The House of Dead Maids Read Free Page B

dress in church.
    “Church?” asked Mrs. Sexton, pausing to eye me askance.
    “It’s the Lord’s Day,” I reminded her. “Oh, dear! I need to wash. What time do the house staff leave for service?”
    “Wash if you like and go where you like,” said Mrs. Sexton. “I stay here.” And she picked up her bucket and left the room.
    This put me in a predicament. Weekly service was inevitable, inescapable, as firmly fixed in the cycle of existence as the baking of the household loaves of bread. Now I asked myself, did I want to go to church? And the answer was by no means simple. Sometimes a curate had the gift of preaching, but more often than not, service was a contest of endurance to see whether the preacher’s voice would give out before I lost the feeling in my dangling toes.The thought that I might choose—that I might go or not as I pleased—awakened in me guilty relief.
    I did have a suspicion that the quarrelsome, untruthful behavior of the residents of this house could not be improved by their impiety and that I should seek a different course if I did not wish to become like them. Nonetheless, such is the frailty of human goodness that I soon stifled this counsel with a dozen practical suggestions. Before I had concluded washing, I had decided to remain at home. Already I viewed my absence from divine worship that day with melancholy regret, as though it were a circumstance that had happened long ago instead of an event that had yet to take place.
    I blush to own that this regret was quite drowned out by another, and that was the lack of an adequate looking glass. The old one in the beaded frame returned only a suggestion of features. I longed to see my new clothes, and as I stepped into the passage, I was just turning over in my mind where I might have seen a better mirror. When first I caught sight of the small figure in black, I thought it was my reflection.
    She stood very still in the dusky passage where the light was poorest. Like me, she wore the blackdress that proclaimed her a maid of the house, but where mine was new, hers was spoiled by mildew and smears of clay. Thin hair, dripping with muddy water, fell to her shoulders in limp, stringy ropes. This was my companion of the night before—and she was dead.
    The dead hold no terrors for me. I have watched by the beds of those who have passed on, comforted by their sorrowless repose. But this little maid was a ghastly thing, all the more horrible because she stood before me. It wasn’t the pallid hue of her grimy face that shocked me, or her little gray hands and feet. It was the holes where her eyes should have been, great round sockets of shadow.
    The dead girl opened her lips as if she meant to speak. Her mouth was another black pit like the black pits of her eyes. She was nothing but a hollowed-out skin plumped up with shadow. I had the horrible idea that if I were to scratch her, she would split open, and the darkness within her would come pouring out.
    I remember that she reached out a hand towards me, and I remember running away. I remember throwing open the door to the kitchen, and Mrs. Sexton’s startled curse. I stood for long minutes by the bright, sunlit window, my teeth chatteringuncontrollably. The comprehension that this was the icy form I had held through the night sputtered across my nerves and set the room to spinning.
    Then Mrs. Sexton brought a glass, and brandy coursed through me like fire. Sense returned, and with it, an over-powering fervor. This had been a judgment upon me. I needed no other sign.
    “I’m going to church!” I gasped.

 

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Mrs. Sexton didn’t hinder me with questions, which would have made me worse again. Seeing that I couldn’t eat, she tied up bread and cheese in a napkin and sent it along with me. Not five minutes later, I stood trembling in the sunshine of a breezy spring day, as glad of my escape from that dark house as I had been of anything in my life.
    The kitchen garden shone