3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
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be. I said I’d take the small room two floors up, please, and she made a note on a paper on the desk beside her.
‘I’m sure Lady Mandeville will want to talk to you about your duties, but she’s occupied at the moment. I shall let her know you’ve arrived.’
She rang a bell on her desk and a footman appeared, not the one from the carriage. His wig was perfectly in place, the gold braid on his jacket gleaming.
‘Patrick, this is Miss Lock, the children’s new governess. Please show her to the schoolroom.’
He bent silently to pick up my bag. We’d gone no more than halfway along the corridor before he dropped it like a terrier discarding a dead rat and gave a low but carrying whistle. A boy appeared from nowhere. Patrick nudged the bag with his foot and the boy picked it up. It was clearly beneath the dignity of a footman to carry servants’ bags. The boy looked so thin and exhausted that I’d have spared him the burden if I could, but he followed us through a doorway and up two flights of uncarpeted stairs. There was no lighting on the stairs, except for an occasional ray of sunshine through narrow windows on the landings. It reminded me of the times I’d been allowed backstage in theatres when calling on my father’s actor or musician friends. Out front, palaces, moonlit mountains and magic forests; behind the scenes, bare boards, dim light and people scurrying quietly about their business.
I tried to keep note of where we were going, aware that much might depend on knowing my way round this backstage world. On the second landing, a maid with a chamber pot stood aside to let us past.
‘How many servants are there?’ I asked the footman.
‘Fifty-seven.’ He said it over his shoulder, adding, ‘That’s inside, not counting stables or gardens, of course.’
We went from the landing into a carpeted corridor with sunlight at last, streaming through a window at the end. The footman knocked on a door halfway along it.
‘It’s the governess, Mrs Sims.’
The door was opened from the inside, on to one of the most pleasant rooms I’d seen in a long time. It wasn’t as grand as I’d feared, much more on a normal domestic scale. A square of well-worn Persian carpet softened the polished wood floor. The windows were open, letting in the mild air of a late summer afternoon. A doll with a smiling porcelain face lolled on the window-seat, alongside an old telescope. A dappled rocking horse stood on one side of the window and a battered globe on the other, next to a cabinet of birds’ eggs. Three small desks were lined up along the wall, blotters, pens and inkwells all neatly ranged. Three children, two dark-haired boys and a yellow-haired girl, were sitting at a table with bowls of bread and milk in front of them, a vase of marigolds and love-in-a-mist in the middle of the white tablecloth. Overseeing them was a grey-haired woman in a navy-blue dress and white cap and apron. She turned to me, smiling.
‘You’ll be Miss Lock. I’m right glad to see you. I’m Betty Sims, the children’s nursemaid.’ Her accent was Lancashire, her welcome seemed genuine. ‘And these are Master Charles, Master James and Miss Henrietta. Now, stand up and say good afternoon to Miss Lock.’
The children did as she told them, obediently but with no great enthusiasm. The older boy, Charles, at twelve years old, already had his father’s black bar of eyebrows and something of his arrogant look. His brother James was three or four years younger and more frail, glancing at me sidelong as if weighing me up. The girl, Henrietta, was between them in age, masses of fair ringlets framing a round face with plump babyish cheeks. Betty Sims told them they could sit down again, so they resumed spooning up the soft paps of bread, though not taking their eyes off me.
‘Did anyone offer you a cup of tea?’ Betty asked.
I shook my head. My throat was parched and I was so hungry that I even envied the children their bread and milk. She told me to take the weight off my feet and keep an eye on the children and went out. I sank into a chair by the window, upholstered in worn blue corduroy.
‘That’s my chair,’ Henrietta said. ‘But you can sit in it for now if you want to.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you know Latin?’ Charles said.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t suppose you know as much of it as I do. Do you know about Julius Caesar?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was the greatest general who ever lived, apart from Wellington. Did you ever meet the Duke of Wellington?’
‘No.’
‘Papa met the Duke of Wellington.’
James dropped his spoon with a clatter and wailed, ‘Where’s Betty? I feel sick.’
‘He doesn’t really,’ Henrietta said. ‘He’s a terrible liar. Did you know you’ve got dust all over your shoes? I have fifteen pairs of shoes.’
‘You’re a lucky girl.’
‘A red leather pair, a green leather pair, pink satin with bows, pink satin without bows, white brocade …’
She was still reciting her wardrobe when Betty came back carrying a tray with tea things and half a seed cake.
‘I feel sick,’ James said. ‘I want some cake.’
Unperturbed, Betty cut thick slices for herself and me, thin ones for the children. When they’d finished them, she said they should go to their bedrooms and be quiet. She’d come along in five minutes and help them change.
‘Change for bed?’ I asked her, when they’d filed out of the room. It wasn’t yet six o’clock.
‘No, changed in case their mother and father want them downstairs before dinner. They usually do, but they might not this evening because of Sir Herbert only just getting back.’
‘Getting back from where?’
It felt mean, commencing my career as a spy on a person who’d been kind to me, but I had to begin somewhere.
‘London, I expect. He’s always up and down from London. Sir Herbert’s an important man in the government.’
She said it with simple confidence, but if Blackstone and Miss Bodenham were right, any importance he might have had was in the past.
‘So he has a lot of business to attend to?’ I said, finishing my second cup of tea.
‘Yes.’ But her attention was on something else. She was staring at the draggled and dusty hem of my dress.
‘If the children are sent for, their governess and I usually take them down together – when there is a governess, that is.’
She was hinting gently that I wasn’t fit for company. My heart lurched at the thought that I might soon be standing in the same room as Sir Herbert Mandeville.
‘But you do look tired out, Miss Lock. If you like, I could make your excuses for you …’
She sounded worried about that.
‘Thank you, but of course I must come down with you. I’ll go and change at once, only …’
‘Did Mrs Quivering say you were to share with me?’
She was obviously relieved when I said I’d opted for the little room two floors up.
‘I hope they’ve got it ready for you. It’s through the door at the end and up past the maids’ dormitory. Shall I ring for a boy to take your bag?’
I refused out of pity for the over-worked boys, so my bag and I made the final stage of our journey together, up two steep and narrow staircases. The room was small, no more than eight steps in either direction, with a tiny square of window at shoulder height looking on to the back courtyard. It was clean and simply furnished with a chair, a table, a wash-stand with a large white china bowl, and a bed made up with clean sheets. I had to go down to the maids’ floor to find a cubicle with a privy and water