Death Below Stairs

by Jennifer Ashley

  I stifled a shriek and swung around to see Sinead emerging from the linen room. She looked somewhat downcast but not sorry she’d nearly frightened the life out of me.

  “Good heavens, girl, what are you still doing down here?” I demanded.

  “Mrs. Bowen set me to folding the linens,” she said, then she went pink and flicked her gaze from mine. “Thank you, ma’am, for what you did. It was brave of you.”

  I swallowed and tried to find my breath. “Not at all.” My action had been foolish and presumptuous, but I had no regrets, even if the encounter had not turned out as I’d imagined. I cleared my throat and spoke as staunchly as I could. “You’ll not have to worry about that while I am here, my dear.”

  Sinead did look worried, and I softened my brisk tone. “You remind me of myself, when I was cook’s assistant.” I put a gentle hand on her arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you and see you’re trained proper. You’ll be able to have any post you ask for once I’m finished with you.”

  Sinead dissolved into a smile. With her dark brown hair and large blue eyes, she really was a very pretty girl. She reminded me as well of another young lady who was very close to my heart.

  “That sounds ever so nice.” Sinead beamed at me and then curtsied. “Good night, ma’am. I’ll try my best for ye.”

  I started off again, but she made no move to follow me. “Are you not coming up?” I asked.

  Sinead gestured into the room behind her. “Have to finish here, or Mrs. Bowen will scold something awful.”

  “Well, don’t be too long about it,” I said. “There will be plenty to do tomorrow.”

  “Not to worry, Mrs. Holloway,” Sinead said. “I won’t be a tick. Good night.”

  “Good night,” I said, feeling better, and I left her. I should have offered to help her, I knew, but I was bone weary and still bewildered by my encounter in Lord Rankin’s study.

  Sinead said another cheerful good night and skimmed into the linen room. I started up the back stairs, and then up, up, up, through the house to the servants’ quarters in the quiet attic.

  My heart was pounding by the time I reached my bedchamber and not only from the arduous climb from the very bottom of the house to its top. Now that I was not focusing on my duties, troubled thoughts flooded me. Daniel had been so different in manner and dress tonight from the man I usually knew that I could have passed him in the street and not been aware.

  No, that was nonsense. I would always recognize Daniel.

  Lord Rankin had certainly been furtive about his visit—he’d been very angry that I’d come with the coffee and not Sinead.

  Perhaps he’d sent for Sinead because she’d be so relieved that Lord Rankin had truly wanted only coffee that she’d likely not pay any attention to the second gentleman in the room. Daniel would have remained looking out the window, and the most Sinead would have been able to say was that Lord Rankin had a visitor. Lord Rankin had not worried about me knowing another man was there until Daniel had turned around and showed me his face.

  Or, had Daniel come here because of me? In the post I’d taken before I’d gone to Richmond, Daniel had watched that house to ensure that I was well, or so he’d said. Perhaps he’d come here to find out what sort of employer I’d found myself with this time.

  No, I was not vain enough to believe that everything Daniel did involved me. He’d visited me several times while I’d been a cook at Richmond, but he’d respected my impatience with him and did not press his attentions. He’d stayed in London most of that time, showing no interest at all in the inhabitants of the Richmond house that I knew of.

  I set down the chamber stick and by its feeble light shakily unbuttoned my frock, made myself clean its cuffs, and hung the dress and my petticoats up on their peg. In my corset and chemise, I washed myself, studying my startled pink face in the mirror as I raised it from the basin. My hair hung in dark tendrils around my cheeks, and my blue eyes were fixed.

  I was still shaky as I finished undressing, slid into my nightgown, climbed into bed, and pinched out the candle, the spark stinging my fingers. I had to wonder whether Daniel was still in the house with Lord Rankin. Or had he gone, lingering to look up at the windows and wonder which was mine?

  Again, nonsense. Daniel would never be so romantic, and besides, one could not see the windows of the top story of this house from the street.

  I huffed and settled myself, forcibly burying my agitation. Daniel must certainly cease popping up in front of me in different guises when I was unprepared for it, or he’d give me apoplexy. I would have to scold him long and loud when I saw him again.

  • • •

  A cook’s day begins very early, and I was up and back downstairs well before sunrise. I wore a clean frock, my face and hands scrubbed, my cap pinned over the braided coil of my hair.

  I walked briskly into the kitchen as the lad who tended the fires was stirring the flames to life in my stove. This house was efficiently run by the dragon Mrs. Bowen, and so the lad had already blacked the stove and raked out the ashes and disposed of them. All I had to do was fill a kettle and put it on a ring on top of the stove as soon as the boy had the fire going strong.

  I went to retrieve the bowl of dough I’d put in the larder before retiring, intending to set it on the table in the warm kitchen for its final rise.

  While Mrs. Beeton might advocate purchasing bread at a bakery or even from a bread-baking factory to save oneself work, I believe nothing is better than home baked. When bread is made en masse in a vat then divided up and sold all over the city, who knows what chemicals might have infiltrated it, or what vermin had taken up home in it? I believed, as did the cook who’d trained me, that fresh-baked bread every day is the key to good health and good spirits. I was never afraid to bite into a piece of bread I’d wrought with my two hands.

  I entered the larder, which was cool and dark to keep food from spoiling. I reached for the bowl I’d covered with a plate—better than a cloth, because if the plate were moved or broken, I’d know that mice had been there to have a go.

  I clasped the bowl between my hands, turned, and made for the door of the dim room. I hadn’t gone two steps when I tripped over something on the floor.

  I glanced down, saw a foot in a black worsted stocking and stiff-laced shoe sticking out from the corner beyond the cupboard in which my dough had rested. The light was faint, but I could follow the shoe and stocking to a petticoat and a gray broadcloth skirt. The owner of the skirt was too far into the dark corner for me to see, but she was unmoving. I took a step toward her, crouching down to peer into the shadows.

  What I saw made me rise and back away hastily, my breath coming in broken gasps. I stood transfixed, odd sensations pouring over me, while I clutched my bowl of dough and tried to continue breathing.

  I’d read nonsensical tales in popular magazines in which maids, when stumbling upon an inert member of mankind, dropped entire trays full of the household’s best porcelain. I’d always considered the maids in these stories to be fools—a dead body is no reason to destroy so much crockery.

  But as I looked down at the young woman whose face had been rendered a bloody pulp, I felt my fingers going numb and the bowl of dough in danger of sliding out of my hands.

  Quickly I set the bowl on a table then returned to poor Sinead and knelt beside her. For indeed, it was Sinead, my young assistant who’d bade me a cheery good night only hours ago. Though I could not see her face, I recognized her work dress, starched apron, and sturdy but work-roughened hands. Her cap lay beside her on the floor, and blood soaked the cap, her white collar, every bit of her hair, and what was left of her face.

  My throat worked in horror, but I put a hand on hers. “Oh, my poor dear Sinead,” I whispered, deciding that, in death, she deserved to have the name she longed for. “Oh, my dear. I should have been looking after you. Forgive me.” And tears overcam
e me.

  4

  I am not certain how long I knelt in the dark of the larder, holding the hand of the young woman whose only fault had been to want to be called by the name she wished. My heart burned in pity and then rage, both at whoever had hurt this harmless, helpless girl, and at myself. I’d stood next to her only the night before and vowed that I’d look after her, guide her. Then I’d gone upstairs, too tired to carry out my promise. I’d failed her before I’d even begun.

  Time meant nothing as I stroked her hand, my anger and grief swelling my chest and making breathing a chore. My fingers were all pins and needles, but I didn’t want to let go of Sinead’s hand. I felt an obligation to comfort her in death, to care about a young woman I barely knew, as I hadn’t had time to in her life.

  Gradually my senses returned to me, and I realized things had to happen. Mr. Davis and Mrs. Bowen might come looking for me here upon finding an empty kitchen, or the footmen or maids would blunder in, and there would be alarm and chaos.

  The police would have to be summoned. Sinead had obviously been attacked. At the angle in which she lay—on her back, arms at her sides—she could not have simply tripped and hit her head in falling. No blood on the edges of tables and the large dresser next to her confirmed this, plus there was not much blood on the flagstones, though I could not see well in the dim room. Someone had hit her and then dragged her into the corner, as though trying to hide his crime. Whether the culprit meant to kill her or not was hardly the issue.

  The thought of some thick-fingered constable touching her, or a sergeant declaring she’d probably fought with her lover and paid the price, made me shudder, but I knew there was nothing for it. Her death would have to be investigated.

  My blood cold, I stepped from larder to the linen room, snatched up a tablecloth, and returned to lay it reverently over Sinead’s body.

  I remembered her telling me she must finish folding things for Mrs. Bowen before she went to bed. Even now, the linen room was neat and tidy—presumably Sinead had completed her task. Or had Sinead been using it as an excuse to linger, to see this lover the police would suspect in secret? Had they met here below stairs when everyone in the house was abed?

  Fury at the man who’d killed her worked its way through my shock. I thought it must be a man by the way her face had been beaten. A woman’s face could be bruised and bloodied by the man who swore on his life to be in love with her—I knew this because it had happened to me, before my so-called husband had disappeared and gone to his grave.

  There was one person I wanted to have come and look at this crime, who would know what to do better than most. The trouble was, finding the bloody man would be a daunting task.

  Before I left the larder again I looked it over in case the culprit had left any hint of his identity, but I found nothing. Sinead’s hand when I’d held it had been cold. The larder itself was cool, but if she had been killed this morning, she’d have still been warm. I’d helped lay out enough of the deceased—my own mother included—to know this.

  I concluded that she’d died somewhere in the middle of the night, probably shortly after I’d left her to go to bed, which renewed my unhappiness at myself. I would be repeating If only I’d stayed; if only I’d ordered her to come upstairs with me for the rest of my life. The killer had likely fled to one of the far corners of London by now, perhaps even leapt on a train and was now on the Continent, out of our reach.

  I straightened the tablecloth I’d draped over Sinead’s body, picked up my bowl of dough, and left the larder. I closed its door and locked it with my key—Mrs. Bowen had already given me keys to the rooms I’d use most. The larder and Sinead must not be disturbed until Daniel could have a look.

  No one was in the kitchen yet, and I wondered where on earth the staff had got to. Households were always busy in the early morning, and I could not imagine that Mrs. Bowen let the maids and footmen slacken their duties for any reason. The boy had tended the stove, yes, but even he had disappeared.

  I walked heavily down the passage in search of Mrs. Bowen. She was responsible for the staff, even more than I, and she would need to hear of Sinead’s death right away. I’d tell her then to go hunt up Daniel, or at least try to send word to him.

  Mrs. Bowen was not in her parlor, however, nor in the servants’ hall. I made my way up the back stairs and through the door covered with green baize that divided the servants’ domain from the master’s to see if Mrs. Bowen was attending her duties there.

  When I entered the ground floor, I discovered why no one was below stairs. Mrs. Bowen indeed had them all working, and working hard. Footmen hurried about with coal scuttles, one maid was dusting every inch of the hallway, while another moved a mop made of rags back and forth on the stairs. Another maid was busy dusting the front parlor, while yet another laid the fire in the empty dining room. No one seemed to realize anything was unusual about this morning; no one seemed to have missed Sinead.

  The maid on the stairs gaped at me as I approached her, obviously surprised to see me outside the fortress of my kitchen. “Where is Mrs. Bowen?” I asked her.

  She continued to gape, mouth open in a round face under a white cap. “Don’t know,” she said breathily. “I’m sure.”

  “Of course you must know,” I began sharply, then relented. I’d frightened her by popping up in front of her, and she had no idea how to respond.

  I lifted my skirts and went past her to the first floor and then up to the second. “You there,” I said to a straight-backed maid who walked through the second-floor hall with a gown over her arms and her nose in the air. “Mary,” I hazarded a guess.

  She turned around and stared at me much as the downstairs maid had but kept her lips firm. “Sara,” she said primly. “I am upstairs maid and also wait on Lady Rankin and Lady Cynthia. Is something the matter, Mrs. Holloway?”

  “Do you know where Mrs. Bowen is?” I asked her.

  Sara raised her brows, still haughty. “Not upstairs, ma’am.” As I continued to glare at her, my impatience and agitation mounting, she took a step toward me and lowered her voice. “Mrs. Bowen might have stepped out. She has a beau and sometimes goes to see him at night. No one’s to know below stairs. Just Mr. Davis.”

  Mrs. Bowen with a lover. Interesting. I might be curious about that any other time, but I was far too agitated at the moment. “Well, send her to speak to me at once if you see her.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Holloway.” Sara stepped back, a confidante no longer, and hurried toward Lady Rankin’s chamber.

  I hesitated on the landing, debating what to do next. I ought to search for Mr. Davis if I couldn’t find Mrs. Bowen; however, I wanted to confirm one thing. There had been a murder last night in this house, and yesterday, we’d brought in a stranger.

  The man Lady Cynthia had run down had been put into an attic room that was more a storage space than anything else. There was a cot in the chamber, where maids or footmen who were sick stayed, I’d been told, so they wouldn’t infect the other maids or footmen whose beds they shared. Sometimes, in houses with a large staff and too few rooms, three or four might sleep in a bed. I considered myself fortunate to have a chamber and a bed all to myself in this house.

  Mrs. Bowen apparently had not stepped out with her gentleman friend—at least, if she had, she’d already returned, because I found her coming out of the very room where the hurt man lay. She started when she saw me, nearly dropping her jangling ring of keys.

  “Mrs. Holloway,” she said when she recovered, closing the door behind her and making her voice crisp. “Whatever are you doing?”

  The question I ought to have been asking her. “Looking for our accidental lodger. Is he better this morning?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Mrs. Bowen stood squarely in the middle of the passage and gazed at me coolly. Before I could ask a question, she said in a burst, “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” I push
ed past her, having to turn sideways and nearly shove her out of my way to do so. “Where has he gone?”

  I opened the door to the makeshift bedchamber and peered inside. The bed was turned back, the sheets rumpled, but there was no sign of our guest—Mr. Timmons, I remembered his name was.

  “Perhaps he felt better and returned home,” Mrs. Bowen said, but she sounded uncertain.

  “He had a broken arm,” I pointed out. “And a dose of laudanum. I doubt I’d be early to rise and rush out if it were me.” Of course, a man with a broken arm and a belly full of laudanum likely couldn’t have bashed a young girl to death either.

  And why had Mrs. Bowen come to check on him? Compassion? Curiosity? Or had she simply given the other staff so many tasks there’d been no one left to look after Mr. Timmons? She’d not come up here to offer him food or drink—her hands were empty now that she’d let go of her keys, which swung gently from their chain against her skirts.

  As Mrs. Bowen stood watching me, worry in her eyes, I made up my mind how to proceed.

  “Mrs. Bowen,” I said. “I have something upsetting to tell you. But you must promise me to keep it quiet. At least for now.”

  • • •

  Mrs. Bowen did not take the news well. She went gray as I conveyed the fact of Sinead’s death, and her hands went to her face, her fingers white streaks on her paling cheeks. When she at last spoke, her careful English accent fell away, and her voice was pure, broad Welsh.

  “Oh, dear God, no. Oh, the poor, motherless girl.”

  She gazed at me pleadingly, her brisk efficiency gone, as though begging me to say I was mistaken or playing a joke. When I reached out to put a comforting hand on her arm, Mrs. Bowen started violently, gazing at me with unfocused eyes.

  I led her downstairs as quickly as I could. We did not pass any of the other staff, mercifully, as they were still madly cleaning the master’s part of the house.

  We entered the passage to the kitchen and servants’ hall to see Mr. Davis in front of the larder door, ready to unlock it with his key.