‘Thank you, madam,’ she says, the words clipped, as if stifled. Hester smiles, seeing that Cat is near overcome.
‘You’re most welcome, child. Please do carry on,’ she says, by way of a dismissal. Cat stalks from the room with her shoulders rigid.
In the kitchen, Cat throws the embroidery onto the table and stares at it, holding her bottom lip savagely between her teeth. The grocer’s boy is bringing in boxes of goods, struggling to see through piled packages of flour and rice and gelatine.
‘Can you believe this?’ Cat demands of him, gesturing angrily at the frame.
‘What, miss?’ the boy asks. He is not more than twelve years old.
‘This!’ Cat picks it up and shakes it furiously at him. The boy steps closer, screws his eyes myopically at it, reads haltingly.
‘Hum … hum …’
‘Humility!’ Cat snaps.
‘Humility is a Servant’s True Dig … nity,’ the boy says, glancing up to see if he’s got it right.
‘Can you believe that?’ Cat demands again. The boy shrugs, at a loss.
‘Don’t rightly know, miss,’ he mumbles, and hurries away from her.
‘What are you belly-aching about now?’ asks Mrs Bell, waddling into the kitchen and slamming the kettle onto the stove.
‘Nothing that concerns you, Mrs Bell,’ Cat says, flatly.
‘Everything in this house concerns me, my girl,’ the housekeeper points out. She spots the embroidery on the table, picks it up and examines it. ‘She’s made this for you, has she?’ Cat nods. ‘So, what are you so steamed up about?’
‘I … I do not agree with the sentiment.’
Mrs Bell eyes her shrewdly. ‘No, well, I dare say you don’t, being so full of hot air and your own opinions. Just you be grateful that you’ve the kind of mistress who wants to make pretty things for you, rather than beat you about with a stick. The first gentleman I worked for would come down and beat the kitchen-maids if he thought his tea was too cold, or too hot, or stewed too long; so you mark my words – you’ve landed on your feet here and you’ll do well to remember it!’ Her arms, folded over her bosom, look like ham hocks.
‘Why should there be different rules for us, Sophie? Aren’t we human beings, just like them upstairs?’ Cat asks. She picks up the embroidered motto again, and examines it. Hester has stitched a small tabby cat into one corner, arching its spine amidst blue cornflowers. Cat runs her thumb over the neat little creature, and frowns.
‘What are you talking about, girl? Of course there are different rules for them and us!’
‘But why should there be?’ Cat asks, keenly.
‘Because it’s always been that way, and it always will be that way! What can have happened to you that you’ve forgot your place in the world?’ Mrs Bell blusters.
‘I don’t believe I have a place in the world,’ Cat murmurs.
‘Well, you have. It’s here, in this kitchen helping me get the tea trays ready.’ Mrs Bell bustles back to the stove.
Later on, Cat hangs Hester’s embroidery on her bedroom wall, where once the crucifix had hung. Though she can’t read the motto without her blood rising, she likes the little tabby cat, skulking in the cornflowers. Cat feels reckless this night. She hardly waits until the household has retired before slipping from her room, down the back stairs and out into the courtyard. Mrs Bell is not yet snoring. When she looks up at the house, bedroom lights are still lit. She could still be called upon, to make a hot drink or fetch a book from the library. The thought makes her heart beat faster. But she will not be kept in; she will not be checked upon. Let the vicar’s wife find her gone, she thinks, savagely. Let them cast her out. Better that than to be a prisoner. The night is still, and warm. From the meadows comes the occasional throaty call of a frog, the creak and whine of insect life. The scent on the air is of hot bricks and dry grass, the slight damp of dew falling.
Cat makes her way on soft feet to the far side of the house and to the little collection of outbuildings that flanks the courtyard. Here are the woodsheds and the gardener’s den, the greenhouses and tool sheds. This latter is where the vicar stores his bicycle. Cat fumbles for it in the darkness, cursing when her questing hands make things shift and clatter; when her foot kicks a shovel, sending it toppling towards the concrete floor. She catches it at the last moment, with hands that shake. She has only ridden a bicycle once before – borrowed for a turn from the butcher’s boy in London. She silently curses the soft squeaking of the wheels as she pushes it along the garden path and out of the gate. She does not see, behind her, the bloom of a cigarette in the darkness, nor Robin Durrant’s gaze following her as he leans against the front wall of the house, blowing plumes of blue smoke up into the gentle sky.