The Housekeepers(14)

Alice had never felt carpets like this before entering Park Lane. They were so rich, so new. They seemed to suck at her feet. The doors were mirrored and looked as if they’d been glazed with syrup. She adored the bedroom floor. It made her teeth tingle, as if her mouth were filled with sugar. It was heavenly, the home of angels.

She waited at the end of the passage, smoothing her apron, listening to the clocks. Straightened her cap. The household machinery tensed, every clock hand poised, straining, ready.

“Wait for Madam in the passage,” the house-parlormaid had warned her. “Don’t go and knock. She hates that.”

Until now, Miss de Vries had been an entirely remote figure. Nearby, certainly: really only a few feet away if Madam was in the bedroom and Alice was in the dressing room. But she was attended by other servants. Alice observed her, studied her daily movements. She didn’t talk to her at all. The Bond Street seamstresses managed all the fittings for Madam’s ball dress. Alice despised it.

It was black, per instruction, suitable for mourning. But the sleeves were fussy, heavy, and the lace looked almost antique in its design. The seamstresses worked section by section, sending parts up to Park Lane for Alice to finish. Hackwork, really, the kind of thing she could do with her eyes closed. Yet she found herself unpicking their stitches, remaking the lines, softening the gown’s edges. Trying to make it elegant. Sometimes, when she was hanging about for the latest delivery, Alice would make sketches of the gown that she’d design for Madam. Something with a little pep to it, something with a little go. Something to make people stare.

Thunk.

The clocks marked the hour, and soft chimes issued through the house.

At the end of the passage there was a fan window, admitting a bright shaft of sunshine. And in it, threaded into the haze itself, she spied a figure on the approach.

A wisp of a person, a moth-wing flutter of black lace, fair hair. But there was a force around her, pressure in the air.

“Madam,” called Alice, raising her hand.

The figure paused. The light shifted, dissolved, and Miss de Vries turned and looked her way.

The first time Alice saw Madam, she’d been startled. She hadn’t expected Miss de Vries to be so tiny. To be such a small, delicate person. She was—what? Two years older than herself, at most? Twenty-three, and only just that.

Just a girl, really.

Miss de Vries was wearing mourning, black-dyed and ruffled lawn, and the lace came all the way up to her chin. Her flaxen hair was teased and curled so that just one lock fell on her forehead. She had curious features. A thin nose, and slightly protuberant eyes. Like a fairy, or a goblin. She waited for Alice to approach.

And it was the way she waited—patiently, perfectly, preternaturally still—that gave Alice pause. As she stepped closer, Alice felt it. Electricity crackling around those delicate hands, wrists. Miss de Vries’s bones seemed miniature, like a bird’s, but there was something dense, ferocious, about the way she was constructed.

“Alice, isn’t it?” Miss de Vries said. Her voice was low, carefully modulated, controlled.

Alice nodded.

“Good. Come to the dressing room. I’ve something to ask you.”

The bedroom doors were on runners, and they slid back noiselessly.

The light changed when you entered the bedroom. It was an enormous gilded box, cold and lofty and strange. There were pale pink flowers printed on the walls, and the windows were thickly sheathed in muslin, but you could still see the gray-green shadow of Hyde Park across the road. There was a bureau where Miss de Vries kept her letters and her personal papers and—Alice had squinted through the crack in the dressing-room door to make sure of this—her own personal funds. Banknotes and postal orders and petty cash tied up in silk bags.

The bed was very grand indeed. Someone had stitched words into the canopy: “If you do not rise early, you can make progress in nothing.” Alice had always assumed young ladies stayed in bed till noon. But Miss de Vries got up at dawn, before her servants were even awake. “What does she do with her time, rising so early?” Alice had asked Mrs. King.

Mrs. King had considered this, deciding whether it was a relevant question or not. “She reads,” she’d said, at last, voice stiff.

“Oh? What does she read?”

Alice had detected a tiny note of doubt in her sister’s voice. “Improving texts.”

“What sort of topics?”

Mrs. King had frowned. “War. Philosophy. The art of diplomacy. Chronicles of great kings.”

Alice had laughed. “Not really?”

Mrs. King had been quite serious. “What else?”

Miss de Vries opened the door to the dressing room. It was a miniature copy of the bedroom, mirrored and gilded and festooned in silk. But it was much darker, and without windows. It contained only wardrobes and painted screens. Alice was here all the time, carrying bolts of fabric back and forth from the closets.

“Tell me,” said Miss de Vries, and her voice lightened, as if she could talk frankly now that they were alone. She marched to the wardrobe, threw open the doors, rummaged quickly for something—and drew out a stack of papers. “Are these yours?”

Alice flushed. Madam was holding the sketches, the ones Alice had made. She raised an eyebrow when Alice didn’t reply.

“Well?”

Alice reached for them. “Beg pardon, Madam,” she said. “I shouldn’t have left those there.”