On the morning of the following Monday, which was the tenth of June, Janey was waiting in the big kitchen at No. 53, hovering not far from the area door under pretext of hanging some damp drying-up cloths above the quietly smouldering range. She was in a state of acute apprehension, fear and excitement snickering at her stomach. It was three minutes after ten o’clock.
The kitchen was cool and grey for all the sunshine just feeling its strength outside. The north-facing window, sunken in the area, seldom at any hour of the day or time of the year was crossed by sunlight and the bright unbroken blue sky that was alone just visible through it sent only the palest wash of light into the big room. The great kitchen table, scrubbed daily till its pale brown boards, grooved and ridged with long hours of work, were now almost white, rested foursquarely on its sturdy legs, bare at this moment, awaiting the flurry of luncheon preparations to come. Under it the wide stone flags of the floor were still just wet from Janey’s wash of them not long before. Across on the far side from the glinting black-leaded range the tall dresser stood looking like so many patches of moonlight in the quiet summery duskiness. No one was about. The damped-down fire in the range shifted once, sending out a quiet grumble of complaint. The pendulum clock on the wall tocked softly.
Rat-tat-a-tat-tat.
The knocking, for all that Janey had been awaiting it nerves stretched, made her jump in the air as if someone had poked a pin hard into her flesh. For several moments she stood shaking with the shock. Then she hurried over to the door.
When she turned the key in the lock and opened, Val had his hand on the knocker again. Stepping back, he gave her a colossal cheerful wink.
“Val,” she said, in a thudding-heart excited whisper.
But he took no notice and instead spoke up in a voice that must have rung through the empty kitchen behind her.
“Good mornin’, me dear. Any nice rabbitskins for sale this bright blue mornin’?”
A smile, mischievous even, in response to his bravado, came up to her face. And, soon hardly able to suppress laughter, she went through the pantomime that had been agreed between them on the Friday before in a hurried 6:30 A.M. exchange out on the steps. Caught equally between the bubbling laughter and an inner pounding excitement that was more than half sheer fright, she left him at the door, went back into the kitchen, crossed its cool flagstones, and went into the larder. There, tucked away out of sight, she had left a fine skin, which she had succeeded in pulling off complete. Sold to the regular rabbitskin man on his customary Friday call it would have earned her a useful sixpence to add to the small savings in the little wash-leather purse deep at the bottom of her box. But she sacrificed that gladly.
She picked up the skin, feeling it as having gone a little hard during its wait in hiding. Then she stood where she was, as she had agreed with Val, and began counting. Val had asked her for three minutes, “till you count two hundred, slow.” It ought, they had decided, to be long enough for him to dart on tiptoe across the kitchen and on to the foot of the back stairs, knowing from her directions just where he had to go. Then up the stairs, fast as he could but keeping well to the edge for quietness, and open the first green-baize door he came to. One quick peep, in case by some unlikely chance there was someone about in the hall, and then over to the breakfast room, once more knowing exactly where to go. He would not need as much as half a minute behind the screen looking at that door, he had told her. Half a minute to do what Climbing Charlie had asked, “Study it like it was the will of a old gentleman a-leaving you his fortun’,” and then he would know everything the cracksman might enquire about it Half a minute on his own behind the worked leather screen. And this morning there would be no Mr. Burch coming unexpectedly out of the closet, not when he was, as she had made sure earlier, safely out on the morning walk he almost always took to pass the time of day with the butler along at No. 47 during this their quiet hour. Half a minute for Val and then back the way he had come, and, if she timed it right, there he would be out in the area again just as she came up with the rabbitskin.
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen … Slowly she counted, giving a little stroke to the furry pelt at each number. Sixteen, seventeen—
“And who are you? And what are you doing in my kitchen?”
Even through the heavy closed door of the larder she heard it. Mrs. Vickers’ voice. Mrs. Vickers’ voice raised in loud indignation. And right outside. Right outside, where at ten o’clock in the morning, her time for discussing with the Mistress the day’s meals regular as clockwork, she should not possibly be.
“It’s—Sure, I’m just a rabbitskin man, missus.”
Val. Sounding more Irish than usual, putting it on for all he was worth. But Janey, who had listened to that voice with such an intensity of love, could tell that under the brave assurance he was in a panic of fear.
“Rabbitskins. Rabbitskins. I’ll give you rabbitskins. How does buying a rabbitskin bring you right into my kitchen, I’d like to know.”
Janey clutched so hard at the stiff skin in her hands that her nails almost dug through it.
“It was”—came Val’s voice, fumbling more now—“it was—The kitchenmaid told me she’d a skin to sell, missus.”
“Well, she’s a slut if there ever was. Going to give up a cup of tea, I dare say. Thinks when my back’s turned she can play fast and loose with the Mistress’ provisions.”
“Ah no, missus, no. ‘Twasn’t like that at all, at all. I swear to God it wasn’t. She just went to the larder to fetch a skin as she told me she’d got”
“Oh, she did, did she? Well, I’ll give her larder. Going off and leaving the area door wide open like that. I just happen to come down to see how much cold beef we got over, because the Mistress takes it into her head … And what do I find? Janey! Janey, where are you?”
And Janey, still digging with her work-broken nails into the rabbitskin, realised that no longer was the overheard scene outside an event taking place without her being in any way able to influence it, passionately though the outcome concerned her. Now the finger was pointing directly at her.
“Janey!”
She forced herself to the door, wrenched at the knob, and, her mind whirling, presented herself in front of Mrs. Vickers.
“Now then, what’s all this about letting this man in here?”
Janey swallowed and thanked heaven for the preparations they had made over their story.
“Please, Mrs. Vickers, it’s the rabbitskin man. I been to fetch a skin I got fer ‘im.”
“Oh, you have, have you? And don’t you know better than to leave the door open so’s any sort of rapscallion can make his way in? Really, the girls I’m expected to get along with under me. It’s no wonder things never go right. If they’re not lazy, they’re stupid. And if they’re not stupid, they’re downright sly.”
“Yes, Mrs. Vickers.”
“And don’t you ‘Yes, Mrs. Vickers’ me.” She whipped suddenly round to Val who had been glancing across to the distant area door, measuring his distance. “And don’t you think I’ve forgotten you either, my man. What were you doing right across here, for one thing? Not one word of explanation have I had for that.”
“No, missus, no,” Val muttered, plainly searching for some shred of excuse.
“Well, speak up, speak up. Or do I have to send the girl for the policeman?”
And then she took a pouncing step nearer him.
“You’re not the regular rabbitskin man either,” she proclaimed. “Friday’s his day. Friday. And here’s it’s Monday. What are you, I should like to know!”
This is it, Janey thought. It’s come to it now. He’s caught. We’re both caught.
She felt numb through and through, incapable of speech, incapable of action, incapable of thought.
But Val was not as dumbstruck, by any means. Mrs. Vickers’ words had apparently given him a clue. A wide soft wheedling smile spread across his face.
“Ah, sure, you’ve the right on it there, missus,” he said, Irish as Killarney. “Sure, an’ I knows well the other feller comes of a Friday. An’ it’s thinkin’ to meself I am ‘What if I was to come on a Monday, and maybe like get there before him.’”
“Disgraceful,” Mrs. Vickers exploded. “Disgraceful. You’ve no business to be doing an honest man out of his living like that. No business at all.”
Janey held her breath in sheer suspense. Val was skillfully edging Mrs. Vickers away from the danger area, bringing a cunning she had hitherto only had glimpses of to the repair of the gaping damage that chance had torn in their plan.
Then step by step Val went on with his work, with many an Irish compliment to Mrs. Vickers’ “divilish sharp eye,” with a cautious half pace there and a sideways shuffle here, with a profuse tumbling out all the while of “Good day, missus” and “Thank you indeed, missus.”
He reached the door. Mrs. Vickers’ denunciations of his commercial wickedness rose to a peak. He backed along to the stone steps leading up to pavement level. He started to climb, turned still to cast out dollops of Irish reassurance. Mrs. Vickers, her arms akimbo, raised up her head the better to lambaste him. And then he was at the top of the steps, and in a wink he was away, feet running hard till the corner was reached.
So dash and skill in the heat and smoke of battle can enable half a dozen hussars to outmanoeuvre a whole squadron of dragoons.
But if Val escaped, Janey paid for it. The skirmish seemed to have sharpened to an altogether new pitch Mrs. Vickers’ ill will, sharp enough in any case ever since she had managed to scrape her way out of trouble up before the Mistress.
For the fourth or fifth time since the morning incident she was undergoing a verbal thrashing at the cook’s hands as she scurried in and out of the servants’ hall clearing away the supper dishes.
“It’s all very well for you, my girl,” the nail-hammering voice went on. “It’s all very well for you. You haven’t got a whole kitchen on your shoulders. You haven’t got six courses to send up of a night and every one of ‘em to be perfect. It’s a fine life for the likes of you.”
“Fine life,” Janey let herself murmur, carrying out a fat pile of dirty plates. “It’s miserable, miserable.”
“What was that?”
Her tormentor came out into the kitchen after her.
“What did I hear you say?”
Janey longed to turn and answer that if Mrs. Vickers had heard she had no need to ask what had been said. But she fought with herself and ran into the scullery in silence. A moment later the cook’s irate form was blocking the door behind her.
“I won’t have muttering in my kitchen, d’you hear? I won’t have it. Speak up now, speak up.”
Janey then was unable to hold herself in any longer. She let the pile of plates crash down on the wooden draining board and hurled herself round.
“I said my life’s a misery,” she flung out.
“And who’s fault is that, I should like to know?” Mrs. Vickers came swinging back, seeming the more delighted to have opposition. “Who’s fault is that? It’s your own, my girl. Yours and nobody else’s. You’ve got no one but yourself to blame if you’re always getting into hot water. You do things the way they ought to be done, and I promise you you’ll not find yourself at the sharp end of my tongue.”
“Even when I do do things right, you never believe me,” Janey retorted.
“Oh, I don’t, don’t I? And I’ll tell you why not. It’s because you don’t do things right, my lass. You don’t do a single thing right. You’re all alike you girls today: Think wishing’s doing, got your minds always on something else than the work you ought to be at. That’s your trouble. Well, the sooner you make a change the better for you. You can’t wish away that rabbitskin man this morning, no more than you can wish away the dirt on a floor you haven’t properly scrubbed.”
“I only left him for a moment,” Janey answered, almost too weary of her lie to utter it with proper conviction. “I wasn’t ter know he’d come right into the kitchen.”
“And you wasn’t to know he wouldn’t,” Mrs. Vickers answered with clanging delight, advancing into the suds-smelling little room like a turkey cock. “And that I won’t have, d’you hear? Letting riffraff like that into my kitchen. And with the Master taking on so about burglars.”
And then, the chance words that had come into her head in the rattle and spate of her denunication leading her on with inevitable logic, she brought forth a threat which at the outset must have been completely outside her intentions.
“Yes, and you’ll have to go up to him, you know. You’ll have to see the Master. You can’t get away from that.”
Janey felt the unexpected edict as a smack across her cheek.
A pit opened before her and she tumbled head over heels into it, falling through and through the blackness. She had thought that the week before she had bent and beseeched her way out of trouble. She had thought she had kept her little secure niche in the house then. She had thought that, by taming herself beyond what she had believed she could endure, she had above all kept her place in Val’s heart. And now, with a suddenness that was totally inexplicable, everything was being taken away from her.
She saw it all. Up before the Master, a figure ten and twenty times more terrible than the Mistress. Instant dismissal. Not a word of a character. Thrown out. Lost in the wide world. And cast equally and by the same stroke out of Val’s love. No use to him, thrown away, a rag.
Not knowing even that she was doing it, she lifted up her head in dog-like lamentation.
“Oh, it’s no use your howling,” she heard Mrs. Vickers’ voice, darting and pricking like a hornet round her ears. “It’s no use your howling. My mind’s made up. It’s to the Master for you. You’d have been up to him tonight, only he’s out at the opera and dinner first at his club. Oh yes, you would. But it’s straightaway in the morning instead, I promise you that. Soon as he’s ready to see you.”
Janey howled and howled. Her miseries presented themselves to her now as going on and on till the end of the world. And to lament to the heavens was all she could do in face of the prospect.
And then into the doorway behind Mrs. Vickers there came another figure. Tall, a pillar, grave. Mr. Burch.
“Now, what is all this?” he asked, his voice firm and clear. “You’ve no business to be making a noise like that, my girl. Stop it at once.”
Janey stopped. And, given again the capability of speech, she answered the butler’s question.
“Oh, Mr. Burch. Mr. Burch, it’s that she says I’ve got to go and see the Master. An’ he’ll turn me away. I know he will. He can’t do nothing else, being so particular over locks an’ all.”
“Locks?” said Mr. Burch sharply.
He turned to Mrs. Vickers.
“Has this girl been leaving doors unlocked?”
“Worse,” Mrs. Vickers replied in triumph. “Worse, by far. She’s been letting all sorts come right into my kitchen.”
“Is that the rabbitskin man you were mentioning at dinnertime?” Mr. Burch asked.
“Yes, it is,” said Mrs. Vickers. “Allowing a fellow of that sort to come planting his dirty boots all over my kitchen floor.”
Mr. Burch coughed.
“Well, Mrs. Vickers,” he answered, “it may not be altogether my place to say this, but I think we have heard enough about that business. Janey may have been wrong to turn her back on the fellow, but I can’t say I’ve ever had anything to complain of about her otherwise, which is more than I can say for most of the kitchenmaids I’ve known. But if the Master did get to hear that a stranger had set foot inside the house, Janey would get turned away, and you know it. So I think the less said on that score the better.”
Mrs. Vickers bridled.
“Well, I’m sure I never wished the girl harm,” she said.
Janey saw the butler’s gaze turn towards her.
“Then you had better tell Mrs. Vickers for one last time that you’re truly sorry about this morning,” he said. “And then we’ll hear no more about it.”
Janey felt the stars in their courses swing to new, altogether unheard of places. To be saved. Saved when she had felt herself lost for ever. Saved so unexpectedly. And saved, above all, by Mr. Burch, that distant, always unchangeably correct figure, as far from her in many ways as the Master and Mistress themselves. To have him reach down, step out of his unvarying path and pick her up. It was a miracle. It was the world turned an altogether new way.
Mr. Burch.
Her heart welling with gratitude, she stumbled out an apology to Mrs. Vickers. The last words on the subject. The bringing to an end of what had a few moments earlier seemed to be an on-and-on, downwards-going plunge. And now it was over.
She swayed in incredulity.
Mr. Burch. Mr. Burch. What he had done for her. What wouldn’t she do for him, from now on and for ever.
So first thing next morning Val, creeping up to the gate of No. 53 more cautiously than ever but determined to find out whether his upset plan of the day before had, or had not, wrecked their whole venture, received, when he hissed a greeting to Janey, an altogether different reception from anything he had imagined.
“Hsst. Janey. Janey, is everything all right?”
He saw her jump, startled. Then she turned to him. But at once she checked, and for a moment it looked as if she was going to go back to the brass door handle she had been busy rubbing. But she faced him steadily at last.
“Go away,” she said.
He darted a probing glance at the tall white facade of the house. Was there a detective officer there, waiting for him? All seemed well.
“Janey, is it safe?” he asked urgently.
“It’s safe enough, but go away.”
He felt a small spurt of anger. What was she at?
“Janey, did they twig? Did they ask yer questions?”
The fierceness of his tone evidently compelled her to answer.
“No. No, they didn’t. Mrs. Vickers went on at me, but…”
“But what? What is it, Janey?”
She came down two or three steps towards him. Her face was tight drawn and white in the early morning sunshine.
“Val,” she said, “I don’t know which way to turn. Val, I loves yer. But—but, Mr. Burch.”
“Old fool. What about him?”
“Val, yesterday she was going ter send me up ter the Master. Mrs. Vickers. It’d ‘ave meant the sack, Val. I’d ‘ave been out on the street. I don’t know what I should ‘ave done. I’ve nowhere ter go. I’d of died, Val. There wouldn’t ‘ave been nothing else ter do. But then Mr. Burch, ‘e stepped in an’ saved me. He good as told ‘er she were a interfering cow, Val. Val, ‘e saved me.”
He frowned, feeling cheated of something though he did not quite know what.
“Well,” he said, “’e saved yer.”
She shook her head slowly in wonder.
“I didn’t know ‘e ‘ad that side to ‘im,” she said. “Never in all the time I been ‘ere. It only shows as ‘ow folk ain’t a-always what we thinks. It do truly.”
She stood pondering, seeing new things.
Val felt a surge of impatience, of dislike of the whole situation.
“Ach, the feller happened by chance ter be feeling good,” he said. “An’ he put in a word fer yer. That’s the whole on it.”
“No, Val, no. The more I thinks, the more I sees. There’s more to Mr. Burch than ‘Do yer duty.’ There is, Val, there is.”
She straightened her back in the shapeless print frock he had grown to know so well.
“An’, Val,” she said, “that’s why I don’t want no more ter do with it.”
“With it? With what?”
He shot the questions out like a swift rattle of muskets. But only because underneath he knew well what the answers were.
“With you breakin’ in ‘ere of a night, Val,” she replied simply. “I wouldn’t want Mr. Burch done no ‘arm. Not now.”
“But it ain’t him we’d be doing any ‘arm,” he argued fiercely back. “It’s not ‘is plate we’re a-going ter lay our ‘ands on.”
For a moment he thought he might have won. But Janey was only thinking out her answer.
“It may not be ‘is plate,” she said at last. “But, Val, ‘e polishes it as if it were. I seen ‘im, Val, when ‘e brings pieces down ter the kitchen sometimes of an arternoon. I know it. It’d fair break ‘is ‘eart to ‘ave them things gone.”
“There’d be others got fer ‘im soon enough,” he answered with savagery. “Folk like the folk in there just buys new again when their crib’s cracked.”
Janey was hesitating once more before replying. She must be seeing the truth of what he had said. She must.
He plunged here and there in his mind for further arguments of the same sort. But he was too late.
“No, Val,” she said. “No. I know as ‘ow Mr. Burch would never feel the same. Not when ‘e’s polished an’ petted those things for years, the way I knows ‘e ‘as.”
Once more she lifted her face to him and looked at him with defiance.
“No, Val, no,” she said. “I won’t do it. I won’t ‘elp yer no more, Val, an’ that’s an end on it.”
He felt the anger rise. He felt it come scorching and blazing up him.
And she must have seen it too, because as plainly he saw rage leap up in her.
“No,” she said, her voice clear and ringing, careless of what might be heard or who might hear it. “No, I won’t do it. Not never. An’ yer can tell that to yer thievin’ friends.”
For a single black instant he was tempted to leap at once over the ironwork gate, seize her and fling her to the ground.
But then the thought of all that the house behind her meant to him came rolling up like a rain cloud to drench a burning landscape. And he forced the breath from his body in a long whistling hiss.
“Janey,” he said. “Janey. If that’s the way yer feels, it’s the way yer feels. But it’s not to come between the two on us, Janey. We’re more to each other than that, Janey mine.”
And at the words her tears flowed.
He let them come for only half a minute, desperately conscious of all the noise they both had been making and of the danger it brought. Then in a few hurried whisperings he comforted her and warned her and promised to see her in the usual way on Thursday and left
But he left with a leaden heart.