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CHAPTER XVII.

OF BIRDSFOOT TREFOIL.

I n the dank dead of night, I haunt Ensor House. Tracing the unicorn horns on the tapestries with my fingertips, tongue-kissing the portraits of Lord Manlow, of Lady Augusta. Ensor House haunts me – the wallpapers bulging with hands, the mirrors reflecting back shadows of past maids.

I see a woman silhouetted between candlesticks and in doorframes, her head turning towards me before a candleflame flickers and the shadows shift, interrupting the illusion.

I sneak into chambers, hide in corners of bed-rooms, watch different beasts sleep in their different beds.

During the day, I study Andrew. The constant, unsettling sounds he makes by clicking his tongue and blowing through pursed lips and sucking saliva through his teeth. The way he spills black ink on his clothing and on his desk and on the dog, with no consideration for his belongings.

I study Drusilla. The way her meaty lips are forever wet. The way she asks ‘Oh, really ?’ with an edge of sarcasm when taught about the storming of the Bastille, as if she knew everything about the Bastille, when in fact she knows nothing. I try to gauge what she saw yesterday in the nursery. Whether she saw anything at all.

‘At this point it housed only seven prisoners,’ I am saying, reading from the book, ‘including four forgers, two lunatics, an aristocratic deviant suspected of murder, and Drusilla you are so quiet why are you so quiet?’

Andrew whips around to look at his sister, but Drusilla does not even look up from her book. ‘The previous governess would teach us things while playing games,’ she murmurs, tucking a ringlet behind her ear and pursing her lips.

It astonishes me that they still think of her. She must have left some kind of imperishable mark on them. She certainly did not seem memorable to me.

‘Your previous governess was a fantastic idiot who didn’t have the common sense not to follow strangers to the backs of pubs at night,’ I say.

Drusilla narrows her eyes at me, the hint of realization burgeoning upon her bland, colourless face, but just then – the lunch bell rings, making Andrew jump.

The children leave the school-room as loudly and irritatingly as they usually do while I stay behind to tidy up. I am loath to pick up everything Andrew has thrown upon the floor – jumping-jack toys and sticks and severed doll limbs – but I will do so because I must, because I shall be good and Mr Pounds, I am sure, will reward my behaviour by reverting Mrs Pounds’ dismissal. Because he loves me.

I groan as I crouch to pick up a piece of paper under Drusilla’s desk. I unfold it. It is a pencil sketch of a flower; from the claw-like seed pods I recognize it immediately as birdsfoot trefoil. I balk at the potentially drastic implications of this and rush to pull out a dark-blue volume from one of the book-shelves – an illustrated alphabet of floral emblems. Darkness beating in my ears, I flip through the pages, my finger pressing on the paper, sliding down, down, down until – birdsfoot trefoil. And the symbolism beside it: revenge.

My focus as sharpened as a blade, I consider my options. If Drusilla did notice something amiss in the nursery, if her mind is indeed alight with thoughts of revenge against me, it is logical to presume she must be disposed of. I might claim she is hysterical, send for her to be shipped away to the asylum. Or Drusilla might suffer some kind of accident. Just a little one, like mishandling one of the hunting guns or falling through ice.

I think on it so much, I begin to forget whether I’ve actually done it. But every morning in the school-room, there Drusilla is, acting as if everything is as it always was. I wonder if she was merely drawing a flower (perhaps a romantic gesture to honour the lecherous painter? To whom all her illustrative talents are doubtlessly dedicated). If she even did draw it at all, for I threw it in the fire after finding it and cannot now prove, even to myself, it ever existed.

EVERY DAY, AS I WAKE and squat over the chamber-pot, as the children kneel in the nursery and I oversee their morning prayers while their nurse cries quietly in French in the corner, as I dress them for their daily walk, tightening Drusilla’s bonnet strings until I can feel her swallows traveling down her throat, then dress them again upon their return for lunch, as I teach them about familial duties and roles, snipping the heads off dolls and hiding them in the dollhouse, as I observe the turquoise veins threading their wrists and necks through one thin layer of translucent skin, like food preserved in aspic, I think what a funny feeling it is, to know that I could kill them whenever I so wished.

I could pick up a heavy rock and smash their skulls in or push them down the stairs. I could scrap them from the Earth as smoothly as wiping butter from a blade with a cotton apron.

It fascinates me, the fact that humans have the capacity to mortally wound one another at will, but for the most part, choose not to.