by Neil Gaiman
“All right then, Olive Bell. I understand you’ve come quite some way.”
“From Sheffield, sir.”
“Are you from Sheffield, originally?”
Olive nodded, her eyes still enormous and reflective. Cecil felt a shiver and prayed it did not show.
“Mosborough, sir.”
Cecil crossed his legs and sat back. “I see.”
Furrowing his brow, the lord of the house reached over to the pipe stand on the table before him and chose a meerschaum with little deliberation. He packed it and pinched a match from the cup, and just before he struck it he raised his eyebrows in a solicitous manner and said, “Does it bother you?”
Olive pursed her lips.
“The smoke,” Cecil explained. “Will it bother you?”
“Oh, no sir. No, it won’t.”
“Good,” he murmured as he struck the match. He touched the flame to the densely packed tobacco and drew deeply from the stem. “I do not smoke often, but I confess I enjoy it.”
For several prolonged minutes the pair sat in silence, the master quietly smoking his pipe and the prospective servant gawping at the hands folded in her lap.
“Have you been to Dorset before now?”
“Is this part of the interview, sir?”
“It’s only a question.”
“I haven’t, sir.”
“Then why should you want to live here? Why not London, or Manchester?”
“Hardy, sir.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Thomas Hardy. He came from Dorset. His Wessex stories are all about Dorset.”
“Is that so?”
“It is, sir.”
“Blimey.”
What Cecil Hughes would have liked to say, apart from “Blimey,” was something like, “What a perfectly preposterous reason to pull up one’s roots and move cross country,” but he did not. His decorum was not the result of diplomacy, but the result of the young woman’s startling grey eyes, which once more had become the object of his own staring pair. Cecil shot up from the lounge and moved quickly to the window, keeping his back to his subject.
“Have you any references?”
“Mrs. Eleanor Martin, sir.”
“In Sheffield, I presume?”
“She is, yes.”
Cecil waved it off. “Never you mind, then. I knew a Martin once, a Frederick Martin. Affable chap. Killed a dozen Huns in the war and never spoke of it.”
“I don’t know him, sir.”
“Nor should you,” Cecil said officiously as he pivoted on the heel of his shoe to face her again. “I’m satisfied. Have you your things, then?”
“Just the one trunk, sir. It’s in the foyer, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll have some boys take it up for you.”
“Then I’ve got it?” Olive’s face registered something like shock; her large grey eyes grew larger still. “The position, I mean—I’m hired?”
“Naturally. Don’t you still want it?”
“Oh, Mr. Hughes, I do!”
“Splendid,” said Cecil, turning back to the window and the sloping hill. “Up the stairs, third door on your left. That’s your room from now on. I am certain the journey from Sheffield was a tiring one, and you are permitted to rest today and begin tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hughes,” Olive said, her voice returning to the whisper with which she began. “Thank you.”
He waited until her footsteps—dainty as one might expect—grew quieter until he could not hear them at all. On the hilltop a sandpiper stood, its feathers ruffled up from the cold. Cecil watched the bird, but his mind was distant. He thought not of birds, nor hills, nor the possibility of snow. Cecil Hughes thought of Olive Bell, and in particular he thought of her startling large grey eyes.
And how very much like Marla’s they were.
II
Marla’s eyes were yellow and sunken when she died. Where they were not yellow they were red, webbed with burst capillaries, the product of the heaving coughs and stunted breaths that rushed her toward this ignominious end. To his credit, Cecil sat beside her throughout her final days and watched her slip away. More than this, he wiped her sweat-slick face with a damp cloth and held her hand when her lungs froze up and her face turned a horrific purple hue. He read letters to her, half of them wholly fabricated near the end when their friends stopped writing. He explained Ainsley’s achievements at school as best he understood them. He did absolutely everything within his power to mask his own emotion, the tremendous twisting, clawing feeling he had inside, and he did a very fine job of it.
Cecil was, by any standards, a splendid husband to his dying wife. And when at last the specter of death hung dark and near above her damp, cold bed, only Cecil was there to hear the words she rasped with her penultimate breath.
“I was beautiful, wasn’t I?”
He told her she was, and that she still was, and he meant it deeply—but Marla was already gone.
III
Though the morning was cool, the sun burned up the fog by midday and Olive relished the warm breeze that tickled the nape of her neck through the open window whilst she dusted Mr. Hughes’ writing desk and the photographs on the wall. One picture in particular warranted especial attention from the maid, its frame gilded and floral, its color a rusty sepia apart from the black and the white. In it sat a stern looking woman, stern but still beautiful by anyone’s standards, dressed in a dark fur coat and a jaunty, asymmetrical hat unlike any Olive had ever seen. The woman’s springy blonde curls flounced out from beneath the hat, almost mirthfully in spite of her drawn, austere face. Long after the last speck of dust was wiped away from both frame and glass, Olive continued to stare.
“My mother,” said an uneven voice behind her.
Olive jumped slightly, moved quickly away from the photograph as though she was caught in the commission of a crime. Standing in the doorway was a boy, no older than fourteen, dressed in the coat and short pants of his alma mater, the crest of which was sewn onto the lapel.
“She’s dead, you know,” said the boy. “I—I had an idea of it,” Olive replied. She could feel the heat rising to her cheeks. “It was awful at the end. I wondered why nobody put a pillow over her face or something, just for the mercy of it. Wouldn’t you want somebody to end your suffering, if you knew it would keep on ‘til you died?”
The heat retreated quickly and Olive blanched.
The boy went on: “I would. I certainly would. The vicar wouldn’t like it, though, would he? Sanctity of life and all that.”
A small grin played at the boy’s thin lips and he suddenly marched to the middle of the room, whereupon he extended his right hand. Olive froze where she stood.
“Ainsley Hughes,” he announced. “I’m just back from school. I attend Coventry, you know.”
“I—I didn’t,” Olive admitted.
Realizing that the maid was not going to take his hand, Ainsley lowered it and wandered over to his father’s writing desk.
“I shan’t be an author like papa,” he said, somewhat morosely. “I aim to be a solicitor. Perhaps an MP, someday.”
Olive smiled and a small breath passed her lips. Ainsley spun around, his brow in a red pinch.
“Is it funny, what I said? I could be an MP if I wanted. I can be Prime Minister if I want. What’s it to you? What the deuce do you know?”
Grasping the dust cloth tightly in both hands, Olive averted her eyes, which had gone wide and glassy from the tears she fought valiantly from spilling down her face.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” she whispered. “Not at all.” “Cheek,” Ainsley growled, and he stamped from the room. “I didn’t think it funny,” she rasped, her voice barely audible to herself, much less the boy who was halfway across the house by then.
She turned, absent-mindedly twisting the rag in her hands, and without intending it met eyes once more with the austere woman in the portrait on the wall. Ainsley’s mother. Her eyes seemed to drill into O
live’s own, and for a queer moment she almost felt as though she was peering into a mirror.
IV
“She’s awful, papa. Just awful. I hardly see what entered your mind when you took her on.”
Cecil was traipsing up the hill, walking stick in hand, his son straggling up on stumpy legs. Cecil’s legs were long for his height, and so were Marla’s. He did not know how Ainsley’s remained so stunted.
“When I was a boy,” Cecil said calmly, almost professorially, “I should never have thought to question my father’s decisions in matters thus.”
“Did grandfather ever take a doe-eyed ninny like that woman into his house?” Cecil paused, nearly to the crest of the hill, and sighed. “Olive is the maid, Ainsley. She cleans, dusts, makes the beds. If she is not of the highest intellectual acumen I think you and I can forgive her that, don’t you?”
“It’s you I’m thinking of, papa. I’m to be back at Coventry before the weekend. You have to live with the cretin.”
“That’s enough, Ainsley.”
Three mystical words, first the mother’s incantation but now transposed to the father, and at last the boy gave it up. Silenced thusly, he continued his straggling pursuit of Cecil to the crest of the hill. High over the treetops a flock of sheldrakes screamed by. Ainsley took up imaginary arms, positioning his rifle and spitting for fire at the noisy birds. Cecil knitted his brow and said nothing.
V
The discovery of the cat on the following Sunday set the Hughes house aflutter. Marfin, the gardener, was the one who found it, all twisted and broken, the unfortunate animal’s eyes gouged out. Marfin only came on Wednesdays and Sundays, and so there was no clear inkling as to how long the annihilated creature had lain amongst the hedges. That the gardener presented the horrible spectacle to Cecil at all was cause for reproach—”Have ye a butchers at this,” the man said—but privately Cecil was glad to have seen the cat in its gruesome state. He might otherwise have brushed it all off as the work of a fox, but there was no mistaking what he saw, dangling by the matted brown tail in Marfin’s fist. It was a human being who had done the killing.
Cecil instructed his man to bury the animal—anywhere, as long as it was deep enough to dissuade anything from digging it back up—and though he also made clear the incident was not to be spoken of, this decree came too late. Already Mrs. Rollo, Hughes’ cook, was loudly bemoaning the cat’s fate within earshot of half of Sherborne, by which means Olive Bell became acquainted with the gardener’s gruesome discovery.
It was for this reason that Cecil found his maid weeping in the parlor, her small, oval face pressed into her gloved hands. He sighed deeply, unaccustomed to female histrionics since his Marla died, and advanced slowly toward the sobbing girl.
“Come now,” he clumsily consoled the girl. “It’s only a cat.” “A—all God’s creatures,” she murmured wetly.
Cecil raised an eyebrow at her. “Sorry?” “God’s tender m—mercies are all over His creatures, Mr. Hughes.” “Oh, I see. That’s from the Bible, is it not?” “Psalm 145, sir.”
A smile, faint but a smile nonetheless, played at Cecil’s mouth and he sat down beside Olive on the lounge.
“You’ve read rather a lot, I gather.” “Some,” she agreed hesitantly. “Curious for a girl of your class, what?” “I’m fond of books, sir.” “And cats?” “I’m fond of them, as well.” “Books and cats,” Cecil said. “Well.” “It’s a terrible thing, Mr. Hughes,” Olive said, squeezing out the last syllable in just enough time before the floodgates reopened. She wailed freely as though she were home at Sheffield, and not at all in the presence of her employer, moaning and shaking at the shoulders. For his part, Cecil sat stock-still, shocked to silence, and gazed in wonder at the blubbering help.
“I say,” he managed at last, crinkling his brow and peering out, past the open doors to the empty, airy foyer. “Why, it’s only a cat.”
All at once Olive’s weeping came to an abrupt halt. She lowered her hands, craned her neck to look upon Cecil with narrow, red eyes. Her eyelids were puffy from the crying, her eyelashes matted and cheeks wet, but all the same the girl’s stunning steel-grey eyes pierced his soul and rendered him mute, incapable of a word, of moving even his little finger.
“God’s tender mercies, Mr. Hughes,” Olive reproached him. “Why, yes,” Cecil said softly, surprised at his own reply. “Yes, of course.”
She stood then, a fluid motion, and dabbed at one eye and then the other before walking gracefully from the lounge, across the parlor, disappearing into the echoing foyer.
And as if a spell had been broken, a curse lifted, Cecil shuddered off his start at the maid’s cheek. He rose, staggered halfway across the room, and paused.
“I say,” he whispered to himself.
VI
In the late evening, Cecil privately worried.
He worried some about Olive, about her candor and attitude earlier that afternoon. There was no question in his own mind as to why he took her on—it was her eyes that got the position, Cecil knew that perfectly well, though he would never admit it to anyone else. Still, his highest hope had been that the small indiscretion would prove forgivable, that the girl would turn out a suitable maid in spite of her unknowability. Her deuced strangeness.
Cecil worried too about Ainsley. Often he did; many nights he lay sleepless in bed, the puzzled widower unsure of the tricky dichotomy between a father’s strong hand and a motherless son. At the very least the boy spent three quarters of the year away at Coventry, ostensibly somebody else’s problem, but Ainsley remained Cecil’s responsibility, his heir. A man took the reins, took control of his progeny, shaped them into the man they were to become. A proper man, anyway. Yet the lad’s anger, that was what troubled Cecil so. His anger and his defiance. And then there was the matter of the damned cat…
It was possible that the boy could have done it. He left on Friday, after tea, but the outrage might have been committed at any time between Marfin’s visits, leaving Ainsley two full days to—Cecil shivered. All that prattle about Olive, the boy’s evident, misplaced fury over her, and how he played at shooting the sheldrakes. Cecil did not give a fig about cats, but by God the eyes.
The eyes!
Cecil jolted up in bed, exhaled a noisy gasp and felt the flesh crawl at the back of his neck. Funny, he thought, how the pieces come together so. The whole ghastly affair was so terribly clear now.
The girl, her startling grey eyes. Ainsley must have noticed, he had to have. She was his mother, and to see her own cool, handsome eyes looking at him from a stranger’s face, much less the bloody maid!
“Bugger and blast!” Cecil barked. He threw his legs over the edge of the bed, winced at the cold floor beneath his bare feet. “Ainsley, my God.”
Much too late to do a thing about it now, he realised. He wanted nothing more than to seize the boy by the neck, to box his ears, but even if he should take the Crossley to Coventry there would be no one about, not that early. There was nothing else for it. Cecil had to wait.
So he shrugged his shoulders into his robe and stepped into his slippers, and he padded softly downstairs to the study. There he switched on the lamp, and he was instantly startled by a luminous figure looming at the window. Cecil emitted a small cry, but he was embarrassed immediately to determine the figure was nothing more than his own reflection in the glass. That girl, he mused, certainly does a cracking job on the windows.
His heart still hammering at his ribs, Cecil laughed quietly and turned to the wall beside the desk. Marla looked back at him, surrounded by gold and flowers, the sepia hue of the photograph failing miserably at concealing the sober grey of her lovely eyes.
“Bit barmy tonight, aren’t I?” he said to her. “Are you all right, Mr. Hughes?”
Again Cecil cried out. He spun about and found Olive in the doorway, a candle glowing atop the candlestick in her hand. She wore a long woolen nightgown and her hair was done up. She looked older than her years. Like somebody’s
mother.
“God a’mighty, woman!” he snarled. “You gave me a fright.” “I’m terribly sorry, sir. Really I am.” “It’s all right, Olive.” “I didn’t mean—” “It’s all right.”
The girl smiled. It was a soft smile, with small, soft lips. Cecil reddened, turned quickly back to his portrait of Marla. Her solemn gaze—it never changed.
“A cup, then?” Olive asked. “Won’t take a minute.” “Yes, Olive. Yes, I think that would be just the thing. Thank you.”
Olive went off to the kitchen, hardly her domain but tea was tea, and Cecil lowered himself onto the chair before the writing desk. He would not get so much as a kip in before dawn, and he knew it. A long night ahead. He crossed one leg over the other and waited for his tea.
Outside the ink black sky rumbled.
VII
The rain fell in sheets all morning. Cecil paced the house, from top to bottom and left, right, and centre, his anxiety driving the staff mad though not a one dared say a word. At last the clock struck nine as Cecil was descending the stairs, whereupon he bolted across the ground floor for the telephone in the parlor, nearly colliding with a rather startled Olive along the way.
In minutes he was connected with Coventry. He did his utmost to conceal his panic and aggravation.
“Mr. Harbottle, please,” he snapped at the operator.
The operator tonelessly informed him that Harbottle was engaged. “Glasby then,” Cecil said. “Connect me to Mr. Glasby, and be quick about it.” The line clicked loudly in Cecil’s ear. A moment later it rattled and a tinny voice came on.
“Glasby? Glasby—Hughes, here. Listen to me, I want you to pull out Ainsley. He’s got to collect his things and be ready to come down to Sherborne straight away. I’d rather you sent him along but on short notice I should understand if I must drive up to collect him. Are you listening to me, Glasby? Listen, old man: I wouldn’t tell you all this if it wasn’t terribly important…”