‘No more was you.’
‘That girl was, though. She had to pretend to be a virgin. But she’s no more a virgin than my grandmother. She had this fat young gent come to her. He was too drunk to do it but he gave her three guineas.’
‘Where’s she now?’
‘Gone back to London.’
Augustus opened the door, thinking that Dorcas must be telling the truth because she knew it had been the fat young gent, Mr Archdale. She pushed past him into the lobby and looked about her.
‘Where is it?’
Without waiting for an answer, she opened the nearest door, which led to the passage running the length of the pavilion’s ground floor. With Augustus at her heels, she walked briskly along it, trying the doors until she found the bedchamber.
With a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other, Augustus stood in the doorway and watched Dorcas inspecting the room for all the world as though she were the mistress of the house looking for evidence of her maid’s shortcomings. She tutted over the puddle of wax at the foot of one of the candlesticks on the table. She sighed loudly as she replaced the cork in a bottle of cordial. She raised her eyebrows at the heap of bedclothes on the floor and touched with her forefinger one of the silken white cords that were still attached to the bedposts. She studied the red stains in the middle of the sheet on the bed and wrinkled her nose.
‘Up to all the tricks, that one.’
‘What?’
She stared at him not unkindly. She was three inches taller and nine months older yet her expression hinted that in her superiority to him she might just as well have been as tall as King’s College Chapel and roughly as old too. ‘She lay with me last night and she wouldn’t stop talking. That’s how I knew all about the young gent being unmanned. Happens a lot, she says, and they have to pretend. It’s worth their while, mind you.’
Augustus felt hot and uncomfortable. He turned away, wanting to assert his control over the situation; after all, he was in some sense the host and besides he was a man and Dorcas was nothing but a girl. ‘Come upstairs,’ he said. ‘That’s where the worst of it is.’
He went out of the room without looking at her. He led her back down the passage and up to the long room on the first floor.
‘Pho,’ Dorcas said as she passed through the doorway. ‘Worse than a midden on a hot day.’
She walked round the room, with Augustus once again at her heels. The air stank of stale alcohol and tobacco and the smoke from the candles. Underlying that were other and less agreeable odours. Two of the chairs had been overturned. There were pools of wax and wine on the table and the floor. At least half a dozen glasses had been smashed, some intentionally, and the fragments of glass lay around the empty fireplace. There was a pool of vomit on a bowl of fruit at one end of the table. They found far worse behind the screen, the source of the worst smells, where one of the commodes had fallen on to its side and a chamber pot had smashed. The floorboards here were slippery with urine, more vomit and even a pile of excrement.
‘Take days to set this to rights,’ Dorcas said, and for the first time she sounded awed and even a little scared.
Together they examined the debris on the table. Dorcas picked up a strawberry and ate it. Augustus found a half-eaten chicken leg. They foraged for a few minutes, cramming scraps of food into their mouths.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Do you think they enjoy it?’
A door banged below them. There were footsteps on the stairs. Dorcas seized a brush and began to sweep vigorously. Augustus righted one of the fallen chairs. The door of the room opened and Mr Whichcote appeared on the threshold.
‘I don’t pay you to be idle,’ he said to Augustus.
He might have replied that Mr Whichcote did not pay him at all. Instead, he hung his head and blushed.
Dorcas curtsied low and said nothing, fixing her eyes on the ground.
‘Begin by airing the place,’ Mr Whichcote said. ‘What are you waiting for? Open the windows.’
They sprang to obey him. Whichcote made a leisurely circuit of the room with a handkerchief raised to his nose.
‘Remember,’ he said. ‘I do not choose to have what passes here to be talked about abroad. If there is foolish gossip in the town about it, I shall know that one or both of you have been talking out of turn. And if that happens, Mrs Phear and I will know what to do.’ He looked from Augustus to Dorcas and then went on in the same low, unhurried voice: ‘It is a singular coincidence that neither of you has friends in the world, is it not? It follows that Mrs Phear and I must stand in place of them. And you shall find that, just as we know how to punish wrongdoing, we know how to reward fidelity.’
Without another word, he sauntered out of the room and down the stairs. Neither Dorcas nor Augustus moved until they heard the closing of the big door in the lobby.
‘He’ll kill us if we talk,’ Augustus blurted out.
He glanced sideways at Dorcas. He was alarmed to see that her eyes were full of tears.
‘You remember the other girl, the one that died?’ she muttered.
‘The one who came in February? Tabitha? They said she choked.’
‘Who knows? Maybe they killed her. I tell you this, though – the mistress locked me in with Tabby’s body that night. And now she never goes away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Every night she’s there,’ Dorcas hissed. ‘I see her shape in the bed next to mine. She talks and talks and I can’t hear what she’s saying.’
Elinor Carbury sat in her sitting room and tried to reread Chapter 31 of
But her mind refused to concentrate on the words before her. Her eyes drifted over the distressingly formal garden to the dark green mass of the plane tree. She thought of John Holdsworth and wondered how he was at the mill. She had felt his absence at breakfast. There was nothing reprehensible or out of the ordinary about this, she assured herself, for in the last few days she had seen more society than she often saw in as many weeks. John Holdsworth had simply been part of that society; and as his hostess she had been obliged to see a good deal of him. Still, there was no denying that she felt flat and dull.
The sitting-room windows were open, and so were other windows in the Master’s Lodge. She became aware that Dr Carbury had a visitor in his book room below. The rumble of their voices, her husband’s and that of another gentleman, grew steadily louder. Their conversation was becoming heated.
She rang the bell. When at last Susan bustled into the room, Elinor asked who the visitor was.
‘Why, ma’am, ’tis Dr Jermyn from Barnwell.’
Elinor sent the girl away. Had she imagined an alteration in Susan’s manner? She had seemed strange for the last day or two – unnaturally cheerful but also watchful, almost wary.
In the circumstances, it was scarcely surprising that high words should pass between Dr Carbury and Dr Jermyn. Though Frank’s removal from the asylum had had nothing to do with her husband, Jermyn would naturally believe that at least some of the responsibility was his.
What did surprise Elinor, though, was what happened next. The gentlemen soon lowered their voices, so they appeared to have made peace. Some ten minutes after that, she heard the garden door opening below her. When she craned her head, in a most unladylike manner, she saw the foreshortened figures of Dr Carbury and his guest walking along the gravel path and through the gate that led to the service yard where the wash-house was.
The gentlemen were gone for perhaps five minutes, and when they returned, their heads were close together and they were deep in conversation. Shortly afterwards she heard Jermyn leaving.
It was most curious, Elinor thought, and she could not for the life of her think what they had been doing in the yard. Surely it could be nothing to do with what had happened there on Tuesday morning?
