Page 11 of The Housekeeper's Secret

‘Not at all.’

As she moved towards the door, she searched her mind for a casual conversational opening; some way of discovering—without seeming to pry—if, perchance, Mrs Furniss had ever shopped in Rackhams lingerie department? But her mind remained frustratingly blank, and she found herself back out in the corridor, no closer to working out where her path might have crossed the housekeeper’s.

Except, she was certain that she would have remembered the housecoat, if Rackhams had ever stocked such a garment. She had an eye for quality and knew style when she saw it (which was why Miss Addison—who had not and did not—had offered her employment).

No, it wasn’t the housecoat that had rekindled the ember of a memory. It was the cool beam of that blue gaze.

The vast old house felt different with so many strangers beneath its roof: its atmosphere altered, its age-old stillness shattered. Although Kate was exhausted by meeting the demands of the visitors (Miss Addison proved to be no trouble, but Lady Etchingham was as capricious and demanding as a spoiled toddler), she found it impossible to sleep. In the small hours of both Friday and Saturday night, her restless mind had wandered through corridors and paused outside bedrooms, seeking reassurance that nothing was amiss, and not quite being able to find it.

It was tiredness that had set her nerves on edge, she told herself, trailing back downstairs after taking a tisane up to Lady Etchingham’s room on Sunday afternoon (such terrible indigestion; your cook has a very heavy hand with sauces…). Lack of sleep had brought back that old jittery, unsettled feeling, undermining her confidence, making her question herself. She was dogged by doubt, the feeling that she had forgotten some important duty or neglected some fundamental responsibility and was just waiting to be discovered.

For the punishment to come.

Crossing the hall, she felt the eyes of the second baronet idly following her. On impulse, instead of going downstairs, she turned into the library passage, to check that the girls hadn’t missed any stray glasses in the billiard room. Mr Hyde and Lord Etchingham had played after dinner last night, and the room was stale with cigar smoke, redolent of whisky. She raised the sash a fraction to freshen the air and was about to leave when she noticed that the library door was slightly ajar. A ripple of unease spread through her.

The library was an impressive room, with shelves from floor to ceiling and a galleried walkway running around the upper level, reached by a concealed staircase in the corner. The air of neglect and decay that pervaded other rooms at Coldwell was absent there, but Kate still felt a chill of discomfort whenever she entered it. Perhaps it was the miasma of masculinity—cigar smoke and self-assurance—which stirred buried memories. Perhaps it was the macabre collection of objects fashioned from animal parts that made her shudder—the hoof inkwell and horn candlesticks, the elephant’s foot coal scuttle and paperknife with the tiger tooth handle—or the framed illustrations on the wall behind the desk, rumoured to have been cut from a book stolen from a Mughal harem, showing naked bodies tangled together in an improbable tableaux of erotic bliss. Or the well-thumbed volumes of ‘gentlemen’s literature’ on the shelves, interspersed among respectable and unread titles, hidden in plain sight.

Heart crashing, she pushed the door open and looked in, wary that Frederick Henderson might be in there. Seeing someone standing by the desk, she was about to make a hasty retreat, before realising that it wasn’t the valet at all.

‘Mr Arden.’ Her tone was glacial—did he not know that the servants were not allowed in the library except with express permission? ‘I’m quite sure you have good reason to be in here alone, looking through Mr Hyde’s publications, but I can’t immediately think what it might be. Perhaps you could help me?’

She had expected embarrassment; a deep blush at the very least and some expression of shame at being caught red-handed in a place where servants were not permitted alone. She wondered if Walter Cox had put him up to it. The library was usually kept locked, but gossip about pictures of concubines and naked many-handed goddesses; works of literature by ‘A Gentleman of the World’ or ‘Madame Mauvais’ inevitably circulated amongst the servantry—the men in particular. Had Walter dared the new footman to come to see for himself?

If he was uncomfortable, he showed little sign of it: only the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, the flicker of a muscle in his cheek. His face remained expressionless.

‘I was looking for a book.’

‘A book.’ She almost laughed. At least he was honest (hadn’t his character said as much?), though she had expected a more creative excuse. ‘Was there a particular volume you were hoping to find, or was your interest more general?’

‘A particular volume.’

To her horror, he picked it up. Heat flooded her cheeks as he held it out.

‘The visitors’ book,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Lady Etchingham mentioned it when I took up the coffee after lunch—she thought it might be in here, though it hasn’t been used for years. It was wrong of me to look at it; I’m sorry.’

She swallowed and shook her head as she took the book from him, her throat too dry to respond. Instead, she opened the worn leather cover and feigned interest in the pages of illegible signatures in faded ink and scrawled messages whose meaning had been lost to time.

‘The last time it was used was in 1902,’ he said, his voice low in the velvet quiet. ‘Were you here then?’

‘No, I came the following year.’

It wasn’t one of those formal visitors’ books, where guests had to write in columns and on narrow lines. The paper was plain, to allow for more spontaneous and creative entries. Kate flicked past pen-and-ink sketches and snatches of doggerel verse amongst baffling private jokes (Delighted to meet ‘Lady Gloria.’ What a charming young ingénue!!!). The final entry was dated August 1902 (Dreadful weather, decent grouse) and the page facing it was empty, suggesting that had been the last time a house party had gathered at Coldwell. Except—looking closer—she could just make out that a leaf had been removed from the book. Cut cleanly, with a sharp knife.

Intrigued, she touched the edge with the tip of her finger and was about to remark on it when a noise from the billiard room made her jerk her hand away sharply: the rapid scutter of claws, followed by the creak of a door opening. Randolph Hyde’s booming voice reached them, and she remembered that Miss Dunn had said something at lunch about Miss Addison being interested in art and hoping for a tour of the paintings.

‘Fairly dismal daubs in here, I’m afraid.’ Hyde sounded bored. ‘Italian ruins. Some forbear or other bought the lot for a knock-down price in Italy—souvenirs of the Grand Tour. Put me off bothering with the place, frankly. You’d think Italy would be sunny but look at that for a pea-souper. Give me India any day. Still, this room’s only used as a chaps’ mess, so anything better would be wasted. Shall we—?’

‘But isn’t that another room?’ Miss Addison asked. ‘May I—?’

Kate’s eyes flew up to meet Jem Arden’s. Her heart was beating so hard that she thought he must hear it. Clasping the visitors’ book against her chest, she nodded to the staircase in the corner.

He understood her meaning immediately, moving swiftly to open the narrow door in the panelling and letting her go ahead of him into the small space. It was a standard rule in most houses that servants should avoid being seen upstairs by the family at all costs, though as housekeeper Kate had a little more licence. But not when it came to the library, with its collection of explicit gentlemen’s material.

The staircase was narrower than she’d recalled. Light filtered dimly down from above, and the air smelled of old paper and dust. As Jem pulled the door shut, she climbed the first two steps of the spiral staircase, wincing at the creak they made, not daring to go further. They were just in time. From outside came the frantic patter of the spaniel’s feet, the excited snuffle of his nose in the gap beneath the door.

Hyde’s laugh followed, abrupt and uneasy. ‘Aha, you’ve discovered my bachelor den. Coldwell’s own little gentlemen’s club.’

‘Oh, gosh, what a simply marvellous room! All these books… such treasures! I didn’t know you were a reader, Mr Hyde.’

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