‘I can hear you, yes, though my head hurts terribly and my mouth is awfully dry.’
Beside her the cross woman imitated her – ‘my mouth is
awfully
dry’ – and laughed.
‘Do you think you could send her away?’ Henrietta said.
‘I’m afraid not, dear. She’s from Holloway. She has to keep an eye on you. Now, I can’t do much about the headache, but I can bring you some water. You just lie still and rest. I’ll be right back.’
Henrietta almost grasped her hand so that she might stay, because her kindness was a balm in itself, but her need for a drink was even greater. She sighed unhappily, intensely aware of the baleful presence still at her bedside.
‘Lady Henrietta Hoyland? How the mighty are fallen.’
Henrietta turned her head as far away as she could, a childlike gesture that seemed to further infuriate her tormentor.
‘Shall I tell you what I can’t stick?’ she said, and then, without waiting for consent, ‘I can’t stick the likes of you, shouting the odds at Mr Asquith then collapsing like a half-set jelly when you have to face the consequences. Pathetic, that’s what you are. There’s women in Holloway doing five, ten, fifteen years and they’ve nobody sending ’em prime cuts from the bleeding Ritz. They have backbone, you see, unlike you. They have spine and spirit. Give me a pickpocket over a suffragette any day of the week; at least they’re only trying to make a living. You lot, though, you make me sick. You think you’re something, fighting for the vote, but no. It turns out you miss your four-poster and your silk sheets and your goose-down pillows, and you can’t take another few weeks in the clink. Well boo-hoo, I’m sure.’
She sat back, satisfied at having vented her spleen. Her words prompted a series of fogged images in Henrietta’s mind, and she watched them in a detached but interested manner, curious as to the story they told: a courtroom, the prime minister, the faces of her brother and his wife, a white-haired magistrate passing sentence. She saw these things through a mist, however, and their significance to her own fate was unclear.
She would wait for her drink, she thought. There were no plans to be made beyond that. She closed her eyes and let thought be replaced by the smash and roar of the waves in her head.
S
ilas expected a great deal from Eve’s presence: a transformation, a revolution, a miracle. It wasn’t so much his faith in her ability – although he admired her successes back in Yorkshire – as a steely-minded belief that the Whittam Hotel’s rightful place was at the top of the pile. His hotel must be the best hotel on the island; he wanted it, therefore it must come to pass. In this regard he was like a child whose belief in fairies made them real: he applied mind over matter, dispensed with the facts in favour of another imagined version of events. This philosophy, perhaps a little odd in a hardheaded businessman, was the product of two decades of easy success. Silas was the stowaway ship’s lad who had ended up so entirely the favourite of the boss that the otherwise long, slow, perhaps impossibly steep upward trajectory had been circumvented by the gift of four immaculate steamships to call his own. Granted, he had an excellent eye for business; he had seen the opportunities in shipping from the West Indies, predicted the decline of the sugar cane industry, spotted the potential in bananas – his success was by no means the result of a series of lucky accidents. But his rise had been so fluid and free from obstacle that he had come to regard unmitigated success as a given. He would not countenance the failure of his hotel venture, for the simple reason that Silas Whittam did not fail. People talked of his Midas touch, but no one believed in its powers so completely as Silas.
It angered him, then, that to his certain knowledge there had since Eve’s arrival been no discernible decrease in the number of complaints he was receiving from guests. Time spent in his office was marred by the familiar procession of disgruntled Englishmen whose sensibilities, or those of their wives, had been bruised by daily exposure to a surliness previously unimaginable in the servant class. The food had improved under Eve’s authority, but it seemed that this alone was not enough. Golden piecrusts, tender beef, delicately spun sauces: these were all very well, but they didn’t compensate for the barefaced insolence of the waiters, porters and housekeeping staff.
‘What did you think?’ Eve said, facing her brother across a low table. ‘That I could erase all your difficulties with my talent for pastry?’ She tried to keep her voice light, but there was a perceptible edge to it. His haste for improvement seemed irrational, his demands unreasonable.
They were on the hotel veranda; she drank lemonade, he drank scotch. Eve’s face and forearms were flushed with the sun and her frock of pale blue lawn showed her colour off to enchanting advantage, but he scowled at her, less than charmed by her response.
‘I thought you might make a better fist of it than you have so far, certainly.’
‘You flatter me with your expectations.’
‘Then oblige me by fulfilling them.’
‘Oh, behave yourself.’
He regarded her while he took another drink, then cupped his cut-glass tumbler in the palm of his hand and, with a steady circular motion, made a small amber whirlpool of the whisky. She watched him, unperturbed by his mood or his scrutiny. He was her little brother, and if he was troubled by bad manners among his staff, he should consider mending his own first. She’d seen how he spoke to his employees, with his top lip drawn back in a perpetual sneer. It didn’t help: really it didn’t.
‘I think we’re making progress,’ she said, attempting a conciliatory, if business-like, tone.
‘Yes, that would explain why we had four people take themselves off to the Mountain Spring this morning.’ His eyes were dark, displeased.
‘And I don’t blame them. Their beds were unmade two days running and they waited an hour for a pot of tea. I can’t put that right with perfect pastry.’
He drained his glass. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ he said in a carrying voice. ‘To “work like a nigger” doesn’t mean hard, but, rather, hardly at all.’ He laughed, and his laughter was fuelled by scotch, for this was his third.
A flush of shame coloured Eve’s cheeks. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘What?’ He was genuinely puzzled.
‘If you can’t treat your people with respect, they won’t respect you.’
‘Is that so? News to me. We didn’t build the British Empire by kowtowing to the workers, my dear.’
She felt her temper rising in response to the challenge in his voice. ‘You’ve forgotten your own beginnings, Silas. I can see it in Seth an’ all. You’re teaching ’im to be like you. Seth looks up to you and ’e copies your way of doing things, but I don’t want my lad looking down on folk like you do.’
Silas gave a small snort of derision. ‘God damn it, woman, take him home with you then. Take him back to Netherwood, send him down a mine like his father before him.’
She stood at once, as furious as she was hurt. Her eyes flashed just as blackly as her brother’s, and her voice was loaded with the same suppressed anger. ‘There’s work to do downstairs,’ she said. ‘When you’re ready to apologise, you know where to find me.’
He began to speak as she walked away, but she wasn’t ready to listen. She left the room, letting his protestations hang useless in the air.
Eve was still shaking as she descended the stairs to the kitchen. Her brother’s nasty temper stemmed from his own anxieties, she was almost sure of this. And yet, and yet … She paused on the bottom step to collect herself, breathing deeply two, three times, leaning on the wall to support herself. Images of childhood, faded beyond sepia, rose in her mind. Their father unbuckling his belt and whipping it with a crack from the loops of his britches, Silas cowering beneath him, covering his head with his arms; their father, seeking oblivion in ale, spreadeagled on the stone floor of their kitchen, growling like an injured beast, cursing the world and everyone in it; their father again, his face an ugly mass of weals and bruising, coming off worse from a brawl in the street; their father, filling the small, cold, filthy house with fear and misery, his wife and children alert to every nuance of behaviour, every possible trap or flashpoint.
As they grew Eve and Silas had cleaved together, comforted one other, escaped the misery with fantastical plans for the future. Their mother’s death from typhus was terrifying, shattering, but they would not be dragged down; they were the unfortunate offspring of Dinah and Thomas Whittam but their fates were not bound to their parents, their course was not set. Eve escaped when she married Arthur Williams; Silas escaped on a ship bound for the Indies. They had each flourished and triumphed, shown the world and each other that they were their own selves, not merely doomed copies of their parents’ blueprint. So why did Eve now see in Silas’s eyes the same glint of unhinged fury, the same unquenched cruelty, that they had seen so many times in their father’s? It was unsettling, and in the hot, narrow stairwell she shivered and clung to the wall while the ghosts of her childhood brushed past.
At the top of the stairs the baize door swung open and noisy, living footsteps clattered down towards her. Eve turned as a boy, whose name she hadn’t yet managed to remember, barged by and went into the kitchen. He was lowly in the hierarchy, a washer of pots, a clearer of peelings, and yet he gave Eve a look of such bold hostility that it left her winded, as if he’d thumped her as he passed.
This was intolerable. For a moment she stared after him, frozen by the coldness in his eyes. Then she straightened her shoulders and marched in, pushing the door harder than she’d intended so that her arrival in the kitchen was announced by the violent slam of the door handle hitting the wall. She was propelled by indignation, fired up with the injustice of this treatment at the hands of a kitchen lad. Here, then, was the straw that broke the camel’s back: this moment would change everything, Eve thought. This would be the precise point at which she might say, in the weeks to come, that she had taken the reins and the reputation of the Whittam Hotel was resurrected and restored, polished back up to a high shine. The boy would look her in the eye and listen to her, and he would do it respectfully. She cast her eyes about the room, looking for his skinny frame, his uptilted nose, his round, disdainful eyes. He was gone.
She stood chewing her lip in frustration, at once entirely deflated. Ruby watched her, keeping one finger in place on
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
, which lay open on the table in front of her.
‘That boy,’ Eve said.
‘Which boy?’
‘The thin one. The one who just came through the kitchen.’
‘Wendell?’
‘That’s ’im. Wendell. Where did ’e go?’
‘Wendell will be carrying the bins to the garbage carts. Would you rather he did something else?’
‘No, no. It can wait.’
Ruby looked down again at her page. Her lips moved as she read. The kitchen smelled delicious, awash with aromas of fish and garlic, although dinner preparations had barely begun. Ruby’s three-legged stockpot stood over glowing embers, and in it a fragrant broth bubbled contentedly. Food for the staff, thought Eve. Ruby’s suppers were the principal reason that anyone worked here at all. She walked to the pot and peered in. Fish heads winked at her, bobbing merrily alongside onions, herbs and copious rings of the fiery little peppers Ruby held so dear. Eve, irritated at being thwarted in her purpose, said, ‘What’s this?’ in a tone more brusque than was warranted.
‘Fish tea.’
Fish tea, thought Eve: what a contradiction in terms. Any hot, light liquid was tea to these Jamaicans. To Eve, only actual tea could be called tea, and here it was not very highly regarded. She folded her arms, tapped a foot on the stone flags, and watched Ruby’s head, which was bent low over the text.
‘What’s so interesting there?’ Eve asked, her tone still disagreeable.
‘I am reading about Alexis Soyer’s recipe for puff paste,’ Ruby said with her customary dignity, although she didn’t look up.
‘Pound of butter to every pound of flour, and not quite ’alf a pint of water,’ said Eve.
‘Soyer adds egg yolk and lemon juice. But I’m reading it not for the method but for the way Mrs Beeton expresses herself. And this is my break, I might add.’
Eve felt a flash of contrition and her face softened immediately. She sat down opposite Ruby at the table.
‘I’m sorry. Wendell upset me, on t’stairs.’
Ruby laughed. ‘That scrap of a boy? I advise a clip to his ear.’
Eve, not in the habit of clouting her employees, looked doubtful. In any case, she thought, the way she was feeling now wasn’t really Wendell’s doing. ‘To be truthful…’ she hesitated on the brink of uncharted waters, then continued ‘…my brother put me out of sorts. I think Silas might be ’is own worst enemy.’
At once, Ruby closed the book. Behind her, Batista peeled red Duke of Yorks and sang soulfully about a balm in Gilead that made the wounded whole. This offered the women at the table not only spiritual succour but also a modicum of privacy to speak as they wished. Somehow, between them, a glass barrier was inching down. Eve said, ‘What do you think?’
‘What do I think of what?’
‘Of my brother.’
Ruby took a sharp intake of breath and shook her head.
‘What a question,’ she said. ‘What a question!’
‘Go on, speak your mind. Silas can be nasty, I’ve seen it for myself.’
Ruby paused, then said, ‘Can you picture a monkey’s posterior?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I ask because we have a saying in Jamaica which is very apt for Mr Silas.’
‘Right. Go on.’
Ruby adopted the rich, ripe patois she tried never to use. ‘De higher de monkey climb, de more he expose,’ she said.
Eve laughed, as much at the difference in Ruby’s voice as at the image she had conjured.
‘Mr Silas has forgotten how to be humble.’
Eve nodded. She’d told him the same thing herself, not ten minutes ago.
‘He’s so far up the tree that he thinks he’s above everyone,’ Ruby said, warming to her theme. ‘But when we look up, all we see are his…’