Alfred mumbled his apologies.
“Lord Castlereagh asked you to bring him partridges with truffles. I heard him most distinctly! Yet you brought him a strawberry jelly! What were you thinking of?”
Alfred said something rather indistinct in which only the word “fright” was distinguishable.
“You had a fright? What fright?”
“I thought I saw a queer figure standing behind her ladyship’s chair.”
“Alfred, what are you talking about?”
“A tall person with a head of shining silver hair and a green coat. He was leaning down to look at her ladyship. But the next moment there was no one at all.”
“Alfred, look to that end of the room.”
“Yes, Mr Black.”
“What do you see?”
“A curtain, Mr Black.”
“And what else?”
“A chandelier.”
“A green velvet curtain and a chandelier ablaze with candles. That is your green-coated, silver-headed person, Alfred. Now go and help Cissie put away the china and do not be so foolish in future.” Stephen Black turned to the next footman. “Geoffrey! Your behaviour was every bit as bad as Alfred’s. I swear your thoughts were somewhere else entirely. What have you to say for yourself?”
Poor Geoffrey did not answer immediately. He was blinking his eyes and pressing his lips together and generally doing all those things that a man will do when he is trying not to cry. “I am sorry, Mr Black, but it was the music that distracted me.”
“What music?” asked Stephen. “There was no music. There! Listen! That is the string quartet just starting up in the drawing-room. They have not played until now.”
“Oh, no, Mr Black! I mean the pipe and fiddle that were playing in the next room all the time the ladies and gentlemen were at dinner. Oh, Mr Black! It was the saddest music that I ever heard. I thought it would break my heart!”
Stephen stared at him in perplexity. “I do not understand you,” he said. “There was no pipe and fiddle.” He turned to the last footman, a solid-looking, dark-haired man of forty or so. “And Robert! I scarcely know what to say to you! Did we not talk yesterday?”
“We did, Mr Black.”
“Did I not tell you how much I relied upon you to set an example to the others?”
“Yes, Mr Black.”
“Yet half a dozen times this evening you went to the window! What were you thinking of? Lady Winsell was looking round for someone to bring her a clean glass. Your business was at the table, attending to her ladyship’s guests, not at the window.”
“I am sorry, Mr Black, but I heard a knocking at the window.”
“A knocking? What knocking?”
“Branches beating against the glass, Mr Black.”
Stephen Black made a little gesture of impatience. “But, Robert, there is no tree near the house! You know very well there is not.”
“I thought a wood had grown up around the house,” said Robert.
“What?” cried Stephen.
16
Lost-hope
January 1808
The servants in Harley-street continued to believe that they were haunted by eerie sights and mournful sounds. The cook, John Longridge, and the kitchenmaids were troubled by a sad bell. The effect of the bell, explained John Longridge to Stephen Black, was to bring vividly to mind everyone they had ever known who had died, all the good things they had ever lost and every bad thing which had ever happened to them. Consequently, they had become dejected and low and their lives were not worth living.
Geoffrey and Alfred, the two youngest footmen, were tormented by the sound of the fife and violin which Geoffrey had first heard on the night of the dinner-party. The music always appeared to come from the next room. Stephen had taken them all over the house and proved that nowhere was any one playing any such instruments, but it did no good; they continued afraid and unhappy.
Most bewildering of all, in Stephen’s opinion, was the behaviour of Robert, the eldest footman. Robert had struck Stephen from the first as a sensible man, conscientious, reliable – in short the last person in the world to fall prey to imaginary fears. Yet Robert still insisted that he could hear an invisible wood growing up around the house. Whenever he paused in his work, he heard ghostly branches scraping at the walls and tapping upon the windows, and tree-roots slyly extending themselves beneath the foundations and prising apart the bricks. The wood was old, said Robert, and full of malice. A traveller in the wood would have as much to fear from the trees as from another person hiding there.
But, argued Stephen, the nearest wood of any size was four miles away upon Hampstead Heath and even there the trees were quite domesticated. They did not crowd around people’s houses and try to destroy them. Stephen could say what he liked; Robert only shook his head and shivered.
Stephen’s only consolation was that this peculiar mania had erased all the servants’ other differences. The London servants no longer cared that the country servants were slow of speech and had old-fashioned manners. The country servants no longer complained to Stephen that the London servants played tricks upon them and sent them on imaginary errands. All the servants were united by the belief that the house was haunted. They sat in the kitchen after their work was done and told stories of all the other houses that they had ever heard of where there were ghosts and horrors, and of the horrible fates that had befallen the people who lived there.
One evening, about a fortnight after Lady Pole’s dinner-party, they were gathered about the kitchen fire, engaged in this favourite occupation. Stephen soon grew tired of listening to them and retired to his own little room to read a newspaper. He had not been there more than a few minutes when he heard a bell ringing. So he put down his newspaper, put on his black coat and went to see where he was wanted.
In the little passage-way that connected the kitchen to the butler’s room was a little row of bells and beneath the bells the names of various rooms were neatly inscribed in brown paint: The Venetian Drawing-room; The Yellow Drawing-room; The Dining-room; Lady Pole’s Sitting-room; Lady Pole’s Bed-chamber; Lady Pole’s Dressing-room; Sir Walter’s Study; Sir Walter’s Bed-chamber; Sir Walter’s Dressing-room; Lost-hope.
“Lost-hope?” thought Stephen. “What in the world is that?”
He had paid the carpenter that very morning for the work in putting up the bells and he had entered the amount in his account-book: To Amos Judd, for putting up 9 bells in the kitchen passageway and painting the names of the rooms beneath, 4 shillings. But now there were ten bells. And the bell for Lost-hope was ringing violently.
“Perhaps,” thought Stephen, “Judd means it as a joke. Well, he shall be fetched back tomorrow and made to put it right.”
Not knowing quite what else to do, Stephen went up to the ground floor and looked in every room; all were empty. And so he climbed the staircase to the first floor.
At the top of the staircase was a door which he had never seen before.
“Who’s there?” whispered a voice from behind the door. It was not a voice Stephen knew and, though it was only a whisper, it was curiously penetrating. It seemed to get into Stephen’s head by some other means than his ears.
“There is someone upon stairs!” insisted the whispering voice. “Is it the servant? Come here, if you please! I need you!”
Stephen knocked and went in.
The room was every bit as mysterious as the door. If anyone had asked Stephen to describe it, he would have said it was decorated in the Gothic style – this being the only explanation he could think of to account for its extraordinary appearance. But it had none of the usual Gothic embellishments such as one might see depicted in the pages of Mr Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts. There were no pointed mediaeval arches, no intricately carved wood, no ecclesiastical motifs. The walls and floor of the room were of plain grey stone, very worn and uneven in places. The ceiling was of vaulted stone. One small window looked out upon a starlit sky. The window had not so much
as a scrap of glass in it and the winter wind blew into the room.
A pale gentleman with an extraordinary quantity of silvery, thistle-down hair was looking at his reflection in an old cracked mirror with an air of deep dissatisfaction. “Oh, there you are!” he said, glancing sourly at Stephen. “A person may call and call in this house, but no one comes!”
“I am very sorry, sir,” said Stephen, “but no one told me you were here.” He supposed the gentleman must be a guest of Sir Walter’s or Lady Pole’s – which explained the gentleman, but not the room. Gentlemen are often invited to stay in other people’s houses. Rooms hardly ever are.
“In what way may I serve you, sir?” asked Stephen.
“How stupid you are!” cried the gentleman with the thistledown hair. “Don’t you know that Lady Pole is to attend a ball tonight at my house? My own servant has run off and hidden himself somewhere. How can I appear by the side of the beautiful Lady Pole in this condition?”
The gentleman had cause for complaint: his face was unshaven, his curious hair was a mass of tangles and he was not dressed, but only wrapped in an old-fashioned powdering gown.
“I shall be with you in an instant, sir,” Stephen assured him. “But first I must find the means to shave you. You do not happen to know what your servant has done with the razor, I suppose?”
The gentleman shrugged.
There was no dressing-table in the room. Indeed there was very little furniture of any description. There was the mirror, an old three-legged milking stool and a queer carved chair that appeared to be made of bones. Stephen did not quite believe that they were human bones, although they did look remarkably like it.
Atop the milking stool, next to a pretty little box, Stephen found a delicate silver razor. A battered pewter basin full of water stood upon the floor.
Curiously there was no fireplace in the room, but only a rusting iron brazier full of hot coals, that spilt its dirty ashes on the floor. So Stephen heated the basin of water on the brazier and then he shaved the gentleman. When he had finished, the gentleman inspected his face and pronounced himself excessively pleased. He removed his gown and stood patiently in his dressing-trousers while Stephen massaged his skin with a bristle-brush. Stephen could not help but observe that, whereas other gentlemen grow red as lobsters under such treatment, this gentleman remained as pale as ever and the only difference was that his skin took on a whitish glow as of moonlight or mother-of-pearl.
His clothes were the finest Stephen had ever seen; his shirt was exquisitely laundered and his boots shone like black mirrors. But best of all were a dozen or so white muslin neckcloths, each as thin as a cobweb and as stiff as music paper.
It took two hours to complete the gentleman’s toilet, for he was, Stephen found, extremely vain. During this time the gentleman became more and more delighted with Stephen. “I tell you that my own ignorant fellow has not got half your skill at dressing hair,” he declared, “and when it comes to the delicate art of tying a muslin neckcloth, why! he cannot be made to understand it at all!”
“Well, sir, it is exactly the sort of task I like,” said Stephen. “I wish I could persuade Sir Walter to take more care of his clothes, but political gentlemen have no leisure for thinking of such things.”
Stephen helped the gentleman on with his leaf-green coat (which was of the very best quality and most fashionable cut), then the gentleman went over to the milking stool and picked up the little box that lay there. It was made of porcelain and silver, and was about the size of a snuff box but a little longer than snuff boxes generally are. Stephen made some admiring remark about the colour which was not exactly pale blue and not exactly grey, not precisely lavender and not precisely lilac.
“Yes, indeed! It is beautiful,” agreed the gentleman enthusiastically. “And very hard to make. The pigment must be mixed with the tears of spinsters of good family, who must live long lives of impeccable virtue and die without ever having had a day of true happiness!”
“Poor ladies!” said Stephen. “I am glad it is so rare.”
“Oh! It is not the tears that make it rare – I have bottles full of those – it is the skill to mix the colour.”
The gentleman had by now become so affable, so willing to talk that Stephen had no hesitation in asking him, “And what do you keep in such a pretty little box, sir? Snuff?”
“Oh, no! It is a great treasure of mine that I wish Lady Pole to wear at my ball tonight!” He opened the box and shewed Stephen a small, white finger.
At first this struck Stephen as a little unusual, but his surprize faded in a moment and if any one had questioned him about it just then, he would have replied that gentlemen often carried fingers about with them in little boxes and that this was just one of many examples he had seen.
“Has it been in your family long, sir?” he asked, politely.
“No, not long.”
The gentleman snapped shut the box and put it in his pocket.
Together, he and Stephen admired his reflection in the mirror. Stephen could not help but notice how they perfectly complemented each other: gleaming black skin next to opalescent white skin, each a perfect example of a particular type of masculine beauty. Exactly the same thought seemed to strike the gentleman.
“How handsome we are!” he said in a wondering tone. “But I see now that I have made a horrible blunder! I took you for a servant in this house! But that is quite impossible! Your dignity and handsomeness proclaim you to be of noble, perhaps kingly birth! You are a visitor here, I suppose, as I am. I must beg your pardon for imposing upon you and thank you for the great service you have done me in making me ready to meet the beautiful Lady Pole.”
Stephen smiled. “No, sir. I am a servant. I am Sir Walter’s servant.”
The gentleman with the thistle-down hair raised his eye-brow in astonishment. “A man as talented and handsome as yourself ought not be a servant!” he said in a shocked tone. “He ought to be the ruler of a vast estate! What is beauty for, I should like to know, if not to stand as a visible sign of one’s superiority to everyone else? But I see how it is! Your enemies have conspired together to deprive you of all your possessions and to cast you down among the ignorant and lowly!”
“No, sir. You are mistaken. I have always been a servant.”
“Well, I do not understand it,” declared the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, with a puzzled shake of his head. “There is some mystery here and I shall certainly look into it just as soon as I am at liberty. But, in the meantime, as a reward for dressing my hair so well and all the other services you have done me, you shall attend my ball tonight.”
This was such a very extraordinary proposal that for a moment Stephen did not know quite what to say. “Either he is mad,” he thought, “or else he is some sort of radical politician who wishes to destroy all distinctions of rank.”
Aloud he said, “I am very sensible of the honour you do me, sir, but only consider. Your other guests will come to your house expecting to meet ladies and gentlemen of their own rank. When they discover that they are consorting with a servant I am sure they will feel the insult very keenly. I thank you for your kindness, but I should not wish to embarrass you or offend your friends.”
This seemed to astonish the gentleman with the thistle-down hair even more. “What nobility of feeling!” he cried. “To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! Well, it is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me. And it only increases my determination to make you my friend and do everything in my power to aid you. But you do not quite understand. These guests of mine on whose account you are so scrupulous, they are all my vassals and subjects. There is not one of them who would dare to criticize me or any one I chose to call my friend. And if they did, why! we could always kill them! But really,” he added as if he were suddenly growing bored of this conversation, “there is very little use debating the point since you are already here!”
With that the gentleman walked away and Stephen fo
und that he was standing in a great hall where a crowd of people were dancing to sad music.
Once again he was a little surprized but, as before, he grew accustomed to the idea in a moment and began to look about him. Despite all that the gentleman with the thistle-down hair had said upon the point, he was a little apprehensive at first that he would be recognized. A few glances about the room were enough to reassure him that there were no friends of Sir Walter present – indeed there was no one Stephen had ever seen before and in his neat black clothes and clean white linen he believed he might very easily pass for a gentleman. He was glad that Sir Walter had never required him to wear livery or a powdered wig, which would have marked him out as a servant in an instant.
Everyone was dressed in the very height of fashion. The ladies wore gowns of the most exquisite colours (though, to own the truth, very few of them were colours that Stephen could remember having seen before). The gentlemen wore knee breeches and white stockings and coats of brown, green, blue and black, their linen was a sparkling, shining white and their kid gloves had not so much as a stain or mark upon them.
But in spite of all the fine clothes and gaiety of the guests, there were signs that the house was not so prosperous as once it had been. The room was dimly lit by an insufficient number of tallow candles, and there was just one viol and one fife to provide the music.
“That must be the music that Geoffrey and Alfred spoke of,” thought Stephen. “How odd that I could not hear it before! It is every bit as melancholy as they said.”
He made his way to a narrow unglazed window and looked out upon a dark, tangled wood under starlight. “And this must be the wood which Robert talks about. How malevolent it looks! And is there a bell, I wonder?”
“Oh, yes!” said a lady who was standing close by. She wore a gown the colour of storms, shadows and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets. He was surprized to find himself addressed by her since he was quite certain that he had not spoken his thoughts out loud.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Page 18