Page 16 of The Midnight Carousel

Maisie’s face is lit red, white and blue as she takes a peek at Chicago’s Armistice Day fireworks through a crack in the curtains.

So many casualties, all that death marked by tubes of colourful gunpowder.

The inadequacy of the gesture isn’t so surprising, really, given that she alone still prays for Billy to be found safe.

Though she will turn twenty-one in a couple of months, Maisie feels the ache of that terrible afternoon as acutely as she did at sixteen.

After less than a month, the police stopped searching, and rumours of what might have happened to the boy turned to dust. Even Billy’s parents gave up on ever finding their youngest child dead or alive, sold the tailoring business and moved out east. But Maisie will never lose hope.

Perhaps he was taken by a childless couple wanting a family of their own, she tells herself, and is living a wonderful life somewhere safe.

If she wills a happy outcome, it will be so.

Occasionally, she slips up, catches herself assuming harm has come to him.

Dear Lord of the Water, please care for Billy’s soul , she murmurs, wondering why the charms failed to keep Billy safe.

Did she lay too few pebbles? Were they in the wrong place?

Then she retracts the prayer by throwing ten stones in the lake, the ripples disrupting the words.

He will be found.

Unable to shake the drama of that day, Maisie and Sir Malcolm have tacitly agreed to remain as inconspicuous as possible, closeting themselves at Fairweather in the years after the disappearance.

To her relief, she wasn’t thrown out of the house after Billy’s disappearance, but she feels like she’s been on very dangerous ground ever since.

Fortunately, they keep to themselves, seldom crossing paths.

He resides mainly in the drawing room, almost never venturing to the city any longer for meetings, and barely sleeping, especially during the past few weeks.

Meanwhile, her focus is directed towards household tasks like dusting and polishing and darning, spending any spare time reading or playing card games like Solitaire alone.

The rooms they don’t use are closed up, with the furniture covered in dust sheets, and a musty smell pervades the house, as though no fresh air ever enters.

Though she does make a point to go outdoors for a walk every day, her route never takes Maisie beyond the boundaries of the estate, and certainly nowhere near the carousel, which would only rekindle memories of the party. As far as she knows, the machine has lain undisturbed all these years.

This self-imposed solitude was made easier when America joined the war a couple of years ago.

With so many men called up, and civilians encouraged to do their bit, socializing hasn’t necessarily been expected.

And now the Spanish flu looms as a threat.

The infection has already claimed Eric’s cousin, the Hutton-Bellamy nanny and Mrs Papadopoulos’s two brothers-in-law over the past few months, all healthy adults between twenty and forty years old, and Maisie is playing it safe.

It takes her straight back to the time at Jesserton when the scarlet fever wiped out a third of the household.

Trying to stem the rising tide in the city since September, Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson has also been cautious.

Eric grumbles about smoking being banned on the streetcars; Clara can’t understand why everything fun is closed– the movie house, the skating rink; and Peggy Mae alternately laughs and frowns as she reads aloud from the Chicago Tribune .

‘Lord knows I don’t have the prettiest face, but I’m not covering it with a mask in public,’ she groans.

Or she declares: ‘It’s like that too-big-for-his-boots commissioner thinks we’re criminals– reporting when we’re sick, telling the police to make sure we stick to his rules. ’

Minutes after the fireworks reach their grand finale, Clara walks into the bedroom with a pile of fresh laundry.

It’s late for any staff to still be at the main house, and Maisie watches the maid move to the mahogany bureau, fumble with the bottom drawer, drop a stocking.

Clara opens her mouth, snaps it shut, blushes and hurries to the door, without saying a word to her.

This is strange, for usually the girl chatters away non-stop these days.

‘Is everything all right, Clara?’ Maisie asks.

Clara jumps as if stung by a wasp, and turns around.

‘Well, ma’am, since you asked…’ She clutches her apron. ‘My mother is sick, and I need twenty cents to buy the special elixir from Madame Rose.’

Maisie tries to disguise her dislike of Madame Rose by offering a sympathetic smile.

The one time they met, the woman was holding court in the kitchen, impressing the staff with a tale of how she foretold the downfall of the Russian royal family through the study of a clump of tea leaves.

‘Darjeeling, mind you,’ she’d claimed, waggling a bony finger.

‘None of the cheap garbage.’ Dressed top to toe in crimson silk with a yellow canary feather in her straw hat, she gave Maisie an uneasy feeling of pretending to know more than she actually did.

‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ Maisie says. ‘But are you sure it will work?’

She stops short of saying that Madame Rose is probably peddling snake oil.

‘Why, yes, ma’am, I am. Only I haven’t received last week’s wages. Or the wages from the week before.’

Maisie frowns. ‘Are you saying you haven’t been paid? For two whole weeks?’

Clara reddens, looks at her feet.

‘I am, ma’am, and I wouldn’t have troubled you except that Sir Malcolm suffers from a lot of migraines lately.’

She’s correct of course. Sir Malcolm’s alcohol intake has rendered his presence in the house ghostlike: the back of his head disappearing into the study, a shadowy figure hovering in the hallways late at night.

Though she’d rather not have to deal with this problem, her ambiguous status as unofficial lady of Fairweather House leaves Maisie little choice.

‘All right, leave it with me.’

Before she loses her nerve, Maisie hurries downstairs and heads to the drawing room.

Aunty Mabel’s favourite song, ‘Kiss Me, My Honey, Kiss Me’ drifts along the dark hallway, the lights dimmed by habit to conserve electricity.

‘May I have this dance please, madam?’ she would ask whenever Maisie caught her humming the melody, and they would waltz around until the room spun.

She knocks softly. Her heart is pounding so loudly that she can hear it above the music. There’s no answer. Perhaps he’s fallen asleep. Perhaps another time would be more convenient.

Glad of the reprieve, she’s about to return to her bedroom when the song fades to silence. It’s now or never. Screwing up her face, screwing up her courage, she knocks again, louder.

Muffled swearing, then a bellow: ‘Enter.’

Maisie forces her hands to rotate the door handle. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Sir Malcolm,’ she says, stepping into the room.

He looks startled to see Maisie. Reclined on the couch in his pyjamas, he levers himself to half sit up.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

Remember you’re doing this for Clara, she thinks. ‘There seems to be a little problem with the wages.’

Sir Malcolm shifts on the couch, looks away.

‘Well, I can’t give them what I haven’t got.’

So it isn’t just Clara who hasn’t been paid. Maisie’s heart sinks.

‘What do you mean?’ she blurts out.

The words hang between them, insolent.

Maisie shifts from foot to foot, wishing she could take them back, but also hoping that Sir Malcolm will explain.

He reaches for his cigars and lighter, lights up and puffs.

The darkened shadows under his eyes confirm his poor sleep lately.

Loud noises from the drawing room wake Maisie in the middle of the night, and there have been fewer sightings of him in the daytime over the last few weeks, but she’s been too preoccupied by her own thoughts to pay much attention.

Sir Malcolm gulps the remainder of his drink, leans back on the couch again and studies Maisie’s face, still puffing.

‘All my savings are gone,’ he admits after a while. ‘There was a nice little nest egg after selling up Jesserton. Then I decided to follow Hugo’s investment portfolio.’

With Sir Malcolm preferring seclusion, Hugo rarely visits the house now, although the brothers speak frequently on the telephone.

Voices travel, and, while Maisie tries not to listen in on the conversations, her ears prick up at any mention of Nancy.

The week after the party, Nancy suffered a miscarriage, caused in part, perhaps, by the shock of Billy’s disappearance.

Maisie can still picture the woman’s face soaked in perspiration the afternoon of the party, and how devastated she seemed.

Despite some glimmer of hope over the years, the Randolphs are still childless, and, even though she and Maisie have never got along, Maisie is awash with sympathy for her.

Sir Malcolm puffs away on his cigar until finally he speaks again.

‘It wasn’t my brother’s fault, of course.

He had been telling me for a while about his successes with shares in ammunitions, so I thought to do the same,’ he explains.

‘But I hesitated and bought at the top of the market, instead of doing so when Hugo advised me to. Then the war looked like it was ending, and weapons manufacture was scaled down before I could move. I lost the lot last month.’ He looks sheepish.

‘Duke did warn me that I should spread my investments, but it seemed like I was on to a sure thing.’