The Housekeepers(72)

“Find it,” he said, “and you’ll know, won’t you?”

She yearned to move toward him, and she wanted to creep away, all at the same time. As if blood spoke to blood, repelling and seeking in equal measure.

“Are you comfortable?” she said, at last.

She asked because she was curious. She wondered what it felt like to be there, right on the brink. Because surely this was the end? Surely they were very near it now? You only had to measure the shrinking line of his neck, see the way the weight had fallen away from his cheeks. His movements were growing slower and slower, the degradation unstoppable.

He let out a shallow breath. His eyes moved toward the blur of the medicine cabinet, the bowls, the pillboxes.

“I’m bored,” he whispered.

She loathed him in that moment, but she wanted to laugh, too. I would be bored, she thought. Oh, I would be so bored by it, dying.

Straightening, she said, “Tell me about this letter.”

“It’s about your poor mother,” he replied, barely a whisper.

Mrs. King felt her body turn quite still.

It was extraordinary, wasn’t it, how easily people could shock you? Even if she counted up all the years she’d been here, all the hours and minutes and seconds—and she could count them, she felt sometimes that she simply held them all in her mind, like little slots marked up with luggage labels—then she still couldn’t think of a time he’d mentioned Mother. In his house, in his world, this world that she had entered, Mother didn’t exist. Lockwood had impressed as much upon her, the first day she arrived.

She felt a frisson pass through her skin. “What on earth do you mean?” she said, voice low.

There was something building in her chest, something dangerously akin to fear. Because she knew how games worked. There had to be a delicious little bit of irony, a slice of pain. Someone had to lose for someone else to win.

Mrs. King knew she was a bastard, an indiscretion, a stain. She’d folded that away inside herself long ago. This had to be something different.

“This is yours,” he said. He lifted a finger, barely half an inch. “All this.”

To Mr. de Vries, an inch could cover oceans, prairies, great sweeping tracts of land. Silver. Gold. Mountains, studded with diamonds. So many possessions, held under his name, in his empire. She should have been confused. Dizzy with the scope of it, uncomprehending. But she felt only nausea, deep in her gut. She understood at once. Ha-ha, she thought, dully. A twist, a ruse, right at the end.

“You were married to Mother.”

He didn’t nod. He didn’t shake his head. He just stared at her.

Mother always said she was a widow. Mrs. King never gave it any credence. She’d imagined Mother as a nervy, scattered girl, already in the family way. She’d had a fancy man, Danny O’Flynn: slick curled, a fast talker, causing trouble in the neighborhood. “He gave all the girls a ring,” Mrs. Bone once said, dourly. “To appease the neighbors.”

Mrs. King had understood that. Appearances mattered enormously. They were everybody’s first line of defense. But once Dinah entered that house, she pieced things together: the oddness of her situation, the funds supplied to keep Mother in hospital. Mr. de Vries had fathered a bastard, same as a thousand men before, same as a thousand men would after. She had a stain upon her, and always would.

Hadn’t she?

The notion that Mother had been telling the truth, that she was a widow in law as well as in sentiment, was like being hooked in the stomach. The guilt—that Mrs. King had never considered it, hadn’t even thought to believe her—took her breath away.

“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.

He didn’t answer that. He lay there, breathing, watching her with a peculiar light in his eyes.

“Find the letter,” he said. “And then tell anyone you like.”

That night, Mrs. King began the search for the letter. Start at the top of the house, she decided. The attics.

But the house was impossible. It bested her, every time she approached it. It was comprised entirely of compartments, of secret boxes, of tight containers. Jars, hatboxes, packing crates, vases, bookcases, writing desks, picture frames, looking glasses, false-backed cupboards, bedrooms, bedposts, bed frames…

She needed to make a more thorough inspection.

The plan came as her plans always did: in colors and shapes, not words. But this was bigger, grander, than anything she’d imagined before. It was cloudy, gauzy: she saw gilt and glass. Hot faces and men shrieking in confusion.

She went up to see Madam with the menus, as usual. While Mr. de Vries had been on the Continent, they’d fallen out of the habit. Now he was back, the routine returned, too.

“Soufflé,” Madam had said, edgily. “Speak to Nurse to see what Father wants.”

Mrs. King had put her pen away.

“Is there something else?” Miss de Vries said.

She doesn’t know, thought Mrs. King.

She could read Madam. She could see the girl working hard, at all times, superintending her thoughts and feelings. She seemed weary: her father’s return was like a storm cloud hanging over her head. But she didn’t realize the truth.

“No, nothing else,” said Mrs. King. She left off the Madam.

Mrs. King sat on her knowledge, concealing it. It was like walking around with a mortar bomb under her skirts. I refuse to be rushed, she told herself. I need to plan. She sensed the master growing impatient, yearning for her to commence warfare. She refused to oblige him.