by Wendy Reakes
Just as she heard the horse come upon them, she went to turn about but the weight of her burden prevented her from changing direction to hail them down. With that, a single horse went galloping by and she just managed to glance at the rider as he carried on past. Well, the shame of him, she thought, passing them by without offering to help the poor lad and his carrier.
She was glad of the sight of the village as it loomed ahead. Soon she could offload the young man and make her way home and that was with no help from the rider on the horse who had, so selfishly, passed on by.
The inn was down the street, just past the horse trough in the middle. “I can’t hold you much longer,” she panted. “We’ll have to find someone else to help you. Wait here and I’ll run ahead and wake someone up.”
But before she could go dashing off, he grabbed her arm. “Don’t leave me here in the middle of the street.” His eyes were pleading and for a moment she felt quite sorry for the lad.
She guided him towards uncle’s house with the intention of letting him loose again before she went off to find some help.
Once more he grabbed her wrist to prevent her from leaving. “Don’t go.”
“I must,” she said.
He hung on. “No, don’t.”
When she swung around to look at his face, Marley saw something in his eyes that came as a big shock to her. She’d just helped the ungrateful lout all the way along the road and now there he was with a look in his eye that was…well, she’d call it penetrating. Like he was looking into her soul and he wanted in.
She gave her arm one last shake to make him let her go but he held on fast. She couldn’t understand him. He needed to be helped. Then she saw him stand upright without any fault to his stride. It didn’t make sense. Had she just been duped, but to what avail? What purpose could he have to make her half carry him all the way home?
“Your uncle the locksmith told me to make sure you got back alright, he did.”
She shook her head. “No, he made no mention of you.”
“Maybe he forgot? We did a deal, see. He said I should make sure you look after me, he did.” He reached out and took a curl of her hair between his fingers.
Then she knew.
As fear enveloped her heart, Marley tried to bolt but he grabbed her and laughed. He held onto her waist, forcing her back against him as he powdered the skin of her neck with his hot breath. Her eyes shot open as she tried to scream but he silenced her by putting his hand over her mouth. The taste of his filthy hands made her gag with sickness. She racked her brain for a way out, a solution of any kind to the dilemma she was facing. Brent! Why wasn’t he home to rescue her? Brent, she sobbed, as the lout dragged her body to the side of the house and threw her to the ground like she was a sack of coal.
His spare hand held her wrists in a tight bundle and pinned them to the dirt floor. The weight of him knocked the wind out of her as he flattened her stomach with his groin, and when she opened her mouth to expel that lost air, his wet mouth came down on hers, making her lips bleed as her hatred for him built to a crescendo. When he used his free hand to lift her skirts and fiddle about, he looked down at her as if he was mocking her, like he was playing. But that was no game. Marley knew what he was about to do and despite her reluctance to let him see into her soul as well, she cried tears of shame.
After three gruelling minutes, when he was done, he stood up and made off like he’d never been there at all. Except he had been there and now Marley was changed.
She wanted to rage like a madwoman when she stumbled to her feet. She could feel the wetness he’d left, running down her bloodied legs. She used her skirts to wipe it away, to wipe him away so that she would never have to think about him again, but she knew that wouldn’t happen. He would be with her forever now. She would never forget.
She’d begun her journey home not one hour earlier and now she longed to go back and do things differently. She should have run past him when she heard him crying like a whimpering dog on the ground. She shouldn’t have stopped. Where was her sense? She shouldn’t have trusted him. Not when she was alone in the dark of night. And what of that lone rider? Why hadn’t he stopped? It would have made all the difference.
Wiping her face with her soiled hands, no longer sobbing, she welcomed the bitter rage in the pit of her stomach consuming her. She opened the back door of uncle’s house and slammed it in her wake. What was once a familiar place had become a home she hardly recognised, let alone appreciated. Yes, she was changed. She would never be the same again. Never.
She knew she had to get away before her uncle returned with some of his drunken friends and let them do to her what that young rogue had done. God help her. Her tears fell, and she was angry at herself for being so naïve, so trusting…so damn stupid. As she staggered about, thinking about what she should do, she realised she did have someone to turn to. A friend. A girl who worked up at the manor. Celia.
Without further ado, she ran to the hooks on the back of the door where uncle kept his keys in the pocket of an old coat. She knew which key she was looking for since she’d seen him use it often enough. She held it like a lifeline, while she grabbed the oil lamp and went to the cupboard under the stairs.
She knew she had to work fast.
Marley shoved the key in the lock and pulled open the door, using the light from the lamp to guide her. She ducked her head and went to the end where row upon row of shiny new keys hung. She fingered them to the end of the rack and finally when she moved the lamp closer she saw a metal tag attached to a single key. The tag said, Wilbury House, back door.
She grabbed the large key and buried it inside the pocket of her soiled dress. Then, after she locked the under stairs cupboard once more and shoved the bunch of keys into the coat hanging behind the door, Marley fled.
Chapter 2
by the time she reached Wilbury House, she was all done in. From the river at Mells, after she’d thrown her shoes into the water, she’d traversed six different meadows, cutting through hedgerows, hurdling kissing gates while panting like a thirsty dog. She was soaked -more than just the top layer of her skin- as if the wet had seeped into her pores, weighing her down like a flogged horse. In the distance, from where she’d stopped to catch her breath she could see the top of the great mansion silhouetted against the sky, it’s towering chimneys and turrets looking like a charcoal painting with black strokes and no colour to brighten its mood. Above the building, the air lashed dark blue and sheets of rain fell from heaven as if it was hell-bent on striking the land it sought. And as she kept walking, only the occasional flash of lightning guided her way.
She arrived at the bordering wall, the familiar cobbled passage she had only twice before entered. She dipped under a brick arch where an open courtyard looked as big as a cricket field and she knew that if she crossed it, she would be seen for the wretch she had become, and her dishevelled, shameful attire would be exposed for all to ponder.
Since the moon had seen fit to turn out its light behind those rotten grey clouds, she walked blind, skirting the courtyard by memory, touching bricks with her broken nails, broken from her terrifying escape across county. At last she reached the door she recognised, since she had the key.
In one last attempt to end her terror, her body slammed against that door as if her shoulder was doing the knocking. Her feet were invisible that far down from her head, but she knew they must have been as muddy as those night clouds and she didn’t have to see them to know they were cut and bruised, any more than she needed to see the rest of her to know she was spent.
The rain lashed down, plummeting her poor bones as she rummaged in her pocket for the big key. It was cold and clumpy between her shaking fingers, but just as a cloud rolled past the moon, a gleaming shine cast itself upon it, reminding her of a lighthouse beacon o’er a violent sea, preventing her from floundering on the rocks.
She pushed the key into the lock, wondering briefly if there would be someone inside to discover her breaking
in, during the night, without any invitation, but she was at the point of not caring. If she was going to get caught, let it be now. She was ready to give up the fight. Like she said, she was all done in.
Marley turned the key with trembling fingers and the lock slid across as if it was gliding along a block of butter. The door opened without any force on her part and she fell into the space inside as if she was a drunkard on his way home to kick the cat.
She couldn’t move another inch. She wanted to shut the door, but her body blocked it. That was until a flash of white shot out of heaven and almost roasted the bottom of her leg. She scarpered like a sodden rat into the hallway, using her foot to kick the door closed behind her.
She must have gone deaf, since she couldn’t hear a thing when she was shut inside, just the sound rain behind the door like rustling dried leaves and the occasional roll of thunder. She leaned up against the wall in the hall leading to the servant’s hall. Her fight had gone. She could do no more.
In the dark, she felt around and happened upon a piece of furniture, narrow against the wall. Her hand grabbed a heavy oiled cloth coat hanging from it. She was beginning to crumble inside. Her heart was about to be squeezed out of her chest by her tightening ribs, so in the end, she made one swift tug and the whole lot came crashing down, burying her.
she had no idea of the hour when she opened her eyes. It was close to morning, judging by the line of dim light from beneath the door. It was no longer raining outside. Everything was quiet and still. She wouldn’t have objected to a door banging somewhere. At least she’d know she was still alive and well and that whatever the noise was, she wasn’t alone. Something was covering her. She moved her aching body to try and sit up, but she was trapped. She shuffled sideways. A flagstone floor lay beneath her, but unlike the rough one in uncle’s small house in the village, the stones were smooth as if they had been scrubbed a thousand or more times a day.
She crept, like a slithering snake, out of the bolthole and by the light of the early morning filtering through some orifices somewhere, she rose to her feet. The top part of the oilskin coat was still attached to the rack she had pulled down, now lodged between the place it had once stood and the opposite wall, looking as if its solid frame, like a lean-to, had sheltered her as she slept.
A pair of boots covered in dried mud laid flat on the ground. No doubt they had once stood to attention awaiting their owner’s feet to fill them, and in her panic last night, she had unwittingly dispersed them across the floor. A man’s cap sat next to them and a walking cane displaying a ram’s head carved on its top. She’d made quite a mess in her frantic bid for shelter and now she had to repair the aftermath before someone came along and discovered her.
She stopped.
Reality slapped her in the face. Look where she was and what she was about to do! She almost visualised the reason for being there, but she managed to kick that thought out of her head as quick as a racing greyhound. There was no time for that but there was time to reflect on her surroundings and what she was going to do next.
The house was still, which was peculiar since she’d always assumed life in a big house like that began early in the morning with breakfast and such like.
Then she remembered. It was September.
Uncle once told her that the family and most of the servants were away at that time of year. They went abroad in July and they didn’t come back until the second week of September.
So, she was alone. Her plan had been to seek out Celia and ask her to help her, with the intention of getting away somehow so that uncle wouldn’t find her if he came looking. She knew she couldn’t do it alone, not without the means and certainly not in the state she was in, all bedraggled and full or sores and bruises. But now, if she was alone in the big house, what would she do and who could she turn to who wouldn’t send her back from the place she had fled?
She stumbled in a little further, which was one more step to trespassing as far as her conscience was concerned. She saw a line of small window panes revealing the kitchen beyond it, as the morning light filtered through the windows over the other side. She’d already established how she was going to get that hall stand back upright, so all she had to do was to put her plan into action.
Her canniness was a shock to her. She had no idea she was such a calculating trollop. She saw a glass display case on the wall, showing keys to all the rooms in the basement quarters and the house. Next to that was a square hole in the wall revealing a dumb waiter with the door open and a single rope running up the side.
Just as it occurred to her what a conniving little sneak she was, and that she was surely the devil incarnate, she opened the glass cabinet and let her fingers run along the rows to find the key to the main kitchen. Then she spotted it, an engraved metal tag dangling from it.
When she unlocked the door and stepped inside, she was immediately taken by the aroma. It smelled of baked bread and cabbage with a tinge of stewed apple. The smell made her feel ravenous, but she couldn’t think about food when she still had the task of getting that hallstand upright. If she left it like it was, she would surely be discovered and find myself in gaol before she could say Welsh Rarebit.
She spotted an old drying rack with a few ladles and pots hanging from it. It was strung up above the table next to the row of small inner windows looking out to the hall. But she wasn’t after the rack. At its side was a pulley with a long run of rope secured to a strong double hook in the middle of the wall.
Marley placed her foot on the under bench and when she climbed up on top, she opened one of the window panes by pulling the frame down from a brass latch. She untied the rope and when she had a piece long enough, she threaded the lot through the window. With her mission filling her heart and mind, she jumped back down and padded barefooted back out into the corridor.
There, she reached up and took the rope coming from the open window pane, and then she tied it to the metal hooks on the underside of the coat stand. Happy the rope was secure, she raced back into the kitchen, jumped back onto the table under the window and threaded that rope once more through its pulley. When it came to a stop, she secured her part to the wall and rushed again outside. There was the hallstand, now upright and back in place.
Just as she was cleaning up her muddy footprints near the door, she heard a noise that made the air in her lungs expel from her mouth as fast as a runaway horse. She didn’t know where she’d gotten her nerve. She should have been locked up in gaol, she reckoned, for the number of devious plans she had up her sleeve.
She had already returned the kitchen key to the glass cabinet, hiding all evidence of her presence, and she'd even had the foresight to pull on the rope inside the dumbwaiter so that the large wooden casing arrived empty. She'd already scouted the hall and realised in good time that while all the doors leading from the hall were locked, there wasn't one nook or cranny in which to hide if hiding was what she needed to do. The only place to go, was up the stone staircase or into the dumb waiter. She had no way of knowing if a person searching for an intruder like her would arrive through the back door or from down the staircase, so she deduced the best place to seek solace, if she so happened to require it, was in the safety of the dumb waiter.
Now, she’d been alive fifteen years when she saw fit to break into that grand house, but she couldn’t remember any time during those years when she’d acted so cannily. She had no history of it, so she didn’t even know it was part of her nature. She thought she was a good girl; someone to be trusted. Instead, when she heard that noise coming her way, she swiftly hopped onto the ledge of that dumb waiter, squeezed her body inside, tucked in her dirty feet and pulled the two doors shut behind her.
Then she listened some more.
The sound of a key turning was the part that got her all a-quaking. It was the metal on metal noise and then a clicking turn that served to represent the end of her and all her dirty dealings in the big house that morning. She stayed as quiet as a dead mouse and even thou
gh her knees were threatening to knock together to make a noise louder than a book being snapped shut, she still remained without consequence to anyone outside that dumb waiter. She shuddered when the two little doors clicked open on their own. They were her enemy now, threatening to reveal her as the dastardly intruder inside the big house. She leaned forward and secured two of her fingernails into the back of two screws. It was enough to stop the doors from swinging open further, but the defensive action played havoc with her cuticles.
She heard footsteps inside the hall. They were heavy on the floor, making her imagine a man of great height and girth coming down the corridor to haul her out. Like a sneak, she peered through the gap. The door down the hall had been left wide open and she could feel a bit of a breeze wafting her way. It made her thirsty, leaving her feeling as if she would commit bloody murder for a long cool cup of fresh water.
The man was someone she recognised. Not only was he the lone rider who had left her to her cruel fate the night before, he was also the groundsman of the big house. She'd often seen him in the village carrying shrubs and vegetables for the old folk. He was a tall man, just as she'd imagined when she heard his heavy footsteps. He was lean, with broad shoulders and a cropped beard. On his head, he wore a cap and now he was sitting on the seat of the hallstand pulling on the boots, unaware that only minutes before that the hall stand was in no state to be sat upon. Outside the door, a dog was barking. The animal had no doubt picked up Marley’s scent and now he was after her blood. The whole affair must surely be over now. She would be discovered and ravaged by that snarling hound and carted off to gaol for the rest of her sorry life.