The Unseen(109)

‘Cat Morley … Cat Morley …’ Mrs Bell says her name as if it is a very curse to be uttered in disbelief, in extremis. Her sliver eyes are wider than ever before. ‘How could you be so stupid? And you so bright?’ she asks, and this is so far from what Cat expected, so far from the scorn and the derision, that at first she can’t think how to reply.

‘I … I love a man,’ she says at last, pausing with the pick buried deep in the salt, stuck fast there. She jabbed it too hard, drove it too deep. Mrs Bell shakes her head.

‘A man! What good is a man? You had everything here!’ Cat wrestles mutely with the pick. Flies circle the stuffy room, and Mrs Bell seems, for once, to be robbed of words.

‘What everything? Truly? What have I here but every day the same, like I am not a person at all but a machine? And to be told that this is my lot, and I should be happy for it while others have it that they can lie around and … and … press flowers all the livelong day!’ she cries, her voice shaking treacherously.

‘What everything? A bed! In a clean, warm house … three meals a day and an income – employers that don’t beat you, but tolerate your lip when it gets away from you! That’s what everything!’ Mrs Bell says. ‘Is that not enough for you, when countless thousands would wish to be so fortunate?’

‘No,’ Cat tells her solemnly. ‘It is not enough. I can’t abide it. I can’t.’ She waits, and watches; but the housekeeper merely stares ahead, then down at her chapped and ruined hands, and does not speak. Cat takes a slow breath. ‘If I am gone by tonight, I wanted to say I’m sorry about your boy. About you losing him. And I’m sorry you lost your husband too. I’m sorry if I … scorned you, for being a good servant. You are everything you should be. I am the one with no place in any of it, as you’ve been telling me from the start,’ she says, in a measured tone.

‘Don’t give me contrition, girl. It don’t suit you,’ Sophie Bell replies, but the whip-crack tone of her voice has gone slack, has lost all its sting, and wanders instead like her gaze around the room; unravelling like a loose thread from a hem.


Robin emerges just a quarter of an hour later. Hester is in her room, but she hears the study door open and then close with a soft, resolute thump. There had been voices, low and muffled, the entire time the theosophist was in with her husband. Mostly Robin’s, as far as she could tell, with a few loaded pauses; a few hesitant, barely audible words in Albert’s voice. Even through the floor she could sense his uncertainty. And yet she knows, as she hears the theosophist’s footsteps go first into the parlour, and then along the hall to the bottom of the stairs, that he will have got his way. For whatever is Robin’s way is now Albert’s way as well. She sits at her dressing table with her powder puff in her fingertips, poised by her cheek. She had been about to repair the damage her tears had done, but had caught her own eye in the mirror, and halted. Her eyes are puffy, and below them her cheeks seem more sunken and drawn than ever before. Her hair is flat and lifeless, and in the bleak light from the window it has no lustre at all. She is a dull creature indeed, she thinks. No wonder Albert should prefer his fairies, his beautiful theosophist. The powder puff trembles a little, sending a scatter of fine, pale dust down onto the mahogany table top.

Robin’s footsteps on the stairs make her heart jolt. His walk is so instantly recognisable – he makes no effort to be subtle, to tread quietly. He bangs about like a thoughtless child … but no. Hester can no longer think of him as childlike – however unruly his hair, however quick his grin. He knocks respectfully at the door, and she does not answer.

‘Hester? Mrs Canning?’ he calls. She hears the mocking way in which he interchanges these two forms of address, as if it is up to him to choose which one to use, appropriate or no. ‘Hetty? I have good news,’ he says; and though her pulse beats hard inside her head, she still does not reply. In the mirror she sees her lips pinch tightly together, a grim line that makes her even less lovely. There is a long pause, and then he chuckles. ‘I shan’t huff, or puff, or blow your house down … but I have it from Albert that Cat can stay on. There – doesn’t that cheer you up? He has some … conditions to this, which she’s not going to like, but I did my best. At least she’s not to be cast out into the world without means. Hester? Aren’t you going to thank me?’ he asks. No! she cries silently, suddenly sure that whatever the reason he has done this thing, it is in his own interests. ‘Very well. Perhaps you are resting. Perhaps you are sulking. Either way, I shall see you at dinner, Mrs Canning; and thanks to me there will be a maid to serve it to us.’