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CHAPTER XXII.

DRUSILLA’S SECRET.

T aking advantage of the guests being presently occupied by such loud, indigestible merriment, I follow Drusilla upstairs. In her sensitive state, I reason, she is more liable to seek help from an outsider by exchanging confidences. And we must not let this happen.

I pass nobody on the way to her chamber. My footsteps tap, almost inaudibly, on the floorboards and carpets. The children’s bed-rooms, on the opposite wing from mine and the guests’, appear still.

I knock on Drusilla’s door. There is but a whimper in reply, whereupon I step inside and lock us in.

‘Miss Drusilla,’ I say, coating my words in honey so that they almost drip from my mouth and down my chin.

Drusilla is splayed across the bed as if she’d fallen from a great height, clutching at the bed-clothes, her forehead sheening. The curtains are drawn, a small candle lit on a table at the foot of the bed. A table, I note, draped in a crimson cloth which might easily catch fire, if the candle were to topple in the most unfortunate way.

‘Miss Notty . . .’ Drusilla moans. Truly, she is making the most of this performance.

I kneel at her bedside.

Drusilla’s eyes are closed when she parts her lips and whispers: ‘I know your secret.’

I smile at her in the candlelight – Darkness coming for her through my chest and up into my throat so I almost choke on it – my hand grasping one of the many pillows, thinking she might be asleep before I smother her, she is so weak.

‘I know you love Father,’ she says.

My hand unclenches, releasing the pillow. Drusilla, eyes still closed, nods. ‘I know you love him. And I do wish you would marry him, so you could live with us forever.’

I am rather struck by her words, uttered in the most ingenuous terms. It’s a sweet plan, all in all. I don’t know how I’d feel upon inheriting two step-children, but –

‘Have you ever been in love before, Miss Notty?’ Her eyes are open now, but staring yonder, lost in a world of their own.

‘Of course.’ (I think in quick shimmers of all the women, all the men I have loved, deeply, for an instant or two, now preserved in their utmost perfection, forever.)

‘Why have you never married?’

‘I came close,’ I say.

I received a furtive proposal from the bachelor brother of one of my employers (governesses, in contrast to other servants, may expect a wedding ring in exchange for certain favours, and his testicles were in my mouth a lot). The elopement was scrupulously arranged, and I could already envision such riches, such wealth – moving to a stately house by the seaside when one of us inevitably fell ill with consumption. But in the end, I could not, would not, marry him when I witnessed him speaking to a baby as if he himself were a baby. I had allowed him to suck my breasts with the aggression of a starving moor lamb, and to insert his arm, coated in dubbin up to his elbow, inside me – but this, this I would not tolerate.

‘Poor Miss Notty,’ Drusilla purrs, her breathing heavy between words.

Charged with a sudden tingle – a feeling of something hot and foreign on my hand, I look down. Drusilla is holding my hand in hers. Her palm is clammy, and a sickly floral scent wafts from it. I gently pull out of her grip. ‘I’m not unfortunate enough to possess regrets,’ I say. ‘And you, you shall find happiness someday. Be it with the painter, or –’

‘The painter does not wish me to write to him. He has asked me to desist.’

‘Well, he has seen reason, then. It is for the best.’

‘No. That’s not it.’ Her eyes return to mine. ‘He just does not like it when I bite him.’

I stare at her. She sighs and recedes with exhaustion into unconsciousness. I hold up her arm and drop it, to make sure she’s asleep.

I sniff at her head, wondering if there’s something I’ve missed. Lift one of her eyelids with my thumb.

A square of paper peeking from under her pillow catches my eye. I pull it out. It is one of the painter’s letters, dated but two days ago.

It says We must not see each other again . It says You display a character which is at best eccentric and at worst alarming . It says Do recommend me to your high society friends . Attached are my portraiture rates .

Tenderly, I dampen Drusilla’s forehead with a sponge dipped into the basin of water on the wash-stand.

Seeing her in this way, so docile while I tend to her, I am thrust upon the memory of the Clergy Daughters’ School, at the time of the Incident. How terribly ill they all fell after consuming the dead crow. Being the only unaffected girl, I was tasked with taking care of the others. How happily I complied! My schoolmates were so compliant and shakily agreeable in their pain. I wished these versions of the girls would stay forever. I yearned to hear their low, murmured begs for love, for their mothers, for health, directed at me.

I would dab at their foreheads with cold, wet rags, and I would tell them, repeatedly, about my father. ‘He lives in Harley Street in London,’ I’d whisper, which was one of the few things I knew to be true.

The surviving girls would remember my whispering for the rest of their lives. They would recall my small, moving lips every time a boiling kettle on the range emitted the susurrating rustle that preceded its whistling. They would remember my words whenever the wind blew through the thistles on the grasslands. ‘He lives in Harley Street. His name is John Pounds.’