Page 23 of Trouble

You must think I am foolish indeed. You cannot fob me off by talking about your CURTAINS. Who cares about the fireplace, or the cornices! Who even taught you the word cornices!

What are the children really like? And the captain? The housekeeper was so kind when we corresponded – please do pass on my thanks to her for allowing this arrangement until I am feeling better. Incidentally – has there been any trouble on this front? I feel I agreed to this in such a malaise of fever that it all seemed like a play we were putting on. The reality is not particularly practical. Do they really not mind that you have never taken care of a child before? I will endeavour to get better faster, so that if complications do arise, they do not have time to come to a full simmer.

I know you think you are an acquired taste, and you do not like to stand still enough for anybody to be able to acquire you, but please remember to be a little sweeter than usual, if it doesn’t turn your stomach.

Also, I don’t know what you said to Mother before you left, but she keeps insisting I eat second helpings of everything practically at knifepoint, and creeping into the room and watching me when she thinks I’m asleep. It’s very troubling.

I love you and I miss you. Thank you for doing this. Not just this.

Your affectionate (and bored) sister,

Amy

Chapter Nine

Two weeks into Emily’s life at Fairmont House, Captain Edwards decided to throw a dinner party.

This was clearly unusual behaviour, because everybody was walking around looking as if they had never heard the phrase ‘dinner party’ before in their lives. When Meera announced it at breakfast, Joe stood up, threw his napkin across the room, stood seething silently for a moment and then sat down again.

‘He’s very pleased,’ Akia whispered to Emily. She seemed to be perfectly serious.

Emily had grown used to taking her meals with the servants. Sometimes Grace demanded her company for breakfast or luncheon in the schoolroom and Emily did stay, eating cake and drinking tea as Grace talked determinedly at her, but just as often Grace disappeared into Aster’s room to eat – a place Emily would not have dared venture even with the king’s militia covering her back – or went to eat with her father. Meera had suggested that Emily could eat in the schoolroom regardless of whether her charges were there or not, as the previous governesses had, but this just felt like additional fuss for no reason. She told Meera very firmly that she did not care, and nobody questioned it any more when she appeared in the servants’ dining room and took a seat at the very end of the table.

She had not been encouraging friendship from anybody at the house, but she discovered that some of its inhabitants didn’t need encouragement. Apparently, her lack of propriety about eating arrangements had put them at ease enough that they thought she might be in the market forfriends. They kept talking to her, trying to pull her into their little rituals and jokes, although they did not seem surprised when she stayed taciturn and distant. Meera chatted away about local people and places at a fast clip, interrupting herself constantly to explain who was related to whom, not that Emily was even attempting to catalogue a single one of them; Akia kept telling her more and more ridiculous stories that could notpossiblybe true, not a bit put off by the fact that Emily never laughed; even Oliver offered her drinks and his pipe without a second thought, as if they were intimate enough friends to share spit.

She did speak to them – she could hardly get through the day without doing so – but she kept fraternising to a minimum. It was probably the only way in which she was behaving like a real governess.

These people were too loyal to let slip any useful titbits about Captain Edwards, and there was no real value in pretending to be far more agreeable than she actually was to get to know them, because now she had an escape route. If she could discover exactly what improper business Captain Edwards had tangled himself up in, and earn herself a quick payout that far exceeded a year’s worth of wages at Fairmont House, she’d be away with the next post – long before they noticed that some of the captain’s most hideous possessions had gone out walking.

The past week had not been fruitful – she’d barely seen the captain, not even when she tried repeating her nocturnal wanderings about the house when everybody else was preoccupied, keeping her hands to herself this time. She was not entirely sure how one went about obtaining secret information about somebody who seemed to be such a closed book. The only time they had been within breathing room of each other was at church, but they had travelled in separate carriages – Meera had been needed for some conversation about linens, so Emily had been relegated to the carriage with the servants – and sat in different pews, so the only view she had of him was his back. She had not been able to glean anything from the way he thumbed through his hymnal.

Aster, on the other hand, accidentally tore one of the pages halfway through the service, and Emily saw her slip it to Grace, who looked exceedingly guilty as she tucked it under a cushion.

‘Joe,’ Meera was saying now, as they finished eating their breakfast, the upcoming dinner party still top billing. ‘If you can get me a list today, I’ll speak to Mr Khan personally and ensure we get the best of everything.’

Oliver, who looked hungover, raised his head as if he were going to try to make a joke, then shook it and gave up.

‘Did you have something you wished to say, Oliver?’ said Meera primly.

‘Mr Khan,’ Oliver attempted valiantly. ‘You want to .?.?. touch mouths with him.’

‘That was disgusting, thank you, Oliver. Put sixpence in the jar just for nauseating me. All right, everybody, we have a lot of work to do! Amy .?.?. I hate to ask, but I’d be grateful for a little help once you have finished with your lessons for the day. We only have a few days to prepare, and it is impossible to get additional staff at such short notice. Nothing too onerous, I promise!’

Akia rolled her eyes, perhaps due to the fact that the more onerous tasks would probably be parcelled out to her, but nobody complained. It seemed to be universally accepted that Meera was doing her absolute best. She would certainly not be shirking responsibilities or delegating everything to the rest of them; Emily was always discovering her doing jobs that were more suited to a maid-of-all-work than a housekeeper. Just that morning, she had found Meera attempting to climb on to a dresser so that she could remove the world’s smallest cobweb from the frame of a nautical painting; in Emily’s opinion it had not been visible to the naked eye, and was certainly not worth risking your kneecaps for.

Emily had planned to set Grace up with some art materials and let her sketch all day again – drawing was one of a few helpful subjects that she had found easy to bluff, as it could be ‘taught’ simply by telling Grace that a dog’s nose had been drawn in the wrong place – but Grace, who was feeling much better, had torn her dress on the corner of a dresser and started musing about where fabric came from, anyway.

This was how Emily found herself explaining the concept and inner workings of textile mills. Grace, who had never imagined such things existed, was so curious that she insisted Emily gave her a full account, which Emily tried to do while pretending she had never set foot in such a place herself. It was hardly a sermon on the rules of etiquette, but Emily could not bring herself to care.

If things went her way, the Edwards sisters were not going to be her problem for much longer; and besides, it might do Grace some good to understand a little something of the real world. It was also pleasing, Emily had to admit, to feel like an expert on something other than the location of a dog’s nose. She wasn’t getting much of a chance to do that at Fairmont House.

Grace listened in rapt fascination the entire time, and then asked a long series of questions that included things like ‘What is a loom?’ and ‘How exactly dowageswork?’

Emily had no idea when she’d stopped finding these conversations so irritating. She supposed she had simply built up a resistance to them. During her first week, Grace had seemed desperate to impress her, but since her fall on the stairs and Emily’s encounter with her there, she had relaxed somewhat. She spoke to Emily as if they were old friends, was always genuinely pleased to see her, and was often rather funny even if she did not mean to be. There was something of Amy in her, too, that Emily was finding it increasingly difficult to ignore.

‘You are in a good mood,’ Grace observed, when Emily had run out of ways to explain mill equipment.

‘No, I’m not,’ Emily said promptly. ‘Start drawing.’