Page 32 of The Housekeeper's Secret

Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of him unbuttoning it, easing it carefully off his shoulders and down his arms. She busied herself with laying out the calico on the table, folding and refolding to create a square the right size and thickness to place against his ribs.

‘Ready?’ she said, and he nodded.

In the milky light his skin was colourless, except for the livid bruising. It was best to avoid meeting his eye, to focus on doing the job quickly and efficiently, but that meant concentrating on his body. It reminded her of the paintings she had seen in the National Gallery on trips to London as a girl, when she had stood in front of huge canvases of gods and saints and soldiers. Of Christ on the cross, all lean, sinewy grace.

But the body in front of her was not conjured by the paintbrush of a master. It was flesh and blood. Solid. Silk skinned and warm to the touch.

A pulse throbbed in her wrist, her throat.

‘Can you lift your arms?’

He did as she asked. Skin moved over muscle, the hard ridges of bone. She swallowed. Tentatively she laid the calico wadding over the worst of the bruising and held it there with one hand while she unfurled the bandage, pinching the end so she could begin wrapping it around him.

There was no way of doing it at a distance, or without circling her arms around him. He stood completely still as she reached to pass the roll from one hand to the other, his chin raised as her cheek almost came to rest against his chest. She breathed in the warm scent of his skin and tried not to register its dry masculinity. Tried not to register anything about him at all.

‘Too tight?’

His face was impassive, but his jaw was set.

‘No.’

If only he’d revealed this injury on the night that it had happened. She could have been doing this with everyone else around, the girls looking on with compassionate curiosity, jostling to be the one to hold the wadding in place and pass the bandages while Thomas cracked weak jokes to lighten the atmosphere. How much easier it would have been. How much more… appropriate… than this quiet room with the rose-tinged dawn spreading outside and the two of them—she in her nightdress still, uncorseted, her hair unpinned—not speaking, not meeting each other’s eyes.

His chest rose and fell inches from her face as she reached and wrapped, and sometimes she felt the warmth of his breath on her hair. He had laced his fingers together, and his hands rested on the crown of his head, as if he was standing before her in surrender. As she pinned the bandage in place and looked up at him, she saw that his face wore an expression of weary suffering.

‘There. Has it made the pain worse?’

‘I don’t think so.’

She moved away, picking his shirt up from the back of the chair and holding it out to him. ‘Good. Go and get some sleep.’

‘But Mr Goddard—’

‘Leave him to me. I’ll explain. You’ve been on duty all night, after all.’

She watched him go, easing his shirt over his shoulders. At the door, he turned.

‘Thank you.’

After that, she went out of her way to avoid him.

It was easy enough. The servants’ basement was large, and they each had their own duties, carried out in different parts of it. Houses like Coldwell were designed to segregate the sexes. The male domains—footmen’s wardrobe, butler’s pantry, lamp room, coal store—were positioned at the other end of the warren of rooms from the stillroom and housekeeper’s stores. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to be aware of him. To listen for his footsteps and to hear his voice.

And so, the days became a sort of dance, where she sensed his movements and co-ordinated her own around them, maintaining a careful distance. She applied herself to the list of tasks she had drawn up and progressed steadily through them: conducting a long-overdue inventory of the linen cupboard, reallocating worn sheets and tablecloths from ‘best guest’ to ‘family,’ and from ‘family’ to ‘servants,’ and setting aside pillowslips and tray cloths that needed the attention of a needle. Trying to keep her mind from drifting back to the servants’ hall in the pearly dawn, and remembering.

Imagining.

In the slow, sultry afternoons she found it annoyingly difficult to stop herself from imagining. She didn’t always manage it.

In the Jaipur Suite and Sir Henry’s old rooms the work progressed steadily. Every day Kate made it her business to see how things were coming along, so she could report back to Mr Fortescue. A cast-iron bath appeared in Lady Hyde’s former dressing room one day—even Mr Kendall’s army couldn’t manhandle it up the stairs and they had to attach ropes to it and call Johnny Farrow and the Twigg boys to help. When she went up the next afternoon, it had been fitted beneath the window, with taps connected to the water pipes and a new copper geyser, which Mr Kendall proudly demonstrated.

She always made sure to go up before Mr Kendall left at the end of the day, so there was no chance of encountering Jem as he carried out Mr Goddard’s duty of securing the house. No chance of being alone with him in that room with the huge bed, swathed in dust sheets, which had provided—to her scorching daytime shame—the setting of a particularly vivid dream one sticky, restless night.

Sometimes, in the late afternoons, she would see him crossing the kitchen yard in his shirtsleeves, or, if she went up the back stairs to check the work in progress, she might catch a glimpse of him through the door of the footmen’s wardrobe. Once, passing the lamp room, she paused to ask him how his ribs were.

‘Improving, thank you.’ The bruising had faded on his face, and his split lip was healing, though still a little swollen. She found herself looking at it as he told her he was managing to sleep more easily. He didn’t say whether he had returned to the silver cupboard, and she didn’t ask.

The male servants were Mr Goddard’s responsibility.

---