The Dark Unwinding

by Cameron, Sharon

  I sat up late thinking of dishes that would be sufficiently party-like without stretching Mrs. Jefferies’s cooking skills, and Mary made sure my list of needed ingredients made its way to the riverboats. In the workshop, I helped Uncle Tully build a tiny steam train, a miniature of the engine he wished to run back and forth between the villages of Stranwyne. “Little things become big things,” he told me incessantly, and on Thursday we wound the clocks, systematically, rhythmically, and in the attempt to coax my uncle’s smile, I more often discovered that he had coaxed my own.

  With Mary’s help, I washed, scrubbed, scoured, and beat every particle of dirt from Marianna’s library. Both Lane and Ben came to help move the heavier furniture, and to evaluate what might be needed to make it an acceptable environment for my uncle. But all that had been seen to years ago by my grandmother, from the color of the walls to the box of toys found lurking in the corner, mostly gears and wheels and other metal playthings. I spent several late afternoons polishing each one, rubbing away the old oil and grease in Marianna’s bathtub while Mary glued wallpaper back onto the library walls.

  On the day I finished the last toy — a now-gleaming boat of tin — I ventured up to the garret in search of extra chairs, and instead found my missing bonnet. It was three stories up, outside a window that did not open, tied prettily by its ribbons onto an old flagpole that could only be reached by way of the roof and a narrow ledge. I broke the window as quietly as possible in the hours just before dawn, dislodging the bonnet with a broom handle, carefully giving no consideration to what I must have done to tie it there. Twice in that week, Mary insisted on dunking me in a cold tub, to “sober me up” she said, and I submitted meekly, though I’d only been happy, with no notion that my actions were strange.

  And public opinion or no, I went rolling with Lane in the ballroom, telling myself that he knocked on Marianna’s door because he wanted my company, that I longed for him to turn me faster and faster beneath the spectacular lights because I loved to spin, not because of the feel of his hands on mine. And when I caught a glimpse of those dark thoughts on his face, I pretended it was because he would miss me and had nothing to do with the irreparable harm I was going to cause him, cause all of them, when I left. I received two letters addressed in Aunt Alice’s handwriting, and fed them both to the fire, unread.

  The day before the party I baked biscuits and scones with Mrs. Jefferies, an activity she had reluctantly acquiesced to, I suspected, solely on a request from Lane. But no sour look of hers could weigh down my buoyant mood. She wore her dressing gown again, her usual apparel for the heat of baking, I’d realized, and just as the last of the scones had come out of the oven, Lane ducked through the open kitchen door, a wooden pail in his hand. I smiled.

  “From Sam Jones in the Upper Village,” he said, holding out the pail for me to investigate. “Or his mother, more likely. Said they were ‘for the lady’s birthday.’”

  I peeked over the edge of the bucket. It was full of whortleberries. “How lovely! But …” I looked up from the bucket. “Who is with my uncle?”

  “He’s gone to his sitting room. I left Ben in the workshop, just in case, but Mr. Tully said good night, so I don’t think he’ll be going anywhere.” Then he spoke very low; I had to lean close to hear. “Are you starting a new fashion, Miss Tulman?”

  I looked up into the gray gaze, bemused.

  “That flour on your forehead is so becoming, I reckon every girl in the village will be wearing it by next week.”

  I laughed, trying to wipe my forehead with a sleeve. How I loved this little game we were playing. I nodded toward his pail. “But what shall I do with them, do you think?”

  Lane shrugged. “No idea. What do you say, Aunt Bit?”

  Mrs. Jefferies looked up from the bowl she was scrubbing, at the two of us standing with the bucket between us, her frizzing hair sticking out all over her head. She muttered something unintelligible.

  “What was that, Aunt Bit?”

  “I said, ‘tart’!” she snapped.

  Lane’s brows went up, but I merely continued to smile, choosing to assume that her answer was a reference to where the berries should go, and not to my person. Either way, it didn’t really matter. “Tarts it shall be, then. Here,” I pushed the pail toward Lane’s chest. “A gentleman would wash those for me.”

  He folded himself down comfortably into a chair. “A gentleman,” he said dramatically, propping his long legs, one over the other, on the table, “would do no such thing. As my old dad once said, ‘Les messieurs avant leurs privilèges.’”

  I glanced at Mrs. Jefferies, who was rolling her eyes, and returned to Lane’s rather smug expression. “All right, then, what does it mean?”

  “It means,” he replied, “that gentlemen take what they can get.” And he popped a berry into his mouth, an action I responded to by flinging the flour still on my hands, which was considerable, at his head. He sputtered in a dusty cloud, and we played in a similar way until all the berries I could rescue were inside the tarts rather than him, and both Lane and the kitchen were a ghostly mess.

  I went to the washbasin while Lane retreated to the garden to brush off his shirt and hair, and I was humming, still giggling to myself, rinsing off my hands, when Mrs. Jefferies said suddenly, “You remember I said I’d be making it hard for you.”

  I turned to look at her, my fingers dripping. She had been quiet as a church mouse while the two of us acted so ridiculously. Not participating, of course, but not hindering either. Now she was cleaning the knife I’d used to cut up the larger berries, polishing it slowly with a cloth, and it occurred to me that she’d made not one objection to my touching her things or coating them with flour. I’d forgotten in my distraction.

  “You sat right there at my table,” she continued, without looking up, “bold as brass, and I told you I’d be making what you’d come to do hard, just as hard as I could. Only I didn’t have to, did I, Miss? You’ve done that all by yourself.” She ran her cloth thoughtfully down the length of the knife. One, two, three, four times … “How you’ll be living with it afterward is beyond me. I don’t think you’ll be wanting to, that’s what I’m thinking.”

  I dried my hands, telling myself that what she’d said was meaningless, nothing, only vitriol and spite; meaningless, nothing, only vitriol and spite; over and over again, learning my lines like a school lesson. Surely there was not another soul in England that could delude themselves like I could.

  “And what’s that, then?” she asked, pointing with her knife. I looked down and saw that my sleeve was pushed up, clearly showing a row of green-purple bruises ringing my wrist like a bracelet. I had woken with them that morning, the knots in the sash of my dressing gown pulled tight.

  “Oh,” I said brightly, jerking down my sleeve, “I just caught my wrist in the door, that’s all.”

  Back and forth went the cloth. “Caught your wrist?”

  “Yes. Silly of me, wasn’t it? Well, thank you so much for all your help, Mrs. Jefferies. I’ll just go upstairs now.”

  I left her polishing the knife, a small smile on her face, and tucked her words into the back of my mind, where they need not be examined.

  Mary waited for me in Marianna’s room, but when I sat at the dressing table to unpin my hair it was her face, not my own, that held my attention in the mirror. Her forehead was wrinkled, her eyes downcast, her lips a long, thin line.

  “I’m all upset, Miss,” she stated unnecessarily.

  I turned around to get a better look at her. It could not be the party. Mary had taken her exclusion not only with good grace, but with outright contempt at my thought of inviting her. A young woman of “her position,” Mary maintained, did not attend her own mistress’s birthday celebration. She was correct, of course, but it could be difficult to tell when Stranwyne’s rules matched up with the rest of the world and when they did not. But Mary was standing in silence, and that could only mean something was seriously wrong. “Why don’t you jus
t tell me what’s bothering you, Mary?”

  She crossed her arms and her mouth pressed even tighter. “Well, since you asked me plain, I’ll speak even plainer. It’s your dress, Miss. It’s ugly.”

  My mouth opened slightly.

  “There’s just no way to be dipping that one in sugar. It’s a shame to wear it after all your trouble, and any good lady’s maid would have been making you a new one, and I gave it a go, Miss, I truly did, but … I’m thinking you don’t really want to be seeing it. Them old linens just wasn’t …”

  “Mary,” I said patiently, “if a lady wanted a dress, she would go to a dressmaker’s or, at the very least, hire a seamstress. The heavy sewing is not part of a lady’s maid’s duties.” I watched Mary’s solemn face committing this vital information to memory. “So in no way have you been remiss in —”

  “Does that mean I ain’t to blame? Because if it does I —”

  “Yes, that’s what it means. And second of all, you know perfectly well that I have a gray silk in the trunk that I brought for best.”

  “But, Miss!” I thought Mary might actually stomp her foot. “It’s uglier, I swear on the grave of Saint Michael, it is! I’d see you pinning flowers on the one you’re wearing before I’d let you go running about in that. And it doesn’t suit! Even you know it doesn’t suit.”

  “Well …” I bit my lip. A thought had come into my head long ago, but I had planned on leaving it there. “There is something … but I’m not sure I dare. It’s not fashionable, or even appropriate….”

  Mary’s hands were on her hips in an instant. “Show me.”

  I thought for a moment, then slipped my hand behind the dresser mirror and pulled out the key to the wardrobe. I felt very possessive of Marianna’s dresses. They had remained in the wardrobe for so long, and their presence made me feel that she was not so far away. But when I inserted the key and turned, there was nothing to turn. The wardrobe door was unlocked.

  I frowned. I’d made sure to lock it after the night I was ill, and found a new hiding place for the key. Mary could have come across the key, I supposed, but I was afraid to ask; I was afraid she would say she hadn’t. I threw open the doors, breathed in the scent of lilies and cinnamon, and then Mary was beside me, her pressed lips now a line of grim determination at the sight of those shelves.

  “Can we work on them, Miss? To make them fit? Can you sew?” She had a rose-colored silk down and was jerking at the buttons of my worsted before I could answer.

  “I think they mostly fit already. But Mary, they must be thirty years old, even more, maybe. If I went out in such a thing in London …”

  Mary jerked the worsted right off my back. “This is Stranwyne Keep, Miss, in case you haven’t noticed where your own feet are standing. What have we to do with London?” She pulled the silk over my head and eyed me critically.

  Before half an hour had passed, dresses of every color were spread over the room, an explosion of spring amongst the brooding furniture, and I had been dressed and undressed at least a dozen times. Mary pulled the blue-green gown from its tissue, and it fell in smooth waves from her hand to the floor, shimmering in the candlelight. She had it over my head in a trice, and we both stared into the mirror as I fidgeted.

  “I don’t know. It would be so foolish….” The dress was more beautiful than I had remembered; I was more beautiful than I had remembered. But my heart sank at the thought of being in a room full of people and discovering myself to be the only one in costume. Mary clicked her tongue.

  “The foolishness is in wearing the other one, Miss. If you try to put the gray thing on, I’ll throw it in the fire. Just see if I won’t. What else is in here?”

  “Slippers in the drawer,” I said, secretly pleased by her confidence. “And gloves and …”

  Mary was stepping up onto the raised floor of the tall, closet-like side of the wardrobe to peer at the upper shelves, either unaware of the existence of the stepladder or ignoring it, when she shouted, “There ain’t no back, Miss! There ain’t no back at all!”

  I turned a little half circle, trying to see over my own shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

  Mary hopped back down to the floor, pointing into the darkness of the closet side of the wardrobe, motioning for the candle. I brought it and shone the feeble light into the interior. Where the planks that made up the back of the wardrobe should have been, three or four of them were gone, showing instead the panels of a door, the wood the same color as the wardrobe, nearly invisible in the dark. “It’s the other connecting door,” I said, amazed. “The wardrobe has been covering it up.” I climbed inside, holding the candle before me. A brass knob gleamed in the light. I looked back at Mary. “Should we?”

  Mary’s response to this was both pitying and disgusted. “No, Miss, we should just be putting on our nightgowns and have a proper sleep without thinking no more about it. Go on, then!” She shooed me forward, and I turned the knob. The door swung into the darkness of the next room noiselessly. Mary climbed inside the wardrobe, grabbed my hand, and we clambered through together. “Coo,” Mary whistled softly, hanging close on my free arm as I held up the candle.

  We were in a nursery, just as dank and cobwebbed as my own room had been when I first came to Stranwyne, though somehow even more desolate. Three small beds were in a row down one wall, their mattresses moldering, and a high iron grate stood before a hearth that was long disused. I looked at the beds, wondering which one my father had slept in. Mary cooed again.

  “If I was the ghost of a dead child, I’d choose here to be coming back to. Don’t you think so, Miss, ’cause if —”

  “Hush, Mary,” I said beneath my breath. I had heard rustling when we first entered, but I couldn’t hear it now. Mice, scuttling to their holes, no doubt. I took a few steps farther into the room, Mary attached to me like an extra limb, letting the light shine this way and that on tables, broken toys, a dresser, and a rocking chair. I lowered the candle. What I was seeing gave me pause. Unlike the dust that had lain so thick and regular in Marianna’s room, whole sections of this floor were nearly bare of it. Mary finally let go of me to peek into a dresser drawer, and I examined the rocking horse beside it, running my fingers over the genuine hair of its mane. It was nearly dust-free. And then, in a corner, I saw something I thought I recognized.

  “Good Lord, Miss! Be careful of your dress!” Mary whispered. “You don’t want it clean all this time just to dirty it up now, do you?”

  I straightened up from my perusal of the floor. What I was seeing was too large for a mouse, and even, I hoped, for a rat. Rabbit droppings. “Has Davy come through our rooms, Mary?”

  “No, not that I’m knowing about, Miss. I —”

  “And you keep your door to the library locked?”

  “Of course, Miss, I told you I —”

  “And my door to the corridor stays locked, doesn’t it?”

  “I think so. What are you … Lord, are them things from a rabbit?”

  “I believe so. But how he could be getting in here is a mystery to me.” We walked the room, but there was no sign of an entrance or exit other than the wardrobe door. I sighed. “Well, there’s certainly no harm in it, but all the same, I don’t want him coming through our rooms without our knowing. He’s very good at hiding.”

  “That he is, Miss. He had to be, at the workhouse, if you take my meaning.”

  I had been making my way carefully back to the door, holding up my candle and the dress, but I stopped to look at Mary. “No, I don’t take your meaning. Are you saying that Davy was in the same workhouse as you?”

  “Oh, yes. Didn’t you know that, Miss? He was just a slip of a thing, always trying to make himself small, so he couldn’t be noticed. And they’d beat him, Miss, when he wouldn’t do as they said, or answer back, or say his name.”

  I winced. If Mary had been nine years old at Saint Leonard’s, then Davy couldn’t have been more than four. I started for the door again.

  “Mum was tr
ying to help him some, but she couldn’t be doing a thing with him, so she showed him to Mr. Babcock, and Mr. Babcock snatched him right up and brought him here to Mrs. Jefferies, and he took to her like fire — Davy, not Mr. Babcock — and so he’s been since. She was the one deciding to call him Davy, I reckon. And she seems to know what he’s thinking, too. Uncanny, that’s what my mum says.”

  We stepped through the wardrobe and back into Marianna’s room, which seemed like a haven of homeliness compared to the deserted nursery. “Well, let’s make certain the doors stay locked, Mary, even if we just nip down the hall for a moment. It’s no fit place for a child to play, in any case.”

  Mary waxed long in agreement to this, and when she had finally gotten me ready for bed and tidied up the room to her satisfaction, she ran off to bed herself. I shut and locked the wardrobe in my nightgown, then looked about, trying to think of a place that a little boy would never find a key. After some deliberation I placed the key in the center of an old chemise, rolled it up several times, then stuffed it into the very bottom of my trunk, beneath my corset, reasoning that my underthings should be more than a sufficient deterrent. I tied my wrist to the bedpost and went to sleep, thinking carefully of the blue dress and berry tarts and flour-streaked hair and nothing else. And the trogwynd sang loud that night.

  The morning of my eighteenth birthday broke with thunder. I untied myself, leapt out of bed, and threw back the drapes. Instead of the bowl of blue I’d seen every day since my carriage ride to Stranwyne, there was a ceiling of cloud gathered over the moors, low and thick. The grasses swayed a different shade of green in the dimming light, and in a wind that blew from the wrong direction. I smiled with satisfaction. The day was special.