The Housekeepers(2)
I’ll just have to come back and get it, she thought.
She took him to the housekeeper’s room, her room, and he stood guard in the doorway, blocking the light. Already it seemed to belong to her past. It wasn’t cozy, just cramped. On the table was the master’s present to her. Four weeks before, she’d marked her birthday, her neat and tidy thirty-fifth. The master had given her a prayer book. He gave them all prayer books with gilt edging, satin ribbons.
She held her head up as she handed Mr. Shepherd the keys.
“Any others?”
She shook her head.
“We’ll see to your personal effects. You can come and collect them in…” He considered this. “In due course.”
Mrs. King shrugged. They could inspect her bedroom and sniff the sheets and lick the washbasin all they liked. Even give away her uniforms, if it pleased them. Serge dresses, plain ribbons, tight collars. You could construct any sort of person with those. “Best to choose a new name,” they’d told her when she’d first arrived, and she chose King. They frowned, not liking it—but she held firm: she chose it because it made her feel strong, unassailable. The Mrs. came later, when she made housekeeper. There was no Mr. King, of course.
She kept her navy coat and her hatpins, and everything else she folded away into her black leather Gladstone. There was only one more thing she needed to remove. Pulling open a drawer in the bureau, she rummaged for a pack of papers.
She threw them on the fire. One neat move.
Mr. Shepherd took a step. “What are those?”
“The menus,” said Mrs. King, all the muscles in her chest tight.
The packet was held together with a ribbon, and she watched it darken on the fire. Red turning brown, then black.
“The what?” His eyes hurried around the room, disturbed, as if he were looking for things he’d missed, secrets stuffed and hidden in the walls.
“For Miss de Vries’s ball,” she said.
Mr. Shepherd stared at her. “Madam won’t like it that you did that.”
“I’ve settled all the arrangements,” Mrs. King said with a cool smile. “She can take it from here.”
She studied the ribbon on the grate. It was satin no longer, simply earth and ash. How quickly it changed, dematerialized. How completely it transformed.
Shepherd marched her through the servants’ hall to the mews yard, but he didn’t touch her again. They passed the portrait of the master hanging above the long table. The frame had been draped with black cloth. She wondered when Shepherd would replace the portrait, now that the funeral had passed, now he’d been buried. Would he put up one of Madam instead, something in soft oils and lavender? It would give everyone the willies if he did. That girl’s eyes were like pincers. She guessed Shepherd would delay as long as he could. He’d be mourning his master longer than anyone.
I hope you’re watching from heaven, she said inwardly, looking at the portrait. Or wherever you’ve landed. I hope you see it all play out. I hope they pin your eyes open so you have to watch what I do to this house.
The house. She’d admired it, once. It was bigger than any other on Park Lane. A sprawling mass of pillars and bays, seven floors high from cellars to attics. Newly built, all diamond money, glinting white. It obliterated the light, shriveled everything around it. The neighbors hated it.
Had any house in London ever been decorated in such sumptuous and stupendous style? Miles of ice-cold marble and gleaming parquet. Walls trimmed with French silks and rococo paneling and columns. Electricity everywhere, voltage throbbing through the walls, electroliers as big as windmills. Enormous gas fires. Acres of glass, all smelling wildly of vinegar.
And everywhere, in every room, from floor to ceiling, such treasures: stupendous Van Dycks, giant crystal bowls stuffed with carnations. Objets d’art in gold and silver and jade, cherubs with rubies for eyes and emeralds for toenails. The zebra-hide sofas in the saloon, and the baccarat tables made of ivory and walnut, and the pink-and-onyx flamingos outside the bathrooms. That library, with the most expensive private collection in Mayfair. The Boiserie, the Red Parlor, the Oval Drawing Room, the ballroom: all dressed with peacock feathers and lapis lazuli and an endless supply of lilies.
They didn’t impress Mrs. King at all anymore.
She didn’t shake hands with Mr. Shepherd. “I shall keep you in my prayers, Mrs. King,” he said.
“Do.”
She supposed the upstairs servants were already clearing out her room. The girls would be scrubbing the floorboards with boiling water and soda crystals and taking the bedsheets to be laundered, eliminating any trace of her.
It was important that she didn’t look over her shoulder on the way out. The wrong look at the wrong person could betray her, spoil things when they were only just underway. A pigeon landed on the portico of the gigantic marbled mausoleum as she crossed the yard. She didn’t give it a second glance, didn’t dip her head in respect to the old master. She marched straight past instead.
She stepped into the mews lane, alone. Heard the distant rumble of motors, saw a clutch of wild poppies growing out of a crack in the paving stones. They were being neglected, trampled, yearning upward to the sky. She plucked one, pressed a fragile crimson petal in her palm, held it warm. She took it with her.
Her first theft.
Or, rather, the first correction. It wasn’t simply stealing, not at all.