She looked anxiously at Jenner. His expression was miserable.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Lady Thalia, with a glossy smile. And Abi sensed that beneath the show of concern, she was being dismissed. ‘Gavar had to head off on parliamentary business in any event. I think it would be best if you went back to your parents and had an early night. Jenner will see you home.’
Under other circumstances, Abi would have been delighted to have Jenner’s company for the long walk to the cottages where the slave families lived. But this evening he didn’t say a word. He just dug his chin into his scarf and his hands into his pockets as they headed towards the Row, keeping always several paces in front of her. Abi had the sense of being in disgrace, though for what offence, she had no idea.
The night was cold and clear, the sky more star than dark, and their breath plumed as they walked. Abi felt her temples gingerly. She couldn’t work out exactly where she’d hit her head. Perhaps Lady Thalia had healed her, she thought. Just not very well. Kyneston’s mistress was only weakly Skilled, though she was a dab hand at repairing things broken by her eldest son in one of his rages.
At that thought, a fresh surge of pain seared the inside of her skull and Abi moaned, stopping where she stood. That made Jenner turn around, and when he saw her he immediately came back.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
And Abi couldn’t help herself. He was right there next to her, so concerned. And it was such an innocent thing to do. She reached for him again.
But he stepped away. His movement was deliberate, and it wasn’t done beneath the hawk eyes of his family. Abi ached with disappointment.
Jenner held his hands out as she’d seen him do to his gelding Conker, when the horse went skittish.
‘Abigail,’ he said soothingly. The assumption that he could calm her like an animal drove a spike of fury through her distress. ‘Please stop this. You’re a lovely girl. We make a great working team. But I think you’re getting muddled up. I’ve seen it happen before, with other girls here. Though I can’t say it’s ever happened to me.’
He gave a self-deprecating laugh, and even as Abi felt her every nerve ending tingle with shame she wanted to slap him for having such a poor opinion of himself. He was the best of them all. The only truly good and kind one.
‘You’re a slave,’ Jenner continued. ‘I’m an Equal. Wouldn’t you rather have a quick ten years in the office than be banished to the kitchen or the laundry, or sent to Millmoor, because one of my family thinks your behaviour isn’t appropriate?’
Was it possible to die of mortification? Abi thought it quite possibly was. She’d be a first in medical literature. They could cut her up and study her, the pathologists’ metal hooks pulling out first her overlarge brain and then her small and shrunken heart. She felt hot tears running down her face and put her hand up to her forehead, wincing as if the pain was back. But it wasn’t her head that hurt.
‘I’m sorry, Abigail,’ Jenner said quietly. ‘But please understand, it’s easier this way. I think you know where you’re going from here? It’s not far now.’
‘I know where I’m going,’ she confirmed. ‘Thank you. I’ll be at my desk for eight thirty, as usual.’
Abi turned away with as much dignity as she could muster. She strained to hear the moment when he went back to the house, to at least have the illusion that he stood there and watched her go, but any footfall was muffled by the grass.
She wished people had an ‘off’ switch, she thought as she walked. Something you could just flip to shut down thought and feeling, letting muscle memory go through the motions of putting one foot in front of the other. The confusion in her heart was beyond her brain’s ability to solve. What problem in a textbook was more difficult than this? None.
The cottages of the Row were still out of sight beyond the steep rise that hid the slave quarters from the mansion. Abi was trudging up it when something monstrous and snarling plunged down towards her from the crest. She threw herself to one side as Gavar Jardine’s motorbike gouged past, the beam of its gaze dazzling her for one terrifying instant.
The heir was heading off on parliamentary business, Lady Thalia had said. So what was he doing out here? Suspicion blooming in her brain, Abi jogged up the incline.
From the top she saw the long line of whitewashed cottages, almost luminous in the moonlight. And moving towards them was a shape so large and lumpy that Abi at first thought she was mistaken, until she puzzled it out.
‘Wait,’ she called, and her sister turned and stopped.
Daisy had put on every coat from the hallway pegs: her own, then on top of it their father’s fleece and Mum’s down jacket. She carried an immense nest of blankets in which the swaddled form of Libby Jardine was barely discernible.