The Housemaid

by Sarah A. Denzil

  I looked down at the photo album on Margot’s lap. Laura was a toddler now, dressed in a bonnet and booties. A few pages later she was in a cute dress, her hair in pigtails. There were pictures of Margot with her husband on the beach, Laura by their side, building a sandcastle. Before my eyes, I saw this woman’s life unfold. It was glossy and privileged, dressed up in clothes as beautiful as their faces, but it was life. It was real, and I saw Margot’s pain as she relived it.

  “This was the beginning of the end,” Margot said, stopping as we reached Laura’s wedding to Bertie, now in the early nineties, complete with hazy, colour photography, large puffy gowns and even larger hair. Margot was greying, a Chanel twinset draping fashionably from her slim frame, still as fabulous as ever with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her lips.

  “What was?” I asked, pulling my eyes away from the wedding photo.

  “Her marriage to Bertie. He made her crazy.”

  “What happened between them?”

  She slammed the photo album shut, and the echoing slap made me cower back. “Put these away, will you? I don’t know why you got them for me. What am I going to do? Sit here crying all day? Preposterous! Take them away. Now!”

  Hastily, I piled the albums up under my chin and hurried, stooped over, to the cupboard by the TV. My breathing came out slightly panicked, alarmed by the sudden change in tone. Margot had been pleasant up until that moment, willing to tell me all about her life. After slamming the cupboard door closed, I turned around, debating whether to ask if she was all right, but Margot stared firmly away from me, the cigarette back between her fingers. She’d closed down.

  I ducked my head and walked out of the room. The Howards rarely directed their spotlight in my direction. The problem was, when they did, it was intoxicating, and when they took it away and you became the ghost again, it left you with a burgeoning, freezing cold in your veins. I disappeared into the servants’ corridor, wrapping my arms around my body. The chill seeped down to my bones.

  No one mentioned the diorama Margot had received. Lord Bertie never pulled me into his office to update me on what was going to happen next. Margot’s diorama hadn’t been a threat, but it had been distasteful and nasty. Surely Bertie would want to get the police involved and maybe take out a restraining order against the disgruntled ex-employee. Mrs Huxley never mentioned it either and we went through the motions at dinner, laying out the plates, serving the food. Mrs Huxley took a plate to Margot in her room because she wasn’t feeling well.

  Bertie, Lottie and Alex started their meal in silence. They continued in silence without a word spoken until Mrs Huxley dismissed us from the room. On our way back to the kitchen, I told Roisin about Margot’s parcel and what I’d seen inside.

  “I never knew Lady Laura tried to hang herself,” Roisin said. “How awful.”

  And that was all we said.

  Later, in my room, I tried searching Facebook for Highwood Hall, wondering if any ex staff members had set up a Facebook group, something like that. Then I tried searching for Susan Cole, Lottie’s ex-nanny, but there were many results, most of whom had private accounts. Without knowing what she looked like, I had no way of knowing which woman could be the Susan Cole I was searching for. I soon gave up, and instead, I read my mother’s letters, using the light of my phone underneath the duvet. This place can make you feel so alone at times. It isn’t a happy place here. I wouldn’t live here even if I was as rich as this family because it isn’t happy here at all. In some ways, I pity the Howards.

  I pictured a young Lord Bertie with his young wife. My mother started working here when I was a baby, so twenty years ago. Bertie and Laura would have been married five or six years, making Alex about five. And then my thoughts drifted to Lady Laura as I fell asleep that night. I pictured her smiling face on her wedding day, dwarfed by the size of her puffed sleeves, like the tiny Lady Diana in her gargantuan frock. When I closed my eyes, I saw the flowers in her hair, the long, trailing bouquet of lilies. This was the beginning of the end. The way Margot had said those words steeped in vinegar. She still lived in Bertie’s house, and yet she blamed him for Laura’s death. I could feel it: the pain, the animosity.

  Margot must believe that Bertie behaved egregiously towards her daughter. But what did he do?

  Poor Lady Laura. She was a small paragraph on Lord Bertie’s Wikipedia page. Her troubles with mental illness had been ignored. She must have led a complex life in this place with her husband, children and mother. And now she had been immortalised on the wall of the room where she once tried to kill herself. Anger bubbled up inside me, for her and all the other women pushed to the sidelines in their own stories.

  The Music Room

  He played Liszt for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. I sat there in awe as his fingers moved impossibly fast up and down the keys. I listened to the way the notes clashed at times and loved the challenge of it. Debussy was calming and romantic. Liszt was a showpiece designed for the performance. I stood a few paces away from the piano stool, and when he was finished, I clapped and he gave a little bow.

  “When are you going to perform for other people?” I asked, taking my place next to him on the stool.

  He shrugged. “I haven’t decided. The next time we have a function at the hall, I suppose. Or maybe I’ll arrange an informal gathering.”

  “Did you ever want to be a professional pianist?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, only every day. But Father would prefer I work in the business. Here I am, I suppose, not letting go.”

  “I don’t think you should give up.”

  My words clearly irked him. A ripple of tension worked its way up his jaw, and he scrunched up his eyes before breathing slowly out. “Don’t pretend to know what’s best for me or who I am. You have no idea.”

  I inched away from him, afraid of the way his body tensed, wound up tight like a mechanical toy. He didn’t say another word, simply launched into his sonata, and I turned my attention to the notes, both on the paper and the fingers moving up and down the keys. I was learning, slowly. Most of the time the music washed away like a tide, moving too quickly for me to read it, but in other moments I understood. Sometimes I found myself gazing at his face, distracted by the intensity in his eyes, before I forced myself to concentrate again. By the time he finished, he was sweating across his brow. He sighed, stood up and paced the room.

  “That middle section. It’s all wrong.”

  “It sounded beautiful,” I said.

  “Well, it would to you,” he replied.

  His mood had turned, sharply. For the first hour, he’d been cheerful, playing me several of his favourite pieces, most of them from memory. A storm cloud travelled across his eyes. They were lovely when he was happy and animated, but now they were dark and unreadable. When he reached out to me, it took all my willpower not to flinch. All he did was tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear.

  “Huxley wouldn’t like you with your hair loose.” He smiled. I wished it reached his eyes.

  “She hates me coming here. She’s never said anything, but I can tell. She sits in the kitchen and watches me walk past when I go back to my room.”

  “She’s a ghoul,” he said and laughed. “Come on, let’s do that middle section one more time. When I play this in front of Father, I want it to be perfect.”

  I saw the little boy in him then, the one who craved his father’s admiration. Despite everything, I pitied him. He fascinated me in the strangest of ways. He was wrong about me. I saw who he was. I saw the darkness in him. I knew he was a controlling man, and I suspected he liked maids because they were easier to dominate. Sometimes I thought he led me on because he saw me as disposable, a woman with whom he had no future. The stakes were low, practically non-existent. Other times I felt deeply connected to him because he revealed vulnerable sides to his personality that I suspected—or hoped—he didn’t show anyone else.

  This time, even I knew he played the piece perfectly. The world
shrank to just us. I stopped watching his hands and instead watched him. When I turned the page, it was instinctual, because I knew the music now and I knew the note and where it fell. Towards the end of his run through, he stopped looking at the sheet music and instead turned his face to me. On the final note, he kissed me.

  He tasted faintly of brandy and the aftershave on his skin. He held my arms by my side as we kissed, and I allowed myself to surrender to that vice-like grip. It excited me in the right way. Frightened me in the right way. It hurt in the right way too when our teeth collided for a split second. Eventually he softened, and his arms circled me. He pulled us close together on the piano stool, his elbow catching the keys, the clashing notes like our teeth. I melted away, a crescendo in my mind.

  Chapter 28

  We didn’t go to the Crossed Scythes that Saturday. Instead, Pawel made us dinner with spare food from the kitchen that needed using up, and the others drank homemade elderflower cider that Ade brought from his home brewery. Mrs Huxley stayed in her room as we took over the kitchen. We were glad for it, obviously. We didn’t want her judgemental gaze on us.

  Ade showed me his gardening explanation YouTube channel, and the others had a giggle about the delivery of his script as he went through his top tips for growing tomatoes.

  “Ha ha, dickheads. I’d like to see you try it,” he said, somewhat huffily.

  The food was delicious. Tapenades and an aubergine casserole with fresh bread and pavlova for dessert. I gazed longingly at the cider, sure that I could have a glass or two but decided not to give Huxley the opportunity to sack me for not staying sober.

  “Oh, let’s go outside,” Roisin said. “It’s a beautiful night.” She skipped across the kitchen to the large window above the sink. “You can see all the stars.”

  “You mean it’s not raining for once?” Pawel said. “Makes a fucking change.”

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing my arm. “Let’s get our coats.”

  A few minutes later, we walked down the lawns towards the rose garden. The floral aroma of Ade’s flowers floated along on a warm zephyr. But I couldn’t quite relax. I cast a couple of guilty looks up at the hall, concerned that Lord Bertie would see us gallivanting around his grounds and discipline us tomorrow. Ade noticed and smiled.

  “He went to London for the night. Alex too.”

  “Oh.” I tried to keep my voice disinterested.

  “What’s going on between you and Alex?” Ade asked. His forthright tone caught me off guard, and I struggled to find a way to answer his question.

  “N-nothing.”

  He gave me a wry smile, clearly not believing it for a moment. I cursed his intuition.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s complicated. He’s complicated.”

  “He’s dangerous,” Ade said.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t get a chance. Roisin had hopped onto the retaining wall at the bottom of the garden and walked along it like a gymnast, pointing her toes. Then she did the funky chicken and we all laughed.

  “Sing us a song,” Pawel said, lifting a bottle of beer into the air. He turned back to me. “Have you heard her sing yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s for the best. She’s terrible.” He gave me an exaggerated grimace to signal the joke, and Roisin kicked out her foot in his direction.

  I laughed, watching them muck about. Behind them, the night sky bled into the cluster of dark forest leading down to Paxby. As Pawel pretended to grab Roisin’s ankles and she hopped and skipped along the wall, I thought of my walk up the hill to Highwood for my initial interview. I pictured the bent boughs in the woods, the moss-covered trunks, and the thorny vines spread out across the forest floor. For some reason I imagined them moving towards us, like a tidal wave of shifting branches here to sweep us away. I trembled.

  “Are you cold?” Ade said. He fingered the edge of his jacket as though considering whether to lend it to me.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Before he asked me again, Roisin began to sing, and suddenly the messing around stopped. I don’t know what she sang. A folk song, I think. Her lilting voice rang purely. Lifting and falling as she walked back and forth along the wall. The moonlight fell on her face and her coppery hair, throwing her into a pale blue light. She was beautiful, of course she was, and I saw Pawel’s usually sarcastic smile fade from his lips. Even in the late-evening gloom I saw how his eyes shone with emotion, and I saw the way Roisin returned the gaze. Ade shuffled closer to me, and I became aware of the arm of his jacket close to mine. Part of me longed to lean in, to allow him to put an arm around my shoulder like I thought he wanted. It felt childlike but sweet, the opposite of Alex Howard.

  And then she stopped. Roisin dropped down from the wall, her face flushed and crumpled. There were tear tracks running down her cheeks.

  “What is it?” Pawel stepped forward first. He tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but she ducked away and started running.

  “Ro?” I called after her. But she ignored me and carried on. I turned to Ade. “I need to go after her. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “Make sure she’s okay,” Pawel said.

  I found her curled up in a ball on her bed, her body rising and falling. My heart tugged when I approached and placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Can you talk about it?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond. For a moment I wasn’t sure if she knew I was there.

  “Do you miss home?” I thought that perhaps the song had brought back happy or sad memories.

  “It isn’t that,” she said quietly.

  “What is it?”

  The sobbing finally subsided, and she lifted herself up to a sitting position. I’d spent too much time comforting others that week, from Margot reminiscing about her life to Roisin’s abrupt turn. But even though a wave of exhaustion washed over me, I realised on some level that I enjoyed comforting others. She wiped away her tears and exhaled.

  “I want to love him, but I can’t.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Pawel?”

  She nodded.

  “Does he love you?”

  She nodded again.

  “Have you told him how you feel?”

  She shook her head. We were silent for a moment, and then she began to speak. “We’ve been together off and on. It’s never been serious, but recently he’s started to tell me how he feels. He even bought me a present.” She leaned across the bed and opened a drawer from the side table. It was a slim, pocket-sized book. “It’s poetry. Love poems.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. He wrote a message inside about how the poems in this book remind him of me, and then he told me he loved me and that he wanted us to be exclusive.”

  “You’re not exclusive?” I asked.

  “No. And at first it was fine because it was casual, and I knew he hooked up with people when he went out in York. But now…”

  “Now he wants more but you’re hooking up with other people?”

  She nodded. “One person.”

  “Oh,” I said, beginning to understand. “Someone from the village.”

  Her gaze dropped down to the book in her hands. She turned it over and then placed it on top of the table. “Not the village, no. Not quite.”

  “It’s someone at Highwood Hall. It’s Alex, isn’t it?”

  She reached out and clutched my arm. “No, it’s not him. I promise. He’s all yours.”

  “Ade?”

  She shook her head and her chin wobbled. “It’s bad. It’s so bad.”

  “Please tell me it’s either Mrs Huxley or Lottie.”

  She bit her lip. “No.”

  I stood up then and placed my hands over my eyes. It was… wrong. Revulsion rippled across my flesh just thinking about it. “You’re with Lord Bertie.”

  “Jesus, I didn’t think you’d judge me,” Roisin snapped.

  I dropped my hands. “Hey, I wasn’t. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “You
’re just as bad. You’re with Alex.”

  “I’m not with Alex,” I replied.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sitting back down. “I didn’t mean to judge. It’s just that he’s so much older than you. I had a bit of trouble picturing you with Pawel at first, but Lord Bertie is an even bigger step. Sorry.”

  “He’s kind to me,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “You’re still judging me.”

  “I’m not,” I replied. “I’m judging him actually. Look, I’m sure you know this already, but he could be taking advantage of you. You’re so much younger, and he’s your boss.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just don’t care.” Her expression had hardened. She gazed up at me with red-rimmed eyes that narrowed with stubbornness.

  I lifted my hands as though in surrender. “Okay. If you’re happy, then that’s… your business. How did it start? How have you managed to keep this a secret from Mrs Huxley?”

  “I think she knows,” Roisin said. “She saw us talking in the servants’ corridor once. He’d followed me in for a kiss. He doesn’t want Margot to know, you see. Not after the way Lady Laura died.”

  Hearing her name sent another shudder through my body. I wondered how many pretty maids Bertie had screwed while they were together. Like father, like son. I pressed my eyes closed briefly, trying to stop my thoughts from going down that dark path. And then I thought about her, a young mother, naive probably, eager to start a new life with her baby. My father had been a drug addict at the time. She’d had no one. She’d talked about Lord Bertie in her letters…

  “It started how anything else starts,” Roisin said, interrupting my thoughts. “By talking. He needed me to clean up a wine spill in his room, and he happened to be in there reading. We started talking and hit it off. He’s so smart and witty.”

  Of course he seemed that way to her, I thought. He was over twice her age, had attended the best schools in the country, and had an entire lifetime of experience, whereas she’d had precious little.