THAT SAME MORNING, standing at the library window, the widow dandled a blue glass paperweight in her palm and listened. She heard a strange scuffling sound from the forecourt below. Then it came again. She leaned out the window and looked down. Emily’s head appeared, just visible beyond the confusion of ivy. She turned, turned again, disappeared. Then her head swung out again. Emily was dancing by herself on the forecourt, her arms held stiffly before her, as if around a companion’s neck. The widow regarded the bobbing head — would the imagined companion be a gentleman or another girl?
“Here you are!” a voice barked behind her. The widow jumped. Zenta was bearing down on her with a look of satisfied determination. The widow had the distinct impression she was about to be spanked, but instead she was seized by the upper arm and dragged downstairs.
“Time to make yourself useful, missy. No more creeping around like a cat. I told Madam you’d been going through people’s rooms, through their private things. Yes I did! ‘Thinks she can get away with anything,’ I says. ‘Put her to work,’ she says. And that’s what I’m about to do.”
They entered the basement, a damp, sweet-smelling room with other rooms coming off it. A massive antique stove slumbered against one wall. In another room was an empty pantry with slate-lined shelves and counters that were surmounted by glass-fronted cupboards, within which sat stacked dishes of various ornate designs. A set of gaudy gold and peach, another one greenish, yet another set in a deep navy blue. A tureen capable of feeding a platoon occupied its own cupboard, a visible beard of greasy dust round its edges like feathered coral. Zenta impelled the widow into a mudroom and made her stand still while she scrounged for a particular broom among many brooms and mops and dusters. She fetched up a miscreant and scraggy loser, with straw fibres sticking out sideways and patches missing, like a madman’s hair.
Zenta leaned close, her milky breath on the widow’s cheeks. “Little miss sly-boots,” she whispered, grinning widely with malice. “You’ll have a job, you will.”
The widow was assigned a thorough sweeping of the forecourt: the fool sweeps the beach. Formerly a grand and imperious platform above manicured garden depths, the forecourt, like the house itself, was now swooning into a gorgeous, natural chaos. Rain-sluiced mud and blown debris lay in deep drifts and runnels along the borders. Between the heaved-up flagstones that formed the floor, seedlings and woody tufts pushed up and knotted together, the growth following a vaguely geometric pattern of broken green lines, like a mouse’s maze. On every flat surface lay the gluey fossil impressions of maple keys. Expired beetles hid in the loam. Spiders slung their nets among the blown roses.
With her decayed broom the widow laboured gamely. After suffering the chores her husband had taught her to do, and her grandmother’s marmish tutoring, she could be obedient as a dog. The skin of her hands tellingly rough and her back strong, the widow wore the ratted broom down to a nub, contented in her work.
At dinner, she sat again in the kitchen, sipping leftover soup and picking at a sliver in her palm. The murmur of the old woman’s voice could be heard through the thick doors, then a grunt from Zenta, who was waiting at table. Emily bent over the washbasin and tested the water with her thumb, casting a wary glance from time to time in the widow’s direction. A kettle of water was heating on the stove, a merry bong issuing as the old bowed metal expanded.
“Did . . . did you . . . ?” Emily’s voice was timid and ghostly, a fretful whisper.
The widow might have thought she hadn’t spoken, except the girl’s pale eyes were staring.
“Hmm?”
“I meant to say . . . did you ever go to school?” “No,” the widow said firmly, “no school.”
“But, miss, you can read!”
“My grandmother taught me,” she said, digging again at the splinter. “She taught me everything.”
“Oh, I see,” came the sad reply. “Just a grandmother. Well, I always wisht I could go to school. I prayed I could. I don’t care what they say about it being bad for you.”
The widow’s own grandmother had believed that education was damaging — too much blood to a woman’s brain would cause reproductive malfunction. To prove her point, she had invoked the spectre of university women who were childless. “Why don’t they have children?” she’d said. “Because they can’t.” And since no one in the family, including her grandmother, had ever met a woman with a degree, the lesson went unchallenged, filed along with other dubious claims: ghosts cause spontaneous combustion in people (the spirit world giving wrongdoers their just desserts); spilled salt is thrown over the left shoulder directly into the devil’s eye; a phrenologist can identify a criminal in childhood, before he causes any damage, so he can be sent immediately to reform school; the monkfish is so named because it looks just like a little monk, complete with cowl. Thinking about it now, the widow couldn’t see how a girl like Emily would be harmed by reading. In fact, for her, the agony lay in half-measures, in knowing how little she herself knew.
“If I could only go to school and be with other girls my age. Sometimes I even dream I am at school, and everyone knows me. There’s the reading, of course. You could read all the books in Madam’s library, if you wanted to. But it’s the friendship, the society of it. I think it’s just grand, and, and important, and . . .” The girl sputtered to a stop, frozen in embarrassment at having spoken so much. She turned quickly back to work, as if she hadn’t spoken at all, then slipped a roasting pan into the water and began a vigorous scraping. Hollow grinding issued from under the water’s surface as the girl vainly went at the glazed mess.
“What in the world are you doing?” said the widow. “Let it soak.”
Stung, Emily stepped away from the basin. Two red streaks appeared on her cheeks. She stood with her back against the counter, hands braced behind her, shoulders hunched; it was the posture of a child trying to appear casual. In the resulting quiet, the widow sipped her soup and assessed this odd girl. She couldn’t be more than fifteen, knowing nothing of life, and never allowed out in the world; a young woman mostly unchanged from the original child. Gradually, watching the girl’s increasing discomfort, the widow deduced what the problem was: Zenta didn’t believe in soaking. Zenta’s way, which was the only way, was to scrub like mad while the water was at its hottest; never waste hot water. Zenta’s hope was to scrub the skin off the world. The widow, on the other hand, had told Emily to stop, and for some reason, the foolish girl had obeyed. So, they were at an impasse. Sometime soon, Zenta’s feet would thump across the floor and she would swing through the doors into the kitchen. And then what hell would rain down on Emily? The widow felt a deep pang of pity, maternal and therefore perilous.
“Well,” the widow said brightly, “this splinter is a pest. Perhaps I should soak it a little in water.” And with that she stepped off her stool and went to the washbasin and began scrubbing. Brownish matter churned up in the water as drippings and spatters peeled off the pan like poker chips and rolled under her brush. She went at the corners with her fingernails. From the edge of her vision she could see the girl, frozen in disbelief.
When Zenta strode through the door, the widow heard the woman’s booming voice: “Emily, why aren’t you . . .” And then, seeing the widow at her task, in a quieter, more approving tone, “Clever girl.”
THE WIDOW STOOD at the end of her bed, then fell sprawling across it. After the whooping of the bedsprings subsided, there was no sound at all, though both windows were open. No breeze carried the scents of night into her room. No dogs barking. A candle stood as if petrified on the bedside table. The old woman and her servants were asleep, and the widow had been at her nightly predations, wandering the empty rooms of the house, opening drawers and cupboards cautiously, silently, so contents would give warning before they shifted, a gentle half-sound before the sound came. Everything she touched was a sound first, or, if she was careful, no sound at all. The old house seemed to sleep as well, like some huge living thing. During the day it creaked and groaned in the way of old things. Now, in darkness, it stood on its foundations in absolute stillness. The widow lay on her bed, wakeful, ears ringing with silence. In her hand lay a wedding ring, not her own, filched from the cluttered back reaches of one of the old woman’s desk drawers.
She had been lying with the ring in her hand for she knew not how long, the small warm hoop of gold resting in her palm, a thin almost sharp thing, light as a lock of hair after all the years of wear, ultimately discarded.
She looked at her own ring finger, which was bare. No indentation, no mark saying a ring had ever been there. She hadn’t been married long enough for it to show.
And yet here she lay, clutching another woman’s ring. Well, it was gold, and it would not be missed, not immediately. How long since the old woman had worn it last? What reasons had lined up against it so that the bird lady had wrung it from her finger and hidden it in a drawer? The widow had found it among bits of string and ruined pencils. I loved my husband well enough. Perhaps it wore on her, the perpetual grip of it. A needling reminder: This is what you used to be — what are you now? Or maybe it began to take on a peculiar weight that belied its actual mass, the solemnity and burden that comes at the end of things, just as joy and callowness come at the beginning. Do all widows remove the ring, eventually? Do they do it quickly, from self-protection, like a mountain climber struggling to cut the rope on a fallen companion before the weight also pulls him down?
Somewhere in the house a door thumped closed. She felt rather than heard it, a thud that came through the mattress. She waited. Another less sensible thud. Silence. Then, a sound she actually heard of footsteps on the stairs, quiet and furtive, but stepping quickly, two stairs at a time. By now she had rolled over on her back and was frozen in a crablike posture, half sitting up, motionless so she could better hear. The boots — yes they were boots, she could hear the heels — came along the hallway quickly, a determined march.
And then Jeffrey entered her room. He came right in, seized the door handle behind him, and backed the door closed till it clicked. The widow sprang off the bed and braced herself in the corner like a cat. The gold ring dropped unheard to the rug and rolled under the bed.
“I want you out of here,” he hissed.
The candle next to her slowly stopped wavering. In its light her eyes were gold streaks. She knew what had happened, knew they had found her, could tell by the black outrage on his face.
“Was it them?” she whispered.
“Listen, you! Make your goodbyes tomorrow. She’ll give you food and such, and then out you go. If you linger here, I’ll let them have you.”
The widow shook her head. “I don’t know where to go,” she said.
“I don’t care.” He glared at her for a long moment. “Take your problems somewhere else.”
She nodded meekly.
“And don’t you breathe a word to her what you did. Not a word. It’ll break her heart. Unlike you, that old woman never hurt a living soul in her life.” He backed out and shut the door on her.
THE WIDOW WAS alone in the barn. It was night, but she had not dared to light a lantern. She would not wait for morning. It wasn’t safe. So she had brought with her a heap of pilfered items that lay now on the ground as she entered the uneasy mare’s stall and tried to gain control of it. A fur coat was ground by a hoof into urine-blackened straw.
The other horse, a small gelded bay, would not even let the widow come near, but the roan was older and calmer and the widow was able to slip in and stand near the mare’s neck and let it quail and veer and shoulder the walls of the narrow stall. Its head was reared up, round nostrils puffing at her face. She rubbed harshly at her scalp and pressed this hand to the mare’s face and snout, not knowing why she did it, just figuring that all animals must learn one another’s scent. She draped a halter around its neck. She slipped a thumb into the mare’s mouth, along the gums, back where there were no teeth, and pressed down till the mouth opened and she could slip the bit in. The rest she pulled over the stiff ears and held the jerking head down and buckled the throat strap. As a girl, someone else had always done this for her, little Mary the master’s daughter, a candy-eating child astride a hobby horse. She was surprised she remembered how, and she stood back and wondered at it. Would this be the first of many small retrievals, illuminations of a vast personal darkness, like the amnesiac wondering, “Can I play the piano?” and then playing?
From over the stall door she took a blanket and English saddle and laid these over the horse’s back. The girth strap swung there, just out of reach. Fearful of bending her head down near unfamiliar hooves, she caught the girth strap with the toe of her boot, Zenta’s boot, and brought it up and cinched it tight. She stood and looked at her handiwork. But then the mare exhaled, and the girth strap hung loose. If the widow were to try to mount now, the saddle would slither round and hang from the horse’s belly. When she went to take up the slack, she found the horse had held its breath again and the strap was tight. This was a conundrum. Having been tricked, she wondered how to proceed. After several experiments, she remembered that repeated upward thumps with a knee into the mare’s belly would cause it to puff, and the strap could be cinched tight. Finally, the widow mounted and stood the horse in its stall, speaking gently to it. In answer it nodded and jerked the reins, oddly passive now that it was saddled. She backed herself and the horse out of the stall and took a stroll through the barn, bending to avoid beams. At last, she brought the mare to the open barn door. Horse and human looked out at the night.
The house stood at some distance from the barn. A path of pale stones wound an ornamental route between the two buildings. A farm for aristocracy. She’d seen many just like it. Conservatory, library, drawing room, barn. A vegetable garden perhaps, where the lady of the house grows lettuce and carrots. She knew the architecture and the kind of lives lived in inherited houses like these. And she believed misfortune was the likely end of this house, of every great house. The children die or move away or refuse to have children themselves, someone marries unwisely, someone becomes sick, someone goes mad, the young wife is barren, the old man gambles unchecked, there are no more parties, the staff dwindles, ivy overgrows the windows and birds nest everywhere, rooms are closed off. When Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot eventually died, her staff would empty the house, keep what they wished, and close the doors.
The widow dismounted, tied the halter to one of the oversized barn-door hinges, and went searching for anything useful. A set of leather saddlebags lay in the corner of a tack room. They were old and frowsed with white rot that brushed away like salt. In another smaller room she found nothing but a broken horse-drawn sleigh, a child’s carved wood sword, and a scorched fire screen with an urn painted on it. In the two days she had been here, she had seen no sign of children, grown or otherwise. She had found the deceased husband, or at least a massive formal portrait of him in his military uniform. He had sharp features but an oddly gentle eye gazing out upon what little was left of his life. Beneath the painting the old woman had set up a table on which she had gathered her departed husband’s possessions, masculine flotsam, laid out as a shrine. A shrine relegated to the corner of an unused room. I loved my husband well enough.
On her first nightly exploration of the house, the widow had found this room and had filched a tiny lapel pin in the shape of a star. She found it pretty. She had put it on her shift and looked at herself in the glass. There had been a little tin containing a notebook and a pencil. She had taken several items that seemed useful to her, including the notebook and pencil, and also a short, lethal bayonet knife that came with its own sheath. Thinking of poultry, and her future needs, she now went in search of a pot.
All these things fit awkwardly into the mouldering saddlebags, the flaps of which were stiff with age. She tossed the stolen fur coat behind the saddle and hung a beaded silk handbag from her shoulder. She mounted again, hitched up her skirts, and proceeded from the barn, a mad silhouette in the night. From the direction of the house came a dog that barked at her once, short and high, a call of question. She listened to things moving in the dark. The dog came sideways, peering, and it circled in a strafing pattern while the blue roan stood its ground. Eventually, they went on, the dog making small yips. She walked the horse slowly over the gravel drive, holding the saddlebags tight to keep their contents from jingling. No light in the house, candle or gas. Its ivy walls went scrolling by and then were gone. They passed through a small field and came upon two looming trees the widow had seen from her window and thought to be stumpy. Instead they were enormous, with vast canopies. The leaves filtered the moonlight and, as they passed under, woman and horse were streaked, erased, reformed.
Soon, they came upon a fence and stood looking over it into another dark field. The widow circled the roan and took them back a short way, then brutally heeled it forward into a canter, and heeled again before the fence, as the dog ducked and veered. They took the jump, landed awkwardly, and trotted to a stop with goods rattling and the roan shuddering and sidestepping with surprise. The dog simply took off. The widow gripped the reins. Two hearts pounding. So, she remembered how to jump too.
They went on into the dark field and soon were gone from sight, leaving the house where they both had been kept and cared for.
THE OLD WOMAN stood at her doorstep before breakfast, her gnarled little hands wringing together and a look of fury on her face. Zenta and Emily cowered behind her. The three women regarded the red-bearded men who waited on the steps, rifles across their backs like hunters.
“I told you,” she said, attempting a sternness she did not possess, “you have the wrong house.” Under the chill of their flat stare, she slowly withered, the trembling lip now mute.
“You have two choices,” said one man. “You can cooperate, or you can see what happens when you don’t. Now, where is she?” His eye settled on Emily, clearly the weakest of the three.