A week later, Jane sat on the stairs for a while after her charge had gone to bed, leaning against the railing and thinking. In the twilight the foyer chandelier burned half-blue. One of its two mini-bluepacks had fizzled that morning, so half the foyer was dim, while the other half was decorated with blue sparks from the hanging crystal prisms. Jane absent-mindedly rubbed the bridge of her nose where the iron weighed down on it, watching the sparks dancing across the walls like tiny lights. Helen would like the way the chandelier sparkled. So would Dorie.
Dancing and walks. It was little enough to build trust out of, and Jane was reluctant to turn their only positive times together into rewards to be dangled overhead. She wondered if Mr. Rochart would have any ideas. She wanted to ask him—but he was always gone, and when he was there, like the day with Dorie and the applesauce, he melted away as soon as he’d appeared. Day after day he shut himself in the attic studio, or was mentioned casually as being “away,” though the motorcar remained in the carriage house. She knew all too well how much Dorie missed him. He had been at dinner twice during the month, and Dorie was much better the next day.
Down below in the foyer, Martha emerged from the forest green curtains, dragging a ladder backward that scraped on the stone floor. She wrestled it into place on the rug beneath the chandelier, tucked the hem of her skirt in her waistband to keep it free of her legs, and went up.
Jane did not speak, not wanting to startle Martha on the ladder, or embarrass her about her hiked-up skirt. But she wondered what the maid was doing—bluepacks didn’t have an empty container, a shell to remove. When they were gone they were gone. And with the rationing nowadays of the final stores left from before the war, when the bluepacks were gone they were generally gone for good. Hardly anyone had spares left to replace them. Mr. Rochart himself had said they were on the last of the big ones—the ones that would run a motorcar.
But Martha pulled a small bit of wiggling blue from her apron pocket and tucked it into the power source on the chandelier’s right side. Jane watched the motions that used to be familiar to everyone—pushing the blue stuff into the copper container (never iron, of course, or it wouldn’t work) with one finger, clapping the lid shut to keep the squirming substance in. It wasn’t that bluepacks tried to get free, exactly, but they did thrum and move in your hands.
Jane had dropped one, once, when she was young and changing the porch light. The old bluepack had fizzled that morning, bursting out of the copper cylinder that screwed into the light bulb, leaving the lid rattling on its hinge. Jane balanced on a kitchen stool that really wasn’t meant for balancing. She leaned wrong and had to grab the base of the light, opened her fist, and there went the bluepack. It hovered pretty much where she had let it go, as if it knew she owned it. But it was that pretty much that was the trick, since it made feeble darts up and back, as if attached by elastic to the spot in the air. Jane knocked the stool over twice more before she finally caught the bluepack and put it into place.
The foyer was fully lit again. White-blue light glittered crazily from the jostled prisms as Martha descended the ladder and clapped it shut. She shook out her skirts, and as she did so Jane saw her apron quite clearly.
Her apron pocket was full of mini-bluepacks.
Martha hoisted the ladder up and headed back through the curtains, the ladder’s feet catching on the velvet.
Jane suddenly stood. Quietly she went down the stairs, following the silent maid. She did not know exactly why, except that the question: How many bluepacks does Mr. Rochart still have? was uppermost in her mind. Why, he could sell them on the black market if he’d a mind to—certainly the various attempts at replacements were nowhere up to speed.
Jane slipped through the forest green curtains and saw that the hallway, which had gone completely black that first night she was here, now had every sconce lit with white-blue light.
Martha strode down the hallway, ladder under her arm now, and Jane followed her down the stairs and around the cellar as she replaced one, two, five more bluepacks. Jane was about to give up out of both boredom and feeling ridiculous when Martha stacked the ladder against a wet stone wall, left the house by a back door, and struck out down a paved walk that led to the carriage house.
Jane waited a cautious interval before following her. She felt rather silly at this point—why was she following Martha back to some closet where they kept supplies? But on the other hand, Martha had replaced a good twenty bluepacks this evening—still had some in her pocket—and Jane had not seen anything like that in ten years.