‘How do you … ?’ she whispers, inadvertently.
‘Albert told me. One day whilst extolling his own purity to me. He could hardly boast of his own virginity, and not by default proclaim you to be in the same state, could he?’ Robin says, with a lupine grin.
Hester shuts her eyes, her face burning. In the darkness behind her eyelids the room seems to spin, and her thoughts to match it.
‘I think you should leave this house. Leave and not return!’ she says.
‘Hester, Hester. You and I need not trouble one another,’ Robin says calmly. ‘We must not trouble one another,’ he adds, making the statement a command, a warning. The hand that gathered her tears lingers, moving softly over the skin of her cheek, along her jaw and from chin to neck, neck to collarbone, until the air freezes in her lungs and she can neither protest nor move nor turn away. ‘Dear Hetty. I’ll speak to Albert. I’ll convince him. You can keep your maid – a gift from me to you, to make up for whatever I have done to turn you against me,’ he says, his eyes alight and savage. His hand stays a second longer on her skin, his fingers warm, wet from her own salty tears. They seem to burn her, and his light touch is like a yoke of iron, fixing her to the spot. Then he is gone, across the hallway to knock softly on the study door. Released, Hester heaves in great gulps of dizzying air and flees the room with blind, faltering steps.
Mrs Bell opens each hamper of laundry as it comes back from Mrs Lynchcombe, lifts out each item and checks it off the list, her eyes screwed up with the effort of reading her own cramped handwriting.
‘That should be six pillow slips – did I count six?’ she mutters; this and similar comments. Cat has seen this process many times, and knows she may as well ignore the remarks. Mrs Bell, despite a close and apparently friendly acquaintance with the laundress, seems convinced that the woman will one day conspire to rob the household of a napkin or a nightdress, and cannot be satisfied without checking the hampers herself each time. She blows out her cheeks, wipes her sweaty brow, puts her hands on the vast slabs of her hips and studies a lace-collared blouse, pressed and neatly folded in front of her. Is this the one that was sent away? Or has it been switched with one of lower quality?
‘Your own suspicions must tire you out,’ Cat observes.
‘What’s that? Don’t mumble behind my back, if you please,’ Mrs Bell grumbles.
‘I said you should be commended, for such thoroughness.’ She smiles briefly. Mrs Bell laughs a short bark of a laugh.
‘Ha! You never said that in a month of Sundays!’ She goes back to her examination of the hampers. Cat shrugs. She is breaking up the salt, which comes from the grocer in a large, hard block. She uses a round pick with a smooth wooden handle, so smooth that the effort of keeping her grip on it cramps her hand. The muscles in her forearm burn. She stabs repeatedly at the block, at just the right angle that small, usable chunks are broken off; not big pieces that must be broken again, not small gritty pieces that she will struggle to collect from the worktop. The right-sized pieces are packed into earthenware jars and sealed until they are needed. They will be ground by hand, as the need arises, to fill the silver cruet. There is some satisfaction in the repeated stabbing, the controlled violence of the job. Precise work is needed; blows of the correct weight and speed, over and over again. Cat’s mind clears as she does it; some of the odd, cold rage that has filled her all morning starts to dissipate. An odd rage indeed, hard and numbing. She hardly knows who it is directed at. The vicar, for seeing her? The theosophist, for sending him out on crusade? Hester, for forbidding her to go out again? George, for insisting that she wed him? Or just because her secret has been found out. Because she has no secret any more: the one thing that belonged to her alone, now taken. She stabs, she breaks the block, her muscles burn, and she grows calmer. Cat kicks off her shoes, lets the cool of the flagstones press into her aching feet.
‘I may be gone from here, soon. Tonight, even,’ she says at length, her tone betraying no dismay at the prospect.
‘What are you talking about?’ Sophie Bell asks, finishing her inspection and slumping into a chair. With a sweep of her arm, she pushes away a pile of peas to be podded, so that she can spread her bosom, her mottled arms, across the table top.
‘I think I am dismissed. The vicar’s wife is speaking to him on my behalf, but I doubt she’ll convince him,’ says Cat. The housekeeper gapes.
‘But … what for, for Christ’s sake? What ’ave you done, you minx?’
‘I … go out in the night. I don’t sleep. I go out into Thatcham, and places. And now he has found me out in this. So I am dismissed.’ She shrugs, as if the future were not suddenly an amorphous thing, shapeless and menacing and empty. No reference for a dismissed servant. No further positions for her, with this last chance spent.