Page 86 of The Housekeeper's Secret

The keys were gone.

A soft knock sounded on the door. She darted forward to open it—had Jem taken the keys for some purpose and was hurrying to return them? He was taking a risk, coming up here now—

‘Morning, Mrs Furniss. Sorry I’m late.’

Abigail came in with the tea tray. She set it down and struck a match to light the candle. ‘The fact is, we’re in a bit of a state downstairs…’

Kate was suddenly wide awake. ‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s Jem Arden.’

‘What about him?’

Abigail looked at her with a sort of bewildered consternation, shaking her head a little. Twin candle flames glinted in the dark pools of her eyes.

‘He’s… gone.’

Chapter 29

It was the least merry of Christmases at Coldwell.

Upstairs in the marble hallway the branches of the great pine tree drooped, its needles falling, its candles unlit. Lady Hyde usually had breakfast on a tray in her room, but Sir Randolph stayed in bed until past midday too, throwing the day’s routine into disarray. Mr Henderson had Susan mix up a concoction of raw eggs and Worcestershire sauce to take up to him, while Mr Goddard came down from the library carrying a tray of decanters to be refilled, several smeared glasses, and an empty port bottle.

‘I don’t know why I bother,’ Mrs Gatley grumbled, sticking a fork (with rather too much relish) into the goose that was drying out in the roasting pan. ‘All this work, and I may as well serve up pease pudding and tapioca for all anyone notices.’

The shock of Jem’s sudden departure was felt by everybody. It was like, Eliza thought, when a crow swooped down on a brood of ducklings and snatched one: the fluster of stunned confusion that followed amongst the others. For a long time, she’d felt cut off from her fellow maids, but that morning they all huddled in the scullery, where Susan and Doris were working their way through a mountain of potatoes, carrots, and parsnips, to speculate about what had happened.

A girl somewhere, Abigail reckoned; a wife, even, whom he’d sneaked off to spend Christmas with. Susan fretted that he’d taken it upon himself to go out and look for Davy Wells and met an accident—fallen through the ice on the lake or something. Thomas, slipping in from the butler’s pantry with the silver fruit plate he was polishing, put paid to that theory by announcing that Jem had taken all his things, and reported that Stanley Twigg said you could see his footsteps in the snow, cutting across the park in the direction of the road.

Eliza said nothing.

There was a time, not so long ago, that she would have been bursting to add her two penn’orth. To produce, like a conjuror drawing a rabbit from a hat, the identity of Jem’s actual romantic interest, which was far more jaw-droppingly scandalous than a common or garden spouse (even a hidden one).

But a lot had changed since that time.

She had a bit more respect for secrets now, and those who kept them. She found herself in the strange position of being more aligned with Mrs Furniss these days than with Abigail, Susan, and Drippy Doris. It occurred to her that Mrs Furniss might know more about Jem’s departure than she was letting on, and it might be part of some plan, cooked up between them, so they could get away from Coldwell and make a new start together.

It was going dark outside by the time they had cleared the barely picked-at goose from the dining room, scraped untouched sweetbreads, game chips, and cod in oyster sauce into the pigswill, and sat down to their own Christmas dinner in the servants’ hall. In spite of the room being more crowded than usual, and the space around the table a squeeze of elbows, shoulders, and knees, Jem’s absence was as noticeable as if they’d left a seat empty for him. At the end of the table, Mrs Furniss looked like she’d been turned to marble. In the low lamplight she was white as a sheet, her skin stretched tight over her cheekbones, her lips bloodless.

So there was no plan, Eliza thought. The housekeeper was as much in the dark about Jem’s departure as the rest of them.

The outdoor servants kept the conversation going, heaping praise on Mrs Gatley for the succulence of the birds she had roasted (chickens for the staff) and the crispness of her potatoes, making up for the personal slight she’d felt from upstairs. But once the pudding had been brought in, and ceremonially set alight in its pool of brandy by Mr Goddard, Henderson spoke up.

‘You’ll have noticed by now that we are one footman down. I’m sure you’re all wondering why.’

‘Didn’t like to ask,’ muttered George Twigg.

‘I see no reason why it should be a secret. Jem Arden was a habitual liar and a convicted criminal. I discovered him last night, two hours before dawn, in the housekeeper’s parlour with the key to the library. He’d attended to Sir Randolph during the evening and had seen him taking Lady Hyde’s Christmas gift—a diamond choker—out of the safe. He must have suspected Sir Randolph would leave it out to give to her this morning.’

Eliza felt the babe inside her lurch, as if it too felt the shock. A gasp went around the table. One of the Twiggs swore quietly, without reprimand. Mrs Gatley shook her head, chins wobbling, and Miss Dunn’s fingers flew to the temperance badge on her chest, touching it like a talisman. Joseph half stood, his eyes like holes in the snow outside, mouth opening as if to argue.

Eliza looked at Mrs Furniss. In that moment, she reminded her of a stone angel in the churchyard back home, head bent, face carved into an expression of exquisite suffering. Her eyes flickered closed, and Eliza, seeing what it cost her to bear the news of this betrayal in silence, looked away.

Around the table, the initial impact of Henderson’s bombshell was wearing off. Spoons were taken up and the clatter of cutlery resumed.

‘I always thought there was something shifty about him,’ Stanley Twigg said. ‘His face never quite fit, if you ask me.’

‘Which no one did,’ snapped Thomas.

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