Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Read Free

the house. Why is there this room full of dusty prams and moth-eaten receiving blankets? It feels to Annie as though she has been the only living thing in this room for years and years. She pokes at a doll lying tangled with other dolls in a box on top of a steamer trunk. The doll’s eyes snap open and Annie jumps. The eyes flick closed again.
    Annie is unlikely ever to have children of her own. She is unlikely, if she remains in service, even to marry. Sometimes it is possible for a maid to take a male servant in the same household as a husband. Annie thinks of Wilks, of the leg poking out from behind the potting shed. She shakes the leg of the doll again and the eyes fall open and stare at her, unblinking, blue as a morning sky.
    The rest of the house is not as sinister. Rooms for dining. Rooms for receiving visitors. To the right of the sitting room where Annie first met Mrs. Dashell is a long hallway, a wing that, like everything else, seems to have been built on as a kind of rash afterthought. Annie wanders down the hallway, hands out to touch the cool walls on either side of her. At the end of the passage a door is ajar. Annie pushes it slowly open, enough to peer inside. Books are layered from floor to ceiling. The density of them like strata in a glacial bluff. Annie has never seen so many books in one place. The small library in the reverend’s house in Portman Square was no match for this one. Near the end of her time in London, Annie was afraid that she’d have to start again in the reverend’s library, start back at the beginning, at the first book she’d borrowed from him.
    There is no one in this forbidden library and Annie pushes the door completely open and enters. A huge oak table piled up with sheets of paper dominates the centre of the room. There’s a desk near one set of bookshelves, and a free-standing globe, almost as tall as Annie, beside the desk. But it is the books Annie is interested in. She stands in front of the shelves, greedily reading the titles of these volumes she has mostly never seen, or heard of before.
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The Last Days of Pompeii.
    At Mrs. Gilbey’s, reading was Annie’s secret. Mrs. Gilbey wanted Annie to be literate, wanted the convenience of a maid who understood written instruction, but she would not have appreciated Annie’s feverish passion for words, would not have tolerated passion of any sort within her household. Annie’s reading at Mrs. Gilbey’s was always done with the same bursts of clandestine intensity that one would use to pursue an illicit encounter. Hiding a book in a cupboard and reading phrases in between changing the bed linen. Putting a book, open, inside the large silver tureen so that she could read and polish the silver at the same time. Luckily the reverend supported her romance with reading and kept her supplied with books from his personal library. But they were largely books on religious matters, or at least with religious leanings. There was not the range that there was here, in Mr. Dashell’s library. Annie runs her hands lightly over the soft leather spines of the books. All those words, just waiting for her.
    “Never mind what I told you,” says Cook, when Annie appears back in the kitchen. “I need you to take these to the Lady. She’s in the glasshouse. Down the garden.” Cook thrusts two goose wings at Annie. The feathered wings are fully extended, and very stiff. They have crude leather hoops sewn onto the underside of them, two on each wing.
    On the path in the garden that leads to the glasshouse, Annie meets Eldon Dashell. He is tall and thin, with a straggly reddish beard and glasses. Hurrying towards the house, looking down at the pattern of stones and grass between his feet, he doesn’t see Annie until he is almost upon her.
    “Excuse me.”
    He looks up, delicately sidesteps her, sees her armload of wings and then her face. “Angels,” he says. “You must be the new maid.”
    “Annie