The House of Dead Maids

by Clare B. Dunkle

  I came in for a share of his bad humor when I pointed out that spring was no time for shooting, as the birds were still raising their young. “I’ve a right to do as I please on my land,” he exclaimed furiously. “I can shoot an egg if I want to!”

  We were near Miss Winter’s rooms just then, in a passage with homely rag rugs, one of the few passages in the house lit by its own window. This pleased me better than the dusty rooms upstairs, so we took it over for our play, Himself running and sliding on the rugs while I sat by on the stairs. Then he hit upon the plan of searching the house for objects of treasure—“loot” was his curious word for it.

  “We’ll take it to our room,” he said. “I’m the leader, but we’ll go share and share alike.”

  I thought this an excellent plan: it had the advantage of keeping us indoors and my charge out of harm’s way. If he truly were master, as they all feigned, he could arrange the household goods as he liked, and if he weren’t master, then this “loot” scheme would bring a swift end to the farce. Either way, we would learn a thing or two worth knowing.

  The first room we searched was small and devoted primarily to books, which stood by the dozens in neat rows behind the glass of two mahogany cases. Several pictures of dull landscapes hung on the walls, and three large Dutch plates of blue and white reclined in a rack above a fruitwood chest of drawers.

  A horse’s hoof shod with a brass plate stood upon one of the bookcases. It struck my companion’s fancy, but I pronounced it barbaric. A teapot with a bright scene painted on its side sat upon a small table next to a comb-backed chair. I should have liked to call it loot, but Himself refused, paying me in kind for dismissing his hoof.

  He tried the drawers, but they were locked. Then he examined the right-hand bookcase, which was not. He took out a book, turning it various ways, and his eyebrows shot up when it opened.

  “It’s like a box,” he said, tipping it upside down and fanning out the covers. “It holds things.” But his voice was doubtful.

  “Books hold words,” I said, turning it over so we could see the pages. “These marks are all words. See, there’s A. That’s a word.”

  “Why keep old words?” he wondered. “Cannot you make new ones?”

  “People write down words so that others can read them later,” I said. “Like the name of this house over the door, or names on tombstones. Then the passersby can see if they knew that person, or if they’re a relative. I know how to spell my name, Aykroyd, and I look for it when I pass graveyards.”

  “So a dead person did this?” asked Himself, growing interested.

  A slight sound distracted us. Miss Winter stood in the doorway, with a countenance that made me wish I were elsewhere. Perhaps the loot plan was a bad one after all.

  “I see you’ve had enough of polishing the hall floor,” she remarked.

  “We’re taking loot,” Himself told her. “Share and share alike.”

  “Then you may leave. I’ve no grace to squander on a pair of urchins rifling through my things.”

  “They’re my things,” retorted Himself. “If you ask for them, I’ll give them back.”

  Miss Winter bestowed a tight smile on him. “Yes, the master owns everything, don’t you? How gracious to give me my things. And what do you have there, master?”

  “It’s a box to put words in,” he said. “Dead people’s words.”

  Miss Winter laughed at him. “Admit that you don’t know what it is. Fine possessions won’t help you if you’re too stupid to know what to do with them.”

  Himself stiffened, and his black eyes blazed. I thought he meant to strike her. But he tore out a handful of pages instead and hurled the book into the grate. While Miss Winter knelt to pluck it from the ashes, he ripped the loose pages into fragments. He said, “I knew what to do with that one, at any rate.”

  I expected her to box his ears at once for his rudeness and the ears of his nursemaid into the bargain. But when Miss Winter turned from the hearth, she still smiled, though it was an unpleasant smile, to be sure. “A good master wastes nothing,” she declared. “He knows each object has a use. But a fool doesn’t bother with what he knows nothing about, and that’s what you are—a fool.”

  I thought this speech no harsher than her usual way, but her words struck their intended target. Himself flushed deep red. Eyes averted, he dropped the ragged slips of paper and quitted the chamber at a run. He pattered down one passageway and up another to the broad staircase of the entrance hall; then he charged up it and disappeared into a room at the top.

  The chamber’s only furnishing was a massive oak buffet. I arrived to find one of the cabinet doors standing open, and Himself crawling inside. “Come out,” I coaxed, kneeling by his hiding place. “We’ll play a better game.” But he made no answer, nor did he speak thereafter, though I made the offer more than once.

  The chamber, poor in furnishings, was rich in decoration, and I had leisure to study it while I knelt in the dust and made my entreaties. Painted leather panels covered the walls, displaying curling vines and bold flourishes of fanciful red and blue flowers. A raised pattern of interlaced circles enlivened the white plaster ceiling, and a carved wooden overmantel surrounded the stone fireplace.

  While sufficient daylight entered the diamond-paned window, the painted panels gleamed with mellow warmth. But as the low dark clouds thickened and rain beat against the panes, color leached out of the chamber. The painted flowers began to look like winter’s withered leaves, and the molded ceiling like a frozen pond etched by the blades of skaters. Twilight gathered in the corners, and the rich details melted into the gloom. The heavy carving of the overmantel, muffled in dust, seemed to writhe with voluptuous shapes. Stains on the leather panels took on sinister forms.

  “Boy! Come out now,” I begged. “I’m cold, and I want my tea.”

  Himself made no answer.

  A point of darkness flickered at the edge of my vision—the shadow, as it were, of a candle flame. Frightened, I squinted at the square door of the buffet, determined not to take notice. The point thickened and spread, blocking the light from the window. A black dress next to my black dress. Gray hands reaching for mine.

  With a shriek, I dove inside the cabinet, surprising the little boy who huddled there. “Shift yourself!” he ordered, shoving at me. “You’re treading on my legs.”

  “It’s her!” I cried. “It’s her. If she comes in here, I think I’ll die.”

  “Who? Old Miss Wheyface?”

  “Wisht! Wisht!” Then I had to battle with myself to take my own advice.

  We held our breath, but even the wind was quiet. Not so much as a creak of old timber did we hear.

  “The ghost girl,” I whispered to Himself. “She stood right beside me.”

  He leaned past me to push the door open and looked out into the room. “I don’t see her,” he remarked, evidently disappointed. “And you told me this morning the dead do no harm.”

  His words put me in mind of the curate who had spoken them, himself now dead and gone. Ghosts shouldn’t frighten us, he had said, but I could not shake my dread of this one. She seemed so ghastly, trying to touch me with those dead hands, as if we were old friends. What reason did she have to seek me out?

  I crept from the buffet into the gloom of the coming night. A hand touched mine, and I jumped, but it was only Himself who stood beside me.

  “Time for tea,” I said, pulling him to the stairs. “Tea, and a nice hot fire.”

  Deep in the nighttime, when not a spark gleamed indoors, nor a star without, the dead maid stood by my bedside again and summoned me from sleep. She shook me as if to rouse me and take me with her, those chilly fingers sliding down my arm; I could not move for sheer terror, but shrank within myself. Then the little boy beside me stirred in the darkness, and his breath blew warm on my face. Breath, warmth, life—and courage.

  “Go away!” I cried. “We don’t want you here!” The icy fingers released me, and I sat up in bed. “Go away! Yo
u mean nothing to me. I don’t know you, you’re dead, go away!”

  This time, I heard no footsteps, but I could feel that she had fled.

  “The ghost girl?” asked Himself quite calmly as I lay back down, and I marveled that such a young child did not cry.

  When day broke, I found two altogether ordinary objects resting on the pillow beside me. So ordinary were they, in fact, that at first I gave them no notice. Two socks, of exactly the sort I had made every day for the past year or more. One sock had come from the hiding place in the clothes press, I discovered, and the other had come out of my greatcoat pocket. It was the sock I had been working during my journey to the house—had begun, but never finished. Yet here it was, tied off and complete, in the style of Ma Hutton’s school.

  And then I knew who the dead maid was.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Mrs. Sexton unlocked our door, I was waiting for her. “What happened to Izzy?” I demanded.

  She set down the ash bucket and handed me black clothes. “For the young master,” she said. “Took long enough, they were letting out the old master’s things first.”

  Himself was solemn as I helped him out of his rags and dressed him. “Master Jack wears a black coat,” he observed, twisting to try to see the back of his outfit.

  I felt proud of my charge. The new clothes suited his dark coloring and made him look a handsome lad; and then, he had that bearing some people have, even at his young age, of being the one who ought to be giving the orders.

  “He’s still barefoot,” I observed. “With a coat like this, he needs stockings and leather shoes.”

  Mrs. Sexton was running a rag over the mantel. “Nay, he’s all right,” she said.

  “And why black?” I wanted to know. “You don’t wear it.” Her own dress was brown homespun.

  “Black’s just for family,” she muttered.

  The absurdity of this remark loosened my tongue, and high time for it too. “But we’re not family,” I protested. “We none of us are. I’ve never worked in a house with more awkward staffing. And what did happen to Izzy? She came from the same school I did, and she wore black even though she wasn’t family. She should be a young woman by now. Instead, she’s walking nights. Why? The dead walk for a reason.”

  Mrs. Sexton cleared away the ashes and laid on the new coals. Then she sat back on her heels. “She was a sweet little thing. Didn’t know she was called Izzy. I don’t learn their names.”

  “Who killed her?” demanded Himself, standing by her on the hearth, an odd caricature of respectability in his fine black suit and bare feet. “Tell us who killed her. I want to watch him hang.”

  Mrs. Sexton took her pipe from her belt and cleaned out its bowl into the ash bucket. “You’ll have to ask the old maid or master that, young sir. I’m not one to tell tales.”

  We ran downstairs to breakfast, hearing as we went the hiss of raindrops against glass panes and the gentle plash of water dripping into shallow puddles in distant chambers of the house. When we reached the kitchen, we found a gray torrent pelting against the large windows, and the tall bushes by the garden wall bending and twitching under its onslaught as though they shuddered from the cold. There would be no chance of a ramble today, I told myself as we ate our bowls of porridge, and I contemplated the unwelcome prospect of amusing my high-spirited charge indoors.

  “Old Miss Wheyface will be in her rooms,” the little boy observed. “You can ask her what happened to your friend.” Then he appropriated my porridge and started in on it while I contemplated the even more unwelcome prospect of attempting to interrogate Miss Winter.

  After breakfast, I followed him to Miss Winter’s chambers, rather wishing I were going elsewhere. Miss Winter sat on a sofa with a tea tray nearby, her finger marking her place in a book. She winced as we entered hand in hand.

  “Lovely day for a funeral,” she said.

  “It’s the clothes Mrs. Sexton ordered for us,” I explained, brushing crumbs from Himself’s coat. He responded by pushing me away scornfully and advancing out of my reach. “Mrs. Sexton says black’s just for family,” I continued.

  “So it is,” she said.

  “But we’re not family,” I pointed out.

  “Indeed you are not,” she replied.

  “But that makes no sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” she agreed, turning back to her book. “Is that all?”

  It almost was. Miss Winter was exerting her usual influence over me. I could feel myself growing ugly and stupid. My companion diverted my attention by picking up a costly teacup. “The dead girl,” he prompted when I signaled him to put it down.

  “He means Izzy, miss,” I said as she glanced up sharply. “I—we, that is—we think it’s her, and we believe she’s not at rest. Mrs. Sexton told us to ask you about it.”

  “Izzy.” Miss Winter’s brow dented, and she pursed her lips. “Izzy . . . she was the first girl from your establishment, is that right?”

  “Yes, miss,” I responded.

  “She died not long ago. She visits me too. I don’t think she wants to leave. She was so happy here.”

  “Happy, miss?” I asked in some confusion. It wasn’t that I couldn’t picture a girl wanting to linger where she had been happy. It was that I couldn’t picture it happening here.

  “I blame myself,” said Miss Winter. “She was a pretty thing, and I made a pet of her. I haven’t been myself since she died. Perhaps if I could stop thinking of her, she would rest.”

  She went on like that, talking of the times they had had together, a lonely woman and her maid. Himself soon tired of listening and wandered off into the next room. Miss Winter didn’t seem to be listening to herself, either, and that distracted me; it made me wonder what she was thinking of just then, and I looked for signs of it. That handsome white face of hers never varied by much; it showed only what she wanted it to show. But her eyes showed too much, flashing and gleaming, roaming the room as if she wished I were gone.

  In her tale, Izzy was growing ill. Too much indulgence, weak lungs, a delicate constitution.

  Delicate like the fine porcelain teacup, I thought. That was what Miss Winter’s face resembled: delicate white plates. Expensive, perfect. Brittle.

  “We shared everything,” Miss Winter said, shaking her head sadly. “She was like the sister I never had.”

  “Like your own child, miss?” I asked sympathetically.

  “No!”

  Her glittering eyes transfixed me with a baleful glare. They gave me quite a turn. In one of my houses, the grandmother had lost her wits, and they had kept her tied to a chair. I should have liked Miss Winter to be tied to a chair just then.

  Gradually, her eyes dimmed, and she composed herself.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” she sighed. “I suppose she was like . . . like you say. Family. And you see now why you aren’t family yet, even though you’re dressed like family. But perhaps one day soon we’ll call each other sister.”

  I could envision no stretch of time long enough to produce such an unnerving result. “Yes, miss. Thank you, miss,” I answered. “I’d best see what the young one is up to.” And I made my escape, deeply grateful that Miss Winter was not yet prepared to take to her heart another sister she had never had.

  “Tabby, come see what I’ve found,” called Himself in a conspiratorial tone, crouching next to an open drawer.

  Inside lay two wax dolls as long as my forearm, crudely fashioned out of candle-tallow. They had neither hair nor clothes, and nothing but the merest hint of features, but we could tell one was a man and the other a woman. The dolls were run through and through with steel pins until they bristled with shining metal.

  I spied in the bottom of the drawer the enameled miniature of a lovely young woman with fair hair, rosy lips, and round white arms—the lid, or so it appeared, of a gentleman’s snuff box. But, alas! it had been ruined, wrenched from its box and then smashed, so that cracks disfigured the charming face and white flakes wreathed it ro
und, instead of lace. Beside the lid lay a lock of yellow hair, of such a hue and curl that I perceived it must have belonged to Mr. Ketch.

  “This one’s mine,” whispered Himself as he snatched up the man. “You can have her if you want.” And we tiptoed into the passage with our treasures, careful lest Miss Winter see us taking loot.

  In my whole life, I had had but one doll, a simple wooden dowel with a face of ink, and that humble creature had come to a violent end, chewed by the head groom’s mastiff. Now I carried my poor injured wax figure to the kitchen and promised the straight pins to Mrs. Sexton for a candle end, whose flame I used to aid their removal and smooth the wounds left behind. I named my new plaything Alma Augusta after a rich girl I had once served, because she had had fair hair like the pretty woman in the smashed portrait. Why this fancy seized me, I cannot tell; my bald and battered Alma bore scant resemblance to the fair-haired stranger, except that both had been badly treated.

  Taking an interest in our play, Mrs. Sexton fetched her rag basket and let us choose scraps to clothe them. Himself refused my offer to make proper garments for his doll. Instead, he knotted a piece of cloth around its legs in an ingenious fashion so that it looked like a baby’s clout. Nor would he allow me to remove the steel pins that pierced his doll’s bare chest.

  “Mine’s a pirate,” he told me. “They shot him full of arrows, but he can’t be killed. He’s the most frightening pirate, sailors drown themselves before he captures them because he makes them die terrible ways.”

  “Wouldn’t he rather be a lord?” I suggested, thinking that he would make rough company for Alma Augusta.

  “He is a lord,” said Himself, waving the figure menacingly at my young lady doll, who retired modestly behind a piece of cloth. “He’s a lord because he took over a whole island and killed all the natives, and now he lives in a palace and they call him Lord.”

  “King, I should think,” I corrected him.

  “Lord Pirate,” he declared. “Because he’s the most evil pirate in the world.”