The House of Dead Maids

by Clare B. Dunkle

  In a little hollow where the gusts didn’t blow so strongly, I ate my bread and cheese and pillowed my head on a tuft to look for shapes in the slow-moving clouds. The monotonous bleating of the sheep, mixed with the higher-pitched cry of the lambs, and the rush of wind in the meadow grasses soon lulled me to sleep.

  I did not wake until late afternoon, when the westering sun dropped behind the rocky crest, and it cast its cool shadow over me. Then I started up in confusion, thinking I had been remiss, and reproaching myself for making so free with my time, more like I had been gentry than servant.

  When I opened the kitchen door, I found that I had been missed. Miss Winter came sweeping around the bare wooden table, demanding to know where I had been. She was in a state of high excitement, with color in her cheeks, and a tall, good-looking gentleman stood beside her.

  “So this is the young maid,” he exclaimed, bending down to greet me. “Flora, I can’t tell if you’re doing God’s work or the devil’s.”

  Miss Winter turned pink, then went pale. “That’s not funny, Jack,” she said.

  He introduced himself as Jack Ketch; however, I learned soon enough that this was not his name, but rather the sort of joke he liked best. He had yellow hair and a yellow curling beard, and his eyes were large and gray. He was past his first youth and had reached an age when men are expected to act with dignity, but he seemed to me all the more agreeable for being so full of high spirits. I felt in my heart that his teasing comment had not been kind, but such was his charm that I found myself grinning all the same and shaking his hand gladly when he offered it.

  “Are you ready to meet the master?” he asked me, eyebrows raised.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” I returned timidly.

  This brought a howl of dismay from the hearth. “He’s not the master—I am!”

  A small boy hurtled out of a corner by the fire, where Mrs. Sexton had been working to undress him. He was perhaps six, but his face looked older, touched with hunger; he was sallow-skinned, with a shock of black hair hanging over his eyes. A dirtier child could not be imagined, and I drew away, mindful of my new dress.

  “I’m the master!” yelped the little imp, his dark eyes daring me to disagree, while Mr. Ketch traded glances with Miss Winter, on the verge of laughter.

  “Indeed you are,” said Mr. Ketch, clapping the boy on the shoulder. “All that I have is yours, little man, and this house is only the beginning. And you’re my shaggy godless devil, aren’t you, you little heathen git?”

  I blinked at the vulgarity, which tarnished Mr. Ketch’s charm, but the little boy tilted his head back to view his hero and showed his sharp teeth in a smile. “I’m a heathen git!” he confirmed with vigor.

  “And a little soap won’t do you any harm,” said Mr. Ketch, holding his neophyte off at arm’s length. “I’ll thank you not to go smirching my clean breeches. Young master, this is your very own young maid, so shake hands. She’s here to be your playmate. Now, go to Mrs. Sexton and let her make you presentable.”

  With that, he and Miss Winter left the kitchen, talking easily like old friends.

  Mrs. Sexton set me stirring a turpentine concoction while she bathed the little boy in a tub. We had to change the water several times, lugging the tub between us, and I was vexed that the urchin splashed my new dress. “I’m master of this kitchen,” he proclaimed when I scolded him. “Master of you, and you, and them in the other room.”

  “Is that gentleman his father?” I inquired of Mrs. Sexton, nodding towards the door through which Mr. Ketch had gone.

  “You mean the old master?” she said. “I doubt it.” And she dabbed the turpentine mixture on the boy to kill his lice.

  “See here,” I said to the little boy next, “is the old master your dad?”

  “Him? Not likely,” he answered, enduring the stinging concoction without complaint. “Old Jack paid a pretty penny to get me.”

  “Then you’re nobody’s master,” I concluded triumphantly. “Nobody makes a stranger’s son the master of his land. He’s just having you on.”

  He opened his eyes wide enough at that intelligence and made a swipe to get me. I dodged, and he upset the turpentine over the hearthstones, where it raised a stink to make all our eyes water. A soapy sponge came hurtling through the air next and slapped me on the side of the head. Only the arrival of Arnby at the kitchen door prevented further combat.

  “Where’s the young master?” he inquired respectfully, removing his hat. “Oh, there you are, young sir. Allow me to bid you welcome to your new home. I’m here to get you measured.”

  After Arnby left, Mrs. Sexton sat us down to our supper. The little boy crammed food into his mouth with both hands, glaring at me all the while like a famished dog.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, hoping to recall him to good manners, but my tactic didn’t work. He only muttered gibberish, or some savage tongue, and leered at me when I looked baffled.

  “My name’s Tabby,” I said, “and you’ll have to call me that; I’ll not answer otherwise. Now, this time tell me your name.”

  For answer, he said the same gibberish as before and repeated it so readily and so often that I was forced to conclude it must be a designation of some sort; but on no account could I say it or remember it, no matter how often he jabbered it out.

  “Don’t you have a Christian name?” I asked. “What does Mr. Ketch call you?”

  “He calls me his rogue, or his little heathen git,” answered the boy, snatching my last crust of bread from me.

  “Well, I won’t call you any such thing,” I asserted, resigning the crumb with dignity. “You’ll have to have a decent Christian name.” But this sent my companion into a torrent of gibberish, laughing all the while over my annoyance.

  “Bed,” grunted Mrs. Sexton, rising from her bench and laying aside her pipe. That put me in mind of the cold dead girl who waited to share my bed with me.

  Before I could speak, my problem settled itself. “I want to sleep with her,” clamored the little boy with the heathen name. “Her room is mine, isn’t it, so she has to let me.”

  I acquiesced at once.

  Almost immediately, I repented my decision. Upon reaching our room, the little boy skinned up a bedpost and swarmed about in the curtains, shouting commands to himself about rigging and sails. I expected Mrs. Sexton to order him down, but she went about her work at the hearth as if she were deaf and dumb.

  “Come down from there before you tear the fabric,” I demanded in as imperious a manner as I knew, but he hung upside down from the canopy frame and laughed at my attempt at authority.

  “I don’t do what you want,” he replied. “I’m master here.”

  “Then act like one. Masters don’t go climbing about in the bed curtains.”

  To my surprise, that remark worked on him like magic. “What do masters do?” he asked soberly, dropping to the floor. When I informed him that masters lay down, said their prayers, and went to sleep, he surprised me again by his compliance. “No prayers, though,” he told me. “Old Master Jack don’t say them.”

  We soon were tucked in as well as could be expected, though he stank horribly of turpentine and squirmed like a litter of puppies. The phlegmatic Mrs. Sexton took her leave, locking the door behind her.

  I had been afraid of the coming night, but this night was nothing like before. My companion played noisy games with the shadows on the curtains, narrating pretend combats. I had no thought to spare for ghosts then; it took all my ingenuity to deal with the living. But I hit upon the strategy of asking my charge to name all the things of which he was master. The result was an exhaustive reckoning, and a capital soporific: I held on through a long list of pots, pans, crockery, and fire irons, but dozed off while he was naming the butter churn, the back stairs, and all the jam in the pantry.

  When he jerked upright, he startled me. I opened my eyes to find the firelight gone and the room completely dark.

  “Get away!” he cried. “W
e don’t want you here. You can’t come in!”

  “What is the matter?” I asked in confusion, reaching out to quiet him. “Wisht now, you’re having a nightmare.”

  “No nightmare,” he said decisively. “It was some girl sneaking into bed. I sent her away. Lucky for you I let you stay here,” he added, snuggling close to me.

  In an instant, he was asleep again, breathing deeply and evenly, while I lay awake and wondered if I had imagined the sound of footsteps running away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lively disarray met my gaze when I climbed out of bed in the morning: my companion had discovered the childish treasure in the bottom of the clothes press and had scattered it across the floor. The papers were trodden on, a sampler was covered in ashes, and most of the feathers were spoiled, for he was using them as swords to fight a duel, stabbing the air, with shouts and curses.

  “Hush your noise,” I said, gathering up the items to restore them to their hiding place. He paused to watch me, chest heaving, probably considering the best way to run me through. Then his sword became a feather again, and he dropped it to the floor for me to tidy up with the others.

  “What did you wrap the mirror for?” I wanted to know. He had draped it with a pillowcase.

  “It’s no good,” he answered, heaping the buttons into a pile. “When I look in, other faces look out.”

  “It’s old,” I said. “It needs new silver.” But all the same, I didn’t unwrap it.

  “It’s where the other girl lives,” he said, sitting on the floor and setting the coins on their edges like wheels. “She can’t live in the chimney, her fingers wouldn’t be so cold then.”

  “She’s dead,” I told him. “She can pass through the locked door.”

  He rolled one of the coins into his pile of buttons. “Dead people creep into the house at night,” he said, “to hunt for crumbs under the table.”

  I shuddered, then pretended it was due to the chilly morning and dragged a blanket from the press to pull around my shoulders. “That’s a foolish, pagan idea,” I said, sitting down beside him. “The dead do no such thing. The bad dead go to hell and roast in flames, and the good dead go to the kingdom of heaven and sing songs with the Lord Jesus.”

  “She didn’t go anywhere,” he said, aiming another coin at his stack.

  “Maybe she did,” I rejoined virtuously. “Maybe she’s come visiting. She’ll do us no harm. A curate told me the dead can’t harm the living.”

  “What’s a curate?” he wanted to know.

  I was deeply shocked. “How could you not know that? They preach, and christen babies, and marry people, and when you die they follow your casket and pray over the grave.”

  “They must know about dead people, then,” admitted the little boy.

  After breakfast, my charge was restless indoors, possessed with a keen desire to climb onto a sideboard and pluck down one of the weapons that hung as decoration above it: a reasonable course, he did not tire of telling me, as they belonged to no one else. To discourage his martial zeal, I persuaded him to walk with me in a private garden that lay next to the house, though the sky was lowering and the wind was chill. This garden I had seen through the windows of Miss Winter’s room, and I had spotted its high walls while I was up on the hillside the day before.

  Once there, I discovered I didn’t like it. The high rock walls gave us shelter, but the north wind whistled and moaned in their cracks. It was a topiary garden; but while the general form of such plantings is orderly and geometric, with neat hedges and cunning shapes, this had become overgrown, and its present gardeners had no interest in restoring order or design. The yew bushes were enormous, taller than a grown man’s head, and clipped into irregular, bulbous shapes, like huge dark puddings.

  There I learned that the mind is unhappy with uncertainty and tries to make sense of the senseless. The yews seemed to my mind like giants huddled in dark cloaks, fat men with wide hats, stacks of millstones, or heaps of boulders. So far were they from their original size that we had to turn sideways to edge past their unnatural forms. Their effect within the enclosed space was suffocating.

  My companion, being smaller, didn’t mind as much as I. To him, they were ideal barricades from which to prepare an ambush for the enemy, a fallen twig supplying him with a gun and another becoming a knife. He ran and shouted, collected spiders and executed them with great cruelty and solemnity, and amused himself for an hour with little assistance from me.

  At length, he tired of vigorous pursuits and settled in a mossy corner where garden wall met house wall and the monster yews drew back a pace. Here he set to building a dungeon scooped out of the mold, and for prisoners, peopling it with earthworms.

  It vexed me that he had no name, so I sat by while he played and tried out all the names I knew. None of them seemed to suit him. They matched healthy English boys who played ball on the village green. My charge was assuredly not English, with his sallow face and gibbering speech; in play, he lapsed again and again into his barbarous tongue. Like a fairy-tale beast that required a special word to tame it, he required a name beyond the ones I knew.

  “Do you know what name you were christened by?” I ventured to ask, but his ignorance on the point was so profound that he had doubtless never been christened at all. Then superstition took hold, and I began to fear I would be naming him for the first time, and thus become responsible for his fate. There is a witchcraft in names. They are not a trifling matter.

  “I’m a heathen git,” he proclaimed with satisfaction. “That’s my Christian name.”

  “Don’t be vulgar,” I said. “You don’t know what that means.”

  “Can you tie a hitch?” he asked, picking up a twig, and he proceeded to demonstrate the art with one of the prisoner worms. This interested me: it was something like knitting, so I entered into the play. Before long, he had progressed in his instruction, and I could splice a brace of worms as neatly as any sailor. I repaid him by demonstrating the best love knot I knew; but here our resources failed us and we had to go digging again, for the love knot required many worms.

  I began to grow uneasy. I could feel a person’s gaze, and yet no one was there. I supposed Miss Winter walked in the garden, for now and then I thought I caught a flash of black dress between the shapes of yew. But I could not be sure. The day was drear, and the tall bushes rose like slabs of dark rock to block my line of sight.

  “Untie the short one there, I’ll add it to the end,” directed Himself. This was the title I had bestowed on him in my mind for the purpose of avoiding a name.

  I caught movement at the corner of my eye a few feet off in the garden. Black dress. Black sockets. The dead maid. But the instant I saw her, she vanished.

  “What do I do after this turn?” he asked. “Hi! Don’t scoot there, you’ll mash the end.”

  Just at the edge of my vision, she walked by again. I scooted further, ignoring his curses. “I don’t like facing the corner, that’s all.”

  We were playing by the slender trunk of a short exotic tree, with long thin leaves clustered like a child’s fingers. I turned my back to the tree and to our corner, facing down the crowd of formless shrubs. A gust of wind blew the little leaf hands down to tickle the back of my neck. One of the hands was ice cold.

  “Let’s go inside,” I said, jumping up and accidentally treading on our knot.

  Himself continued tying worms. “You’re doing what he wants,” he told me. “Act like you don’t see him.”

  “Who?” I asked, turning from side to side in my agitation.

  “The old man with eyes like windows.”

  Black cloth flashed between the yews, but this time Mr. Ketch came through the dark green shapes, dressed in a sober suit of dull black twill. He cut a fine figure, but his handsome face had lost its color and fallen into lines. Our worm knots set him laughing, and he resumed his accustomed appearance.

  “How’s my little heathen git?” he demanded, and the sallow-faced boy answered him with
a joyful shout.

  “Sir, do you know his name?” I asked.

  Mr. Ketch clapped his protégé on the shoulders and gave him a playful shake. “A young rogue like this doesn’t need a name, do you? Young rogue, I hate this house. I most particularly hate this garden. What do you say to a little shooting out on the moor?”

  Himself shouted louder. Mr. Ketch glanced behind me and hurriedly looked away. “Good, good,” he said. “Let’s be gone. God, what a place for the nerves.” And he marched Himself off so quickly that I couldn’t keep up with them, though I had no liking for the garden either.

  I whiled away the afternoon with Mrs. Sexton in the kitchen, helping her put the marks on a new set of sheets. We neither of us said ten words to the other and so got on capitally, for I’m not one to mix talk and work, and Mrs. Sexton was not one to talk at all. When we heard the shots, I thanked the Almighty that our bench was no closer to the window. I wouldn’t have put a gun in that boy’s hands for gold.

  Arnby brought Himself into the kitchen some time later, the pair of them wearing long faces.

  “The young master’s not to go shooting,” he told me, “nor do aught else that could be dangerous. Maidie, I expect you to see to it. Keep weapons out of his hands. And just look, young sir, it’s started raining. You’d be coming inside regardless. We’ve got your health to think of, haven’t we?”

  This did little to mend matters with Himself, who retreated behind that shaggy black forelock of his and glowered like a thundercloud. He held his peace while Arnby stood by, but he made me leave my sewing, and when we had gained the passageway, he gave full vent to his spleen. Old Master Jack and he had been having a grand time shooting birds when Arnby had come rushing up the hill. Then he and Master Jack had had a talk, and that was the end of the fun.