The Housemaid

by Sarah A. Denzil

  “How are you?” he asked. “And don’t say fine. I know you’re not fine.”

  “Not fine,” I said. “Pretty far from it.”

  “Mrs Huxley called me,” he said. “And she told me you found her.”

  “Swinging from the tree. All the life had gone out of her. She wasn’t singing anymore; she was cold and…” I trailed off, horrified by the words coming out of my mouth, by the memory of finding my best friend in the woods. Ade reached across the table and took my hand while the kettle boiled in the background. He had tears in his eyes.

  “I had no idea she was depressed,” he said. “Apart from crying the other night, I’d never seen her upset.”

  “You knew her longer than I did.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I didn’t know her very well. We didn’t talk much.”

  “You were talking in the rose garden yesterday. What was that about?”

  Ade let go of my hand and leaned back in his chair. “God, that feels like a lifetime ago already.” He shook his head. “I asked her if she was all right, because she’d got upset. And then I asked if everything was okay between her and Pawel, but she was… avoidant, like she didn’t want to talk about it. And that was about it.”

  “I think she killed herself not long after then,” I said. “If she even killed herself at all.”

  “What are you saying?”

  I shrugged. “Weird shit has been going on at Highwood since I started working there. Those dioramas turned up, and now someone’s dead. I mean, I know Roisin didn’t get one, but it’s too strange to be a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” he said. “But why Roisin?”

  I paused so I could examine his expression. He had an open face, kind and honest.

  A heavy weight settled on my chest and shoulders. A potato sack of grief and fear and regret. I pulled in a deep breath and made a decision.

  “Roisin was having an affair with Lord Bertie.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true. She told me yesterday. It’s the reason she got so upset. She didn’t know whether to tell Pawel and break up with him or not. I think she loved Pawel, but Bertie had her in this toxic relationship.” I shook my head, a sudden burst of pure rage ran through me. “She was young and naive enough to think it might work with him.”

  Ade rubbed the back of his head thoughtfully. “This changes everything.”

  “Do you think it gives Lord Bertie a motive?”

  His expression sharpened; his eyes narrowed. “That’s a big accusation.” He folded his arms and frowned. “Why though? He’s single. I know she’s a maid, but I think we’re past that kind of prejudice, right?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe not in his world.”

  Ade sighed. “I think we should have a cup of tea and, I don’t know, just chill a bit. We don’t know what happened, and to be honest, neither of us knew Roisin all that well. The police will get to the bottom of anything suspicious.”

  He got up to pour the tea while I tried to calm the nerves running through my body. Ade was being cool-headed and sensible, but he didn’t know the things I knew about the past and about the men at that place. He hadn’t read the concerns my mother had as a maid. I think there’s something wrong with Highwood Hall.

  Chapter 34

  Roisin’s parents arrived from Sligo the day after I’d found her body. They were short people with roundish features and pink in their cheeks. Her mother had the same strawberry blonde hair, though hers was curly and cut shorter.

  I saw the people they could be, and I saw what they were now: a creased, pale imitation with wet eyes and crumpled clothes. But Roisin’s mother hugged me when we met, and I sank into the soft warmth of her. It almost broke me, that hug, but I wanted to hold it together enough to talk them through Roisin’s final days. Afterwards, I showed her mum our shared room and all of Roisin’s belongings. They then packed them away into boxes, silent tears running down their cheeks. With hands held over those boxes, I told them that she loved them. She’d wanted them to know that.

  “We fell out sometimes,” Mrs Byrne said. “But she was always our little girl.”

  I looked into her eyes and couldn’t tell her my suspicions about Roisin’s death. I couldn’t speak at all. Nor could I tell her that her little girl had been involved with a man over twice her age.

  “We’re staying in the village tonight,” she said. “We need to wait a few days for her… body to be released so we can take her back to Ireland. Please keep in touch, won’t you?” She scribbled down a number and passed it to me. “I can see that Roisin cared about you and that you were a loyal friend to her. I’d like to let you know when the funeral is arranged.”

  I took the number and nodded my head. But inside I already knew that I wouldn’t be able to afford to travel to Ireland even though I wanted to say goodbye. When they left, taking Roisin’s belongings with them, I lay down on my bed and stared at the empty side of the room.

  Somehow I’d slipped into a restful sleep—exhaustion will do that—and woke up to find Mrs Huxley standing by the bed.

  “Would you like anything to eat?” she asked. “There’s no hot food with half the kitchen staff still off, but there’s a spread of sandwiches if you’re hungry.” As she stood before me, I searched her face for some sort of human emotion, thinking of her smiling at Heather Grove. She’d been affected by Roisin’s death. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and her hair wasn’t quite as neatly pinned as usual. She turned on her heel, leaving me to make the decision for myself.

  Reluctantly I forced myself out of bed and stumbled bleary-eyed into the kitchen. Mrs Huxley sat at her usual spot at the head of the table. I nodded to her, taking a plate from a stack next to the sandwiches. The world was about to go on turning, and there was no way to stop it.

  After a silent lunch, I put on my uniform and cleaned the library, hoovered the carpets and helped Mrs Huxley with dinner. None of the Howards looked at us as we served them. Bertie had his nose in the newspaper while Alex and Lottie stared at their phones. Margot ate her food in her room, taken to her by Huxley.

  For the days that followed, I worked twice as hard, picking up Roisin’s jobs as well as my own. I felt as though I had to prove I could cope, and I certainly didn’t want Mrs Huxley to hire another maid. The thought of her replacing my kind and gentle friend made my stomach churn.

  It was towards the end of the week when the police report ruled cause of death as suicide, and the Byrne’s took Roisin’s body back to Ireland. I thought of her in a coffin and shuddered. No, I couldn’t go to the funeral. I couldn’t watch her body lowered into the cold ground. Not with the gnawing, clawing sensation in the pit of my stomach, the one telling me I could’ve prevented it. I should’ve seen her hurtling towards disaster. I should’ve done more to stop it. To help her.

  Cleaning became an escape from the grief, and I poured myself into it. I scrubbed and dusted and vacuumed and mopped and polished. I spoke to no one for days. I took no time to myself, and I ate little. When Pawel came back, we found we could barely speak to each other, perhaps each one of us sensing the pain the other was experiencing, or perhaps it was because I hadn’t made my mind up about him. Pawel had been wronged by Roisin. What if he’d lost his temper with her? What if he’d hurt her?

  No. Stop it. The police report… Again, it gnawed and clawed and nagged. What if the police were wrong?

  I kept finding myself in the dining room, staring at the women on the walls, feeling a complete and utter sense of impotence. I wanted to piece together Roisin’s final moments, but every time I tried to read the police report, I found my eyes filling with tears. Even if I did uncover some sort of anomaly, who would listen to a maid? Instead, I kept my head down, and I waited until I was ready to pick up the train of thought I’d started. And at night, when I found that I couldn’t sleep, I reread the letters my mother had sent to my father. I read about what I looked like as a baby and how much she missed me when she went away to wo
rk. I read about her money troubles and her desperation. I read until my eyelids drooped and my mind drifted.

  But during the day, I was drawn to the dining room over and over again. As the Howards ate their dinner, I picked out images of the women on the wood-panelled wall and fixated on them. I gave them backstories and invented families for them. I was one of them, forever imprinted on the walls of this house. That one face, the one I’d seen on my first day, with the passing resemblance to me, became an avatar for me. None of the portraits captured Roisin’s pretty, elfin features, but I knew she would forever be etched here.

  I’d applied for the job at Highwood Hall about six weeks before Roisin died. No one, certainly not me, could have predicted what had happened since I’d joined the staff. I’d expected to grow closer to the one woman I’d always wanted to meet, but never had been able to. And I’d wondered if perhaps after a few weeks I could learn more about her, uncover a few titbits about her past, either through Mrs Huxley or Lord Bertie. But I’d never expected to work through this sense of loss. Never before had I felt like such a failure. And now I had a difficult decision to make. Now I needed to decide whether to pull at the threads I saw around me or leave them and get out. Because it seemed obvious to me now. Highwood Hall had a rotten core.

  The Music Room

  I didn’t want to be there, and he knew it, but instead of the same old roughness—the orders and the punishments—he was softer that day. He didn’t play the sonata at all. Instead, he played different pieces for me and asked me which was my favourite. He told me he was sorry we hadn’t talked since last Friday, that he didn’t like to see me upset, and then he began to let me in, bit by bit, which helped to take my mind off everything else.

  “Daddy never wanted me to be a professional pianist, but he made me learn. All the men in the family learned to play an instrument.”

  “That’s an unusual tradition,” I noted.

  “Believe me, there are many strange traditions in my family.” He smiled. “He’s a brilliant violin player, my father. But all this, the music, the practice—it’s playtime. The business is what’s real. Every man needs a hobby. It’s healthy, apparently, to have a creative pursuit outside work. In my world, you get a wife and a hobby outside the business, and you’ll be happy with it.”

  But my mind was elsewhere. He noticed me staring at the other side of the room and brushed some hair away from my ears. Still gentle. I’d never known him like this.

  “Are you all right? I know you miss her.”

  I wiped tears from my eyes, and for once, I leaned into him. He readjusted himself on the piano stool so that I could nestle into his shoulder, and as I made myself comfortable, I inhaled the scent of his juniper aftershave. His hands smoothed over the crown of my head, and then his fingers worked the hair tie, loosening the waves from their knot. His face was close to mine when he ran his fingers through my hair.

  “I do,” I said. “I miss her so much.”

  “You’ll see her again,” he said. “I know you will.”

  I half listened to him as my hands rested on his chest, balling up his shirt in my fist. This shouldn’t be happening—it was unprofessional, dangerous even—but I craved the warmth of him.

  “Do you trust me, Emily?” he said.

  I nodded my head. His lips met mine while his hands ran through my hair. As I leaned into his kiss, those fingers tightened until they formed a fist, tugging my head back just slightly. He broke away from me and continued to pull, harder now. And as he pulled, he watched me, his eyes dark. And then he let me go.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t trust me,” he said. He turned away and stared at the piano. “I’m fucked up.”

  “Everyone is.” I wanted his hands in my hair again. I ached for the pressure on my scalp, the slight prickling of pain that blocked out all the bad thoughts. “I don’t care what you do to me. I like it. I want more.”

  When I reached for him, he scooted from the piano stool so quickly that he almost tripped over his feet, stumbling back into a music stand. It clattered to the floor, the sudden cacophonous noise making me jolt. “No. Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

  He seemed disgusted with me, and I couldn’t stand the expression on his face. I needed to get out of there fast, but when I moved past him to get to the door, he caught me by the elbow and kissed me again. Soft and lazily at first, but soon he was pushing me back against the wall, his weight pressed against me. I was pliable, like clay—or a doll—to be played with. When he was in control, I left my body. It made me numb from head to toe, taking away the sadness locked inside me. But it made me wonder if I felt anything for him at all or whether I used him as some sort of conduit for my own pain. His hands moved up to my throat, a thumbnail pressing into the flesh. Not too hard but not gentle either. I wanted to egg him on, to tell him to go harder. I deserved the pain. I wanted it. But I didn’t, and he didn’t. He broke off and shook his head as he walked away from me. I watched the ripple of tension work through his back muscles, the flex of his arms as he balled his hands into fists.

  “This isn’t right,” he said. “We should stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…”

  “I’m a maid?”

  “Yes!”

  I placed my fingers on my lips, the echo of the kiss still there. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” he said. “No. I don’t know.” He turned to face me again. “Do you want to live in the north wing with me?”

  “Of course I do!” I said. And it was true. But why was it true? Did I love him, or did I want a home?

  “They’d think you were a gold digger,” he said, half laughing at his own words.

  I shrugged. “Let them.”

  “You’re just agreeing to all this because you’re upset right now,” he said. “You’re not thinking clearly.”

  Perhaps he was right. Yearning made my heart raw, and perhaps I’d allowed desperation to make the decision for me. “Then wait a few weeks and ask me again.”

  He smiled. “All right then.”

  Chapter 35

  I woke up confused on Saturday morning. For some reason I’d expected to be in my bed at Aunt Josephine’s. When I didn’t hear her calling me for breakfast, I didn’t know what was going on. And then I noticed a second bed in the room, and I knew I was at Highwood Hall. That second bed had been stripped bare, the battered old mattress resting on top of the frame. Looking at that lumpy thing brought everything flooding back.

  It was the day of Roisin’s funeral.

  Mrs Huxley had offered to give me time off for the funeral, but I couldn’t afford to fly to Ireland anyway, so I told her I’d be working as usual. She’d hired freelance cleaners to help get the hall in shape that weekend, which meant I could have the day off. I’d decided against it. I needed to keep busy.

  As I showered and changed, I thought about the music room, about the way the piano music had lifted me, transported me to another time and place. When I was in that room, I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust Alex. Roisin had warned me about him so many times, but did that mean much when she was seeing a man like Lord Bertie? He wasn’t going to her funeral. He hadn’t cried for her as far as I knew. He acted like she was a person he’d never known. He hadn’t shown even the slightest bit of sadness.

  Perhaps he was the root of it all, a cancer at Highwood Hall that my mother had sensed all those years ago. And then my mind drifted back to the conversation between Lord Bertie and Mrs Huxley the night Roisin died. The way she’d spoken to him, as though she were putting feelers out to decipher whether his guilty deeds needed to be covered up. What did she know? I desperately wanted to find out.

  While drying my hair, I put together a short list of questions I wanted answered.

  How does Mrs Huxley move around Highwood so quickly? Could there be another secret corridor?

  Did Roisin really kill herself?

  What happened to my mother when she worked here?

  Who se
nt the dioramas?

  But the more I thought about those questions, the more alone I felt. Things hadn’t gone the way I’d planned since I came to Highwood Hall, and I began to wonder if I should have come at all. My aunt would call me a quitter if I didn’t see this through.

  A commotion came from the kitchen. Pawel had decided to travel to Ireland for Roisin’s funeral, so we were short-staffed again. I walked into chaos and quickly dived in, taking pastries out of the oven, handing over spoons, wiping icing sugar from the kitchen surfaces. As we worked through it all, the doorbell rang, and Mrs Huxley muttered under her breath as she strode out of the room.

  My stomach rumbled with hunger as I arranged croissants. It was the first time I’d felt any kind of appetite since Roisin’s death, and I actually felt guilty about it. But Mrs Huxley’s return soon put a stop to the hunger pangs. Her skin, usually a deep russet brown, had turned ashen grey. She carried a gift box tied with a ribbon exactly like the one I’d received on my first day. I rushed over to the table as she placed the box down.

  “Who is it addressed to?” I asked. My heart was in my mouth. I was sure that this box was for Roisin. I’d already conjured the image of it in my mind. A monstrous miniature portrayal of her cold, blue-tinged legs swinging from side to side among the branches.

  “It’s addressed to me,” she said.

  I wrapped my arms around my body to stop my hands from shaking. The appearance of these boxes accelerated my heart rate so rapidly that I doubted I’d be able to look at a present in the same way ever again. Slowly Mrs Huxley tugged on the red ribbon until it slid from the surface of the box. The front flap fell, and we peered inside.