current position. She tells me to think about it. Says she will come and see me again the next day in case I change my mind.
And she does. All smiles and flattery.
I say no, again. More firmly this time. I tell her that I know my place, I know where I belong. With whom, to whom.
Weeks later, when we are back at number seventeen, Hannah finds out about Lady Pemberton-Brown. She calls me to the drawing room one morning and I know as soon as I enter that she is not pleased, although I don’t yet know why. She is pacing.
‘Can you imagine, Grace, what it’s like to find out in the middle of a luncheon, with seven other women intent on making me look a fool, that an attempt has been made on my lady’s maid?’
I inhale; am caught unawares.
‘To be sitting amid a group of women and to have them start on about it, laughing if you please, acting all surprise that I didn’t know. That such a thing could happen right under my nose. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am-’
‘I should think so. I need to be able to trust you, Grace. I thought I could, after all this time, after all we’ve been through together…’
I have still not heard from Alfred. Weariness and worry lend my voice a jagged edge. ‘I told Lady Pemberton-Brown no, ma’am. I didn’t think to mention it because I didn’t think to accept.’
Hannah stops, looks at me, exhales. She sits on the edge of the lounge and shakes her head. She smiles feebly. ‘Oh, Grace. I’m sorry. How perfectly beastly of me. I don’t know what’s come over me, behaving like this.’ She seems paler than usual.
She rests her forehead lightly in one of her hands and says nothing for a minute. When she lifts her head she looks straight at me and speaks in a low, quivering voice. ‘It’s just so different to how I thought it would be, Grace.’
She appears so feeble I am immediately sorry for having spoken sternly to her. ‘What is, ma’am?’
‘Everything.’ She gestures half-heartedly. ‘This. This room. This house. London. My life.’ She looks at me. ‘I feel so ill-equipped. Sometimes I try to trace back through my mind to see where I made the first wrong choice.’ Her gaze drifts toward the window. ‘I feel like Hannah Hartford, the real one, ran off to live her real life and left me here to fill her place.’ After a moment she turns back to me. ‘Do you remember last year, Grace, when I saw the spiritualist?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Tremors of misgiving.
‘She didn’t read for me in the end.’
Relief, short-lived as she continues.
‘She couldn’t. Wouldn’t. She intended to: sat me down, had me draw a card. But when I gave it to her she slid it back, reshuffled and had me draw again. I could tell by her face it was the same card I chose, and I knew which one it was. The death card.’ Hannah stands and paces across the room. ‘She didn’t want to tell me, not at first. She tried my palm instead, wouldn’t read that either. She said she didn’t know what it meant, that it was foggy, her vision was foggy, but she said one thing was sure.’ Hannah turns to face me. ‘She said death was hanging around me and I was to watch my step. Death past or death future, she couldn’t tell, but there was a darkness.’
It takes all the conviction I can muster to tell her she’s not to let it bother her, that it was just as likely a ploy to get more money from her, to make sure she came back for further readings. After all, it’s a safe bet in London these days that everyone’s lost someone they love, especially those seeking the services of a spiritualist. But Hannah shakes her head impatiently.
‘I know what it meant. I worked it out myself. I’ve been reading about it. It was a metaphorical death. Sometimes the cards speak in metaphors. It’s me. I’m dead on the inside; I’ve felt it for a long time. As if I died and everything that’s happening is someone else’s strange and awful dream.’
I don’t know what to say. I assure her she isn’t dead. That everything is real.
She smiles sadly. ‘Ah then. That’s worse. If this is real life, I have nothing.’
For once I know the perfect thing to say.
She meets my eyes then and takes my hand. Seizes it, almost roughly. ‘Don’t leave me, Grace, please don’t leave me.’
‘I won’t, ma’am,’ I say, touched by her solemnity. ‘I never will.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
And I kept my word. For better and for worse.
RESURRECTION
Darkness. Stillness. Shadowy figures. This is not London; this is not the morning room at number seventeen Grosvenor Square. Hannah is vanished. For now.
‘Welcome home.’ A voice in the dark, someone leaning over me.
I blink. And again, slowly.
I know the voice. It is Sylvia, and I am suddenly old, tired.
Even my eyelids are perished. Dysfunctional. Like a faded pair of Roman blinds with worn-out cords.
‘You’ve been asleep for a long time. You gave us quite a scare. How do you feel?’
Displaced. Left over. Out of time.
‘Would you like a glass of water?’
I must nod, because a straw is in my mouth. I sip. Lukewarm water. Familiar.
I am unaccountably sad. No, not unaccountably. I am sad because the scales have tipped and I know what’s coming.
It is Saturday again. A week has passed since the spring fair. Since my episode, as it is now known. I am in my room, in my bed. The curtains are open and the sun is shimmering in off the heath. It is morning and there are birds. I am expecting a visitor. Sylvia has been and prepared me. I am propped like Miss Polly’s dolly against a stack of pillows. The top sheet she has folded over neatly to form a wide smooth strip beneath my hands. She is determined to make me presentable and I have little will to resist. God help me, I have even let her make me over.
There is a knock.
Ursula leans her head around the door, checks that I am awake, smiles. Her hair is pulled back today to reveal her face. It is a small round face to which I am unaccountably drawn.
She is beside the bed now, head inclined, looking down at me. Those large dark eyes: eyes that belong in an oil painting.
‘How are you?’ she says, as everybody says.
‘Much better. Thank you for coming.’
She shakes her head rapidly from side to side; don’t be silly, her gesture says. ‘I’d have come earlier. I didn’t know until yesterday, when I called.’
‘It’s as well you didn’t. I’ve been in rather large demand. My daughter
