“What can be done?” I urged, outwardly calm and inwardly frantic. “And what did you think would be done, anyhow? You must have wanted us to find them, but I can’t imagine what—”
“And I can’t either!” she cried, eyes wild, before her mouth pressed into a tormented dash. She hugged her own arms. “You must forgive me. No—no, you mustn’t, I’ve no right to even ask. My father is a country parson, my mother an industrious invalid, and they are happy when they’ve oxtails for their soup. Their parish is just outside London, but poor and plain for all its proximity. I learnt piano, thinking I could give private lessons. Well, I’m an utter shipwreck at music, and Mr. Munt when visiting our parish lecturing hired me anyhow, I arrived just a year before you did though I was far older, and this position pays—oh, don’t look at me, I can’t bear it.”
“You think you’re lucky to have the place.” I tentatively touched her forearm.
“I think he wanted me and not my music—who could want my music! He courted me for years without ever proposing before the letters started, and now I’m trapped, for what decent woman would have kept a job of all things with such correspondences plaguing her?” She shuddered. “Last month, he stopped me in a deserted corridor to, to pray for me, and he put his palms on my brow and here, over my heart.”
I required answers, and so increased the pressure on her arm. “Have you spoken with him since Clarke’s Reckoning?”
“Not a word. Did you burn the letters?” Miss Lilyvale whispered. “I thought them proof of his disgusting attentions, but that was unspeakably foolish—they are merely evidence of my complicity. Did you destroy them?”
“Yes,” I lied.
It was better than saying I reread them nightly because I do not understand their effect on me and I am studying it in the cause of science.
“Thank you. I was . . . terrified, paralysed.”
“We’ve tried everything,” said I, implacable. “We’ve shared, we’ve stolen, we’ve foraged spring greens when we were meant to be playing hopscotch. Clarke will not survive. What can we do?”
Pressing her sleeve to her eyes, Miss Lilyvale glanced in naked fright at the clock in the corner. “God forgive me. I’m your teacher, I ought to have . . . Yes, there is one thing to be done. Mr. Munt is his own bookkeeper. If you altered his accounts, and then took food on the day of its delivery, he would not know you had done so. Tomorrow the farm will deliver the week’s eggs and produce.”
The information echoed like the clap of a gong, for Clarke that morning had confessed herself bedridden. Porridge, lawn weeds, and rare stolen roast potatoes would no longer suffice.
“I take it I’m meant to perform this little magic trick,” I could not help but mention.
“Oh, Steele—”
“Never mind. I’ll do it. Does he keep the ledger in his study?”
Miss Lilyvale nodded, righting her hunched posture. “He invited me there for tea once. I shall never forget that occasion, no matter how I try.”
“When girls refuse to return their food, they’re told to visit his study, and no one speaks of it afterwards,” I said lowly. “Why?”
“He tells them who he thinks they really are, and what they must sacrifice to save themselves from hellfire,” Miss Lilyvale answered against a raw throat. “Sometimes he shows them pictures, suggests things . . . things he accuses them of secretly longing to do. For hours. Can you imagine?”
I could, but the service was about to commence. “I must know why you placed me in this position.”
Two feverish blots glared from her cheeks. “Please understand that I never meant for Clarke to—”
“Do the idiotic thing she did. I still deserve an explanation.”
Miss Lilyvale was a sweet, toothless, impressionable creature, but she was also an honest one, and finally she looked me straight in the eye.
“I know your past is . . . chequered. I also know that you forgive others more readily than anyone I have ever encountered, and I cherish it—you have a great talent, you know, for accepting people. Have you ever kept a secret,” Miss Lilyvale asked me, all the blood in her body seeming to drain straight through the floor, “which was not precisely your fault, but which would—if discovered—ruin you? Have you ever awoken to nothing save dread of daylight?”
“You know I have,” I answered, comprehending that she spoke of my mother’s bad end.
“Mr. Munt means to destroy me if he cannot have me,” Miss Lilyvale murmured. “Please forgive my inexcusable actions. I only . . . I simply couldn’t do it anymore.”
Watching her, I thought about secrets. One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it. I would have done anything to shed Edwin’s dead eyes glazed fish-scale grey.
Solving Miss Lilyvale’s problem and saving Clarke at once would have to suffice, however, lest I defy the restful nature of the Sabbath.