Mrs. Poovey didn’t even blink.
Emily swallowed hard. “It might be sunnier tomorrow, don’t you think?”
If Mrs. Poovey thought that, she gave no sign of it. With a soft sigh, Emily set the pillow on the cot. Now there seemed nothing left to do but go on with her work. She sloshed out the basin and emptied it into the slop jar as Tilly had directed. Then Emily whisked the feather duster over the furnishings and finally began to sweep. She had entirely given up the idea of any conversation with Mrs. Poovey, so to fill the lonely, uncomfortable stillness, she began to hum under her breath. Soon the hum became words.
“London Bridge is falling down,” sang Emily. Whoosh! went the broom.
“Falling down.” Whoosh! “Falling down.” Whoosh!
Suddenly, almost without her knowing it, the words began to change.
“I’ll get braver by and by,
By and by, by and by,
All I have to do is try,
My fair lady!
“I will never groan and sigh,
Groan and sigh, groan and sigh,
Mrs. M. can’t make me cry,
My fair lady!”
Flustered by what she had done, Emily looked shyly at Mrs. Poovey. Was that a spark in her eyes? Emily’s heart leaped. But when she looked again, the spark was gone. In any event, her work in that room was done, so she picked up her broom and mop and bucket. But as she turned to leave, she remembered something else. Despite the way Tilly behaved, Mrs. Poovey was not a chair or a table. She was a person. Emily dropped a curtsy.
“Good day, Mrs. Poovey,” she said. “I—I am so pleased to have met you.”
But Mrs. Poovey might well have been a chair or a table. She never smiled, or even so much as blinked. Feeling dejected and hopeless, Emily left to find the room described by Tilly as belonging to Mr. Bottle and Mr. Dobbs.
“Mr. Bottle’s the one what’s got the hankerchee, case you needs to know,” Tilly had said. At the time, Emily had wondered why they couldn’t tell her themselves which was which, but after the meeting with Mrs. Poovey, she was beginning to understand. Perhaps though, with two in the room, things might be a little cheerier. Knocking lightly on the open door to announce her presence, she entered.
Wearing patched, thin sweaters, and baggy, threadbare trousers, Mr. Bottle and Mr. Dobbs were seated across from one another on the only two chairs in the room, chairs as straight and stiff as old wooden skeletons.
Mr. Dobbs was snoring, with his chin dropped so far into his hollow chest it seemed intent on working its way to the opposite side. He looked as if he might have fallen asleep over his reading, except that there was nothing to read in his lap unless you considered two gnarled hands to be a book or a newspaper.
The other sound in the room came from Mr. Bottle’s thin, red nose. He was, just as Tilly had said, the one with the “hankerchee,” a tattered, grey piece of cloth that might have been retired from duty as a cleaning rag because there was so little service left in it. Besides honking into this relic, Mr. Bottle was also studying a small scrap of paper. It was a wrinkled, worn soap wrapper Emily discovered later when she made up his bed, because as soon as she came in, he quickly thrust it under the mattress. It was as if he was actually afraid to be caught reading!
As for any cheer or conversation, Emily soon learned that neither would ever come from that room. Mr. Dobbs never did wake up while she was there, and Mr. Bottle only gave muffled replies in one word—or less—from behind his handkerchief, to every attempt at conversation that Emily made. The only sounds that came from the room were whooshing, thumping and swishing, accompanied by the mournful chorus of honking and snoring.
Emily’s next sad encounter was with Mrs. Quirk, a lady so tall and thin she seemed like a piece of elastic stretched as far as it could go, then allowed to grow old and brittle in that position so it never could spring back. Emily felt that if Mrs. Quirk swallowed a marble, you would see it travel all the way down her. Moldy bread lumps and fish head stew—no wonder she was wasting away to a shred!
At the moment Emily entered Mrs. Quirk’s room, the old lady was seated on her chair waving her fingers about in the most curious way. As soon as she caught sight of Emily, she quickly laid her hands down on her lap, but not before Emily guessed what was happening. She was doing make-believe embroidery, without embroidery thread, needle, or canvas!
Emily, however, could no more start a conversation with Mrs. Quirk than she could with anyone else. But while she was doing her chores in the sad, silent room, she came to a decision. For the moment, she would forget about Uncle Twice, about the missing ballroom, and all the other mysteries of Sugar Hill Hall. She would devote all her energies toward bringing some happiness, no matter how little, to the pitiful old residents who lived, silent and forgotten, in the upper reaches of this evil mansion. Filled with thoughts of how she might accomplish this, most of them hopeless, she finished her chores and then decided she had better find Tilly for more instructions.
Where was Tilly now? Suddenly the mansion seemed filled with a gloomy hush. Emily set down her bucket and crept quietly down the narrow attic stairs to the floor below. Then she made her way down the hall, room by room, peering through one half open door after another. Some were empty. In others, the old people sat hunched in their chairs, staring and silent like Mrs. Poovey. But Tilly was nowhere to be found. Emily decided finally that she would have to try the floor below. Carefully, she tiptoed down the next flight of steps.
Creak! Pop! Snap! The wooden
