The Glass of Time

by Michael Cox

  When she saw me she stopped, put down her mop and bucket, curtseyed, and smiled broadly.

  ‘Good-morning, miss,’ she said.

  She moved aside as I made my way down to where she was standing.

  ‘And who are you?’ I asked with a smile, for she seemed a most winning little creature.

  ‘Sukie Prout, miss. Upper house-maid.’

  ‘Well, Sukie Prout, upper house-maid, I’m very pleased to meet you. I’m Miss Gorst, Lady Tansor’s new maid. But you may call me Alice.’

  ‘Oh no, miss,’ Sukie said, visibly alarmed. ‘I couldn’t do that. Mrs Battersby would never allow it. She’d think it too familiar for one of the servants to address her Ladyhip’s maid so, and would scold me if she heard me. I must call you “miss”, miss, if you don’t mind.’

  I wanted to laugh, but she had such a serious look on her funny little face that I quickly checked myself. Not wishing to risk the wrath of Mrs Battersby (of whom I was already forming a distinctly unflattering impression), I therefore suggested that Sukie might address me as ‘Miss Alice’ out of the housekeeper’s hearing.

  ‘Are you afraid of Mrs Battersby, Sukie?’ I asked, seeing that she remained apprehensive.

  ‘Afraid? No, not exactly, miss. But she has a way about her that makes you careful to do what she asks. And her words can hurt sometimes, if she’s cross, though she never shouts at you, like old Mrs Horrocks did. It seems worse somehow that she don’t shout, if you know what I mean, miss. I can’t quite explain it, and p’raps I feel it more than others, though everyone – even Mr Pocock – is ruled by her, below stairs, I mean. I’ve heard Mr Pocock say it’s all a matter of character, though I’m not quite sure what he means.’

  ‘I still wish you to call me “Miss Alice”, in private,’ I said, ‘whether the Great Battersby likes it or not. Will you do that?’

  Sukie agreed, if somewhat reluctantly.

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ I replied. ‘I’m delighted to have made your acquaintance, Sukie Prout, upper house-maid, and hope very much that we’ll be good friends hereafter.’

  ‘Friends! Her Ladyship’s maid wants to be friends with queer Sukie Prout!’

  She gave a delighted little squeal and put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Is that what they call you, Sukie?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I pay it no heed,’ she said, with quiet defiance, ‘for I know I am indeed a poor queer thing. If I was bigger and cleverer, I dare say they’d call me something else, and so what’s the use in complaining?’

  ‘You’re not at all queer to me, Sukie,’ I said. ‘Indeed, you already seem to be the nicest and most sensible person I’ve met here.’

  A little blush began to colour her chubby cheeks.

  ‘Can you tell me one thing I’m curious about, Sukie?’ I asked, as she was picking up her bucket. ‘Why was Miss Plumptre dismissed?’

  Setting the bucket down again, Sukie looked up and down the staircase, and lowered her voice to a whisper.

  ‘Well, miss, that was a great scandal. They said she’d taken a valuable brooch that her Ladyship had left on her dressing-table one day when she’d gone up to London. She denied it, of course, but Barrington swore he’d seen her leaving her Ladyship’s apartments at just the time the brooch disappeared, and when they searched her room, there it was. The curious thing was that she went on denying she’d took it, which no one could understand, seeing that the thing had been found in her room, and this vexed her Ladyship something terrible. And so she was sent on her way, without references. Mind you, she’d never been able to please her Ladyship. But it were a good thing in the end, for now you’re here, miss, to take her place.’

  The sound of a door shutting on the floor below suddenly caused Sukie to look down in consternation.

  ‘I must go, miss – Miss Alice, I mean – before Mrs Battersby catches me.’

  Whereupon my new friend curtseyed, wished me good morning, and picked up her mop and bucket, before continuing on her way.

  II

  The Servants’ Hall

  I MADE MY way to the head of the circular stone stairs that Mr Perseus Duport had said led down from the Picture Gallery to the Library.

  On reaching the stairs, I hesitated.

  I was eager to see for myself the famous Duport Library, which my tutor had told me was celebrated throughout Europe; but was it proper to accept Mr Perseus’s flattering invitation? What would Lady Tansor say? Perhaps I could just take a peep, to see whether Mr Perseus was there, and then decide what to do. So down the stairs I tripped.

  At the bottom, I found myself in a narrow hallway, with a curious ceiling decorated all over with intricate patterns of sea-shells. To my right was a glazed door opening on to the terrace that I could see from my room; at the other end of the hallway was a smaller, white-painted door, which I now proceeded to open, as unobtrusively as I could.

  The sight that greeted me made me gasp.

  Before me stretched an immense rectangular room of dazzling white and gold. Facing me, giving a view of the terrace and the gardens beyond, eight soaring windows, with semi-circular architraves, rose up to meet the exquisitely plastered ceiling, flooding the great room with early-morning light. Between each window, and running the whole length of the opposite wall also, were tall wire-fronted book-cases, whilst on either side of the central aisle stretched two lines of free-standing cases, and a number of glass-topped display cabinets. I had never seen so many books gathered together in one place, and marvelled at the prodigious outlay of time, industry, and expense that assembling such a collection must have required.

  At the far end of the room, sitting at a bureau reading, his back towards me, was the distinctive figure of Mr Perseus Duport.

  What should I do? Wishing very much to take up his invitation, but convinced now that I should withdraw, and make an exploration on my own of some other part of the house, I began slowly to close the door. As I did so, I was aware of someone coming into the hallway from the terrace.

  The newcomer, I was certain, was Mr Randolph Duport.

  The contrast between the brothers was marked. Mr Randolph was a good head shorter than Mr Perseus, with broader shoulders, supported on a thick-set, well-made frame, giving the impression of a robust and active constitution. I would have guessed him to be an outdoors man from his tanned complexion and confident bearing, even had he not been wearing a long, well-worn riding-coat and a pair of muddied and equally well-used boots.

  His face, dominated by a wavy mop of thick auburn hair and a pair of soft brown eyes, was to me instantly suggestive of an even and open temper. I will not deny that, all in all, he was a singularly personable young gentleman, with a most taking way about him, to which I was neither insensible not – I further admit – indifferent. In my previous life, in the Avenue d’Uhrich, I could fancy Mr Randolph Duport making an impression on me that might have been productive of a good many sighs and tears. As it was, in my new existence, allowing myself to imagine feeling an amourous attaction towards my Lady’s engaging younger son was, of course, quite out of the question. Nevertheless, I was young and susceptible enough to consider it a pleasant situation, to be living under the same roof as two such elgible young gentlemen as Mr Randolph and Mr Perseus Duport.

  On seeing me, Mr Randolph’s face lit up in a beaming smile.

  ‘Hullo there!’ he exclaimed, closing the terrace door and coming towards me. ‘Who’s this? Ah, I have it! It’s Mother’s new maid, ain’t it? How d’ye do? Delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Girst – Garst – Gorst. That’s it at last! Miss Gorst!’

  He was laughing now – a full, honest, spontaneous laugh, which made me laugh too.

  ‘But, look here,’ he said, lowering his voice to a more confidential level, and assuming a suddenly serious expression, ‘we shouldn’t be laughing, you know. I’ve come to tell my brother. Slake’s dead.’

  Seeing my puzzled look, he explained that the Librarian, Professor Lucian Slake, had suffered a seizure that morning and had died.

  ‘Bolt from the blue,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Completely un
expected. Fit as a fiddle, old Slake, if you’d have asked me. Saw him only yesterday, looking as chipper as you like. But there it is. Death comes when it will.’

  Having delivered himself of this sobering reflection, he wished me good morning, and went into the Library.

  Leaving the brothers to their conversation, and feeling secretly gratified that neither of them appeared to find my Lady’s new maid wholly beneath their notice, I decided that I would continue my explorations in the open air.

  FROM THE TERRACE door, I passed under an arched gateway, then down a shallow flight of steps leading to an area of smooth, sunlit lawn, dotted about with croquet hoops. On the far side of the lawn, opened back against a crumbling fragment of ancient castellated wall, a door – iron-studded and time-blackened – seemed to beckon me.

  In a few moments, I found myself in Paradise.

  I was standing in an ancient quadrangle, such as one finds in a cathedral, or in one of the colleges at Oxford or Cambridge that Mr Thornhaugh had shown me pictures of. On three sides were dark, fan-vaulted cloisters; the fourth side, in which was set a large painted window, again of ancient date, formed the eastern end of the Chapel. In the centre of the court, a fountain played, sending out delicate, tinkling echoes.

  On the petal-strewn flagstones of the central area were a great number of urns and troughs, some fashioned of lead, others of weathered stone, from which tumbled a profusion of late-summer geraniums, ferns, and trailing periwinkles. In between were several low, fluted columns, some bearing sculptured busts of blank-eyed Roman emperors (I immediately recognized Lucius Septimius Severus, whose name used to delight me as a child). Others, wreathed round with glistening green ivy, stood empty and broken.

  Threading my way to the far side of the court, I sat down on a little iron bench, and leaned my head against the warm stone of the Chapel wall.

  The sound of splashing water mingled deliciously with the gentle cooing of a pair of white doves that had just that moment fluttered down to land on a fantastical dovecote made to represent the great house itself. As I was drinking in the scene, I began to think of Madame, and of what she might be doing at this hour; and then of Mr Thornhaugh, pupil-less now. How he would relish Evenwood, and especially this little portion of Paradise!

  It had been Mr Thornhaugh who had first read the legends of King Arthur to me, and shown me such scenes as this, painted in the most brilliant colours, in a Book of Hours from the Middle Ages that he possessed. Now here I sat, in my very body, in just such a place, like Camelot made real – substantial and vividly present to my senses, yet seeming somehow dreamlike, and beyond Time.

  A dazzlingly painted, sun-faced clock over the entrance to the quadrangle was now chiming half past twelve, reminding me that it had been a long time since Barrington had brought me my breakfast tray. So up I jumped to go in search of the steward’s room, where I hoped some luncheon would be provided.

  I HAD NOT gone far in my search when I discovered Sukie emptying her bucket down a drain.

  She greeted me with a cheery smile and a shy little half-wave, before looking about nervously, as if to assure herself that no one had observed her committing such a disgracefully presumptuous act.

  I asked whether she could show me the way to the steward’s room.

  ‘Certainly, miss,’ she said, setting down her bucket. Then, glancing over her shoulder once more, and lowering her voice to a giggling whisper, she added: ‘Miss Alice, I should say!’

  She led me over to a door on the far side of the yard, and then down a series of well-worn steps until we came at last to a passage leading into the servants’ hall – cavernous, and lit by a row of round windows set high up in the wall opposite the huge fire-place and range that dominated the hall, and before which some half a dozen or so of the below-stairs population were seated round a large table taking their mid-day meal.

  ‘It’s the door over there, Miss Alice,’ whispered Sukie, pointing to an opaquely glazed screen at the far end.

  I felt the curious gaze of the other servants on me as I made my way down the hall. One or two smiled a greeting, and one old gentleman with a grizzled beard rose as I passed to make me a stately bow.

  At the open door of the steward’s room, I halted.

  Three persons were sitting round a table, engaged in earnest discussion.

  ‘Nine o’clock this morning,’ one of them – a short, middle-aged man, with a few strands of thin ginger hair pomaded carefully across his otherwise bald head – was saying. This proved to be the butler, Mr Pocock.

  ‘Fifth stroke,’ he went on. ‘There’s something to put on your gravestone!’

  ‘You don’t say, Mr Pocock. Fifth stroke. Well, well.’

  This satirical remark issued from a rather fleshy young man, sardonic of countenance, and dressed in livery.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ replied Mr Pocock, nodding his head definitively. ‘Dr Pordage was called, and his repeater, as you well know, Henry Creswick, is never wrong.’

  The third man, somewhat elderly, with a weathered face and bushy grey side-whiskers, now delivered the opinion that this was all very well, but exhorted Mr Pocock to remember the rooks. The explanation of this cryptic remark soon followed.

  ‘The rooks know, Mr Pocock. They allus know. I saw ’em plain as day – five or six of the devils, as ’e were walkin’ up the Rise yesterday mornin’. They was a-swirlin’ and a-swoopin’ all about ’im like Death’s black servants. I said to Sam Waters, ’e’ll be dead by tomorrow night, and sure enough ’e was.’

  Then I understood that they were speaking of the sudden death that morning of the Librarian, Professor Slake.

  ‘You mark my words,’ the elderly man went on, ‘they allus know. Never knowed ’em to be wrong. It were the same with my Lady’s father, that day in ’53. I saw ’im ride off to Stamford, with the grandsires of those same black devils that followed the Professor a-wheelin’ at his back. I said then, ’ed better look out – you won’t remember that, Robert Pocock. It were before your time. But I said it, and so it was.’

  After refreshing himself from a large pewter tankard, the elderly man – Mr Maggs, the head gardener, as I subsequently learned – was on the point of making some further observations on the subject when a young woman entered the room carrying a bottle of wine and an empty glass on a tray.

  III

  The Housekeeper

  SHE STOOD FOR a moment in the doorway, regarding me with a most curious smile, almost as if she knew me, although I had never seen her before. The others, observing that her attention had been caught by something, all turned their heads towards me.

  ‘I beg your pardon for disturbing you,’ I said, feeling quite uncomfortable at the four pairs of curious eyes studying me; but I was an actress now, as I had dreamed of being as a child, with an actress’s power to convince my audience that I was someone I was not. On, then, with the character of docile Miss Gorst, newly appointed lady’s-maid.

  Mr Pocock rose to his feet with a welcoming smile.

  ‘Miss Gorst, I believe,’ he said. ‘Come in, come in – if I may speak on your behalf, Mrs Battersby?’

  He looked enquiringly towards the young woman with the tray, who nodded at him, laid the tray down on a sideboard, and walked over to the head of the table. Making no attempt to greet me, or to introduce herself formally, she stood looking at me for a moment or two before taking her seat.

  So this was the fearsome Mrs Battersby. From the little I had gleaned of her from Sukie, I had pictured some tyrannical old retainer, ill-tempered and parochial, a bigoted harridan immovably set in her ways; but the person I now saw was as far from my imaginings as it was possible to be.

  She was no more than thirty or so years old, as I guessed, and, whilst not tall, her figure was slim and elegant. Light-brown hair, gathered under a pretty lace cap, framed a small, well-proportioned face, which, despite a slight chubbiness about the chin and neck, many would have considered to be quietly beautiful. I was particularly struck by her hands, with their long, tapering fingers, the nails showing eve
ry sign of regular care – not at all the rough country hands of the Mrs Battersby I had pictured.

  Equally surprising was her manner. I had expected vulgar truculence and provincial narrowness. Instead, she had a cultivated guardedness about her – the self-confident look of an educated person possessed of an active and critical intelligence. This impression was made both unsettling and tantalizing by the singular cast of her mouth, which tilted upwards on one side, and downwards on the other, seemingly set in a permanent half-smile – at once cynical and inviting. It was as if she wore a divided mask – one half sweetly amiable, the other sour-faced and disapproving, both together producing a mystifying and confused effect in the observer as to the true state of her feelings. As I was to discover, there was nothing outright and unequivocal about Mrs Jane Battersby: everything was held in and considered, or insinuated in the most gradual and ambiguous manner.

  ‘I am glad to meet you, Miss Gorst,’ she said at last, smiling, or not smiling, I could not quite tell, ‘and happy that you have decided to join us here for your meals, as your predecessor was pleased to do. Will you take a little beef?’

  Her voice was low and soft, with an unmistakable refinement of tone, the words delivered slowly and deliberately. She nodded to the young man, Henry Creswick, who, introducing himself as Mr Perseus Duport’s valet, drew out a chair for me, then handed me a plate, a glass, and cutlery, before helping me to some beef and potatoes.

  The others sat silently observing me as I ate my meal and drank down my barley-water – Lady Tansor, as I was to learn, allowed wine or beer to be drunk by her servants only at supper-time, and then in strictly regulated quantities.

  It seemed as if no one felt able to engage me in conversation until liberated by the example of Mrs Battersby, who remained resolutely silent. It was only when my plate was empty that she spoke, to ask how I liked Evenwood.

  I replied that it was the most wonderful place I had ever seen.