Page 38 of The Housekeeper's Secret
Eventually the sounds of activity died away and the basement was quiet again. The light changed: the shadows slid down the walls and the heat subsided into a stuffy, enveloping warmth. Kate was hungry but couldn’t gather the courage to go to the kitchen for food. She was acutely aware of the presence of the others—Mr Goddard and Jem—as if she could hear them breathing through the walls. But still, the soft knock at her door was completely unexpected.
She opened it to find Jem standing there. She was so used to seeing him in uniform that in his own clothes he seemed like a different person from the inscrutable, impeccably mannered footman. This was the man who had sheltered from the rain beneath Black Tor and walked back with her across the steaming heath. The man who had gathered her into his arms and held her while she cried.
His hands were in his pockets and he was standing a little way back, appearing utterly at ease. Except for the faint flicker of a muscle in his jaw and the slight hoarseness in his voice. ‘There’s going to be fireworks,’ he said, then paused and cleared his throat. ‘This evening. They’re setting them off up on the hill before they light the bonfire. I wondered if you’d like to watch them?’
The bonfire had been the subject of some discussion in the servants’ hall in the preceding weeks. It was part of a national network of ‘celebration bonfires’ that were to form a chain the length and breadth of the land, and a local committee had apparently been formed to oversee its construction, on the highest part of Howden moor.
‘Watch them?’ She was thrown, picturing a walk to the village to join a clumsy jostle of beer-sodden revellers, the effort of assembling her professional mask and keeping it in place amid the merriment. The journey back with him in the dark. ‘I—I don’t know, I—’
‘Not from the village,’ he said, as if he’d read her mind. ‘From here. You won’t even have to leave the house. I know the perfect place.’
‘Where?’
She had wondered how she would broach what had happened before, and thank him for what he had done, but somehow, he had made it unnecessary. She’d thought it would be impossibly embarrassing to face him, but as he smiled at her in the fading light, embarrassment was the last thing she felt.
‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’
It was a different world. One she hadn’t known existed.
She had followed him through the servants’ basement, waiting outside the footmen’s wardrobe while he went in and picked up a cloth-covered crate from the table, taking care not to make a sound as they went up the back stairs. At the door to the footman’s attic she hesitated, suddenly doubtful.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Just to the corridor,’ he said. ‘There’s a way out onto the roof. I’d imagine there must be one in the maids’ attic too, though obviously I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
His smile was deliberately charming, as if he was trying to persuade her of his honourable character. It worked. Her heart was beating too fast, but she had come too far to go back downstairs to her quiet room and another evening spent poring over invoices or stitching frayed seams. His hands were full, so she opened the door herself and let him go ahead of her up the stairs.
It looked the same as the girls’ attic but smelled unmistakably male. It was twilight up here, and they both trod softly on the creaking boards as she followed him to the low window at the end of the landing. The sash had been raised to its fullest extent and beyond it the park was spread out, softened by the evening. A breath of warm air blew a curl across her cheek.
He leaned through the open window and put down the crate, then stood to the side. Placing one hand at the small of his back, as he would do when attending the family, he held out his other, and bowed slightly.
‘After you…’
She laughed, to cover up a lurch of nervousness and misgiving. ‘Is it safe?’
‘Completely.’ His face, with its mottling of faded bruises, was grave in the half-light, his voice low. ‘Have you never been out there?’
She shook her head, trying to remember if the window on the girls’ side was the same. Did it open wide like this one? She thought she knew the house well, but she couldn’t think. Couldn’t focus.
‘Then let me show you.’
It was easier than she thought, climbing through, especially with his hand to steady her. She felt a brief rush of vertigo as she got her bearings, and found herself in a new landscape, one of sloping slate, lead-lined gulleys and rows of chimneys as tall and solid as terraced houses. Pressing herself back against the reassuring solidity of the wall, she took in the dizzying panorama of the park: the folds of land where the shadows pooled, the dark copses of trees. The sky was marbled with fine veins of cloud, stained pink and apricot by the sun, which had sunk to rest on the smoky line of the distant hills. It looked like the painted ceiling of some grand rococo ballroom.
‘Oh! It’s… astonishing! Familiar, but so different.’
‘I thought you would have discovered it long ago. There’s a wall dividing this half of the house from the other so you can’t get round to the maids’ side, but I assumed they’d go out on their half.’
‘There is a window on the maids’ landing…’ Without the distraction of his touch her memory clarified. ‘It’s got bars across it though, so you couldn’t climb out.’
‘How unfair.’
And how unsurprising that the girls should be the ones to have their freedom restricted. She followed him round the corner, to the north-facing side of the house, where the temple was disappearing into the darkness of the trees behind it, somewhere between magical and menacing. Setting down the crate in the lea of a dormer window, Jem pointed out the silhouette of the coronation bonfire on the hill.
‘The fireworks are being set off just outside the village, but we should be able to see them from here.’
‘What’s in the box?’
He moved the cloth aside, to reveal half of Mrs Gatley’s cheese and onion flan and two bottles of beer. ‘I thought you must be hungry. I took some of this to Mr Goddard earlier and I could see you hadn’t had any. Between you and me, it’s wasted on him this evening. The hospitality in the lounge of the White Hart must have been pretty generous. Very decent of him to condescend to accept it really, given how he feels about the village.’