This notion, that Danny could be dead, carried no credence with her. She turned her back on that clerk and marched home. There was no circumstance on earth in which Danny would have got himself killed. He was too hard-shell, too wily, for that. He would have negotiated with the boulder before it fell on his head. She pictured him in a shack office somewhere on the other side of the globe, heat raging down on him through a slatted window. Signing contracts, pondering his signature. He never respected his name. He hated being an O’Flynn, being one of a multitude, cousins crawling all over the neighborhood.
“I’d like to live forever, Scarecrow,” he used to say, lying awake at night, bouncing a rubber ball off the beams. “Forever.”
He’d return—she’d always been certain of that. The rest of the family wore black armbands and the priest came and Ma expired with grief, but she never went into mourning. “You wait,” she said grimly. “Just you wait.”
There was no satisfaction in being right. Trust Danny to return with a horde of newspapermen in his slipstream, a milksop merchant’s daughter on one arm: renamed, transformed, richer than the devil. Wilhelm de Vries, he called himself. They were ablaze with it, in the old neighborhood. Danny sent a gentleman, a young clerk with silvery hair, from house to house, making arrangements. Everybody needed a little something to keep their mouths closed and their opinions to themselves. Danny—Wilhelm—was extravagant in his generosity. He gave a good deal more than was necessary. He could afford to, of course.
That day at the house, she’d trod carefully across the grass, stopping at the edge of the picnic blanket. He didn’t get up.
She understood why he was smiling. This must have been everything he’d ever dreamed of. To lie there, basking in the ferocious heat of a London summer afternoon, his mansion springing up behind him. His own sister staring at him, goggle-eyed. He wanted her to feast her eyes on him. To see how well he’d done. To marvel. She understood that impulse: she felt it herself. It wasn’t easy to make a name for yourself in the lanes and back alleys of Devil’s Acre. You had to roar as loud as a lion if you wanted anyone to pay attention to you.
His curls had faded and he looked thinner around the cheeks—sunken, as if his back teeth were rotting. But he’d done something to the surface of his skin, rubbed it with oils or creams, made it shiny and expensive looking. He was wearing a wedding ring. He was always wearing wedding rings, she remembered. Every time he knocked up a girl he used to wear one, for the sake of appearances, to appease the neighbors. He’d yank it off five minutes later, of course.
“We hear you’re not dead, then,” she said tartly, trying to hide the shake in her voice.
“I’m not dead,” he said, grin stretching, arms stretching too.
She loathed him for that. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow at that. “Don’t be so pious, Scarecrow. You’d have done the same yourself.” He paused. “If you could.”
In the end he gave Mrs. Bone two checks. The first was a neat repayment of that original loan, plus a very fair rate of interest. Everybody in the old neighborhood heard about it. He made sure that they did. It was signed in his new name, with the most beautiful flourish, that whip-crack W slicing right across the paper: “Wilhelm de Vries.”
She didn’t cash it. She knifed it to the wall instead, to make the point.
The second check was bigger. Nobody heard about that one. It came with no terms, no parameters—without words, even. No need for explanations with a sum that size. It said, I don’t want any trouble.
That one she lingered over, weighing it in her hands, for many months. Of course she cashed it in the end. It bought her the factory, and the villa attached to it, and her seaside place in Broadstairs, and the storage house for her favorite treasures down in Deal. It bought her evidence of her own importance, her own mark on the world. It made her feel bigger; it made her feel as if she had teeth. It didn’t parch one iota of her rage against Danny. It made it worse. She yearned to crack rubies between her teeth, drink liquid gold, draw blood.
All that was twenty-four years ago. And now Danny was gone, really gone, and here she was still on the outside, gazing up at his vast and glistening house.
Nobody had answered the tradesman’s door. She banged on it, hard.
“Oi!” she shouted. “Let me in!”
The kitchen impressed her—she couldn’t help it. It bustled with life. Stove belching heat, tiles as white as teeth. Mrs. Bone felt stirred up by the glinting surface of everything. She eyed a line of gigantic fire irons. Mr. Bone would have liked those, she thought, with a little pang.
“Very busy, ain’t it?” she said to the cook, who was giving her the tour. Clearly, the woman had schooled the new people before, had perfected her system. She described the contents of every cupboard, taking her time about it. Mrs. Bone was itching to get on, get upstairs, take a look at the good stuff. “You’ll need to be patient,” Mrs. King had warned her. “Don’t let them know you’re a little racehorse. Don’t give yourself away.”
“I know how to do my preliminaries, thank you,” she’d said brusquely.
“What shall I call you, mum?” Mrs. Bone asked the cook now, trying humble on for size.
“Cook,” said the cook. “Now, then. Here’s where you empty the cinder pails. I suppose you know how to do that? You’ll need to make up the housemaids’ boxes, do the tea leaves for the carpets, get the hot-water buckets filled.”
Mrs. Bone sniffed. “All right.”
Cook eyed her, suspicious. “You bring the fresh dust sheets out. My girls don’t do that. And you do the napkin press, all right? Mr. Shepherd don’t like seeing no utensils out and about in the kitchen, and nor do I.” She glared at Mrs. Bone. “Got that?”
I’m a worm, thought Mrs. Bone. I’m a slug. She bowed from the waist. “Oh, yes, mum. That’s all most familiar to me.”
Cook liked being bowed to. It showed on her face. But it went against the rules. “You don’t call me mum, you call me Cook,” she said. “Now, are you f’miliar with brushes?”
Mrs. Bone had rolled her eyes when Mrs. King lectured her on this point. Hard brush for mud, soft brush for blacking, and the blacking went in a corked bottle. Always a corked bottle.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know ever such a lot about brushes!”
“And look out—you’re in Mr. Shepherd’s way.”
Mrs. Bone only vaguely recalled the butler. The one who’d brought out a jug of lemonade to the park, carrying his silver tray. He plowed heavily toward them, followed by a train of bootboys, oblivious to her, nodding vaguely. He smelled of camphor and oil, and he was sweating. She saw a flash of light, the bright and perfect glitter of a key, attached to a chain around his waist. Oh, I could snap it off with my teeth, she thought.
“We don’t like dawdlers,” Cook said, and grabbed Mrs. Bone by the elbow.
And I could snap you in two pieces and all. Mrs. Bone grinned like an idiot, and matched Cook’s pace: slow, slow, slow.
“And here’s your room,” said Cook, banging the door open. “You’ll be sharing with Sue.”