Page 18 of Trouble

‘Tell Father I tried,’ she said to Grace, before she stormed out.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Grace said faintly. ‘She .?.?. doesn’t really like Gothic literature.’

‘Yes,’ said Emily, still catching her breath. ‘Well. I .?.?. I should not have lost my temper. I can only apologise.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Grace, valiantly attempting normality. ‘I am sure that by tomorrow we will all have forgotten it and be greatfriendsagain.’

Chapter Seven

Large as it was, the house felt too small to contain Emily’s anger.

She did not attend dinner with the servants that evening, choosing instead to go to bed early and pull the blankets up over her head and seethe steadily until she fell asleep. She half-expected that any moment Captain Edwards would kick down the door and demand that she left at once for the crime of insulting his precocious daughter, but the captain did not appear, and her door stayed intact. She could only surmise that she had somehow remained employed, at least for the time being.

Meera took one look at her at breakfast the next morning and gently suggested that she might take the afternoon off.

‘The doctor is visiting Grace after luncheon, anyway,’ she said cheerfully.

‘The doctor?’ Joe said, pausing with his knife half-sawn through a hunk of bread.

‘Just to check on her progress,’ Meera said, giving him a reassuring smile. ‘No cause for concern.’

Joe resumed sawing.

‘What is there to do?’ Emily said. ‘If I take the afternoon off, I mean.’

‘Oh, well, there are all sorts of places, although most of them are either cliff or beach .?.?. You have not been into the village yet, have you? It isn’t very large, but at least it isn’t made of rock, grass or sand.’

‘I think it actually is made of rocks and sand,’ said Akia. ‘Is that not what houses are made of?’

‘Unless they’re made of mud and horse shit,’ said Oliver.

He paused, then sighed, reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin, which he slid towards Meera without further comment.

‘There’s a pub,’ said Meera. ‘Although the food is—’

‘Don’t eat the food,’ Joe said gruffly.

‘Unless,’ suggested Akia, ‘you are trying to urgently rid your stomach of poison. In that case, there’s no better fare in the whole county.’

With these glowing reviews in mind, and after a claustrophobic morning spent in the schoolroom watching Grace sketch intense, lopsided puppies, Emily set off to the village.

It was a brisk half-hour walk, and something lightened in Emily’s chest as she put the house behind her. It was a relief to be anonymous and unobserved, accompanied only by jagged coastline and squabbling seabirds and the crash of the surf below. She could slouch, and put her hands in her pockets, and swear at the sky if the mood took her (which it did, and often). The landscape, which she had previously written off as one long stretch of grey, was actually broken up by bright, scrubby patches of gorse and heather, and it wasn’t long before hedges and stone walls rose up with the promise of civilisation ahead.

The road down to the village sloped so much that Emily dreaded having to walk back up it; when the village itself came into view, it was nestled down by the sea like a bird’s nest built optimistically into the cracks of a cliff, the buildings a collection of squat grey sentinels guarding a small market square against the coastal wind. There were boats moored at one end of what could not even charitably be called a harbour, bobbing on the gentle waves.

It did not seem to be a market day, and yet there were still a few stalls set up selling freshly caught fish and local cheese, which was a pungent combination. Emily walked past the scrum of shouting fishermen and their customers, then the small line outside the haberdasher’s, and entered the Rose and Crown.

It was a tiny warren of a pub. It had many oddly shaped corners, tables squeezed into nooks, and old men nursing their drinks in crannies; quite a few of them looked up at her as she entered, and then tracked her progress towards the bar. Emily wished hellfire and damnation on all of them.

She fingered the handful of sixpences in her pocket that she’d slipped out of Meera’s swear jar, and then ordered a pint of strong beer.

She had never been a drinker – certainly not ofbeerinpublic houses, even after her station had experienced such a rapid decline that it would not have been strange for her to join the other mill workers for a drink at the end of a shift – but the week had already been too long, and it wasn’t even over yet.

Besides, this beer was good, insofar as beercouldbe good. Halfway through the pint Emily stopped feeling on edge and shrinking from every glance thrown her way. Her gaze wandered to the walls, where somebody had attempted to improve the interiors by wonkily nailing up a few framed etchings; some of them looked as if they had been torn from a newspaper.

One of them was of Fairmont House.

It looked nicer, etched. Less lonely. You could almost imagine that the front drive gave way to lush, well-kept grounds instead of endless coastal moorland. You could pretend the people living inside it weren’t obnoxious pudding-heads. You could pretend they had all died in a fire.