“Of course.”
“Charles likes you,” she added as she skipped towards the door. “I’ve never seen him like anyone so fast. He actually shook your hand.”
Following this obscure observation, she disappeared, and I was left once more to ponder the enigmas of my new household. Then, lacking other occupation and knowing I had an hour till supper, a subtle electric pulse thrumming in my boot soles, I likewise donned my warmest things and quit the main house in the opposite direction, marching silently for my cottage and whatever—whomever—I might find there.
SIXTEEN
It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.
If you expected to find yourself in a Gothic snowscape, reader, ears tickling with spectral whispers as the plucky protagonist breaks into a cottage haunted by the shades of her past, regrettably you are mistaken.
The door was already unlocked. Opening the panel of the small lantern I had brought, I discovered that my erstwhile home was carpeted in grit and vermin droppings, and furthermore that spiders are the most industrious creatures alive.
Slowly, my ears adjusted; no ticking of clocks greeted me, no exclamations of alarm. The place had been emptied, and not merely of its few antiques—even the bedding and the better chairs were dispatched. A pang struck me at the thought of faithful, nonsensical Agatha turned out to pasture—or worse, deceased—but I could do her no better service than to press on, so press on I did.
The kitchen was mouldering, the parlour decrepit, my mother’s bedroom sacked and empty, which hurt my chest terribly, and still I could not bring myself to quit the place. Creeping up to the garret was a whim; I knew I must be back soon to sit with Sahjara over another brilliantly orange curry, swallowing questions down my gullet.
I will have a peek at the attic space, then be done.
And what did I behold but my mother’s old wooden trunk, resting in a corner. I dived for its dust-soft handle and heaved open its lid; an explosion of dry grime and a short stack of letters met my gaze, and my fingers discovered the papers were indeed corporeal. I think I had been half expecting leprechaun gold in that cottage, or at least small, strange men proposing dangerous quests. Instead I held foolscap with ink scrawled over it, ink which might very well tell me what I had inherited and what I might venture to do about it.
To escape with the sole prize I had come seeking, save Agatha herself, seemed altogether too good to be true: but I did, and twenty minutes hence had stowed my treasure under my mattress without a single person knowing I had left the main house at all.
? ? ?
What became of the original staff?” I asked, sniffing at a plate of heartily spiced potato and cabbage with mustard seeds. “Surely this place was populated by English servants, before.”
“I regret to say that they were made to feel rather unwelcome.” Mr. Sardar Singh spooned out portions of chicken curry and saffron-scented rice to Sahjara and me; twice before he had dined in our company, and I found myself avidly hoping he would do so again. “We brought with us an unknown master, foreign tastes . . . their defection was natural.”
“But never forced?” I questioned, envisioning my elderly Agatha scrubbing floors in some rot-ridden dispensary.
“Of course not—heavens, I hope none of them ever felt so. Some had family they wished to return to, others dreams of travel. They were all of them dismissed with a thousand pounds, after all.”
“A thousand . . .” I echoed. It was the sort of money a titled landholder or a City purveyor of stocks might have brought in yearly, and it was a princely figure to a domestic worker.
“Miss Stone, I hope that I haven’t overstepped the bounds of English propriety. The figure is irre—”
“Of course it isn’t irrelevant—Mr. Thornfield could have got away uncensored distributing bonuses at a hundredth the price.”
“The master of the house saw no need to be parsimonious,” he returned, but I saw he was pleased.
“Not often the way,” I quipped, “with masters. Please do sit down.”