From under a glass dome on the mantelpiece a clock strikes the hour. She's hopelessly behind, and the chimes send her whirling around the room with her duster. Over the mantel and the clock's dome, over the vase on the far side, over another glass dome with an arrangement of dried flowers beneath it, then to the side tables. Gritty dust everywhere, as though no one has dusted in weeks, when in fact she dusted in here only yesterday. Then the door opens. Sarah. It's always Sarah, as though she has the time to be looking in on her like this. She has a curious smile on her face as she presses the door closed behind her.
"You're not finished?" she says. "You're going to catch it."
"I got called in to see Mr. Robert."
"Mr. Robert? Again?" She comes closer. "Did he tell you anything about the burglar? Is that what it was about?"
She shakes her head. "Not that. No."
Sarah walks over to the window and looks out. "Lost your tongue this morning, have you?"
Her face is burning. She turns away, but not quickly enough.
Sarah laughs. "What on earth have you been up to?"
She rubs the arm of a chair with her duster, though she should shake it out—it is grey with dust.
"We mustn't keep secrets—at least not from each other. Come on—out with it."
With the duster squashed into her fist she looks over at Sarah. Against the window she's little more than a silhouette. "He measured me."
"Oh—that." Sarah wraps her arms around herself. "He's called us all in there. It gave me the creeps." She turns back to the window and leans her hip against the frame. "What I wouldn't give to go out whenever I liked. Wouldn't that be the best thing about being a lady? You could just leave and there'd be no one to say you couldn't." She lets out a sigh and comes over to Jane. "Anyway, this afternoon I'm going to fetch the new tazza."
"You haven't got it yet? Hasn't anyone noticed?"
"Haven't had the chance, have I? Cartwright said something about it being strange it was gone—don't worry about him, though. He's not going to make a fuss, not when he owes me a favor or two. Now, I've still got the hallway to finish—you can do that for me, can't you? Just skimp a bit here and there along the way, and you'll fly through it all."
"All right then," says Jane. But the thought of having more to do weighs on her. There is more than one person can manage, far more.
Sarah shakes out her apron. "If Mrs. J. asks why you're so behind, you can tell her Mr. Robert wanted you for his measuring." With that she spins on her heel and heads for the door. As for Jane, she stands on the edge of the carpet, holding her duster and looking about her at all there is left to do.
I
t's so late that Mr. Cartwright has locked up the house, and Mrs. Johnson wished her good night and left the room in the swaying light of her candle. Jane listens to her footsteps fading down the corridor, then the groan of her door as she pushes it closed. That morning lost in the study, and having the hallway to finish, set her behind the whole day. Now when she should be going to bed she is still down in the kitchen sitting over a slice of bread and dripping because she missed dinner. Elsie has pulled a small folding bed out from the pantry and is sitting on the edge of it to unlace her boots. Both of them glance around as the door squeaks, but it's only Sarah. In her hands she holds something wrapped in a cloth. She sets it down on the kitchen table and plucks off the cloth, like a magician doing a trick. "Look," she says. "Not a perfect match, but close to it."
The new tazza. Jane snatches in her breath. "How did you manage it?" She bends her chin almost to the tabletop, her hands on its edge, not wanting even to touch the thing.
"I know where the missus shops," she says, and she pauses. "It isn't a cheap place. Five pounds, this cost."
"Yes," says Jane, and she lifts her head, "yes, of course. I'll pay you back." Does her shock show on her face? She hopes not. Five pounds. More than a third of her wages for the year, for what's hardly more than a fancy plate on a pedestal.
"Well then"—Sarah takes up the tazza—"all that's left is to put it back where it came from."
The closing door leaves a shudder of cool air in her wake, and Jane shivers as she takes another bite of the bread. The dripping slides across her tongue, greasy and slick, and for a moment she thinks she might gag. No, she tells herself, you can't—not when you've barely eaten all day. If you can't keep your strength up, you can't work, and if you can't work, you'll be on the street. So she forces herself to open her mouth wide and tear off another piece of the bread and to lick the dripping from her lips. Butter, she thinks— butter would have been so delicious. But after Mrs. Robert came downstairs and warned Mrs. Johnson about using too much—she heard all about that, saw the way Mrs. Johnson's mouth set like a trap afterwards to hold in her anger—they've had to make do with dripping. As for Mrs. Johnson, she's been quiet ever since, as though she is weighing things in her mind.
Jane chews with her eyes closed and her arms flat on the table beside her plate. They feel so heavy that when it's time to take another bite she has to tell herself to lift them, to make them reach for the bread, to bring it to her mouth. Then she lets her eyes close again. Her hands smart from where small splits have opened up—so much of the day with her hands in water, or polishing with silver sand, or bringing the furniture to a gleam with a mixture Mrs. Johnson makes up that stings her raw skin. As for her joints, they're swollen and aching. It's almost enough to make her cry, but she doesn't. Every night since she can remember her hands have pained her like this. Not just at the Saunderses' but before, at the orphanage, where training up girls meant having them scrub floors and pans and clothes from sunup to long past sunset.
A little dripping has smeared onto her fingers, and she rubs it in. Five pounds, she thinks. It'll be spring before she's paid Sarah back. She sees those weeks upon weeks laid out before her, filled with fetching coal and emptying slops. All for nothing. All because she was tired.
There's a strange gurgling noise. It intrudes far enough into her tiredness to make her open her eyes. Elsie, rocking herself on the edge of her bed, her dress down below her shoulders so that Jane can see the top of her chemise, laughing, laughing.
"What is it?" says Jane. "What's so funny?"
"Oh Lord," says Elsie. "You're in for it now, well and good." She almost chokes on the words. "You owe her, don't you? A favor here, a favor there—it all adds up, don't it?" She stands and pulls down her dress, then steps out of it. Beneath it her flannel petticoat is patched and stained.
"I'll pay what I owe."
"Oh no." Elsie drapes her dress over the back of a chair. "You won't—you won't ever be able to do that."
Jane pushes her plate away. "That's enough of that foolish talk."
"Oh, la-di-da." Elsie sits back down and brings her feet up onto the bed, then arranges the covers over herself.
She should mend the rip in her dress, but she can't bring herself to, not tonight when it takes such an effort to move. So instead she hauls herself to her feet and takes her plate over to the sink. She busies herself washing and drying it and putting it away. Now that the room is dim the vermin are out. When she turns shapes scatter across the floor before her like spilled beans.
Elsie has laid her head on a thin pillow. In this light it looks filthy, her blanket too. Her eyes are closed, but she's not asleep. "I'd watch yourself," she says softly.
Jane stares down at where Elsie lies, her bony face all shadows, making her look like an old woman on her deathbed.
She lights her candle stub from Elsie's—maybe she should blow out Elsie's for her, but she doesn't. After all, what does she owe her? She lets herself out into the corridor and starts up the stairs towards the room on the second floor where Sarah is already in bed, and where she will lie so close that, if Sarah sighs too heavily, Jane will feel her breath on her face. She has done wrong, she tells herself, letting Sarah replace that tazza. She should have taken the broken pieces to Mrs. Robert and shown her what she'd done, and borne the consequences—one of Mrs. Saunders's favorite words,
consequences.
Because even if she'd been dismissed, maybe that would not have been so bad. Maybe she could have found herself another situation.
Nonsense, of course. Without a character no decent mistress would want her. Besides, if she wanted to admit to what she'd done she could still do it—though now, of course, it would mean admitting that Sarah helped her cover up the breakage, and that would mean trouble for both of them. So what is there to do except climb the stairs, up to where Sarah is probably already asleep?
As she lifts her tired feet from one step to the next with her shadow looming over her from the walls, the idea of lying down in that bed, so close to Sarah, fills her with dread. Five pounds for a tazza. Who would have thought that Sarah had five pounds saved?
Silly, she tells herself, letting Elsie make her afraid like that when Sarah has been a good friend to her. And yet, the farther up the stairs she climbs, the smaller she feels—small as a cat, small as a mouse, small as a creature that seeks out dark corners and lives in fear of its life.
Chapter 6
T
he hat, when Robert Bentley gets his hands on it on Monday morning, is nothing remarkable. Yet it took all the weight of his letter of introduction from Monsieur Bertillon of the Paris Police Prefecture's Department of Judicial Identity to obtain it: the hat that was left in his house—in his possession!—by the intruder five days before. The police offered it up reluctantly, although, as they admitted, they'd found nothing more than the stains of Macassar oil belonging to a man with a head larger than the average—they had, they told him, all tried it on and it fit none of them. As for the name of the hatter—a popular establishment among gentlemen, they told him, though Robert could have told them that himself, for it is the same shop from which he bought his hats when he lived in London. Had they, he asked, been to the shop and asked to view their records? The officer who handed him the hat had scoffed. "Are you aware of the number of crimes daily reported to this station, sir?" and he'd leant forward onto the counter, his eyebrows raised. "Although the intrusion into your house was disturbing, as you yourself have admitted, nothing is missing. Am I right, sir?" It certainly was right, and he admitted as much. Were such intrusions to be overlooked, then? Good God—what a state of affairs!
At home he sits in his study and stares at the hat, turning it this way and that in the feeble light coming through the window. The crown is dusty, and is marked by a greasy spot that might have come from a candle. Inside, the red silk lining is a little stained. The owner has not taken good care of his hat, but what else is there to deduce? An hour later, when he steps into a hansom, he has the hat under one arm and his other weighed down by his box of instruments.
He should head straight for the prison to be sure of arriving in good time. Yet barely has the cab reached the end of Cursitor Road when he calls out to the driver: "Oxford Street. Not the prison, but Heath's on Oxford Street."
When he arrives at the hatter's there is only one other gentleman there, a thin man with flushed cheeks who is in deep discussion with the more senior shop assistant. A young man comes towards the counter. "Good morning, sir. Can I help you?"
All of a sudden he feels a little foolish. He had, he realizes, been imagining himself as a sort of Holmes who could, from this one hat, glean everything he needed to know about its owner. After all, he is a man of science, and has been trained to extract inferences and information from the scantiest of details. However, as he sets the hat on the counter between him and the young man, he cannot find the words to begin. Together the two of them stare down at it.
"This hat," he says, "was left in my possession."
The assistant pulls a large handkerchief from his pocket. "Yes, sir?" The end of his nose is red. He dabs at it, giving a loud sniff.
"Yes." Robert turns the hat over so they can peer inside. "It is from this shop, as the label indicates—as you can see." He points with one finger. "The initials were once marked here, but they have been worn away and are illegible."
"Yes, sir." The young man holds his handkerchief bunched in one hand. His eyes narrow as he swallows, as though it pains him to do so. "Do you wish to purchase another similar in style to this one?"
Robert looks up. "No. I wish to find out who the owner is."
"I see." He looks down at his handkerchief and folds it. "Would not the owner find that he is missing his hat and come to claim it? Or wouldn't a small advertisement in the newspaper alert the owner to his loss?"
"Unfortunately, this hat was left in my house by a person who intruded himself into my home and apparently wished to keep his identity to himself."
"Ah," says the young man. "Then is it not going beyond the call of duty to want to return it?"
Robert straightens himself up. He is ready to snap at this young man, to tell him that he isn't a fool—but instead he lets out a burst of air from between his teeth. "I am trying to discover who it was that forced his way into my house during my absence, and this hat is all I have for my information. I am, in short, doing the work that the police have chosen not to do."
He realizes as he finishes his explanation that the shop is largely silent. From behind a curtain steps a short man with slicked-back grey hair and small features. There is something of a seal about him. "May I be of assistance?"
And so Robert is escorted into the back of the shop—not into the area where gentlemen have their heads measured in curtained privacy but beyond, to an office piled high with papers tied with ribbon and ledgers leaning drunkenly against one another on the shelves. Here he explains his problem again, then lays the hat on the ledger open between them.