Page 93 of The Housekeeper's Secret

The attics felt bitingly cold after the crowded downstairs rooms. Cold and dark. Kate lit the lamp in her room with a shaking hand and stood numbly, holding the spent match, not knowing what to do after that. For the next five minutes, or the next five years.

The flimsy foundations on which she had built her life had collapsed, and she felt like she was falling, with nothing to hold on to.

How did Henderson know?

He had given some sketchy explanation that she had barely heard—Alec turning up at the Savoy, a gaming acquaintance of Sir Randolph’s. (I must say, he’s not the sort of man I thought you’d go for, Mrs Furniss, though I daresay that roguish charm might have a certain appeal…) It had been all she could do to keep herself upright and get through the rest of the interminable ‘Blue Danube,’ because she knew that leaving before it finished would cause a scene. She hadn’t trusted herself to speak, and to ask the question that now filled her head, squeezing out all other thoughts.

Did Alec know she was here?

Distractedly, she began to scrabble at the back of her dress, desperately trying to reach the row of little buttons that fastened it. It had been made for a lady who enjoyed the assistance of a maid; Abigail had fastened her into it earlier, but Kate couldn’t wait until the festivities had ended and the girls made their way up to bed to take it off. Nowhere felt safe anymore. She was shivering with cold, and her mind felt as frozen as her body in the thin, exposing dress. She pulled at the silk, not caring if it tore, until a knock on the door stilled her.

‘Mrs Furniss?’

Miss Dunn’s voice from outside was an urgent whisper, close to the door. Had it not been for the stupid dress Kate would have called out to her to go away, said that she was unwell, but she went across to let her in.

It struck her that there was something different about Lady Hyde’s maid recently. It was strange to think that she had seemed so timid and insignificant when she had first come to Coldwell, faintly ridiculous with her air of anxious disapproval and her temperance ribbon. But as she came into the small room there was a determined set to her jaw and a steadiness in her gaze, though her hands twisted together and her thin lips were pale.

‘He’s told you, hasn’t he?’ she said without preamble. ‘About your husband?’

Kate’s head reeled.

All this time she’d believed that she had escaped the past. She’d thought that no one knew who she was, or where she came from, but it seemed that illusion was as flimsy as her safety.

‘How did you know?’

A thought, like a dark spot on her brain, had begun to spread. Jem was the only person she’d told, and he was gone. Had he betrayed her more completely, more cruelly than she’d begun to comprehend?

‘I’m so sorry.’ Miss Dunn’s voice was low and steady. ‘I’m afraid I have played a most regrettable role in this situation, a fact for which I can only beg for your forgiveness and understanding. It was I who identified the… gentleman’ (a slight hesitation over the word, and a faint trace of scorn) ‘at the Savoy as your husband. I wasn’t thinking straight at the time. I wasn’t… myself.’

Kate turned round, pushing her fingers into her hair, making it pull at the pins.

‘But… how? How did you know?’

She could barely articulate the question, but Miss Dunn, recovering her composure, took charge. With a cursory ‘May I?’ she pulled out the chair from beneath the table and sat down. ‘I should have been honest with you from the start; I see that now. But we pack our pasts away when we enter service, don’t we? It never does to ask too many questions in the servants’ basement.’

She tucked her skirt carefully about her knees and clasped her hands in her lap as she told Kate that her father was a Methodist minister, who had moved to Bristol when she was a child. She described a household dedicated to the Methodist movement, and how she, from a young age, had joined her father in working for the church, and become an active member of the city’s Band of Hope, enthusiastically spreading the word about the benefits of abstinence.

Kate had seen the temperance disciples, of course. A city like Bristol—with its teeming population of dockers and stevedores; its brisk brewing and import trades and countless taverns, gin palaces, and alehouses—provided fertile ground for those earnest young women distributing pamphlets on street corners, the children singing hymns and carrying banners in Sunday parades (Buy Bread Not Beer!). She had never paid them much attention, but Alec hated them with a scornful passion. Joyless harpies, he’d called them. Silly spinsters who should keep their noses out of men’s business.

‘It was through my work for the Women’s Total Abstinence Union that I crossed paths with Mr Ross…’ Miss Dunn didn’t look at Kate as she spoke, instead keeping her eyes downcast and folding the lace edge of her handkerchief over and over. ‘I didn’t know his name, but he was a regular in some of the places we used to hand out our tracts and periodicals. It wasn’t unusual for us to be mocked and jeered, but I remember him because on one occasion he took the pamphlet I offered him and made a great show of reading it out loud, feigning sincerity, only to set his lighter to it and insult me in the… crudest, coarsest terms.’

Kate could imagine. Alec Ross had taken a great deal of trouble to cultivate his cultured persona and polish his thin veneer of charm, but it didn’t take much for the mask to slip, especially with drink inside him.

‘I went out of my way to avoid him after that. I’m sure he wouldn’t have recognised me once he’d sobered up, but I never forgot him. Which I suppose was why I noticed him coming out of the theatre one evening, with his lovely young wife on his arm.’

She raised her eyes and looked at Kate with an apologetic half-smile.

‘So, you knew?’ Kate croaked. ‘From the day you arrived, you knew who I was…?’ She remembered the carriage arriving at the front steps on that bright spring day, when so much change had come to Coldwell. She remembered the figure inside, the glint of her stare in the gloom.

Miss Dunn shook her head. ‘No—not straightaway. I had a feeling I recognised you, but I couldn’t put my finger on from where. It had been years since I’d moved away from Bristol… Before I worked for Miss Addison, I had a position as a shopgirl in a department store, and of course you see an awful lot of faces in that type of work. It wasn’t until I saw him again—Mr Ross—in the hotel that day, that it came back to me. I recognised him immediately. Not so much his face—the years and the drink haven’t been kind—but his accent caught my attention. And his attitude. Arrogant… if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’

‘And you told Henderson.’ Kate sank down onto the edge of the bed, rubbing her fingers over her forehead. ‘You told Henderson what Alec Ross was to me.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

Miss Dunn’s tone had changed. Even through her own distress Kate registered the sudden terseness. A shutting down, a drawing inwards. Miss Dunn’s lips were pressed together more thinly than ever, and her handkerchief was a tight twist between her fingers. ‘I wasn’t myself,’ she muttered. ‘He tricked me. Took advantage.’

Kate’s head snapped up. She waited. Miss Dunn’s face was composed, but one hand had gone to her breast, to the ribbon badge, and her chin trembled. When she spoke again, her voice was little more than a whisper.

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