“Tell her I must have a name, that I don’t see anonymous clients,” said Miles, accustomed to the army of deranged men and women with appalling imaginary grievances, who are anxious to occupy, gratuitously, so much of a lawyer’s professional time.
Edwards returned to say that the young woman called herself Teresa Field, but said she did not suppose Mr. Amery would remember the name.
“Remember it?” repeated Miles thoughtfully. “No. She’s quite right. It conveys nothing to me. I wonder who she is.”
“I’ll bring her in, sir?”
“Yes. Bring her in.”
Edwards ushered in a very neatly dressed young woman of about four-and-twenty. She had the square, rosy appearance of the country girl, and was tidily dressed in black, with fabric gloves and sensible square-toed shoes, extremely well polished. Her manner was deferential without being in any way fawning or eager. Her expression was quiet, her eyes clear. She took the chair Miles offered her, sitting with the straightness of those unaccustomed to lounge in the presence of superiors. Miles decided she was a shop assistant or some kind of servant in an upper-class establishment. Her features were vaguely familiar, though he could not place them, and this vexed him, since he was apt to pride himself on his memory of the individual.
She spoke, in a soft clear voice indigenous to the county whence she was sprung.
“I’m sure I’m sorry, sir, if I’ve done wrong in coming to see you, but this is the kind of thing that’s never happened to me before, and I didn’t know what to do. No one could tell me anything for certain, and I remembered you were a legal gentleman, so perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me.”
“Telling you what?”
“What I ought to do. I know you must be busy, what with this dreadful affair about Mr. Gray…”
He remembered her then as one of the servant-girls at the Manor House.
“Of course. I saw you there at Christmas, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you there still?”
“Well—not exactly, sir. It was about that I wanted to tell you. Now that Mrs. Gray and Miss Gray have gone, of course there isn’t any need for us to be there. A new gentleman has bought the house, they say. Mr. Richard said he never wanted to live there now.”
Miles, who had known that already, deflected her on to the line of her own dismay. She spoke sensibly and clearly and answered his questions without hesitation, gently smoothing a little fawn-coloured tippet over her knee as she spoke. After the break-up of the household, she said, she had applied to Mrs. Cochrane, the housekeeper, who was acting as caretaker till the new gentleman moved in, for a reference for a better-paid post in the neighbourhood. The new lady seemed quite satisfied, provided her references were good. To Field’s amazement, Mrs. Cochrane refused to say a word for her. Miles remembered the woman, tall, sour-visaged, with a tight mouth.
“She told me she wasn’t the fool some people took her for,” Field continued, “and she hoped she was a Christian.”
“That’s only another way of spelling trouble,” Miles assured her.
“I asked her what she had against me, seeing I’d been three years and no complaints up at the Manor,” continued the girl earnestly. “At first she wouldn’t speak. Then she said she knew what she knew, and she’d been against it from the beginning.”
“Been against what?”
“Me coming to the Manor, sir. Everybody knew about my sister, she said, and these things run in families.”
“What did she know?”
“There wasn’t anything against Betty really, only she was a bit silly, through being so bright and fond of a bit of fun. But folks talk, whether there’s anything to talk about or no, so she didn’t stay down at Munford, but came up to London and got work as a chambermaid in a big hotel. Married now, she is, with a baby, but, of course, Mrs. Cochrane said that didn’t make any difference.”
Field had pressed for explanations, definitions, something concrete, and after much trouble the story had resolved itself into an accusation of misbehaviour at the gardener’s cottage by the big gates on Christmas Eve. Another servant had reported to the housekeeper that a young woman from the servants’ quarters had been seen creeping out of the cottage into the house at two o’clock in the morning. She, the servant in question, had had severe toothache and had been applying laudanum. From her window she had a good view of the gardener’s cottage, and she had seen the young woman emerge, and steal up the drive, and in by a side door.
“She says it was me, sir,” Field told Miles, in evident distress, yet displaying an admirable amount of control that compelled his immediate interest, “but that isn’t true. Even if I’d take that kind of risk, which I wouldn’t, I—I mean to say, that sort of thing wouldn’t interest me.”
Miles supposed she meant she had a regular follower, but she negatived that, saying, “No, sir, it’s just that I don’t care about that kind of thing. It doesn’t lead anywhere.”
Miles observed reasonably that it led to a home and family.
“I meant, sir, it doesn’t lead anywhere that I want to go. I’ve got two married sisters, and I’ve stayed with them both. Well, it’s all right for them, because they like it, but it’s shown me that isn’t what I want.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“Oh, yes, sir. But if I don’t get this situation there’s nothing to show I’ll get any other. It ’ud be bound to come out that I hadn’t got a reference. And then I’d never get anywhere.”
“What is this ideal job of yours?”
She was too ardent to feel any embarrassment at describing her vision. “To be a housekeeper myself, sir,” she explained, her eyes bright, her expression warm and hopeful. “To have my own room, and a big house, with me responsible. To go through the linen cupboard of
