“What is it?” Gracie asked.
“What are you doing here?” Doll said, taking her by the arm. “We aren’t supposed to carry clothes along these stairs! What if someone came to the door! It’d look terrible. That’s what back stairs is for. You only come down these if you’re sent for to one of the front rooms.”
“Oh. Oh, yeh. O’ course.” She had known that. She was not thinking.
“Where’s yer wits?” Doll asked more gently. “Yer out woolgathering?”
“What? What’s woolgathering?” Without realizing it, her arms were lowering and the blue dress was trailing on the floor.
Doll took it from her. She was six inches taller and it was an easy task for her.
“Picking bits o’ sheep wool that’s got caught in the hedges. I mean your wits are wandering.” She shook her head. “Yer going to iron this? If you weren’t before, you’d better now … and clean the hem of that skirt train.” She looked at the silk appreciatively. “It’s a lovely color. I always imagine the sea looks like that ’round desert islands and such.”
Gracie had no time for desert islands. The best things happened in gardens in England, in the dying blaze of the year. Green and white were the most beautiful colors. She followed Doll obediently through the baize door, along the passageway, turned left, and then past the stillroom, the footmen’s pantry, the room where they hung the pheasants and other game, the coal room, and on to the various laundry rooms and ironing rooms.
Doll put the blue dress on a hanger and inspected it carefully, flicking off specks of dust, wringing out a cloth till it was barely damp, and then wiping the places where Gracie had inadvertently let the hem of the dress brush on the floor.
“It doesn’t look bad,” she said with a slight lift in her voice. “Let it dry a minute or two, then iron it. Mrs. Pitt won’t find fault. You’ve got a good place. You’re lucky.”
Suddenly Gracie put Finn Hennessey from her mind and remembered the moments of unhappiness she had seen in Doll’s face, the deep, searing loneliness and sense of pain, not fleeting, but there all the time, breaking through in an unguarded instant.
“In’t you lucky?” she said very quietly. She nearly asked if Mrs. Greville found fault, but she did not think that was the answer. It seemed too surface, too insubstantial. And although one could not judge someone’s private treatment of their servants by the public face they presented, she had not felt that Eudora was of that nature. Mr. Wheeler was not in the least nervous in his duties. He was deeply shocked at his master’s death, and aware of at least some of what murder meant, but that was not the same thing.
Doll’s back was stiff, her shoulders set as if all her muscles were locked.
“In’t you lucky, then?” Gracie repeated. It was important; it had suddenly come to matter very much.
Doll started to move again, reaching up to the cupboards as if she were looking for starch, or blue, or some other laundry aid, although they were all there in labeled jars, and she took none of them.
“You been very pleasant to me,” Doll said, choosing each word, then delivering it as if it were of no importance. “I wouldn’t like to see you hurt.” She moved a couple of jars around to no purpose, still keeping her back to the room. “Don’t go falling in love, Gracie. Kiss and a cuddle’s all right, but don’t ever let no one take it further than that. There’s grief in it you wouldn’t think to imagine … for the like of us. Don’t take offense. It isn’t my business. I know that.”
“I don’ take no offense,” Gracie said softly. Although she felt the hot blood surge up her face, it was embarrassment. If Doll could read her so well, maybe everyone could. Maybe even Finn could! She must concentrate her mind. She should know how to be a detective. She had had enough example. “Did you fall in love, then?”
Doll laughed, a bitter, tearing sound close to a sob.
“No … I never fell in love. I never met anyone … anyone I felt like that about, not as’d be likely to look at me.”
“Why wouldn’t anybody look at you?” Gracie said frankly. “You’re one of the prettiest girls I seen.”
Some of the rigidity eased out of Doll’s back. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “But that’s not all a man wants. You’ve got to be respectable too, have your character.”
“You mean your reputation?” Gracie asked. “Well, I s’pose so, mostly. But it don’t always count.”
“Yes, it does.” Doll’s voice was flat, allowing no argument, as if she had already hoped and been beaten.
Gracie was almost sure she must have someone in particular in her mind.
“Is that why you stay, even though it in’t a good place?”
Doll froze. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a good place!”
“I in’t goin’ ter go an’ tell anyone you said that,” Gracie protested. “Anyway, maybe she’ll change now. Things is goin’ ter be different now Mr. Greville’s dead, poor creature.”
“He wasn’t a poor creature.” She almost choked on the words.
“I meant ’er. She looks terrible pale and scared, like she knew ’oo done it.”
Doll turned around very slowly. Her face was white; her hands gripped the marble ledge of the sink top as though if she let go she might fall.
“ ’Ere!” Gracie started forward. “Yer goin’ ter faint?” She looked around but there was no chair. “Sit on the floor. Afore yer fall over. Yer could hurt yourself rotten on this stone.” Against Doll’s will, Gracie clasped her and threw her inconsiderable weight to catch her and made her ease downwards instead of falling.
Doll crumpled, carrying Gracie down with her. They sat together in a heap on the cold stone floor.
Gracie kept her arm around her, comforting, as she would have one of the children. “You know ’oo done it too, don’t yer?” she pressed. She could not afford to let it go.
