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CHAPTER II.

IN WHICH I MEET MY EMPLOYERS AND AM NOT TERRIBLY IMPRESSED.

T he dining-room boasts an ornate, coffered walnut ceiling, and hanging above a sideboard a massive Rembrandt depicts a flayed carcass – Slaughtered Ox , most likely a copy by one of his pupils.

Mr and Mrs Pounds are seated at one end of the dining-table, which is longer than a whale, while I am exiled at the opposite end, setting us at an absurd, almost comical distance. As they peer at me through silver candlesticks, I wriggle in my chair in a feigned attempt to make myself more visible while accomplishing the opposite.

Mr Pounds looks to Mrs Pounds for instruction. Upon the raising of her eyebrows he appears to decide, at last, to hurl himself into the abyss of conversation. ‘I trust your journey was a pleasant one?’

‘No,’ I say, so cheerful and beaming that Mr Pounds simply nods and says, ‘Good.’

The seal broken, Mrs Pounds speaks up. ‘Your advertisement mentioned that your father is a clergyman?’

‘Yes,’ I say. The Reverend is not, so to speak, my father – more of a replacement – but after so many years I have learned to refer to him as such. ‘He is curate of our local parish.’

‘And your mother?’

‘Ten years dead,’ I reply. I picture Mother’s teeth, smiling at me from her bed.

‘That is a pity,’ says Mrs Pounds with disappointment. ‘A mother’s presence in a home is vital. Otherwise, who will instil in the children a sense of morality and tenderness?’

I cudgel my brains for an appropriate response.

‘Well, the governess, for one, I would expect,’ Mr Pounds says, a sardonic chuckle caught in his throat, ‘as that is what I’m paying her for.’

‘Yes. We do expect that you will be of better character than our previous governess,’ says Mrs Pounds, her grey eyes marbled with streaks of candlelight. ‘Most ungrateful, that one. Disappeared without a trace.’

‘Enough with the previous governess, I tire of speaking of her,’ says Mr Pounds. A hush descends upon the table as he reaches for a grey beefsteak. The clinging of cutlery on china builds in the silence. ‘And so. Miss Notty. Here you are,’ he says, nestling into the reassurance of fact.

‘Yes.’

‘And all the way from Hopefernon.’

‘Yes.’

‘Quite the small village, Hopefernon, is it not?’ he asks. ‘How does one occupy oneself there?’

‘Well, there is rather a lot of dancing,’ I say darkly.

Mr Pounds looks at me sharply, a small furrow in his brow (round, ample brow, I note). ‘Do you jest?’ he asks with a hint of distaste.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Isn’t Hopefernon where all those babies were found murdered?’ Mrs Pounds cuts in.

It is not uncommon for those I encounter, when confronted with the topic of Hopefernon, to inquire about the babies. It was in the papers. Awful business. (Five discovered in unmarked graves, one shoved down the privy.)

‘Grim Wolds is a sturdy village,’ Mr Pounds continues before I can answer, slurping at the beef fat on his potatoes. ‘And Ensor House has presided over Grim Wolds for centuries. It is precisely that sense of strength, of steadfast tradition, we desire for you to instil upon our children.’

‘Yes, but we shall not abide any manner of corporal punishment under this roof,’ Mrs Pounds hurriedly clarifies.

I nod. It is apparently quite the rage now, not to slap children.

‘In fact, we’d rather you not touch the children at all,’ Mrs Pounds adds.

‘I shan’t even look upon them,’ I say brightly. My advertisement in the Times assured I was “of an amiable disposition”.’

‘Miss, ah –’ Mr Pounds waves his hand in my direction, tutting, as if his forgetting my name is somehow my blunder.

‘Winifred Notty,’ I say.

I wink at you, dear reader, upon this, our first introduction.

‘Miss Notty, you are a studious woman,’ says Mr Pounds, who then frowns as if the words have left a bitter aftertaste. ‘Or, well. You can read and write.’

I simper amicably in confirmation.

‘You perchance are familiar with the theory of phrenology? The “science of the mind”? I must confess I am very much the scholar.’

‘My whole life is phrenology now,’ Mrs Pounds says bleakly into her teacup.

‘For a small fee one can have one’s skull measured,’ Mr Pounds continues, ‘the surest way of establishing one’s mental and moral faculties. My own skull was assessed some months ago by the leading practitioner of phrenology, Sir Reginald Batterson –’

‘Is not the leading practitioner one Lorenzo Fowler?’ asks Mrs Pounds.

‘There’s something on your face, darling,’ Mr Pounds says.

Mrs Pounds pats at her cheeks as Mr Pounds resumes. ‘As I was saying, only through this illuminating science may we determine the contents of our minds, of our very souls . . .’

I picture my own soul escaping my body, oozing from between my legs in a clotted, barley-coloured sludge. It leaves a viscous stain on the carpet before slithering about the room to examine the porcelain with the hand-painted boar crest, the ox painting, the sweaty-faced footman who stares straight ahead as if blind. It then slides upward along the wall and presses a featureless face against the window overlooking the copper beech hedges.

‘Is that why you refused to welcome my cousin Margaret last spring –’

‘Your cousin Margaret possesses a singularly bad head,’ snaps Mr Pounds. ‘Embarrassingly feeble and moody.’

‘Really, John.’

‘It is not I; it is the science.’

My soul turns its curdled, stinking head towards us and says, ‘I do believe I shall be quite content here.’

Mr Pounds squints at me through the distance. ‘Your skull looks to be promising, Miss Notty. The forehead is broad, surely housing prominent organs of Benevolence.’

I nod solemnly. ‘Untold benevolences, indeed.’

The flayed ox in the painting hangs by its hind legs from a wooden crossbeam, mottled fat and muscle smeared thick by impasto. Mr Pounds spies me staring, a flicker of pride in his eyes. ‘I do hope the work hasn’t upset you,’ he says in a tone that suggests he, in fact, desires it very much. ‘I find the artist’s anatomical precision masterful, don’t you?’

‘Indeed, quite masterful,’ I say, and Mrs Pounds’ mouth sets.

Mr Pounds grins, a yellowed eye-tooth glinting under the flickering of the candelabra, and says, ‘We have no doubt your employment here shall be most fruitful.’

WHEN I RETURN to my chamber, a frugal fire has been lit in the hearth. My trunk has been brought up and rests against a wall, still corded, likely an intentional sign from the servants that it was not tampered with. I unbind it and slip a hand inside, eager to confirm the presence of my most prized belongings: locks of hair from long-gone loved ones, Mother’s brooch, Father’s letters.

When I was small, Mother took me to a parish churchyard in East London, pointed at a tombstone, and said, ‘That’s your father.’ It was only after I learned to read that I discovered the grave belonged to one Ilsa Haynes, dead a good ten years before I was born.

Mother would speak of my father in sporadic outbursts. ‘Your father used to dress like that,’ she’d say flatly while crossing a tailor’s shop window. Or: ‘Your father liked that colour, too,’ when I pointed at a periwinkle sky. Because Mother referred to him in the past tense, I did not know if he was dead or if he merely didn’t like such things anymore.

I was about six when Mother, posing as a respectable widow, moved us to Hopefernon and married the Reverend. He had been offered perpetual curacy at the village church and found himself struck by the resultant loneliness. The village was a scattering of black stone houses, erected in irregular lines up on a hill, replete with constricting alleys that led nowhere. Of the marriage ceremony I remember little, except for a dead brown duckling on the church steps, which Mother brushed aside with the hem of her one good dress upon her descent.

The parsonage hallways were draughty and the tiny rooms stuffy when the fireplaces were lit. The place was at once cramped and bare, with an entrance hall of dove-coloured walls and sand-stone floor. The entire palette was muted, faded, earthen – from the peeling wallpaper to the calfskin spines of the books lining the shelves – save for a lone splotch of brilliant, hysterical red on the dress of the peasant girl adorning the clockface. Balancing a basket on one hip as she picked cranberries on the moors, the girl hoisted her dress with clumsy urgency, as if the fabric stung her calves. The Reverend wound the longcase clock every night on his way to bed. I would hear him from my bed-room near the staircase – the clicking of the chain like a blade tapping on teeth.

I unfasten my home-made cotton corset and as always am invaded by the alarming sensation of rapidly falling flesh, as if it would slap against the floor if I weren’t to catch it.

I stand very still a moment in the silence of my bed-room, attempting to ascertain whether I am able to listen through the walls. I am convinced I can hear bells – the bells that chimed from inside the safety coffins in the Hopefernon churchyard. ‘To ensure one isn’t buried alive,’ explained the Reverend when I first remarked upon them as a child. ‘They can only be rung from inside the coffin.’

‘But I hear them at night,’ I had told him, and the Reverend had sighed and shaken his face full of wrinkles – wrinkles set so deeply into his skin they had ridges. As a child I imagined that the Reverend’s father had carved them himself, and that the Reverend would eventually carve them into his son. But the Reverend never did have a son. In fact, Mother and the Reverend did not produce any children, for the Reverend taught Mother not to want them. I spied one such conversation, observing Mother in slices between the hinges of the dining-room door at the parsonage. ‘We must not, we must not,’ Mother was saying, as if engaged in rote recitation.

‘ You must not,’ the Reverend replied, and his mouth brimmed with saliva, as it was wont to do when enraptured with disgust.

‘I must not, I must not,’ Mother repeated.

I pull back the bed-clothes, peer underneath (at previous posts the children were inclined to slip in live crayfish or mice or, one time, a hairball seemingly made of human hair. Children are playful creatures). Satisfied that there are no monsters but the ones I carry inside me, I slip into bed in my nightdress and cast a look around the unfamiliar apartment. The fire spits out the last of its life. I squint at what looks like the silhouette of the Reverend in the gathering darkness, standing straight and unmoving by the dresser. But it is only my upright trunk.

I roll over, my eyes relaxing their focus. Through a damask pattern in the wallpaper, a woman beckons to me.