The Companion

by Kim Taylor Blakemore

  Jacob glared at me, his elbows resting wide on the table. “Mary drowned.”

  “Did she?” I swallowed and gave a slow nod. The hiring agent only stated the girl deceased. An “unfortunate passing.”

  “God rest the girl. It’s Lucy’s turn now.” Cook lifted the spoon and bowl from in front of me and set them in the sink.

  “Are there only the three of you, then? For this large a house?” I didn’t say how queer it was to find such a place in the middle of wilderness and villages and sheep. I couldn’t imagine Cook on her knees sweeping ash from a fireplace, though I could see her gathering and throwing out the piss and shit from the chamber pots. She had the arms for it. “Are there children?”

  “None.” Mr. Beede lifted an eyebrow, then let it rest again. Said nothing more, though plenty of thoughts traveled his forehead.

  “Who does the maiding?”

  Cook pressed against the table and slid the claret bottle closer. “That would be yourself. Jacob will help. And Rebecca dusts when the fancy takes her.”

  “Rebecca?”

  “The mistress’s companion.” Mr. Beede reached for the claret, tipping it to his glass, waiting for the last splash to land. “I suppose if one counts Rebecca above and John Friday in the stalls, there are five of us. Six with you.”

  “But it’s such a big house. How in the world—”

  “We know our ways.” Mr. Beede sucked in the last bit of wine. “How many does one need?”

  Later, I lay on my pallet, a nub of candle casting light on the irons and coppers, my satchel tight between me and the wall. Oh! Not much to be watchful of, really. Nothing but an extra shift, an apron, a tortoiseshell comb. And my secret treasure, folded into a square of paper: a lock of hair white as the summer sun and smoother than silk. My baby’s. Ned. All I had left of him.

  The house slumbered. Master and mistress dreamt in one room. Down the hall past the larder, heavy snores. Could be Mr. Beede’s or Cook’s. A sleepy cry and then silence from Jacob’s. I snuffed the candle, curled under the blanket. I was to be the new maid in a new house with a new life. I’m good with lies. Lucky me.

  Chapter Two

  I’d never slept well in unfamiliar surroundings. With the worsted blanket pulled tight to my chin, I watched the black night through the kitchen windows. Three small squares of glass set high in the wall, the whorls and bubbles catching threads of ice, splintering the shafts of gray light as early morning crept close.

  Here, as always in the split between night and morn, came the terrible vision of my Ned, blue and still on the cot beside me, his body warmed only by my heat. I was given a week with my babe. He was then to be taken by a family. Given a different name and different life. Mrs. Framingham promised she’d find him the best home. Only the best home, she said, and took the last of my coins. Mrs. Framingham kept the coins and God took the baby. Who is to know if he’d have had a better life?

  The metal lock on the kitchen door squealed. I sat up with a start but stayed far in the shadows. The door swung open, blocking my view of whoever visited so early. There was only a dull thud on the table, a shuffle of boots, then the door shut and the lock turned again. The frigid breath of air warmed and dissipated.

  Then came the toss of shadows as Cook’s oil lamp sputtered round the kitchen. She seemed a great shadow herself, floating in and out of the lamp’s thin glow, her thick skirts and stiff petticoats a whoosh and whisper. I heard her grunt and sniff, then the squeal of the stove door and the flash of red as she shifted old wood and placed new wood to join the heat.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Four forty-five, and it’s the last time you’ll sleep so long.”

  There was a pop and bubble of new boiling water in the kettle. Cook’s hand and arm appeared in the lamplight; I caught the glint of a knife as she set it on the table. She held up a burlap bag—the thud from earlier—and her great fist and fingers pulled apart the twine that bound the opening.

  “John Friday’s brought rabbits.”

  She stuffed her hand in the bag, lifting one out by its hind legs. She turned her wrist this way and that to look at the animal. Its fur was brown and matted. Melted ice clung to the edges of its ears. The front legs dangled stiffly, frozen and lifeless from fear and the weather.

  “Lean winter for this one.” She laid the rabbit on the table, patted its side once, then reached back in the bag. “You’ve skinned rabbits before?”

  Out came another, clutched tight in Cook’s hand, this one white with a ragged circle of gray on its shoulder.

  “I haven’t.” I moved into the room. “Mrs. Temple, at my last house, wasn’t fond of it.”

  “Who’s not fond of rabbit?” She hesitated, the rabbit clutched tight, then narrowed her eyes. “What sort of person is not fond of rabbit?”

  “She liked . . . ham. And cod. I know how to fillet a fish.”

  “Well, New Mary, we’re fond of rabbits in this house. I’ll show you how it’s done. There’s six good rabbits here; you’ll be an expert by the fifth.”

  Out came the rabbits. She laid them side by side, nestled stomach to back, then rolled the burlap and set it on a narrow shelf behind her.

  “Come around here so you can watch and learn.”

  I moved next to her, my back to the sink and windows. To my right was the larder and entrance to the hallway with her room and Mr. Beede’s and Jacob’s. Directly across, three stairs led to the floors above. The door at the top was painted black and disappeared in the dimness.

  I felt like a rabbit, down a deep hole under heavy stone and earth. As if Cook and I were all that breathed and moved, save the slow shift of the continents above.

  The rattle of keys shook me from my thought. “Pay attention.” She used the toe of her boot to shift the offal bucket between us.

  I took a breath. I had been charged with learning to skin a rabbit.

  Cook was bound and determined to be patient. She kept her frustrations to long sighs and a few twitches of her eyelid. A vein pulsed under the skin of her jaw. Sometimes she reached for the knife. Sometimes she darted her hand back.

  “Drain the urine, you daft girl. That was instruction number one.”

  Rabbit by rabbit I made mistakes—too deep a puncture in the belly, too shallow an incision on the back, guts spilled on the floor. They slipped through my fingers, the slick fattiness causing me to wrestle them into the bucket. On the fifth rabbit, by which time I was meant to be an expert, I struggled to pull the fur and skin off in one piece.

  “Give me the knife.” In nearly the blink of an eye, she skinned the rabbit, snapped the pelvis, dropped the head in the bucket. She laid the knife beside me. “Continue.”

  The room went from gray to lavender as the weak sun struggled for morning.

  A door banged. Jacob hopped down the hallway, pulling on a boot and tucking in his shirt. “Rabbit!”

  “Not for you. Egg and toast when you return.” Cook trundled around the table, her hip upsetting a chair. It wobbled, then mended itself upright. At the steps to the main floor, she grasped the rail and lifted one foot and then the other to the next riser. Her breath came out a wheeze, but up the few steps she went, fingering the heavy keys on the ring at her waist. Lifting the right key to shift the lock.

  “Do you lock us in, or them out?” I asked.

  She stopped, her hand hovering above the handle, and looked down at me. “What’s your meaning?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jacob shoved a cold corn cake in his mouth, catching the crumbs with his tongue. “It’s to keep Mrs. Burton from wandering and getting lost.”

  “Jacob.” Cook smacked the keys on her leg.

  He flicked me a look as sharp as a cat’s, then bounded up the steps toward Cook. She spit in her palm and smoothed his hair flat.

  “Maybe a bit of rabbit,” she whispered to him. She pushed the door—and if I’d been paying attention to the rabbits at that moment, I’d have missed the flit of movement on the
other side. A young woman with wide green eyes blinked at me in surprise. “Oh.” Then she disappeared in a swirl of dull blond hair, leaving only an empty space for Jacob to sidle through.

  “Who was that?”

  “Rebecca, already pressing for the morning tray. Every day, she prods and pushes . . .” Cook plodded down the steps, waving me away from the meat. “You know how to do toast?” She grabbed her hip and sucked in a breath. “Bring me a chair, will you? And stop the driveling questions.”

  After settling into the chair I proffered, she blew a breath, her cheeks puffing wide and deflating. “My bones are not fond of winter.” She untied the key ring from her apron, holding out a small key while the others shifted and jangled. “Bread’s in the larder. I’ll be watching you.”

  I grew used to being watched at the house. I grew used to watching. Watching and waiting for the slips of attention, the temporary diversions. There Cook too concerned with the spilled flour, and there Mr. Beede pacing and awaiting Mr. Burton’s return from the mill. Jacob helping John Friday with the foaling in the spring. Mr. Burton focused on his ledgers and plats, devising plans for more money and more land. It was easy to slip by them all.

  Except for Rebecca.

  I’m hanging because of her.

  “What day is it?”

  Mr. LeRocque fidgets on the low wood stool. He’s not doing well, my newspaperman—not by the soil on his collar and the fray of his trouser bottoms. Still, he shined his boots. Too bad for the mud on the way to my cell. There he sits, fingering the collar of his black coat. The elbows shine with too much use. The cheap wax and wick of the candle at his side give little light, just a grim umber glow.

  “It’s Wednesday.”

  “Already Wednesday? Well.”

  He twists round to open his leather satchel, pulling from it a small package wrapped in faded chintz. He leans forward on the stool, just enough so his hand and the package cross the boundary of the bars between us.

  “Lemon tart. From my wife.”

  “Give it to one of the guards on the way out.”

  “It’s one of her specialties.” His long mustache curls in and out as he speaks.

  “It’s one of your bribes.”

  “All I want is the truth.”

  “You seem to have done well without it.” I lean back against the stone of my cell. “I’m quite interested in what you wrote last month. I was twisted by my ‘desperate surroundings’? Oppressed by the ‘unending death-wielding hours of work’? Oppressed by the room I slept in as a maid? I slept in more than one at that house, but it’s simpler for readers your way, isn’t it?”

  He knits his brows and looks at me like I’m being a petulant child.

  “Have you seen my hands?” I splay my palms up, show off the sloughing skin and the swollen fingers. “They’ve put me on the men’s washing. At least I won’t be doing that much longer.”

  “Miss Blunt—”

  “I know you’re trying to gain me sympathy. You’ve written before that it’s sinful to hang a woman. But how many women have your stories saved? I think none.”

  “Letitia Blaisdell. We saved Letitia.”

  “And now she serves tea to the warden and his family. I don’t envy them that worry.” I shrug. “How did she get out from the rope?”

  “She showed remorse.” He sets the tart on the ground between us. “You show none.”

  In the passing days, the only sign there was life above our kitchen came from the infrequent pull of the bells, the food carried up (a plate of cold meats and broth for Mrs. Burton and her companion; a variety of substantials for Mr. Burton come back late from the mill), the chamber pots carried down.

  I even wondered if there were a master and mistress. Perhaps Rebecca took the trays up the narrow stairs, then sat straight down at a table and gobbled everything up.

  There were no children, no pups yapping, no cats mewling. I never heard a piano or harp or viol. No guests came to the door after that first night, no other maids knocked for a visit at ours. It was as if Josiah Burton’s house was an island or some strange ephemera created by my mind. Even Mr. Beede and Cook seemed transitory, the only permanence to them their bristly chatter. Rebecca, who remained on the floors above, was nothing more to me than a name, a wan silhouette I’d seen that first morning.

  I kept my mouth shut and woke early. I was in charge of eggs and making the toast. I bedded late. In between was full with washing pots and pans, with wringing chickens’ necks, with scrubbing the stones and floors and breaking the ice sheets from the well. No time to think, and I thanked God for that, for it was hard enough in the few minutes that were mine at the end of the night.

  On the fourth morning, I dropped the water bucket by the well and hefted the iron, letting the weight shatter the ice. My hands and face were already numb. I wrapped my scarf up round my cheeks and felt the rough crystals of tears. My shadow was dark; the sharp early sun cleaved the image, freeing it from my toil. Now it could meander, for the cold wouldn’t bother it. It would see the bones of the trees at the edge of the property, and down the hill the workers ambling along a road from the township to the mill. The town itself was nothing more than clapboard and brick, the boarding houses and businesses built right against the steep rock walls. In the middle of the valley—if one could call the narrow junction between those walls something so vast sounding—sat a simple white church at the end of a triangular commons. It was all owned by Mr. Burton, whose ice I chipped in the yard.

  I think Mary Dawson tipped herself into the creek just to escape this chore. I would have, save I was too damn cold to go a step farther from the house.

  I grabbed the handles, turned, and saw the mistress. She stood in the middle of the wide swath of yard, her face tilted to the sun. Her dark hair tumbled loose and tangled down her back. Her gown was too delicate for any but summer weather. A sapphire cloak pooled in the snow at her feet.

  I stepped forward then, off the path, wanting to see her properly, to see if she truly existed or was just an image as unreal as my wandering shadow.

  She had heard me. She lifted the cloak to her shoulders, then stumbled and half crawled to the house. But she did not enter the front door; instead, she reached her fingers out, as if she were searching for something in the night, finding then the bare branches of the shrubs that girded the stone. She pushed her shoulder into the limbs to make room for her body, then crouched. Her hands pressed the frame of a low window and she slid feet first inside.

  The window was one in a line of four others. Mr. Beede’s, Cook’s, Jacob’s, and mine.

  I tightened my hold on the bucket, loped along the path, and pounded my elbow to the kitchen door. I’d certainly see her now. Face-to-face. What would she do? Tell Cook to ignore her, she was only out for a stroll?

  Such long minutes until Cook opened the door. I barreled past, the bucket slamming my shin as I ran past the larder and turned the corner, boots sliding to a stop at my room. I set the bucket aside and tried the door handle. Locked. As were all the other doors. I pulled the key from my waist pocket, but I knew, once I had egress, there would be no one there. I had been too slow in returning. I should have followed right on her heels. The room was as I left it, the quilt folded at the end of the bed, my comb on the dresser, my shift hanging on a wall knob next to an extra apron. And a trail of melting snow splattered in the middle of the plank floor.

  Chapter Three

  Mary was a little lamb,

  Her soul as white as snow.

  And everywhere that Mary went

  Death was sure to go.

  He tracked her to the brook one day,

  Which was against the rule.

  He tempted her quite far astray

  And made the lamb a fool.

  She tried, she tried to turn him out

  But still he lingered near

  And waited patiently about

  Till Mary did not fear.

  What made the lamb trust him so

  Mo
st any would descry?

  O! he loved Mary, too, you know.

  Tis pity she must die.

  The ground was too solid to bury Mary Dawson; she was draped in shrouds, her body strewn with winter-dried lilac and marjoram, the coffin awaiting its shift to the receiving vault until the arrival of spring daffodils and more forgiving earth. She would share the stone vault with the Messrs. Whitworth and Michaels, the widow Daughtry, and two newborns. All quite natural—if not quite expected—deaths.

  The entire house had been invited to the viewing and the funeral. Mr. Burton sent over the finest grosgrain ribbon woven by the mill and a spool of strong thread. Cook and I sewed black cockades and badges for each of us. I pierced my thumb more than once—I had never been one for needles—so Cook moved me to pressing the men’s shirts and the mistress’s fine petticoats. She prayed quite loud that I wouldn’t burn down the house with the iron.

  I will admit my concentration was not keen and my temper impatient. I didn’t want to attend the funeral—I truly did not know the girl, no matter the hiss and whispers later printed in the papers. I had hoped for the day alone, to find the path the mistress had taken from my room to the floors above. I was certain there was a set of hidden stairs along our hallway or tucked in the linen room. I’d seen such before and spied those who stole up and down them.

  I would have had the time to explore had not that black-clad invitation ruined my plans and my afternoon off.

  We stood at the bottom of the front steps that morning, watching John Friday draw the new-waxed bobsleigh around. He sat ramrod straight, white-gloved hands on the oiled harnesses, staring forward to a spot directly between the two chestnut geldings, his dark skin beaded with iced sweat. Then he lifted an arm and tapped a metal bell to call us on our mournful journey.

  Cook murmured penances, eyes heavy lidded, fingers picking and pulling at the corners of the prayer book she held tight like a lover to her bosom. Mr. Beede straightened Jacob’s jacket, then stepped forward to wipe the curve of a runner with his handkerchief. He opened the half door and reached in to fluff the blankets that would cover the Burtons on the ride.