Rutherford Park Read Free

lightly on the boarded floor. Not an echo, not a word. It was a maid’s job more than anything else to be invisible, a kind of wraith every morning carrying coal to every bedroom. Breathless, boneless wraith. Until the hand touched the hair on the back of her neck, until it stroked the flesh of her arm below the turned-up sleeve of the dress.
    Emily screwed her eyes shut on the servants’ stair, and stopped. The housekeeper had caught her crying here a week ago—come running up the stairs before Emily could right herself. “What’s the matter with you?” Mrs. Jocelyn had demanded. “Get out of the way.” Emily had done as she was told. Nevertheless, it was strange. She thought that she had forgotten how to cry. The shame and terror had wrung it out of her. Mostly she would stand in those lost moments with a dry mouth and dry eyes, staring into the future, beyond grief. He’d taken her heart, she’d thought then to herself. Taken it, broken it, left it staggering through each hour like a faulty clock trying to keep time.
    She went as quickly as she could down to the basement, and met Alfred Whitley by the kitchens. “Give me the coal,” she hissed at him, snatching the bucket he had brought. She was sorry for her rudeness afterwards; Alfred was willing, if stupid. His mouth always looked too big for his open, gormless face, and his nose permanently ran and he would wipe it on his sleeve. “Like a wet weekend,” John Gray, the estate steward, had said. “That’s what you get out of the village. They don’t breed brains down there. Just muck.”
    Still, poor Alfred. Poor Alfie. You had to feel for the lad. Only thirteen, and with the worst of the jobs, the hallboy. Though he seemed not to care, standing in the yard cutting a hundredweight of logs, hair plastered to his head in the rain. They never letMr. Bradfield, the butler, see Alfie in one of the boy’s states: exhausted, muddy, wet, sitting on the back step with a mug of cocoa. Mr. Bradfield would have kicked his sorry hide. Mr. Bradfield liked his steps nice and clean.
    Emily was dodging the butler’s room now. She could see the oil lamp lit in there; there was a glass panel in his door. She hurried past with the coal scuttle, climbed a second stair, and pushed open the green baize door to the house.
    This stair brought her out on the south side, next to Lord William’s study, and the archive, and the library. Emily disliked it here: not so much the study, which was a pleasant little place with a fine desk and a small fireplace where she now lit the first fire, but the archive containing all the Roman relics that had belonged to Lord William’s father. All the shelves had to be dusted, with their stained alabaster birds and cats, and little sculptures and pots, and bones dug up from Beddersley Hill, where they said that ancient kings were buried. They were all funny things, strange things. They made the hair prickle on the back of her neck. She hated the elongated eyes of the cat statues—two of them, one on each side of the door.
    Seeing the fire catch, she put up the fireguard and went back to the hallway, crossing the marble floor under the high, vaulted arches. This was the oldest part of the house, what had been the main house before Lord William had extended the whole place fifteen years ago with Lady Cavendish’s fortune. They said that the money from the wool mills was the only reason that Cavendish had bothered with a bride, but Emily did not know anything about that. To her, the great hall seemed stranded in the center of the modern additions: heavy wood beams far above. Alfred had lit the oil lamps by the entrance and the main stair. They were pools of color in the dark.
    Emily went into the drawing room. There was an urgent needto be fast at this time of day. There were five fires to light on this floor, and then the bedrooms by six o’clock, or soon after. Cynthia and Mary helped the maid of all work stoke up the kitchen fires, sweep out