The Misbegotten

1821

The day of the wedding was one of signs and portents. Rachel tried not to see them, since the higher half of her mind knew better than to believe in them, but still they kept coming. She could well imagine her mother scolding such frailty of thought, but with a smile to soften the words. Nerves, my dear. ’Tis nothing but a touch of nerves. Nevertheless, Rachel kept seeing them, and the signs seemed like warnings, one and all. A solitary magpie, strutting on the lawn; a mistle thrush singing on the gatepost. She stepped on her petticoat as she put it on, and tore it along the waistband; as she unwound the rags from her hair, every curl fell flat immediately. But it was the first dry day in over a week – that was surely a good sign. Early September, and the weather had turned stormy during the last days of August, with heavy rain and strong winds that tore down the still-green leaves. Rachel had hoped it would still be summer when she wed, but it was definitely autumn. Another sign. Arms aching, she gave up on her hair and went to the window. There was sunshine, but it was low and brittle – the kind of sun that got into your eyes and was blinding instead of warming. This will be the last time I stand at a window of Hartford Hall, wishing I was somewhere else, she reminded herself, and this thought trumped all the warning signs. In the morning she would wake up to a new life, in a new home, as a new person. A wife; no longer a spinster, a nobody.

Rachel’s mother would have brushed away these supposed signs, for sure, and reassured her daughter that the match was a fair one, given the circumstances. Anne Crofton had been a practical woman; kind and affectionate but wholly pragmatic. She hadn’t married Rachel’s father for love, but out of good sense; though love later grew between them. She would have approved of the cautious way in which Rachel had considered Richard Weekes’s proposal before accepting. He was lower than her in birth, to be sure, but his prospects were good, his business flourishing. His income was more than enough to keep a wife in modest comfort. His manners were a little coarse but there was no doubting his charm; and with innate charm, Rachel could work to shape the rest. A rough diamond, to which she could bring a shine. And however more rarefied her birth had been, the fact remained that her current status was lowly. All these things she could hear her mother say, when she shut her eyes at night and missed her parents with a feeling like a terrible ache in her bones. And in her father’s voice… well, he would have said less. Instead, she would have seen the misgiving in his eyes, because John Crofton had married for love, and always said it had made him the happiest man alive.

But Rachel had an argument ready for him, as well: she knew that Richard Weekes loved her. Thus she entered into the match on much the same footing as her parents had, and hoped to be as happy as they had been. Rachel hadn’t believed in love at first sight – not until she’d met Richard for the first time in June, and watched it hit him like a thunderbolt. He’d come to Hartford Hall with a selection of Bordeaux wines for Sir Arthur Trevelyan to sample, and was waiting for the gentleman in the small parlour when Rachel came into the room to find a deck of cards. Outside a summer storm gathered, brought on by a week of torpid heat; the sky had gone dark and odd flickers of lightning came and went like fireflies. Trapped indoors, her two younger charges were restless and bad tempered, and she’d hoped to distract them with whist. She hadn’t known that anybody was in the room so she entered with unladylike haste, and frowning. Richard leapt up from the chair and tugged his coat straight, and Rachel halted abruptly. They faced each other for a suspended, silent moment, and in the next second Rachel saw it happen.

Richard’s eyes widened, and words that had formed in his mouth were never spoken. He went rather pale at first, and then coloured a deep red. He stared at her with an intensity that seemed to border on awe. For her part, Rachel was too taken aback to say anything, and her murmured apology at intruding also died on her lips. Even in the wan light from outside, which made his burning face look a little sickly, Richard was arrestingly handsome. Tall and broad at the shoulder, even if he did not stand up as straight as he should. He had light brown hair the colour of umber, blue eyes and a square jaw. In spite of herself, in the face of such scrutiny, Rachel blushed. She knew she wasn’t beautiful enough to have caused such upset with her face or figure alone – she was too tall, her body too flat and narrow. Her hair was the palest of blonds, but it was fine and wouldn’t curl; her eyes were large, heavy-lidded, but her mouth was too small. So what else could it have been but realisation? The realisation that here was the person he’d been looking for, without even knowing it; here was his soul’s counterpoint, the one who would bring harmony.

There was a mist of sweat on Richard’s top lip when at last Sir Arthur’s footsteps were heard, and they were released from the spell. Rachel dipped him a graceless curtsy and turned to leave, without the deck of cards, and Richard called out:

‘Miss… forgive me,’ as she walked away. His voice was deep, and smooth, and it intrigued her. She went back upstairs to the children’s rooms feeling oddly breathless and distracted. Eliza, the eldest daughter of the house, was curled up in a window seat reading a book. She looked up and scowled.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said, loading the question with scorn. It was lucky for Eliza that she was dark and delicate and pretty. A plainer girl would not have got away with such a waspish personality, but at fifteen Eliza already had a great many admirers.

‘Nothing at all to concern you,’ Rachel replied coolly. There had been times during the six years that Rachel had been governess at Hartford Hall, more times than there ought to have been, when her fingers had itched to close Eliza’s mouth with the flat of her hand.

For a few weeks after that, Richard Weekes appeared here and there, unexpectedly, claiming to be on business in the area. Outside church; near the grocer’s shop in the village; on the green on a Sunday afternoon, where people gathered to gossip and plot. He came to Hartford a number of times, ostensibly to ask after the latest wines he’d delivered, and how they were drinking. He came so often that Sir Arthur grew irritable, and dealt with him brusquely. But still Richard Weekes came, and he lingered, and when he caught sight of Rachel he always found a way to speak to her. And then he asked for her permission to write to her, and Rachel’s stomach gave a peculiar little jolt, because there could be no mistaking his intentions from that moment on. He wrote in a crabbed hand, each character stubbornly refusing to join up with the next. The prose was coloured by quirks in spelling and grammar, but the messages within it were sweet and ardent.

She’d had only one proposal of marriage before, even though, in the days before their disgrace, her family had been wealthy and well respected. Rachel was never beautiful, but attractive and well spoken enough to arouse interest in more than one young gentleman. But she never gave them any cause to hope, or encouraged them at all, so only one ever plucked up the courage to ask for her hand – James Beale, the son of a close neighbour, on his way up to Oxford to read philosophy. She’d turned him down as kindly as she could, feeling that she ought to wait – wait for what, she couldn’t say. There was loss in her family already, by then, but it was not grief that stopped her; only the want of something she could hardly put her finger on – a degree of conviction, perhaps. She was not romantic by nature; she did not expect her soul to take flight when she met the man she would marry. But she did hope to feel something; something more. Some sense of completion, and certainty.

Richard Weekes fumbled his proposal when he came to it, tripping over the words with his cheeks flaming; and it might have been that sudden show of vulnerability that convinced Rachel, in the moment, to accept. They’d been out walking, with the children to chaperone them, on a warm afternoon in late July. The countryside around Hartford Hall, near the village of Marshfield to the north of Bath, was more golden than green, drowsy with warmth and light. It had been a hot year, the wheat ripening early and the hay fields rife with wild flowers – poppies and cornflowers and tufted vetch. They came to the top corner of a sloping cattle field, where the air was scented with earth and fresh dung, and stopped in the shade of a beech tree while the children ran ahead through the long grass, like little ships on a waterless sea – all but Eliza, who seated herself on the low stone wall some distance away, opened a book and turned her back to them conspicuously.

‘This is a beautiful spot, is it not?’ said Richard, standing beside her with his hands linked behind his back. He had stripped off his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and Rachel noticed the solid build of his arms, the scuffed and weathered look of his hands. A working man’s hands, not those of a gentleman. He wore long, well-worn leather boots over snuff-coloured breeches, and a blue waistcoat just slightly too big for him. Bought second-hand and never altered. That does not make the man any less worthy, Rachel thought.

‘This is one of my favourite views,’ Rachel agreed. Beyond a line of birches and willow pollards at the bottom of the slope, the land rose again, sweeping up, chequered with fields. High above them a young buzzard was calling to its parent across the cloudless sky, its voice still whistling and babyish, though it soared half a thousand feet over their heads. The skin felt tight over Rachel’s nose, and she hoped it wasn’t sunburned. Her straw hat was making her forehead itch.

‘You must never want to leave Hartford,’ said Richard.

‘There are plenty of places, I am sure, that I might come to love as much. And places left may always be visited again,’ said Rachel.

‘Yes. You might always return to visit.’ After this, Richard Weekes seemed to sense that he had assumed too much. He looked down at his feet, shifting them slightly. ‘You grew up near here, you said?’

‘Yes. My family lived in the By Brook valley, not six miles from here. And I spent three seasons in Bath before… before my mother was taken from us.’ Before everything fell into pieces, she did not say.

‘Forgive me, I had no wish to summon sad memories.’

‘No, you did not – they are happy memories, Mr Weekes.’

After a pause, Richard cleared his throat quietly and continued.

‘I imagine you have some acquaintances then, in Bath and around? People you met during your seasons there?’

‘Some, I suppose,’ said Rachel awkwardly. He didn’t seem to understand that all such society had ceased with her father’s disgrace; she found that she had no particular wish to enlighten him. She had spoken of losing her parents, and he’d seemed to accept that as reason enough for her to have taken a post as governess, without any connotations of shame or penury. ‘But it has been a good many years since I was there.’

‘Oh, you will not have been forgotten, Miss Crofton. I am entirely convinced of that. It would not be possible to forget you,’ he said hurriedly.

‘A good many people come and go from the city,’ she demurred. ‘Did you grow up there yourself?’

‘No, indeed. I grew up out in the villages, as you did. My father was an ostler. But life in the city fits me far better. Bath suits me very well – I would not want to live anywhere else. Though there is sin and hardship there, of course, same as anywhere, and it’s more visible, perhaps, where so many people live in close quarters.’

‘Life can be cruel,’ Rachel murmured, unsure why he would mention such things.

‘Life, but also men. I once saw a man beating a small child – a starving, ragged boy no more than six years old. When I forestalled the man he told me that an apple had fallen from his cart, and that the child had filched it from the gutter. And for this he would beat the wretch with his stick.’ Richard shook his head, and gazed out into the sunshine, and Rachel waited. ‘In the end it came to blows. I fear I may have broken his jaw.’ He turned to look at her again. ‘Does that shock you? Are you appalled, Miss Crofton?’

‘Does what shock me? That a cruel man might beat a child over an apple, or that you might step in and punish him?’ she said severely. He tries so hard to make me know he is brave, and just, and sensible. Richard looked anxious, so she smiled. ‘The cruelty to the child was by far the worse evil, Mr Weekes.’

Richard took her hand then, and suddenly Rachel was all too aware of Eliza’s rigid back and listening ears, and the distant laughter of the other children. A breeze trembled through the beech leaves and fluttered a strand of hair against her cheek. Now it comes.

‘I have already told you how much I… admire you, Miss Crofton. How much I love you, as I have never loved another. You must marry me.’ Richard’s voice was so tense that this proposal came out as a clipped command, and his cheeks blazed with colour. He looked at his feet again, though he kept hold of her hand. It was almost like a bow, like supplication. ‘It would be an advantageous match, I do believe, for both of us. Your gentility and your manners are… so admirable, Miss Crofton. Your acquaintances in Bath… our combined resources, I mean… can only… can only lead to a shared future of far greater – I mean to say, please marry me, I beg of you.’ He coughed, regrouped. ‘If you would do me the great honour of being my wife, then I swear that I will devote my life to your every comfort and care.’ He was breathing deeply, looking up as if he hardly dared to. Two proposals, near a decade apart; this one somewhat the less graceful, but doubtless will be the last. Rachel did not feel certain, but the sky was the most brilliant blue, and his hand was as warm as his flushed cheeks, and his eyes were frantic as he waited for her answer to his clumsy words. The sun glanced from the sloping lines of his cheekbones and jaw. A beautiful face, and all coloured up for the love of me. She felt her heart swell, then, and crack open just a little bit; a glimmer of feeling that was unexpected, long absent, and brought tears to her eyes.

‘Yes. I will marry you, Mr Weekes,’ she said.

Rachel and Richard were to marry in the chapel next to Hartford Hall and then travel at once to Bath, to Richard’s house, where they would live.

‘What street is the house upon?’ Eliza pounced, when she heard of this plan.

‘I forget. Kingsgate, perhaps?’ said Rachel, inventing the name evasively. The house was in fact in Abbeygate Street, and her heart had sunk when she’d told this to the head nurse, Mina Cooper, and watched that kind woman trying to find something good to say about the address. I dare say it is much improved since I was there last.

‘Kingsgate? There is no Kingsgate that I know of. It can’t be near any of the better streets, if I haven’t heard of it at all.’

‘It is possible that there are things in this world that you don’t yet know of, Eliza.’ There were things, for example, that Rachel now knew about Richard that few others did. That in spite of his youthful looks, he was already past thirty. That his favourite thing to eat was bread dipped in the hot butter where mushrooms had been sauteed. That he was afraid to ride, having been thrown badly as a child. That though his father had been a lowly ostler, Richard had raised himself up through hard work and good taste and self-education, to become one of Bath’s most successful wine and spirits merchants.

All these things he told her, without her asking him; like a man laying himself bare – letting her know the good and the bad at once, so that she might know him completely, and it made her trust him. He didn’t seem to notice that he’d asked her little in return, or that she’d volunteered scant information about herself. And for each thing he told her, a dozen further questions were asked in a distant recess of her mind. This curious observer was subtle as a shadow; it was like the echo of a voice, coming up from a deep place; a part of herself she had somehow become separated from, in the years of loss and grief that had followed her happy childhood. But it was a voice she cherished; which, when heard, gave her a pang of loss that went deeper than flesh, and of joy at hearing it again, however softly. On the subject of Richard Weekes it was almost childlike, full of fascination, shy pleasure, and fleeting doubt.

Sir Arthur and Lady Trevelyan dutifully declared that they would miss Rachel, when she told them she would be leaving. She suspected that what they most regretted was having to advertise for a new governess. Only Frederick, the youngest child, seemed to genuinely grieve at the thought of losing her. When he threw his arms around her waist and buried his face in her skirt to hide his tears, Rachel was stabbed with regret.

‘You’re a good boy, Freddie, and I will miss you a great deal. I hope we will visit each other often,’ she told him.

‘I doubt that,’ Eliza chipped in. ‘Bath is so dull and… reduced, these days. We shall be travelling more often to Lyme from now on, I should think. And even if we did come to Bath, I dare say we would move in somewhat different circles.’ In her increased unkindness, Rachel read a touch of sorrow in Eliza, too. She feared that Eliza was one of those people who would only ever be able to express themselves through anger, so she found it in herself to cross over to the girl and kiss her cheek.

‘Be happy, Eliza. And try to be kind,’ she said. Eliza scowled furiously, pulling her face away. She stared resolutely out of the window, looking as though she would love nothing more than to throw open the casement and fly away through it, into the world beyond, far from her home with all its walls and doors, its straight lines and straighter rules.

A knock at the door made Rachel turn from the window. Her wedding gown – in truth her only good gown, of pale fawn cotton, short-sleeved and gathered beneath the bust – shifted around her ankles. She felt the failed curls of her hair brush her neck, and wondered if it was too late to do anything about them. It was Eliza who came into the room, not waiting for her knock to be answered.

‘If you’re ready to wed the shopkeeper, Father has brought the barouche to the front for you. I said it was fifty paces to the chapel and easy to walk, but he insists that a carriage is in order for a wedding,’ she said, sounding bored. She was wearing a beautiful dress of cream satin, edged with intricate embroidery, finer than anything Rachel possessed. Rachel thought this a final act of tactlessness from her former charge.

‘Thank you, Eliza. I am ready.’

‘But… your hair…’

‘My hair will have to do. It’s windy out, anyway. And besides, Mr Weekes will not mind.’

‘He might not, but perhaps you ought. Here, sit down a moment.’ Eliza picked up some discarded pins from the dressing table and set about fixing up some of the stray tresses. ‘You should have had Bessie come and help you,’ she muttered.

‘As you have so often reminded me, Bessie has enough to do without dressing my hair for me.’

‘It’s your wedding day, Miss Crofton. And why you refuse to wear a false front of proper curls, I’ll never know. Miss Crofton, Miss Crofton – I thought you might like to hear it a few last times, before you become Mrs Weekes.’

‘It’s good of you to attend a wedding you so disapprove of,’ said Rachel, amused.

‘I never said I disapproved. Mr Weekes is… well. Right enough for you, I suppose.’ Eliza shrugged.

‘A good and honest man, and one who loves me. Yes, I would call that right enough,’ said Rachel, and in the mirror she saw Eliza blush slightly, her lips thinning as they pressed together. A thought occurred to her then – that Eliza might somehow envy her. She’d caught the girl out, more than once, spying on Richard Weekes from a window. He cut a romantic figure, and he was handsome – more than handsome enough to enchant a fifteen-year-old girl. Rachel knew she shouldn’t let this please her, because Eliza was really just a child; but still, when she rose from the table at last it was with a good deal more resolve.

Down the wide staircase with its sweeping balustrade, along the rich Turkey carpet in the hallway, towards the tall front doors. Rachel’s reflection accompanied her, flitting from one vast mirror to the next like a companionable ghost, and there was something profoundly comforting in this duality. The temptation to see her reflection as a separate person was strong. She didn’t dare turn her head to look, because she knew what she would see – only herself; no companion at her side after all. She would likely never step inside such a grand house again, but Hartford Hall was also cold, and unyielding. There had been little laughter, in spite of the children, and few guests. Rachel had always found it a sad and quiet place, after the warmth and jollity of her childhood home and the constant girlish chatter at boarding school. She pictured the way her father and little brother, Christopher, had wrestled – rolling on the hearthrug, digging at each other’s ribs until laughter rendered them helpless; she tried to picture Sir Arthur behaving that way with Freddie, and couldn’t imagine it. But perhaps she’d brought some of the quietness with her to Hartford, in mourning the loss of her parents; because some measure of herself had died along with them, or so it felt.

Her mother went first, from a seizure; her father three years later, when grief had led him into ruin, and scandal, and the house and all their furniture had been sold to set against bad debt. The doctors had been mystified as to what actually caused his death, but Rachel, who’d seen the look on his face as she kissed him goodnight for the final time, was quite sure her kind and gentle father had died of shame. The thought was too painful, so she tried not to think it. There was the magpie, perched on the gatepost as the carriage rolled her away from the front doors. One for sorrow. Rachel raised two fingers to salute him, in spite of all better sense.

Nerves. Nothing more. Life was about to change for ever, after all. She could be forgiven for feeling anxious, especially since she was alone in all her decisions, with no recourse to advice from a parent or older sibling. Perhaps I am only in want of a second opinion. She had come to know and trust Richard, but their courtship had been swift. Sometimes when he smiled it seemed that other, more serious thoughts hovered behind his eyes; and sometimes when he was serious, his eyes danced in silent merriment. Sometimes she looked up to find him watching her with an expression that she didn’t recognise and couldn’t decipher. Such things are learnt in time. I will learn to read him, and he will learn to read me. But he told her that he loved her, over and over again, and swore his devotion to her. And she’d seen the effect she’d had on him, when they first met. Still, her heart was thumping as she made her solitary walk down the aisle to join him in front of the altar. She had no male relative to accompany her – long before her mother died, her brother Christopher had been carried off by a fever, at the age of nine; Sir Arthur drew the line at taking on this familial duty himself. The bride’s side of the chapel was populated almost exclusively with absent people, but she pictured them there as she made her way past, and she pictured them glad, and approving of her choice. She held herself straight, and walked with measured steps.

Richard was wearing his best blue coat and a crisp white neck tie, with his hair combed back and his jaw clean-shaven. He was strikingly lovely; his eyes were clear and apprehensive as he watched her approach. He stood close enough to her for their arms to press together as the parson gave the welcome. There seemed a promise in the touch – that soon there would be nothing, not even cloth, between their two skins. Rachel felt anxious at the thought. The sunlight through the chapel window was warm. She could smell Richard’s shaving soap, a slight aroma of camphor from his coat, and the vital, masculine smell of new sweat. She cast her eyes sideways as the clergyman spoke on, and saw Richard staring fixedly at the effigy of Christ on the cross that hung above the altar. Small knots were working at the corners of his jaw, but when he was called upon to speak, and make his vows, he turned towards her and couldn’t keep from smiling. Try as she might to be calm as she spoke her part, Rachel’s voice was so quiet and strangled that the parson struggled to hear it. When it was done, Richard raised her hand to his lips and shut his eyes, bowing before her.

‘Mrs Weekes. You have made me the happiest man alive,’ he whispered, and then laughed delightedly, as though he couldn’t keep it in.

Starling blew angrily at a lock of her reddish hair that kept falling into her eyes. Her hands were sticky with onion juice, so she didn’t want to brush it back; the smell of food and cookery lingered on her long enough as it was. In spite of the chunk of stale bread impaled on the point of her knife – a safeguard that Bridget had sworn by – her eyes were stinging from the fumes, and just then her nose began to itch as well, so her teeth were already clenched in irritation before Dorcas came sidling up to her. Dorcas smoothed her apron repeatedly with the flats of her hands, and smiled a quick, thin smile. She hovered there, in the corner of Starling’s eye, like some insect looking for a place to land. Starling took a deep breath, put down the knife and raised her eyebrows. Dorcas’s smile became a scowl, and Starling could see how much she loathed asking a favour of a lowly kitchen maid.

The sun had only just set and the lamps not yet been lit, so the fire sent shadows capering up the walls like devils.

‘Will you do it today, Starling? You know how bad he was yesterday,’ Dorcas burst out. The skinny housemaid, with her horse’s teeth and her narrow, lashless eyes, was sweating, though whether that was from discomfort or the heat of the cook fires, Starling couldn’t tell.

‘Is that anyway to talk about the master?’ Starling was too cross to make it easy for Dorcas. Let her beg me, she thought.

‘Don’t play me the high and mighty, Starling. You know what I’m talking about,’ said Dorcas. Starling studied her, and saw real fear in the girl’s eyes. She hardened her heart against it.

‘What I don’t know is why you expect me to do your work for you, Dorcas Winthrop. I don’t see you down here chopping endless onions for the soup.’ Dorcas’s nostrils flared in distaste.

‘I’m upper housemaid. I don’t do kitchen work.’

‘You’re the only housemaid, so go do your own work and leave me be.’ Starling turned back to the onions, feeling the other girl’s impotent rage as she backed away.

The kitchen of the house on Lansdown Crescent, in Bath, had a vaulted ceiling and tall windows to compensate for being below street level. The windows looked out onto a narrow, shadowed courtyard, and let in little light. It was a space nestled amongst the foundations of the building, carved into the ground, supporting the house above in more ways than one. Starling sometimes thought of it as like an animal den, a warren through which the servants moved, day in, day out, with grime under their nails and dried sweat in their clothes, blinking at the light of day. The cook, Sol Bradbury, chuckled as Dorcas finally slunk reluctantly up the stairs.

‘You’re wicked, you are, Starling. It’ll end with you going up, and you know that.’

‘Perhaps. But she nips at me like a flea, that one. I can’t find the will to make it easy on her,’ Starling replied.

The gentleman of the house, Mr Jonathan Alleyn, had indeed been worse than usual in the past few days, for which Starling felt gratified. It was her doing, after all. He was ruled by his moods and dreams and the pains in his head; the disarray in his dark and cluttered rooms reflected the disorder in his mind. Starling had many ways to goad him. Earlier in the week she’d learnt, from an old soldier drinking in the Moor’s Head, the exact tattoo of French marching drums. She’d beat out this rhythm on the hearth as she swept it, ostensibly to knock the ashes from the shovel and brush. When she’d finished, Jonathan Alleyn had been sitting with his eyes tight shut and his nostrils white, his whole body wrought hard with stress, so tightly that it shook. No more than you deserve, Starling had thought, pleased at this result, and that he went downhill the rest of the week. Yesterday, Dorcas had been pale and goggle-eyed when she finished in his rooms. Starling curled her lip at the memory. The girl was as gutless as a rabbit. She tucked the offending strands of hair more firmly under her cap and went back to the onions. Sol beat the batter for a plum cake, quietly singing a bawdy song.

In minutes Dorcas was back, tears streaking through smudges of soot on her cheeks.

‘He’s gone mad! This time he’s gone quite mad!’ she cried, all shrill and staccato. Starling couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘Don’t you dare laugh at me, Starling! No decent person should have to go into those rooms! It’s worse than anything the devil could devise! And he’s like a demon himself… I think his soul must be black as tar! As black as tar!’ Dorcas clamoured.

‘What is all this now?’ It was Mrs Hatton who spoke – the housekeeper; a small, brisk woman with iron-grey hair and a careworn face. The three women in the kitchen stood up straighter, and buttoned their lips. ‘Well? Out with it, one of you.’

‘It’s Mr Alleyn, ma’am. He… he… I went to set up the room for the night and he…’ Dorcas dissolved into tears again, stretching her mouth into a wide, upturned crescent.

‘Saints preserve us. There now, Dorcas! I’m sure he didn’t mean you any harm.’ The housekeeper fetched out her handkerchief and handed it to the housemaid.

‘But I’m sure he did, ma’am! I think he has gone mad this time! He snatched up the smuts bucket and threw it at me! If I hadn’t ha’ dodged it might ha’ knocked all my teeth out…’

‘Perhaps no bad thing,’ Starling muttered. Dorcas shot her a look of pure venom.

‘Starling, nobody asked you to speak,’ said Mrs Hatton, exasperated. Dorcas wept on.

‘And… and he called me such names! I shouldn’t have to hear such things. And I did nothing to deserve it!’

‘That’s enough. Now, calm down. You have work to do, and-’

‘No! I won’t go up there again! Not now and not tomorrow neither! It’s not natural, what he gets up to! He’s not natural, and no decent person should be expected to… to… have to see him, or serve him! And I won’t, even if it means I’m dismissed!’ With this Dorcas ran from the kitchen. Sol Bradbury and Starling exchanged a look, and Starling fought hard not to smile.

‘Lord, not another one running out,’ Mrs Hatton muttered; for a second, her shoulders sagged in exhaustion. ‘Starling, stop smirking. Go up to Mr Alleyn, if you please, and make his rooms for him. You’ll need to bank the fire well, there’s a nip in the air tonight. He’ll ask for wine but I have it from the mistress that he’s not to have any – the pains in his head have been bad this week, poor soul. Any one of us would be as volatile, had we to live with such suffering. Now, please, Starling – I don’t want to hear any argument.’ She raised one finger in warning, and then walked out in pursuit of Dorcas.

Starling smiled at her retreating back. It served her well to let Mrs Hatton believe that she was reluctant to go into Jonathan Alleyn’s rooms. It would have caused suspicion, after all, if she seemed keen to go in, though keen she was. A strange kind of keen, because her pulse always raced and her breathing came faster, and on some level she knew she was afraid of him. Not afraid of the look of him, or the contents of his rooms, or of his rages, like the other girls; she was afraid of what she might do, and what he might. Because she had known Jonathan Alleyn since she was a little girl, and she knew things about him that the other servants didn’t. Things nobody else knew.

She found the supper tray that Dorcas had abandoned on a table in the hallway outside his rooms. He had two adjoining chambers on the second storey of the house, on its west side, sharing a wall with the next house along the crescent. The room where he slept was towards the back of the house, plainly furnished but dominated by an enormous canopied tester bed, its wooden posts all gilded, its drapes of heavy crimson damask. Linked to this via double doors, the room at the front of the house was supposedly his study, and had an enormous bay window arching over the street, giving a far-reaching view of the city and the hills around it. A view almost always hidden by closed shutters. This room had filled a succession of housemaids with horror. Starling paused and strained her ears for the sound of Mrs Hatton’s footsteps, or anyone else who might be near, before adding a bottle of wine to the supper tray. A bottle she’d got especially, from Richard Weekes; dosed in secret with extra spirits to make it stronger. Mr Alleyn would drink it, she knew, even if he realised it was doctored. He didn’t seem to be able to stop himself. Perhaps – she almost smiled to herself at the idea – perhaps he even thought she did it to please him.

Starling listened hard for a moment. She steadied herself. There was silence from within; no sound of movement, or speech, or violence. He would be waiting in the dark, but Starling was not afraid of the dark. Jonathan Alleyn never lit his own lamps; he liked to sit as the gloom gathered around him. She’d once heard him say that the shadows soothed him. Well, she would banish them. Why should he be soothed? Behind her, the lamp on the wall made a soft tearing sound as it guttered in a draught. That same draught brushed the back of Starling’s neck, and made the skin there tingle. That’s all it is, she assured herself. Just a cold zephyr where a door has been left open. It was not fear. She refused to be afraid of Jonathan Alleyn, even though the worst and biggest thing she knew about him, which nobody else knew, was that he was a murderer.

He would be waiting within, nothing to betray his whereabouts but the ruddy gleam of the fire reflecting in his eyes. For you, Alice, she pledged silently, as she knocked smartly at the door, and went in.

Sir Arthur’s generosity extended to loaning the barouche to Rachel and her new husband for the drive into Bath for the wedding breakfast. As soon as they’d climbed down outside the Moor’s Head inn, the carriage pulled away, and her connection with Hartford ended to the sound of iron-shod hooves clattering on cobblestones. The wind funnelling down Walcot Street was brisk. Richard tipped two strong lads to carry Rachel’s trunk south to the house on Abbeygate Street, then he held out his hand to her.

‘Come, my dear. Come in out of this breeze,’ he said, wrapping her hand around the crook of his elbow. Just then, the abbey bells began to strike the hour, and Rachel paused.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘It’s been many years since I heard those bells.’ She looked down the street into the thick of the city, where pale stone buildings clustered in all around, and the cobbled streets ran with carts and carriages, donkey traps, servants hurrying on their masters’ business. There were dowdy maids with laundry bundles, scuffing their feet along in the wooden pattens that kept their shoes out of the muck. There were housekeepers and cooks with baskets full of fresh meat and vegetables; sweating bearers carrying the wealthy uphill in smart sedan chairs; street hawkers and urchins and fashionable ladies with their pelisses buttoned tight against the weather. Rachel took a deep breath and smelled the dankness of the river; the sweet reek of rubbish in the gutter; freshly baked bread and roasting meat; a cloud of beery fumes and tobacco smoke from the inn. A mixture of smells she’d grown unused to, living in the sterile calm of Hartford Hall. ‘Not since I came here with my parents in the season. My little brother too, before we lost him.’ It was a fond memory, but Richard mistook her, and thought her sad.

‘Forget all that, Mrs Weekes.’ He squeezed her hand, pulling her towards the door of the inn. ‘I’m your family now, and this is a new beginning. For sure, Bath is much changed since you were last here – new buildings are finished all the time; and new folk come in. Fine people too, the right sort,’ Richard said, and Rachel smiled at him, not caring to explain herself.

The Moor’s Head had low ceilings heavy with beams and a red brick floor worn smooth from long years of use. There was a racket of voices and laughter already, in spite of it being just five in the afternoon, and cheering broke out when Richard appeared. He grinned and clasped hands with several men who were already well soused, judging by their red cheeks and heavy eyes. Rachel smiled uncomfortably as they toasted her with tankards of ale and shook her hand more roughly than she was used to. The smoke made her eyes sting, so she blinked frequently. Richard wore a grin from ear to ear until he glanced at Rachel and saw her discomfort. His smile faltered.

‘Sadie, is our table ready?’ he called out to the girl behind the bar, who was moon-faced, with deep brown curls, abundant bosom and apples in her cheeks.

‘Aye, Mr Weekes, just as you asked. Go on up as it please you,’ said Sadie. Just then a man came to stand in front of them; portly, with a lined face and a filthy grey wig that had slipped down over one ear. He patted Rachel’s hand clumsily.

‘Well, young sir, I declare you have done mighty well for yourself. You told us she was a beauty, but we none of us expected you could ensnare such a fine creature as this, hmm?’ said the man, slurring slightly. His breath was sour with brandy but his face was kindly, and Rachel inclined her head graciously at the compliment. Her new husband scowled.

‘Of course she is fine. Finer than me, certainly. But I hope to raise myself up, and to deserve her,’ he said stiffly.

‘You are too kind to me, and do yourself a disservice, Mr Weekes,’ Rachel told him.

‘Well, I never saw a bride so radiant. No, indeed. You are the loveliest thing to grace this poor place in as long as I can recall,’ the man continued. ‘Let me-’

‘That you could even recall the time of year would come as a surprise to me. Come, my dear. This way.’ Richard led Rachel away, as the elderly man was drawing breath to introduce himself. He looked crestfallen as they departed, and Rachel turned to smile in farewell.

‘Who was that man?’ she said, as Richard led her to the foot of a crooked wooden stair.

‘That? Oh, nobody. His name is Duncan Weekes. He’s my father, if truth be told,’ Richard muttered, keeping his hand in the small of her back to urge her onwards.

‘Your father?’ Rachel was shocked. Richard led her into a cosy room on the upper storey, where the wooden floor rolled and undulated, and the leaded windows were hazy with city grime. But the table that had been laid for them was well scrubbed, and laid with china plates and wine glasses. Rachel took her seat, and noticed that the china was chipped in places, the cutlery stained. She was proud to find herself not as disheartened by such things as she might have expected. ‘I understood you had little contact with your father?’

‘As little as I may, truth be told,’ said Richard.

‘And yet… you must have invited him here today, for the wedding feast?’

‘Invited him? No, I did not. But… we have some of the same acquaintances, perhaps. He must have heard we would be coming here.’

‘You come here often, I divine. You seem to have many friends here.’

‘Friends, some. Clients others, and some acquaintances that perhaps I once enjoyed, and now can’t quite be rid of. But never mind them – today is about us. Here, try the wine. It’s Constantia, shipped all the way from the Dutch colony on the Cape of Good Hope. A rare treasure, and I have been keeping this bottle for my bride for some years now. I can’t tell you how happy I am to finally be able to raise a glass of it in a toast to you, my love.’ He filled two glasses, handed one to her and entwined their wrists.

‘Happy to have found your bride, or to be able to try the wine at last?’ Rachel teased.

‘Both.’ Richard smiled. ‘But you are undoubtedly the greater pleasure. To you, Mrs Rachel Weekes.’

The wine sank hotly into Rachel’s empty stomach.

‘It’s delicious,’ she said, and tried not to dwell on the fact that her new name made her a stranger to her own ears. Since childhood she’d envisaged her wedding feast as a rather different affair. She’d imagined her parents with her, and other family, and a white embroidered tablecloth beneath a feast set out on silver platters and fine porcelain; herself far younger, not past her bloom at twenty-nine as she now found herself, and having endured years of the pitying looks aimed at an old maid. But she could never have hoped for a more handsome groom, nor one so devoted to her. ‘Mr Weekes, shouldn’t we ask your father to join us? Whatever has passed between you, it doesn’t seem right that he should be so near at hand, and yet excluded from our celebration,’ she said. Richard didn’t answer at once. He took a long swig of the wine and then turned the glass by its stem on the table top.

‘I would rather have you all to myself,’ he said at last, looking at her with a smile that did not quite tally with the look in his eye.

‘I fear that you are ashamed of him, and don’t want me to know him. Please, I assure you, you need not worry. Duncan Weekes is now my father too, after all, and I should very much like to come to know him…’

‘You only say so because you don’t know what he’s like.’

‘Perhaps. But a wedding is a time for family, don’t you think? He seemed kindly… a touch disordered, perhaps, but-’

‘No,’ said Richard, and there was such a note of finality in his voice that Rachel didn’t dare press the matter, for fear of souring the mood.

So they feasted alone, and once the Constantia was finished more wine was brought in by the serving girl, Sadie, along with a huge platter of roast lamb cutlets, a whole trout in butter and parsley sauce and a dish of curried root vegetables. Richard emptied his glass thrice for each time Rachel emptied hers, and soon his cheeks were flushed and his eyes were bright, and his voice as he spoke grew blurry. He told her about his business, and how he hoped to grow it; how soon it would be before they were able to move to better accommodation; how their son would join him in the wine and spirits trade, and their daughter would marry a baronet.

‘I fear that you may find our rooms somewhat… less than you are used to,’ he said at one point. ‘I hope you will not be disappointed.’

‘What right have I to be disappointed?’ said Rachel. ‘I who have near nothing, save the clothes I stand up in? Hartford Hall was not my home, and my family home was lost to me years ago. All that you have you have worked for, and got for yourself, and that is far more than I can claim. And you would share it all with me… I shall not be disappointed.’

‘And yet, in truth, you are accustomed to fine surroundings, fine food and the company of well-mannered people…’

‘I am accustomed to the company of bad-tempered children,’ she said, taking his hand and squeezing it. ‘That was not the life I wanted. This is.’ She smiled. Love, whispered the echo in her head. Love is what’s needed, and what you should become accustomed to. So love him.

Richard kissed her hand, all pleased and relieved, and Rachel wondered at a strange feeling of detachment that grew in her as the evening progressed.

She felt slightly as though she was watching a scene in which she had no part; watching things that were happening to another person altogether. Some important part of her had slipped away, and gone in search of other things. It was the same odd numbness that had begun with the first death in her family and grown through each one that came after, and she had hoped that the way Richard had touched her heart when he proposed had marked the beginning of its end. At length Rachel pushed her glass away from her, and held her hand over it when the girl came to fill it. A few drops of wine splashed from the jug onto her fingers, and she looked up to remonstrate with Sadie only to find that it wasn’t the dark-haired girl who poured it, but a red-head. A pretty girl with elongated, broad-set eyes that looked clever and too knowing. She had a short nose, tilted up at its tip; brown eyes and a wide mouth shaped by a lazy curve. Her hair was a coppery colour, like autumn leaves, and long strands of it hung down from her cap. She had halted in the act of pouring the wine, and stood quite still, staring most peculiarly; her gaze seemed to pass right through Rachel, and settle on some other place or time entirely.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Rachel, her own tongue loosened by the wine she’d drunk. The serving girl blinked; shut her mouth with an audible click of her teeth.

‘Beg pardon, ma’am,’ she said, in a low voice.

‘Your cloth, please, to dry my hand.’ Rachel held out her hand for the dish rag hanging over the girl’s shoulder.

‘I’ll take some more.’ Richard pushed his glass towards the girl, and looked up. He too seemed to notice that this was not their normal server, but he said nothing. He only watched the girl guardedly, and for a moment all three were locked in mute immobility.

‘Your cloth, if you please,’ Rachel said again.

‘Beg pardon,’ the girl repeated. She set down the jug with a thump, turned abruptly and left the room.

‘Well! What on earth got into her, I wonder?’ said Rachel, but Richard didn’t answer her. He picked up his glass to drink, found it empty, and put it back down irritably.

‘Sadie!’ he bellowed towards the open doorway, and moments later Sadie reappeared to take up the wine jug. Rachel kept an eye out, but the curious red-haired girl did not return. The house on Abbeygate Street was all in darkness when they entered. Richard lit a single candle to guide them up the stairs to the bedchamber, so Rachel could form no impression of her new home other than of a clinging coldness on the lower floor; narrow, creaking wooden stairs and a spacious but low-ceilinged upper room with a rumpled tester bed at its centre. The air smelled as though the windows had been a long time shut; the bed as though the sheets had been much slept upon. All of which is only the lack of a woman’s touch, Rachel assured herself. Richard put the candle down on the nightstand and came to stand opposite her at the foot of the bed. He laced their fingers together, swaying slightly on his feet; in the candle’s glow his face was soft and smiling. Rachel’s smile was more uncertain, and she wished then that she’d drunk more wine at dinner. She’d wanted to be fully aware of this night, of this crucial moment in her life. There were only her and Richard to remember it, after all, but now it came to it she was afraid and didn’t know what to do, and wished to be less aware than she was. Richard kissed her gently, opening her mouth with his, and Rachel waited to feel something other than the urge to recoil from the wine gone sour on his breath, and the taste of lamb grease on his lips. Mother did not love Father at first. And Father was a good man. Richard’s kisses grew harder, and more insistent, and soon he was pulling at her clothes.

‘Rachel, my sweet wife,’ he murmured, kissing her neck. Unsure how to behave, Rachel reached up and began to unpin her hair, as she normally would before bed. The pins pattered onto the floor as Richard swept her from her feet, and crumpled onto the bed on top of her.

She would have liked more time to become acquainted with his body. The differences with her own intrigued her – the heft of it, the breadth of his shoulders, the fairness of his skin across which, she could just make out in the candlelight, freckles were scattered. He was so solid, so warm. She sank her fingers into the flesh of his upper arms, and pictured bones as thick and smooth as the mahogany arms of a chair. The weight of him pressed on her chest and made it hard to breathe. She would have liked to see the thing between his legs, to know how it behaved, to feel it with her fingers before it touched her elsewhere, but she had no chance to. Breathless and still muttering disjointed endearments, Richard pushed his way into her, remembering only too late to be gentle. He groaned as he moved, to and fro, and Rachel clasped his shoulders tightly, screwing her eyes tight shut at the discomfort and the strangeness of it. He is my husband. This is proper. She studied the sensation, which by the end was merely uncomfortable, and tried to feel satisfied that this was a duty done, a milestone reached. A pact sealed, irrevocably. I am his now, she thought, and only then realised how strange and limited a kind of freedom marriage might be.