Page 78 of The Housekeeper's Secret

Reluctantly Jem tore his eyes from the trees and turned away. Joseph felt a flare of anger towards stupid Davy Wells as they trudged down the hill, the spaniel bounding ahead, Jem glancing back towards the wood every few paces. Joseph hoped he might remember the conversation that had been interrupted, and pick it up again, but he didn’t, and pride prevented Joseph from trying himself.

They walked in silence.

When he was younger Joseph used to wish he was invisible, to avoid the force of his father’s fury. Now it felt that he might be. That he had faded into the nothing his father had always said he was, like the trail of their footsteps, fast disappearing in the freshly falling snow.

Chapter 26

While the snow fell it was like they were under some sort of enchantment; a spell of silence, where everything was altered. Folding back the drawing room shutters on the third day Eliza saw that the flakes had stopped and there was a pink dawn spreading across the sky, making the white world blush.

She stood looking out, watching the crows rise raggedly from the wood, before briskly turning away, picking up her box of dusters, brushes, and black lead. As she passed a wide mirror, she caught sight of a figure in the glass and felt a judder of shock.

It was her. The stout woman with the pudding face and the hair scraped back under her cap was her.

The foxed glass above the washstand in the maids’ attic only showed small bits of her at any one time, so she had been spared the impact of the whole. With a soft moan, she faced her reflection fully, setting down the box and twisting left and right, checking to see if the swelling in her belly, which felt like she’d eaten a tray of underbaked currant buns, was visible.

She’d had to let out her corset laces, of course, but she couldn’t risk loosening it as much as she’d like, so the roundness she felt at night, beneath her nightgown, was concealed a bit. Miserably, she tugged at her apron. She looked like the laundrywoman who sometimes came up on Monday with a snivelling infant strapped to her back.

‘Eliza…’

She spun round and felt her heavy stomach drop.

Mrs Furniss had come into the room and stopped short. For a moment they stared at each other, and Eliza watched the colour drain from the housekeeper’s face as her eyes moved from Eliza’s stomach to her face and back, realisation dawning like the sun rising over the snow outside.

‘I think…’ Her voice sounded like someone had her by the throat. ‘I think you’d better come to my room.’

Kate had always prided herself on her attention to detail.

At twenty-five, she had been inordinately young to take over the post of housekeeper in a house this size, and relatively inexperienced in matters pertaining to cleaning and household maintenance. However, those were things that could be learned from Cassell’s Household Guide and Mrs Beeton. The qualities that were so notably absent in Mrs Walton—understanding of the girls whose labour she relied on, awareness of their lives, their alliances, their squabbles, their worries, and their pleasures—came naturally to Kate, and she believed that these things (along with a head for figures and a methodical approach to accounts) were what made a good housekeeper.

And that’s what she had thought herself—a good housekeeper, up until that moment in the drawing room, with the low winter sun stretching its rosy rays across the faded carpet and giving Eliza an aura of gold. Kate’s first thought was that she looked like a figure from an old painting—a shepherd girl, or Demeter perhaps—womanly and voluptuous. It took her a second to understand why.

It was her fault.

Self-recrimination beat inside her as she went down to the basement, where Frederick Henderson had collared a miserable-looking Joseph in the gloom beneath the stairs. Any other time she would have stepped in to rescue him, but her head was too full of her own responsibilities—if she had kept her focus, none of this would have happened. Sending Eliza to wash her hands, Kate went into the housekeeper’s parlour and sat down at her desk. She let out a shaky exhalation.

She had never held with the idea that servants should—or could—be controlled by intimidation. Kate had tried to lead her girls by example… to show that it was possible to find satisfaction in work well done, to establish a valuable life for oneself as an independent woman.

And then Jem Arden had come to Coldwell and she had stopped trying to do those things. She had lost sight of everything but him.

Eliza came in quietly, without knocking. She stood beside the armchair, leaning against it as her eyes moved around the room, eventually fixing themselves on the window.

‘How did it happen?’ Kate asked in a low voice. She suspected she already knew and could hardly bear to hear it, but she owed Eliza the chance to share the burden of her secret.

‘I should think you know that, Mrs Furniss.’

Eliza’s tone was sardonic. Defiant almost; a sharp contrast with the shame Kate had expected. She felt herself instantly disconcerted, as if she had opened a door and found quite a different vista from the one she’d anticipated. Distress affected people differently, she reminded herself. She must be patient.

‘I mean, was it—were you—assaulted? Did he force himself on you?’ As she said it, she felt her throat close in a gag, remembering the smell of hair oil and the hardness of fingers digging into her flesh. ‘If so, you must tell me, and I will deal with it. I will see to it that the man who did this is not allowed to remain in this house and does not go unpunished…’

There was the silver lining to all this. She would never forgive herself for this happening to one of the girls in her care, but at least now she could openly confront Frederick Henderson and make sure it didn’t happen again.

‘No, Mrs Furniss.’

‘No?’

‘I wasn’t assaulted. Or forced.’ Eliza shrugged, sounding almost bored. Her eyes slid from the window to rest on Kate, faintly challenging. ‘I suppose I wanted a bit of excitement. I reckon you’ll understand that.’

Kate moved her leather-bound ledger a fraction, lining it up precisely with the inkstand. Words swirled in her head, but it would be a mistake to snatch at the first ones that came to her. It was important to hang on to her temper. She inhaled, then paused for a beat.

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