ROBERT CONTINUED TO COMMANDEER the dining room when he was at Lillypot to progress the specimen index project he planned for the museum, where at last he had been appointed curator. Susan found she must take her meals with him on a tray in the parlour, or upstairs with the children. He breakfasted with her every day, then took a walk. In the middle of the morning, he would return and follow a specific system of preparation. First he must cast off his jacket and roll his shirt-sleeves to the elbow. The ink and the blotter must be just so, and his papers and cards must be arranged in a particular way. Any volumes he intended to consult must be ranged about him on a small stool and a table he kept in his study for this purpose. There was even an order in which he approached these arrangements, as though the small ritual sharpened his mind, as a notary might sharpen his pens. Only when all was ready could he begin.
So much Susan had observed when helping, although increasingly Robert did not wish her help, preferring instead that she should try to keep the children quiet so that he could work undisturbed. He was not a fond father, never given to sitting a babe on his knee or chucking it under the chin – in fact, it seemed he was not fond of infants at all. Perhaps he would come into his own when they were older, Susan thought, although she imagined him rather more as a terrifying tutor and interrogator than a companion and guide.
The need to maintain peace in the house threw Susan and Elsie together much. They took turn about on the night nursing and comforting, and when the children woke early, as they inevitably did, Elsie brought the twins to Susan and took young Robert with her as she swept the hearths and set the fires, setting him small tasks of stacking kindling or fetching brushes and black-lead to keep him occupied. Once her morning chores were complete, Elsie got the children breakfasted while Susan ate with Robert downstairs. Susan came back upstairs then, and the two of them oversaw the dressing, Susan seeing to young Robert who liked to ‘dress himself’ and took, therefore, at least three times as long as Susan might, while Elsie dressed the twins. This was a favourite task and she sang and tickled their tummies and pretended to bite their feet until they laughed and squirmed and squealed.
Susan supervised their play then, and Elsie attended to her own duties, bringing the midday meal. Robert’s was taken to him as he worked and Elsie and Susan sat together and took their own while the children ate, feeding one twin apiece between spoonfuls of soup. Susan had had little experience of children before her own had come, and she was grateful for Elsie’s easy knowledge, the ‘clip clop’ of the ‘horsie’ as she inveigled a spoon through clamped lips and the neat trade-offs she managed with young Robert, one more forkful of peas before pudding, or an extra story at bedtime in exchange for a clean plate. Try as she might, Susan could remember little of her own earliest years; her memories seemed to start later, and the oldest of them seemed to be less of things she had done than of sensations and sights and objects – her mother’s voice, the smell of her father’s pipe, the blue button eyes of a rag doll she had loved.
In the afternoon there were naps and, if Robert needed no help, Susan slept too; she was with child again and not too big as yet, so her sleep was good. When they woke they made an excursion outside into the garden for young Robert to run around and poke into plant beds and play with his ball, and the twins to tumble and roll on the grass and pick daisies with their clumsy fingers. Tea was next, and then Elsie took over for bathing and bed while Susan ate with Robert in the parlour downstairs. Elsie brought the children down for their goodnight kisses, and Robert listened to small Robert lisping his prayers. Then Elsie would take them up to bed and Susan and Robert would pass the evening in work or reading.
It was natural, of course, that Susan and Elsie should come to be accustomed to one another as they collaborated on the shared project of the children. Susan liked Elsie, who was quick and clever, and she thought Elsie liked her, in so far as any maid likes her Mistress. They talked easily enough of the children, and a time or two Susan thought about talking to Elsie about her situation, but Mrs Scott was prone to popping her head round the door to check on them once or twice a day, in the guise of bringing soup, or folded laundry, or a dose for colic. Susan knew Elsie had her instructions to keep her distance and button her lip – she had heard Mrs Scott reprimanding her once for forgetting herself and addressing her betters before she was spoken to.
‘Mind and dinnae forget your position, Elsie,’ she had said, ‘there’s the Master, and the Mistress, and then there’s the likes of you and me. It’s no for a serving lass to speak to the Mistress as an equal. The Master could skelp you for that.’
That reassured Susan, in a way, it seemed to show Elsie was not an active participant in her jailing, she was under Mrs Scott’s thumb also. She decided she wouldn’t press Elsie, for the time being, although now and then she would ask where she had learned to do this thing, or that, or if she remembered having her milk teeth, or what her mother’s name had been. These queries seemed safe enough, deriving from their chatter about the children, and Elsie answered perfectly happily, growing ever easier in Susan’s company. She had been fond of her mother, it seemed, and perhaps spoiled as the only girl in the family, but then her mother had died. Elsie laughed and said it had been just her in a house full of lads, and she had run wild with them, out rabbiting and playing ball and roaming the streets of the Old Town.
Susan filed all this away in her memory, imagining each fact on its own small card, like Robert’s specimen notes. If Elsie could become her friend, then perhaps, one day, she could be prevailed upon to help Susan and the children leave this place.
‘I had no brothers or sisters,’ she told her. ‘Is it hard, to always obey Mrs Scott’s orders when you were used to running wild?’
Elsie didn’t answer for a moment, but then she laughed and said she was growing used to it; she was grateful for the position, her father couldn’t keep her. Then she picked up young Robert and asked if he would like to go rabbiting and running around the heichs and the howes of the great volcano of Arthur’s Seat in the Old Town, where his Elsie had grown up? Robert repeated ‘rabbit’ with great delight, and Susan told him his father must have run about there in his young days, too, he had attended the High School that was only a stone’s throw from the great volcano.
If Elsie had sought to change the subject, it had worked, and Susan didn’t quiz her again. For a week or two the days passed in the same way as ever, but then came a day when Robert said he had business in town, and Mrs Scott was to go to a funeral, but Susan would have Elsie and John with her in case she had need of anything, and Mrs Foster would come and make their dinner. Off went Robert and Mrs Scott in the carriage after breakfast, the latter dressed in her best, and Susan and Elsie and the children went about the first part of their day as usual. After lunch, which Elsie heated up and brought to them, Susan had barely stretched out on her bed and closed her eyes when there was a great crash and a wail from below.
Downstairs, the door to Robert’s study was closed and she could hear an odd noise behind it.
‘Elsie?’ she called. ‘What has happened?’
Elsie didn’t answer but she continued to make the strange noise, a sort of high-pitched keening.
‘Hush, Elsie,’ she said. ‘Let me in. Whatever has happened, I can help you to put it right again. I know how Doctor Knox likes his papers and his things.’
There was a pause, and then Elsie pulled the door back. There was an odd smell in the room.
‘I just came in to set the fire,’ Elsie said. ‘But I’ve broken a big jar. It was on a stool, and I didn’t see it. But . . .’ She broke off and gestured to the floor, where a great pool of liquid was spreading out, with a greyish thing in it that Susan could make no sense of at first. Then she peered closer at it, and she saw it was a human hand, but with three fingers and a thumb only. She made a noise of her own, almost without realising.
‘Why has the Master got a thing like that?’ Elsie asked, her voice still in the pitch of her keening.
‘He . . . He studies such things,’ Susan said. ‘All doctors do. That way, they can learn how a body should be, and what might go wrong with it. Now, I think we must see if we can put that . . .’ She couldn’t say the word. ‘We must put it in another jar. Does Mrs Scott have a large pickling jar?’
Elsie looked as though she might be sick, but she hurried out of the room. When she was gone, Susan took out her handkerchief and dropped it over the hand. Then she took the tongs from the fireplace and, as carefully as she could, she picked up the hand and dropped it on a piece of paper on the desk, fighting down nausea as she heard the noise the thing made as it landed.
In a moment, Elsie came back with a large stoneware jar.
‘Vinegar too, I think,’ Susan said. ‘I don’t know if that’s right, but I know the water is a sort of pickling solution. Can you bring me some?’
When Elsie had gone, Susan once again used the tongs to pick up the hand and did her best to manoeuvre it into the jar. She didn’t get it in quite cleanly, and the greyish fingers seemed to curl around the lip as if to grip it, before the whole slid inside. Elsie returned with a great flagon of vinegar and Susan poured it in without looking, all the way to the top.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Nothing to cry over. Now fetch some sacking for the broken glass, and a mop and a bucket, Elsie, with warm water and soap. Let’s get this mess cleaned up.’
When that was done, and the paper that the hand had rested on consigned to the fire with Susan’s handkerchief, Susan sat Elsie in the parlour while she went to check on the children. When she came back, she poured Elsie a glass of sherry wine.
‘I’m no supposed to let you in to the study,’ Elsie said. ‘No when the Master’s out. And Mrs Scott’ll have my guts for garters that I was so clumsy and broke the Master’s jar.’ She shuddered again, clearly thinking of the contents of the jar.
‘I won’t tell them if you won’t,’ Susan said, feeling a sense of excitement all of a sudden at the possibilities sharing a secret with Elsie might offer. ‘We’ll say Robert – I mean Doctor Knox – must have left the door open and one of the twins got in and pulled the jar down. I’ll say it was my fault, but you cleaned it all up.’
‘But that’s a lie!’ Elsie said.
‘Yes,’ said Susan, ‘but better a lie than you lose your position.’
Elsie looked at Susan tearfully and nodded.
‘Well, now,’ said Susan, ‘there’s nothing to worry about. Drink your sherry, and then you can lock the room and get on with your work as normal. I’ll tell Doctor Knox tonight. But before that you must find a time to tell John I let the twins crawl around the house and one of them got into the study and caused all manner of havoc.’
‘I will,’ said Elsie. ‘You can go outside with the children by yourself. I’ll come out after and tell him I’ve been clearing up your mess.’
Susan had to trust that Elsie would manage her part of the bargain while she prepared herself to lie to Robert. They ate their evening meal with the children, and then they bathed them and put them to bed together, before Elsie went down to the kitchen to iron some linens and Susan took herself down to the parlour. By that time she truly was quite discomfited, and a glance in the looking glass showed that her face was pale, and her eyes red. She rubbed them a time or two as though she’d been crying.
At last, Robert came. Susan was attempting to complete a piece of fine work, but as soon as she heard the door, she cast it aside and got to her feet.
She met Elsie in the hallway, coming from the kitchen. Robert was removing his gloves, Mrs Scott following behind. Robert looked quizzically at Susan.
‘Are you quite well, Susan?’ he asked.
To her surprise, Susan found that she was quite overwhelmed, and burst into tears. Behind her, Elsie began to stammer out their story, that the Mistress had brought the twins down after their midday meal, and the door of the study was somehow open, and one of the twins got inside and pulled a glass jar over. The child was well, but the jar was ruined.
‘Elsie cleared up the mess,’ Susan sobbed. ‘And she put the . . . the thing in the jar in another jar, in vinegar. I told her to do it, Robert, I’m sorry if it was wrong. But I had such a fright.’ And she broke down in tears once more.
Robert seemed more concerned than angry, asking whether the child was cut, or swallowed anything in the jar, but Susan said no, she was fine and they had checked her limbs for glass, but there was nothing, only her frock was wet and they had stripped it off her and washed it right away.
‘Well then,’ said Robert. ‘There’s no harm done. Come, Susan, you should be in your bed. It was quick-witted of you to think of vinegar; I don’t know if it will have saved my specimen, but the principle was accurate, you’ve remembered well.’ He steered her towards the staircase with an arm around her shoulders.
As she climbed the stairs, the tears flowing as freely as if the story were true, Susan thought they had got away with it. But as they reached the turn in the stair, she saw Mrs Scott looking through narrowed eyes at Elsie, and she knew there would be a price to pay.
The next day Susan was unwell, with a sore head and a sore throat. Robert said perhaps she had inhaled some of the fumes from the liquor in the jar, although Marjorie seemed well enough; he had checked her limbs and there were no cuts, and looked in her eyes, which seemed quite as usual, and indeed she was in fine fettle altogether. Susan said she should go to the children, but Robert said no, she should stay in her bed, Mrs Scott and Elsie would see to the children, and Susan found that she was glad of it, her heavy eyes were closing of their own accord.
Susan slept that whole day, dreaming of hands and feet and nightmare things in jars, and woke only after dark, when Robert was there and said she had a fever and he had brought her a draught. Then he helped her use the pot and she slept again and woke late into the morning, feeling herself again, the heat of fever gone, only weak.
Presently Mrs Scott came into the room and told her it was good to see her awake and looking more herself again. Susan thanked her and asked for the children: would Elsie bring them in to see her?
Mrs Scott said she should rest more and see the children later. That evening, she brought them in herself, although Robert said they should not stay long, their mother had been ill. Young Robert seemed solemn and the twins crotchety, and Susan asked what ailed them, but they only cried and whined until Mrs Scott took them away.
The next day a stocky, red-headed girl Susan had never seen before came in the morning with a ewer of hot water for washing and a cup of tea. Susan struggled into a sitting position and asked who she was. The girl did not react. She put the tea down beside Susan, and sat the ewer in the bowl, and then she bobbed a curtsey and was gone.
Susan drank the tea and then, feeling her heart race with the effort, she got out of bed and washed her face and neck with water from the ewer. Then she pulled on a dressing gown and with careful steps made her way to the children’s room.
Mrs Scott was there, presiding over breakfast.
‘Good morning, Ma’am!’ she said, with apparent pleasure. ‘I didna expect to see you out of your bed!’
‘Where is Elsie?’ Susan asked.
Mrs Scott looked down. ‘Elsie has left us,’ she said. ‘She’s gone home to her father.’
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ Susan said. ‘It was Marjorie.’
Mrs Scott sighed. ‘I know you mean kindly, Ma’am,’ she said. ‘But you needna dissemble for Elsie. I know fine she’ll have been the one to leave that door open, as she went about her cleaning. She’s a through-other lass, and her mind is never on her work. I wanted to give her a chance, but I had my doubts. And, think! Much worse might have befallen our wee Marjorie, through her careless ways, and how would we all have felt then, the poor wee bairnie?’
Susan felt the trap shut around her, its springs made from her own lies.
‘I think I’ll go back to my bed,’ she said. ‘I feel a little faint.’
Susan did feel faint, and moreover there was an odd roiling in her belly. As she made her way back to the room, the roiling gathered in a sharp bolt of pain that made her fall against a dresser in the hall. She felt a gush of something hot between her legs, and looking down she saw a red stain spreading on her nightgown. Mrs Scott appeared in the children’s doorway, alerted by the vase that had fallen from the dresser, and Susan saw her mouth working but she couldn’t hear her over the rushing in her ears. Then Mrs Scott was calling for Robert and half-carrying, half-pulling Susan into her bedroom.
‘It’s too soon,’ Susan said, ‘far too soon.’
‘Hush, now,’ Mrs Scott said, ‘it may be nothing, you’ve been upset. All will be well, I’m sure.’
Then Robert came, and cursed, and there was more blood by then, and Susan rolled in on herself to contain the pain. Mrs Scott was staring, and Susan looked at her and knew it was a lie, all would not be well.
They came later that night, twins again although no one would have credited it. There was no cry, they were too small even for that. Susan asked to see them but Robert said better not, and Mrs Scott took them away in a basin, covered with a cloth. Susan asked why it had happened, and Robert said there was something wrong, one twin was much larger than the other, as though it had had all the goodness from Susan that was properly the other’s share.
‘But why?’ Susan asked.
‘We don’t know,’ Robert said. ‘That’s why we do what we do, studying the dead in hope of helping the living.’
Susan opened her mouth to say, please, no, not my babies, but she found she couldn’t, it was as though she was in a story and there was a spell on her tongue. If she spoke, then it would all spill out and she would ask what he did with that first little boy, the twin wrenched from her body, the child she never saw and never held, and if Robert’s answer confirmed her fears, then she thought she would truly go distracted.
Instead, she turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes, although the tears came still.
Robert sat there for a while in silence, and then, at length, he blew out the candles and left the room.
When Susan was well again and rose from her bed, she discovered the red-headed maid who had brought her water sitting with the children, as Elsie used to do, while the twins gummed their bits of bannock and young Robert clumsily spread butter on a piece of oatcake. Unlike Elsie, though, she sat there in silence while they chattered and babbled on.
‘What’s—’ Susan began, and then she felt rude. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’m Mrs Knox. The Mistress. We’ve not been introduced.’
The girl didn’t respond, not even to turn her head to the door. Susan cleared her throat and tried again.
‘Hello?’ she said.
Nothing. The mad thought came to Susan that perhaps she had died and not known it – she stood here as a ghost and no one could see her – but then Robert said, ‘Sit down, Mama,’ and it came to her, instead, that this was her punishment: the new twins were gone, and Elsie was gone, and this woman had been sent in her place and told not even to speak to Susan, or look at her.
Then young Robert said, ‘Joanie’s ears no work,’ and Susan felt relief flood through her, so she became light-headed almost, and sat down hard. The maid started, and Susan put out a hand to soothe her, and the maid smiled shyly and bobbed her head, then pointed to herself and said her name, although her voice was the oddest Susan had ever heard.
Young Robert offered Susan an oatcake and a piece of cheese he had assembled, and she accepted it, finding she was hungry. He prattled on, and Susan found she was glad of the maid’s deafness; she need say nothing and so there was no need to gather her wits, just eat her oatcake and smile at her children and do her best to think of nothing at all.
Susan didn’t go down to dinner that night, and so Mrs Scott came with a tray. While Susan ate, she busied herself about the room straightening this and putting away that. Susan asked about the maid, and Mrs Scott said she was a good, clean lass, and she couldn’t hear a word, but if you stood in front of her and spoke clearly, then she could more or less make out what you said by watching your lips.
‘I wonder how she learned to do that,’ Susan said. ‘She must have had a kind mother, or someone else to take the time.’
‘Doctor Knox asked her all about it,’ Mrs Scott said. ‘She told him she wasn’t aye deaf, or at least not so deaf as she is now. She could hear folk speak when she was a wee lass. She can speak, you know, but the sound is strange and so she doesn’t like to do it.’
‘I wonder why it happened,’ Susan said. She was only musing out loud, she didn’t expect an answer.
‘Doctor Knox had a look in her ears,’ Mrs Scott said.
‘Of course he did,’ Susan said.
Mrs Scott pretended not to hear that, and Susan almost smiled – the housekeeper was deaf too, in a way, but her deafness was of a particular form that came and went as suited her.
‘He said he might find a blockage or the like,’ Mrs Scott said. ‘Since her hearing had been there, and then gone. But he said there was nothing of that ilk. He didna ken what made her so at all.’
Mrs Scott finished her work and took the tray from Susan, who indicated she had had enough.
‘Doctor Knox is going back to town tomorrow,’ she said. ‘So we will be quiet here.’
‘Thank you,’ Susan said.
‘Will you come down, do you think, Ma’am?’ Mrs Scott asked. ‘I wondered if you might like to open yon great article the Master sent. The dolls’ house.’
‘Perhaps,’ Susan said. ‘I’ll take my breakfast in bed, if you’ll be so good as to bring it, Mrs Scott, and then I’ll see.’