The ball had begun. But the lady of the house was still below stairs, just where they wanted her. Mrs. Bone was being held in the butler’s pantry, and the chauffeur barred the door. Mrs. King had been very clear about this. Let them interrogate you as long as they want. We need them down in the servants’ hall, so the men can pack up the old nurseries. Mrs. Bone pictured rocking horses creaking as they were lifted onto runners, gigantic dolls blinking as they were turned upside down. The nursery was a forlorn sort of place, preserved in aspic: too big, too bleached. The wallpaper was metal colored, a bleak and relentless pattern. The whole place had given Mrs. Bone the shivers. She was glad it was being packed away.
“Alice, tell Mr. Shepherd what you told me,” Miss de Vries said, her face glinting in the lamplight.
Alice kept things brief. “I saw her,” she said, pointing at Mrs. Bone, “selling silver spoons to a man in the street. She had them hidden in her apron.”
So far so good. Mrs. Bone tutted loudly. “I was cleaning them.”
“No, she was not,” said Alice.
Mrs. Bone shook her fist, per her stage directions. “Rot!”
“Madam, I had no idea,” began Mr. Shepherd.
“That’s what’s troubling me, Shepherd.”
Mr. Shepherd went very red in the face then. He gripped Mrs. Bone by the shoulder. His fingers felt surprisingly dense. “Tell us at once,” he said, and his breath smelled, soured by wine. “Are you a thief?”
She wrenched herself away. “Yes, I helped myself to a fork or two,” she said. “What of it?”
Silence, but for Mr. Shepherd’s intake of breath.
“There’s plenty of cutlery going spare. She sits upstairs and has dinner by herself every night—” Mrs. Bone gestured at Miss de Vries, whose eyes were like steel “—using one little cheese knife, one little butter knife, and don’t even get me started on the spoons. And yet here we are, counting ’em, polishing ’em like our lives depend on it. I took a couple to make something useful out of ’em. Who cares?”
“Someone call for the constable,” Mr. Shepherd exclaimed, “to apprehend this wicked woman.”
Wicked? Mrs. Bone thought, staring at him. I’m not the wicked one.
Shepherd knew about the girls. He had to know. He was the one with the keys. Mrs. Bone pictured him, disappearing into the bowels of the house at night, concealing his movements. Bowing to a gentleman slipping through the garden door. Pocketing a little tip for himself.
Wicked, Mrs. Bone thought again, mind hardening.
They’d planned for Mrs. Bone to grow wild with fear, to distract them all with hysterics. But when it came to it, she did the more satisfying thing. She locked her hand into a fist, and she punched Mr. Shepherd straight in the mouth. Knuckles met bone. Hot, clean justice.
“Aaah,” he cried, reeling back.
A gasp went up from the servants watching at the open doorway.
“Get—Call the constable—” Mr. Shepherd’s voice was muffled, hand pressed to his lip. He had blood on his fingers.
Alice spoke quickly, as rehearsed. “A constable? With the princess on her way to the house, and a pack of detectives sitting out in the yard? Are you mad? But look here...” Alice fished something out of her pocket. “I found this in her room.”
She held up a silver watch, sparkling dimly in the light. Mrs. Bone recognized it by those narrow letters engraved on the underside: WdV.
Miss de Vries showed immense restraint. She didn’t reach for the watch. But something crossed her face. Something hard and furious.
“Alice is right,” she said calmly.
The others stilled.
“Don’t send for the constable until tomorrow morning. We can’t afford any disturbances tonight. Take this woman upstairs and lock her in her room. And go and wash your face, Shepherd. You look a fright.” Miss de Vries turned to Mrs. Bone, expression rigid. “You might have thought you could do what you like here,” she said in a deadly voice, “but you can’t.”
Mrs. Bone was transfixed. Anger was coming off that girl in waves, but it was controlled, harnessed. She’d only lost a watch. An old silver watch, and a couple of teaspoons. Her fury was all out of proportion.
But she understood it entirely. She pictured Mr. Murphy’s men finding their way into her hidey-hole, rifling through her drawers, sniffing her peach-colored tea gown. It made her feel unsteady. The same would happen to this house: it would be carved up, sliced into bits, profits shared. Extracted from its current ownership. Taken out of the family.
It prickled at her. A tiny, wicked thought. This house belonged to O’Flynns. It belonged to her blood. The notion had been circling all day at the back of her mind. It had been there for weeks, if she was honest about it. It was her loan that bought Danny his ticket to Cape Colony, his ticket to his new life. It was her cash, earned from her own jobs, that got him going in the first place. Just like it was her cash that had got this job on the move. My carts, she thought. My vans. My men. My loans. My Daimler. My Janes.
Lucky sevens. Two equal portions. Just two. It made her teeth ache. It made her feel like she’d been punched in the face. Like Mrs. King was laughing at her, curls gleaming, eyes dancing...
Mrs. Bone knew what envy felt like. She recognized the low burn, the rage that existed deep in her gut. It was far too easy to get lost in it. She forced her mind to come back to the room. Miss de Vries was gathering her skirts, her costume shimmering darkly. She sent her voice down the hall so that all the servants would hear her.
“Don’t ever touch my things,” she said.
Hephzibah didn’t enjoy parties. Never had. They gave her the willies. But she knew she’d never be at a ball like this again. She held on to her wig with one hand. Her skirts ballooned around her, taking up space, sweeping the floor. People stared.
“I know,” she said, raising her glass. “I look marvelous.”
Naturally she had business to take care of. Once the ball was underway, she’d begun surreptitiously gathering her actresses, sending them circling around the ballroom, knocking over drinks, upsetting supper plates, causing confusion. “Movement,” Winnie had said when they were going over the program for the evening. “We must have constant and immediate movement. We need people away from the windows, eyes on the entertainment. We’ve got ropes going up the eastern side of the house. We can’t have anyone spotting that.”
“I’ve got it,” Hephzibah had said. Winnie had made her apologies half a dozen times, but Hephzibah still wouldn’t meet her eye. “Don’t fuss.”
There was no delay to the dancing, no wallflowers spoiling the mood: Hephzibah’s actresses saw to that.
I might join in, Hephzibah thought, a splendid fog descending over her vision. She saw her men leading women to the ballroom floor, music swelling. They looked like sea anemones, billowing into each other’s arms, pulsing. It was a waltz, a fast one. It made the blood start pumping in the veins.
I need more champagne, she decided. And more jelly.
She spied a boy gawking at her from the corner of the room. A lamp-trimmer, she assumed, or an urchin kept for running errands. He had a pointed, weaselly face, and he was keeping himself carefully out of view from the other servants. In the normal course of events, Hephzibah might have flicked him half a crown for trying his luck upstairs. But this wasn’t the time for unkempt boys to be scuttling around the house. They’d made no allowances in the plan for that. And she didn’t like the way he was staring at her.
One of Hephzibah’s actresses came whirling past, a profusion of taffeta and silks. “Goodness gracious!” she cried, throwing her champagne glass to the floor, where it shattered in all directions. “Enough chaos for you, dear?” she muttered to Hephzibah as the waiters hurried to clean it up, the dancers surging around them.
The boy’s eyes narrowed. Have I been rumbled? Hephzibah wondered, with a prickling of alarm.
“Boy!” she exclaimed, sidestepping the actress. “Fetch me a drink!”
Perhaps her voice came out a little louder than she’d intended. An under-footman or a waiter glided up, tray in hand. “Madam,” he said, blocking her path.
She dodged. “That little boy can fetch it for me,” she said. “He needs teaching a lesson. He made a face at me. He is a cheeky rodent.”
I never, mouthed the boy.
“Tell him...tell him to go down to the kitchen and fetch me a...cold flannel!”
Oh, I do feel a little dizzy, she thought. Perhaps it was the heat. Or the champagne. Surely she could leave her actresses to manage things, just for a moment. “Here, help me,” she said, lurching forward, grabbing the boy by his shoulder. He wriggled furiously underneath her. “Get me to a chair.”
The footmen had glanced at each other, then at the crowd. “Help Her Grace into the Boiserie,” one said to the boy. “I’ll bring her a glass of water.”
It was very hard keeping a hold on these people. They moved so quickly, in such unexpected directions, sidling around the edge of rooms. She looked for her beautiful waltzing troublemakers. But they were gone, sucked into the heat and noise of the ballroom.
“Don’t move a muscle,” she said to the boy. “Don’t even think about leaving me unattended.” I need to decide what to do with you, she thought.
He squirmed, nearly spitting. “Mr. Shepherd,” he called.
Hephzibah felt her body go on alert.
She hadn’t seen him downstairs. The footmen had opened the front door, seated her, escorted her to the dining room, brought her wine. Not Shepherd. She’d been braced for him. It had to happen—she had to see him; it was inevitable. It was like pulling a tooth, she told herself. A necessary and shocking pain that would subside as quickly as it came. That was what she wanted. Something sharp and clean.
But he hadn’t appeared. She began to hope, to believe, that he wouldn’t. This was an enormous house, full of hundreds of people. It was possible that they might never cross paths again.
The last time she’d gone to see Mr. Shepherd, she’d nearly slipped on the parquet. Not for nothing did she hate that floor. Eighteen years ago, and she’d been hurrying to the stairs, skidding, nearly falling on her face. She couldn’t stand the smell of beeswax, to this day.
Shepherd had done what he always did. He took his report. He had a way of asking questions without using the necessary words. It didn’t make it any less revolting. It made it worse, as if the discussion were being bleached. She recalled the scratch of his pencil, the feeling of nausea, as if someone were shoving their fingers down her throat.
She left Park Lane that night. The scullery maid called Dolly Brown gobbled herself up. She dissolved, disappeared. She would never come back.
Sometimes, when things were very painful, it was best to draw back. Hephzibah did that now. She didn’t let go of the lamp-boy, but she leaned away from the door. She could see Shepherd on the other side of it.
Evidently, he had been hurrying in the other direction, and he didn’t look at all pleased to be waylaid. He peered across the room, spotting her. Hephzibah heard him speaking to the footman, sotto voce, flustered. “Who is...?”
“Hephzibah Grandcourt,” she said, standing, facing him fully. “That is my name.”
The early hours of a ball were a febrile, anxious affair. Things could swing in two directions. Dull or magnificent. There was nothing in between. When Winnie entered the house, leaving her pyramid glittering in the road, she made for the garden, where the most eye-catching entertainments would be held. She stepped nervously onto her raft, balancing precariously, the hosepipes chugging as they flooded the courtyard that had been turned into the Nile. She could see her own painted reflection in the scabbards and spears of the other entertainers. The courtyard walls glittered with lights.
“Miss de Vries,” someone called from the terrace. “You must be the first to cross the Nile.”
Applause went up, a delighted crowd appearing at the top of the steps. The barges, which were rafts joined up with painted and gilded chairs, bobbed merrily on the surface. There was a dank smell to the air: too much tepid water in a confined space.
“If I must,” said Miss de Vries, emerging from the crowd. She looked pale but calm, Queen Cleopatra from head to toe, corseted and decked in black crepe, her jet ornaments swinging dangerously as she moved.
“I am Isis,” Winnie said, throat dry, paddling the raft toward the steps.
She didn’t like being near Miss de Vries. Never had. She learned that lesson on her last day in the house. Her mistress was then just twenty. She still had some plumpness in her cheeks then. She hadn’t yet begun to reduce, to slough off her excess, to drain her body of blood. But her eyes were as old as the hills, just like her father’s. Maids came and went, and it made Winnie feel sick. They hadn’t been going off and getting shop work, like Mr. Shepherd said.
“Doesn’t it seem odd to you, Madam?” she had said when she mentioned it.
Miss de Vries had stared at her, face blank. She didn’t even speak. She didn’t say, I’ve no notion what you mean. Did she know or not? There was some silent, unsayable, unseeable thing in this house—and the utter wrongness of it made Winnie’s skin crawl.
The barge trembled now upon the water. Miss de Vries turned, not recognizing Winnie, seeing only the painted face, the sapphire gems, the white sequins.
“Get ready,” said Winnie as Isis, and extended a hand. “I have come to deliver you to your death.”
But Miss de Vries took another hand, stepped onto a barge of her own. “Very nice,” she said vaguely, and floated away.
Cheers went up, and the waves lapped sorrowfully at the edge of Winnie’s boat. Oh, I shall empty this house, she thought. I shall strip the meat right down to the bones.