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CHAPTER VI.

OF ONE MR POUNDS.

I do not see as much of Mr Pounds as I had expected to. He is often away, or behind closed doors conducting business with his clerk or his tenants. He is a mystery I am intent on solving.

From the children I learn he is fickle, as prone to playing with them and indulging their every whim as to punishing them for reasons unknown. Their admiration of him is evident in their hushed tones, in the grand detail given to every description of his accomplishments.

The servants are less forthcoming, unless they are speaking amongst themselves. They speak of his crippled brother, who, though crippled, could ride a horse prodigiously. They speak of Mr Pounds’ jealousy of this brother, who was their father’s favourite, and died young, and so remained his favourite for ever. They speak of his great-uncle, who ruled Ensor House before him, and of his great-grandfather, who won the house in a game of whist. They rarely speak of Mr Pounds’ qualities as a man and master, but perhaps this omission itself speaks volumes.

My wishes for a rapprochement are met a fortnight after my arrival at Ensor House, when I come across him in the Great Hall, where he is leaning against the Dutch-tiled fireplace in his fur-collared riding cloak, examining a document.

He looks up at me, and his features rearrange into an expression I cannot yet read. ‘Miss Notty,’ he says, throwing the paper into the unlit hearth. ‘I was about to take a walk across the grounds. I wonder if you might grant me the pleasure of your company.’

I consider his petition from the other side of the room. He is not, I suppose, a handsome man, his forehead perhaps too wide and his eyes too close together, his nose too feminine for the ampleness of his chin. I see a glint of myself, however, in him – a twinkle about the eyes, a naughty, at times empty, grin – and that is enough to fetter me.

On our walk, Mr Pounds speaks to me of Andrew and Drusilla (even though she is the eldest, Drusilla tends to come second, her name stammered from her brother’s like Eve from Adam’s rib). Panting slightly as he strives to remain two steps ahead of me at all times, he touts their virtues, seeming – could it be? – almost proud of them; as proud as he is of all his legal property, to the exclusion, perhaps, of his wife.

‘They shall be fine specimens,’ Mr Pounds says in conclusion.

I am growing hot under my bonnet, scratching at my neck where the strings bristle against my skin. Having taught both children and found them woefully unexceptional, I deem it unfair for them to accrue all this admiration from a man who possesses such a limited amount of it.

In the pit of my stomach, the Darkness slithers around my soul. ‘How do you even know they’re yours?’ I mutter, rubbing between my fingers a patch of skin flayed from the skull of a missel thrush.

Mr Pounds swivels his head to look at me – or rather at the space around me – without interrupting his stride. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he asks, in a voice on the verge of taking offense.

‘I said, sir, “How you must love them when they’re yours!” ’

Mr Pounds grins and the flush that had been creeping across his neck recedes. ‘Ah, yes,’ he says. ‘Forgive my lack of mindfulness, speaking thus of them. It must be such anguish for you, looking after children you can’t help but love profoundly, all the while knowing they can never be yours.’

I close my eyes, curl my lower lip and nod my head with theatrical melancholy.

‘You are a credit to your sex, Miss Notty,’ he says, then, clearly aroused by the word in his mouth, he repeats the phrase, sucking on it as if on a cherry: ‘Acredittoyour sex .’ He pauses his march, readjusts the crotch of his tailored trousers, then resumes, briskly, his fat, useless, Newfoundland dog drooling at his heels.

Upon our return, I wait for Mr Pounds to retreat upstairs before I fish out the document he tossed into the grate. It is a blacksmith’s invoice for the grinding of scythes and garden shears, nothing of interest – except that it is his – but I place it in my trunk with the others.

OUR WALKS BECOME a weekly occurrence, whereby Mr Pounds escorts me on interminable journeys around the gardens and through the moors, the sun lowering progressively earlier, our shadows cast before us like freshly dug graves.

Mrs Pounds observes us from her usual upstairs window. ‘What do you do with her?’ she asks her husband in front of me at breakfast (they often speak of me as if I were not present). ‘What do you talk about?’

‘Nothing of import, dearest. The moorland, generally. Heather and the like.’

‘Miss Notty has opinions regarding heather?’

‘Indeed. She is an artist. Water-colours, mostly.’

I suck noisily on a pickled oyster and Mrs Pounds scowls at me, anger lidding her eyes and thinning her mouth. She is looking positively miserable these days. The lines on her sallow forehead seem to be mating to beget more lines. Her chin sags like a turkey’s wattle.

‘None of the servants seem to want to talk to me about heather,’ Mrs Pounds grumbles, buttering a slab of toast.

‘What are you going on about, dear?’ Mr Pounds sighs as his correspondence is delivered to him on a silver tray.

Switching tactics, perhaps in an attempt to inspire in her husband a form of protective rage, Mrs Pounds says: ‘The servants called me ugly. I heard them whispering in the gallery.’

‘Nonsense,’ says Mr Pounds, but the manner in which he frowns at the letter in his hands reveals that he is not listening.

IN A SPELL of defiance, Mrs Pounds decrees, ‘The servants are to turn their backs if I am not looking my best.’ This pronouncement leads to them turning on her in the middle of staircases and hallways, whipping around to face the walls, their laden trays trembling as she passes.

‘I’m hideous!’ she wails over breakfast, after Mr Pounds has departed to attend to business in town and she is alone with me (and three servants). She doesn’t express her woe to me; instead, it is uttered unto her plate.

‘That’s absurd, Mrs Pounds,’ I say. ‘You are very handsome.’

Mrs Pounds turns her head slowly towards me, one of her eyelids collapsed from a recent fit of apoplexy. ‘You don’t really mean that,’ she says softly, lips puckered in hope.

I look at her, truly look at her: her uneven eyelashes, trimmed with scissors in the hopes they would grow more lushly; her eyebrows blackened with burnt cloves; her irises dull and cloudy from the belladonna drops to brighten the sclera and dilate the pupils; her hair, slathered with hogs’ lard. Truly, her effort is undeniable.

‘Any man would be fortunate to count you among his possessions,’ I proclaim.

Whether from the crushing of expectations unknown to me, or shame at her own neediness, or something else altogether, Mrs Pounds’ eyebrows droop. ‘You’re dishonest,’ she hisses.

She stands and vehemently brushes crumbs and larger bits of breakfast detritus from her frock. A pock-sized portion of sausage lands on my plate. I quickly pop it into my mouth. From afar, the Grim Wolds church bell chimes the quarters. It is half past eight. The servants pull at the tablecloth and remove the dishes in a choreographed clinking and clanging of porcelain and silver. A crumb brush is wiped across the table and my lap. The shard of an oyster shell is plucked from between my fingers.