Doll started to shake her head, gasping to catch her breath.
“No! No, I don’t know!” She gripped Gracie’s hand, holding it hard. “You have to believe me, I don’t know! I just know it wasn’t me!”
“Course it wasn’t you!” Gracie kept her arms around Doll. She could feel her shaking as the fear ran through her and seemed to fill the air.
“It could have been,” Doll said, clinging to her, her head bent low, her fair hair beginning to straggle out of its pins and its cap. “God knows, I wished him dead often enough!”
Gracie felt the chill take hold of her, as if something dreaded had become real. “Did yer?” She had to ask. She needed to know for Pitt, who was in bad trouble, and anyway, Doll could not keep it all tied up inside her anymore. “Why were that?”
Doll did not answer but just wept quietly as if her heart would break.
Gracie thought of the maid she had seen in the passage near the Grevilles’ bathroom. She hurt almost physically with her desire that it should not have been Doll and her fear that it might have been. She did not want to remember, but the question of denying it did not arise. Apart from the fact that she had seen her, she had told Pitt. He would not forget. Not even if she could let him.
She did not even want the picture cleared in her mind, but she had to see it if she could.
Still Doll said nothing, just huddled there, consumed with pain and fear.
Gracie tried hard to remember, to recapture the picture in her mind. Perhaps there would be something to prove it was not Doll? Nothing came at all. The harder she tried the more elusive it was. She took a deep breath.
“Why did you wish ’im dead, Doll?” she said with far less fear than she felt inside. “What’d ’e do to yer?”
“My child …” Doll said in an agonized whisper. “My baby.”
Gracie thought about all the babies she had known, the living ones and the dead, the unwanted, the loved and cherished who still got sick or had accidents, the ones she cared for at home in Bloomsbury, although they were hardly babies now, only in moments when they were tired and frightened or hurt. Perhaps everyone was then.
She held Doll as if she too was a child. There was nothing absurd in the fact that Doll was taller, older, handsomer. In this instant it was Gracie who had the strength and the wisdom.
“What’d ’e do to yer baby?” she whispered.
For another long moment there was silence. Doll could not bring herself to say the words. Gracie knew what it would be before Doll did at last manage to say it.
“He made me … have it killed … before it was born ….”
There was no possible answer. The only thing she could do was hold her closer, rock her a little, nurse the grief.
“Were it ’is baby?” she said after a few moments.
Doll nodded her head.
“Did yer love ’im, afore that?”
“No! No, I just wanted to keep my job. He’d have thrown me out if I’d said no to him. Then if I kept the baby he’d have put me out without a character. I’d have ended up walking the streets, in a whorehouse, and the baby would probably still have died. Least this way it never knew anything. But I loved that baby. It was mine—just as much as if it’d been born. It was part of my body.”
“Course it was,” Gracie agreed. The coldness inside her was now a hard, icy anger, like a stone in her stomach. “ ’Ow long ago were it?”
“Three years. But it doesn’t hurt any less.”
That was some small relief. At least it was not so very recent. If she had been going to kill him in revenge, she had already had three years and not done it.
“ ’Oo else knows about it?”
“No one.”
“Not Mrs. Greville or the cook? Cooks can be awful observant.” She nearly added “so I hear,” then realized that would give away that Charlotte had no cook.
“No,” Doll answered.
“They must ’a thought summink. Yer must ’a looked like yer’d broke yer ’eart. Yer still do.”
Doll gave a sigh that ended in a sob, and Gracie held her tighter.
“They just thought I’d fallen in love,” Doll said with a fierce sniff. “I wish I had. It couldn’t hurt this much.”
“I dunno,” Gracie said softly. “But if you din’t kill ’im, ’oo did?”
“I don’t know, I swear. One of the Irishmen.”
“Well, if I were Mrs. Greville, an’ I knew wot yer just told me, I would ’ave killed ’im, no trouble,” Gracie said candidly.
Doll moved back and sat up. Her eyes were red, her face tear-stained.
“She didn’t know!” she said vehemently. “She didn’t, Gracie! She’d never ’ave been able to hide it. I know. I was with her every day.”
Gracie said nothing. Doll was right.
