The Housekeepers(45)

Hephzibah picked her way slowly across the room and Winnie reminded herself, she won’t spoil things; she won’t mess it up. She kept smiling, to be encouraging, to hide her doubts.

Mrs. Bone had hired a Daimler for them at further eye-watering expense. It had a bright blue body and button-leather seats, slick and black as tar. Hephzibah held her parasol over her head and tried to stay cool. Winnie passed her a box of visiting cards, marked the top one with a PPC. “Keep the rest. But don’t you dare pay any other calls.”

Hephzibah felt hot and clammy, sweat running down her back. She prayed it wouldn’t stain the satin. The motor ground to a halt and Winnie flashed a nervous smile as she slipped out. “Good luck.”

Hephzibah concealed her expression, and her trepidation, with her parasol. “Talent does not require luck,” she said, in as frosty a tone as she could manage.

They’d hired the chauffeur with the car. He didn’t know Hephzibah from Eve. “Here, m’lady?” he said.

Hephzibah peered out. She hadn’t planned for this moment. The house was still so extraordinarily big, so white—like a wedding cake, many tiers high. The park was a desert, all baked earth and scrub grass. Dust came in great billowing clouds from Rotten Row. It was desolate, a dreadful place.

I’m not equal to this, she thought.

“Yes, here,” she said to the driver, and he got out to deliver her card. Her own self vanished. She sank into her silks and ruffles, and became the Duchess of Montagu.

The head footman ushered Hephzibah through the hall. Servants paused in their duties and huddled behind pillars. The staircase was still tremendously ugly. She’d forgotten its recesses, those blocks of black and blood-red marble. They looked like gravestones, signposts on the way to hell. How many times had she cleaned the banisters, rubbed them with blacking, cracked her nails on their grooves and whorls?

The footman gave Hephzibah a wide and courteous berth. “No more visitors,” he murmured to the under-footmen, and they closed the doors.

He was enormously good-looking. Stony faced, dark haired, terrific eyes. He was something to focus on, to occupy the mind.

“This way,” he said, extending a gloved finger.

“Oh, I can guess the way,” said Hephzibah. She needed to warm up, to test the voice. “People only move in one direction when they build a house like this.” She held out her parasol, and he took it. “Up.”

His eyes flashed, a single golden gleam. Amused. Good, Hephzibah told herself, that was a clever line. Well judged. Nice and rude. She wondered, Would a duchess speak to a footman? Perhaps there were no rules for duchesses.

She tried to quiet her mind. It was too easy to lose a character, just by listening to all the chatter in one’s head. She eyed the footman’s calf muscles, the hard curve of his arse underneath his tails. Lovely, she said to herself, trying to cheer herself up. She could smell beeswax: there was parquet upstairs. It made her dizzy, the memory of all those tiny pieces of wood. It took hours and hours to polish every block.

The saloon doors slid open—slowly, slowly. She spied a small figure on a couch, far away in the center of the room. Great slanting shafts of light came through the windows facing the park. Hephzibah shaded her eyes with her hand.

She had tried to cast her mind back to the old days, to remember the child who’d lived in the nursery. A snowball creature, with yellow-gold hair done up in ringlets. More like a pet than a person, a fluffy thing fed and watered by the senior servants. Hephzibah had hardly thought about her, had hardly imagined her living or breathing or existing at all.

This woman—straight, thin, upright, alert—was different altogether. “Don’t let her hook you,” Mrs. King had warned her. “Whatever you do.”

Hephzibah paused at the threshold. She could leave, right now. Claim another appointment, feign illness, call the whole thing off.

Slowly, Miss de Vries rose to her feet. “Your Grace,” she said, in a voice that startled Hephzibah. It was low and calm. Hephzibah longed for a voice like that herself.

She studied Miss de Vries. Something was working furiously in the girl’s mind. Surprise, delight, fear. “The other neighbors are cutting her,” Winnie had told her earlier, per Alice’s regular report. “It’s got her right in the neck. She’s desperate for a lady to come calling. A real lady. So do your worst.”

“Miss de Vries,” Hephzibah said, in a thrilling voice of her own, and extended her gloved hand. She wanted her fingers to be touched reverently—to be kissed, as if she were a queen.

Inside Hephzibah was the creeping, shrunken ghost of a scullery maid, shaking violently, but the Duchess of Montagu had a steady hand.

Miss de Vries extended her own. “How do you do?” she said.

Hephzibah smiled. Curtain up, she thought.

They drank tea. Hephzibah remembered the advice Mrs. King had given her.

“Don’t aggravate her. At least, not straight away. Her father trained her well. She’s his perfect creation. She’ll observe etiquette.”

“So what do I do?”

“Tickle her. Give her a little fight. It’ll make her feel like your equal. She’ll like the game.”

Easy, Hephzibah told herself, fingers trembling. Miss de Vries’s skin glistened as if someone had rubbed it with oil.

“Do sit down,” Hephzibah said, indicating Miss de Vries’s own chair with a careless toss of her hand.