empty stalls to make way for the new motorcar and its driver (not assisted, Kate gathered, by Johnny Farrow, who was refusing to facilitate his own replacement), and she could hear their activity. Nearer still, there was a steady thud: a little slower, a little less regular than a heartbeat. Taking her glass of lemonade she went to the stillroom, from where she could see out into the yard.
Jem was there, outside the woodstore, and for an unguarded second, she felt a spark of relief that he wasn’t on the train speeding away from Coldwell.
She quickly extinguished it.
The pitch pine dividers that had formed the horses’ stalls had been hauled out and leaned against the wall in broken pieces, which he was chopping into kindling splints. Sipping her lemonade, she watched. He worked slowly and without enthusiasm, which she initially assumed was because of the heat of the day and the tedium of the task. But then she noticed how he bent stiffly to pick up each post and hesitated before raising the axe. She couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were tense and hunched and he paused often, pressing a palm into his side.
Returning to the larder, she poured another glass of lemonade, before going out into the dusty heat of the yard. The smell of burning lingered but was overlaid with a resinous tang. As she crossed the cobblestones, she had a clear view of Jem’s battered face in the second before he looked up. She saw the way it contorted in pain as he swung the axe.
‘I thought you might be thirsty.’
He set the axe down, carefully, and took the glass.
‘Thank you.’
She could go back inside now; there was no reason not to. If it had been Thomas chopping wood, would she have done that? Not if he appeared to be in pain, she told herself briskly. She wouldn’t be doing her job if she did. She was the housekeeper. She had a duty of care.
‘It looks like it’s healing all right,’ she said, watching him drink. His swollen top lip meant that he could only sip slowly, and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth as he lowered the glass. ‘Is it still very sore?’
‘It’s fine.’
She shook her head, looking down at the ground. The hem of her skirt was fringed with dust and she shook it out absently, making her chatelaine chime. ‘Henderson did a lot of damage, for an accident. Two blows to the face before he realised his mistake…? And I don’t think that was all, was it?’