Miss de Vries took this flank attack with a thin smile. “Indeed.”
“So her safety is of paramount importance. We have our own policemen at the palace, you understand.”
The moment stretched, longer and longer. And then, at last, Miss de Vries said, “They should feel free to look around, if it would help things.”
“Thank you,” said Hephzibah, setting her cup down with a clatter. “If a few of your people clear out, give them a few rooms to stay in, then I am sure that would suffice.”
Miss de Vries looked uncertain. “You mean…”
“On the night of your party. We would want our own men in the house.”
Miss de Vries laid down her cup. “Is it likely that the princess will attend, Your Grace?”
Hephzibah drew on the strength of all duchesses past and present, the specters of great ladies living and dead.
She sat up straight and said, “Miss de Vries. I would no more presume to predict the movements of Her Royal Highness than to divine the direction of the winds. But I am willing to put in a word, if you’re able to oblige me.”
Miss de Vries’s gaze narrowed, suspicious. “If I can, Your Grace.”
Hephzibah smiled. “It’s quite remarkable, the expenses people incur, ferrying Their Royal Highnesses from one engagement to another. If there’s anything that can be done to ease the burden for us…”
Miss de Vries’s face closed, as if she’d disappeared behind a screen.
“She’ll hate it,” Mrs. King had said, “being treated like a piggy bank. It’s everything she despises. But she’ll need to see a sign of weakness. She needs to feel she’s in control.”
“I am, of course, willing to defray expenses,” Miss de Vries said coldly. “If that is necessary.”
“Too kind,” said Hephzibah. “And tell me,” she said, getting to her feet, heart hammering, almost done. “Who else is coming? I’ve been asking and asking, and I can’t for the life of me uncover a single soul who’s accepted.”
Two spots of color formed in Miss de Vries’s cheeks, but she maintained her composure. “I shall have someone send you a list directly,” she said.
Hephzibah leaned in, as close as she dared. “Leave it to me,” she said. “I’ll rustle up a good crowd for you. Everybody does exactly as I tell them.”
She saw it for a second: the extraordinary relief and anger in Miss de Vries’s eyes, the reminder that she had to simply pay her way to the top. “Thank you, Your Grace,” she said in a low voice.
“Good day to you,” Hephzibah shouted—and she got out of that room at top speed, so she could take a lungful of air, so she could breathe.
19
The day before the ball
Sunday dawned hotter than anyone could have expected. The air was thick and ripe, the scent of horse manure and cut grass wafting in from the park. The household was summoned to the servants’ hall after church to hear their final instructions before the ball.
It unsettled Mrs. Bone to see how easily she’d been stitched into the pattern of the house. The precise clicks and thunks of the household routine began to sound in her head. The skin in between her fingers had first grown red, then itchy, and then cracked—but as the days passed it began healing, hardening over.
Danny’s portrait loomed over her all day long. At first she avoided it. Then she couldn’t help herself. Lines had formed around his eyes. Crevices dug right into the skin.
Nobody knows what my brother looked like when he was young, except me, she thought. It gave her a funny feeling in her heart.
“What did he like to eat?” she asked Cook one day. She wanted a little slice of Danny, an insight. She wanted to know what he’d become.
Cook pressed her fingers together and gave a beatific smile. “Cheese soufflé,” she said, heavily. “He liked that a great deal.”
That didn’t tell her much. Nobody did reveal anything here. Shepherd in particular was impossible to nail down. Once Mrs. Bone tried to follow him on his evening rounds, but he was too fast for her. He slid through a side door, somewhere near the Oval Drawing Room, and disappeared. She guessed she’d find him in the Boiserie, but he wasn’t there, and even when she crept upstairs to wait in the vast, dark expanse of the ballroom, she didn’t catch him. Clearly, he covered his tracks when he moved.
New girls had been arriving every day, hired on to help prepare for the ball. It seemed the more orders that came downstairs—different flowers, new drapes, fresh paint, another electrolier—the more servants Mr. Shepherd employed. He was looking increasingly harassed. Cook loved it. She glided out of the shadows, notes tucked up her sleeve, and gave the new arrivals her interminable tour. One of the girls gave her a wary glance. “I’m not staying,” she said, as if to ward off any pleasantries. “I’m going for a shop job. Just took this to fill the gap.” Cook’s eyes gleamed at that. She took half an hour instructing the girl on the proper use of the napkin press.
Shop jobs. Factories. Offices. The clever girls, those with their wits about them, would come and go, wheeling upward, outward, away from this house. Mrs. Bone sometimes looked at Sue—quiet, with pale pockmarked skin—and worried. Some people liked having silent, frightened little creatures around. Thinking about this gave Mrs. Bone a strange feeling, a prickling sensation down the whole length of her spine. At night she smelled the sweet, sugary scent coming off the girl’s skin and remembered her own little Susan, and her heart tightened.
Nobody had come knocking on their door again.
“Stand up straight, Sue,” she muttered now. The girl had her hands shoved in her apron pockets. She’d get a hump, slouching like that.
“Yes, Mrs. Bone,” Sue muttered back.
Mr. Shepherd said nothing during the briefing. He sat enthroned in his chair at the head of the kitchen table. The kitchen maids had no time to be briefed: they were running late, passing pans covertly down a line. William, the footman, read out everybody’s duties. He looked gray, as if he hadn’t slept.
Cook broke into Mrs. Bone’s thoughts, breath hot in her ear. “And where are those two?” she said.
“Eh?”
“Them Janes.”
Cook had been stewing on the Janes for days, the indignity of them, their very existence. She’d whipped herself into a frenzy about it. It was the peculiarity of them, she said—their odd looks, those daft expressions. The fact that they were allowed to share their own room. Cook didn’t like this one jot. Sisters could cause trouble if they weren’t separated, she said. “Who let them get away with that? Not Mr. Shepherd. I doubt he even knows about it. I should tell him.”
“Go on, then,” said Mrs. Bone, and flicked a bit of dry skin away under the table.
“I should ask him what he means by it. He ought to be ashamed of himself. And so should they! Not that they will be, for all the trouble they give me, staring at me all day, marching around like they’re the ladies and we’re the skivvies, as if I weren’t the single most necessary person in this household, specially—”
“Hush, Cook,” whispered Mrs. Bone.