It was standing in the hip bath.
A stout woman, brushing her hair. Her kirtle was the colour of pickled gherkins. She wore dirty linen oversleeves and an apron that fell to her ankles. Her expression teased as she swept the brush through the ends of her wavy brown hair, the other hand smoothing behind. It was a flirtatious look, yet somehow hostile.
‘Go on then,’ Elsie croaked. She was light-headed with a sense of her own bravado. ‘Move if you’re going to do it. Move, damn you, move!’
The eyes remained still. But she heard, just at the edge of her consciousness, the sound of bristles tearing through dry hair. The scent of roses flared up, thick and choking. Suddenly it was very warm.
Her mind would not stand it. Whirling round, she slammed the door shut and ran back down the corridor. Her legs refused to move with their usual speed. She was slow now, weighted by the baby. Vulnerable.
The others were waiting on the landing. They had coaxed Mabel onto a chair and she was dry-faced, very pale.
‘It was locked,’ Mrs Holt said. ‘I swear it was locked. Mrs Bainbridge doesn’t have the key, Mabel. I just don’t understand how this has happened.’
‘Mabel.’ Elsie tried to keep her voice steady but it was a strange, swooping thing, beyond her control. ‘All of you. I want you to think, very carefully. Who has been in the house? We have had tradesmen and workmen. Gardeners. I want you to make a list. Someone, somewhere, for whatever reason, is playing a trick upon us. Putting handprints on the windows and . . .’ She frowned, distracted by a glint of light. ‘Mabel, are you wearing my diamonds?’
Colour flared into the maid’s cheeks. ‘I were warming them, ma’am. That’s what Helen says they do, in the fancy houses. Ain’t it, Helen? Warm the mistress’s pearls.’
‘Warming them?’ Sarah cried. ‘A likely story! Mrs Bainbridge cannot even wear them during her mourning.’
Elsie had ridden a crest of anxiety all day. It had to break. Anger flickered through her fear and she seized it with both hands. ‘Take them off!’ she shouted. ‘Take them off at once!’ Fresh tears spurting, Mabel grappled at the base of her neck, but her hair was tangled in the chain. ‘If you don’t take them off this minute, I will send you out of this house!’
Helen stepped in with her steady, chafed hands. She unfastened the clasp and pulled the necklace away. Threads of Mabel’s dark hair still clung to the chain.
‘Didn’t mean no harm,’ Mabel muttered, rocking. ‘Didn’t mean no harm, didn’t deserve no bloody thing in my room.’
There was a bang, then a shout rang out in the east wing.
Elsie’s eyes met Sarah’s. ‘It sounds like they have prised the garret door open,’ she whispered. ‘Go and get the second part of that diary.’
Sarah went at once.
Mrs Holt paced up and down, pressing her hands together. ‘Dear me, dear me. What a to-do! And the laundry not even finished . . .’
Elsie looked at Mabel, shivering in Helen’s arms. She felt calmer now; slightly ashamed of her harsh words. ‘Look, Mabel, whatever you think, I did not place that companion in your room. I am starting to hate them just as much as you do.’
Mabel looked up at her, but she could not read the expression.
Sarah returned at a run, breathless and empty-handed. She looked queer. Pale, shivering like a whippet.
‘Sarah, what is it? Has the book gone?’
‘No, it’s there but she didn’t . . .’ She gulped down a breath. ‘She didn’t want me to take it. I could feel that the poor soul didn’t want me to read it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘She was in there.’ Sarah’s chin trembled. ‘Hetta was in the garret.’
It was cold enough for snow, but Peters and Stilford sweated as they stood in the yard, swinging down the axe-heads again and again, thunk, thunk. Piece by piece, chunk by chunk, the wood splintered away, first brown then maggot-white, stringy and harder to cut. Peters rested for a moment, one hand on his hip. A miscellany of body parts lay heaped before him: wooden heads, severed wooden hands.
Elsie huddled by the kitchen door with Sarah and the female servants, wearing her heaviest cloak. She wished she were a man. If she had strength to pick up an axe she would do it; hack that gypsy boy’s face to bits. She thought of the circular saw in the match factory, newly cut splints rattling from its teeth into the trough. A shiver ran through her.
‘It seems such a shame,’ whined Sarah. ‘They are antiques! My ancestor Anne Bainbridge bought them in sixteen thirty-five. Could we not at least have tried to sell them?’
‘Who would pay good money to have a bunch of dolls give them the willies?’ Mabel cried. ‘They’d have to be touched in the head, ma’am.’
Sarah bit her lips. She was unhappy and it made Elsie feel uncomfortable. By rights, the companions belonged to a descendant of Bainbridge blood – not an interloper, a mere Bainbridge by marriage. She was destroying Sarah’s heritage. But what else was she supposed to do? Have them cropping up all over the house like jack-in-the-boxes, scaring the life out of them all?
‘The extra firewood will come in handy for the winter,’ Mrs Holt put in.
Elsie’s skin itched. ‘No. I do not want to burn them inside the house. I do not think that would be . . . wise.’
‘Could I give it to the villagers then, madam? In Fayford?’
The axe whistled through the air again, followed by the clop of falling wood.
‘Perhaps it is best if we just burn them here, in the yard.’
Mrs Holt did not reply, but Elsie heard her little cluck of disapproval.
Was she being foolish? It did seem silly, now the companions lay dismembered on the cobbles – a nervous reaction from an overwrought female. And yet the horses were uneasy, their ears flat, the whites of their eyes rolling. Beatrice the cow was keeping well back in her stable, lipping another clump of hay from her net. The animals knew. Animals always sensed these things.
‘Right then,’ Peters panted. Perspiration ran into his eyes. ‘Last one.’
They all turned to look at the one Sarah called Hetta. Poised, silent and alone, she gazed over the massacred remains of her fellows; her smile serene, the white rose against her breast.
Elsie did not think she could watch Peters chop this last one up. What would it be like to see the lineaments of that face, so like her own in childhood, fractured? The past amputated, then going up in flames.
Peters took a step forwards.
‘No!’ It was Sarah. ‘No, please. We cannot! Not Hetta. She has suffered enough already.’
Elsie averted her head so that the side of her bonnet hid Sarah and the companion from view. ‘We have to, Sarah. There is something about these things, something . . . wrong.’
‘How do you know it is wrong? You only know that it scares you.’
A child’s hand on the window, the slide of those eyes . . .