The Blue Bedroom

There was no chaise out of Ambry before eight the next morning, which Nell established from Perrin, in the yard, in the rain, at half past four, with her case already packed and standing at the foot of her bed like a reproach.

She came back through the kitchen passage and found Héloïse waiting at the top of it.

“Perrin will have told you there is nothing until the morning.”

“He has.”

“Then I am going to ask you something, and I should like you to notice the shape of it.” Héloïse had her hands at her sides. “You have no engagement in this house. You are not working here and you are not owed anything here, and there is a stamped paper on my blotter that says you will not take sixpence off me for the fortnight. Which means tonight is the first night since the twentieth of October on which I can ask you to stay here as a guest without it being a bribe. I have wanted to ask for nine days and could not, and now I can, and I find I am nervous, which is absurd at thirty-five.”

“You’re asking me to sleep in the cold room I’ve had for a fortnight.”

“I am asking you to sleep in a different one,” said Héloïse, “because that room is a disgrace and has been for fourteen days, and Bess is lighting a fire in the blue bedroom at this moment on my instruction and not on a timetable.”

“Then aye. Thank you.”

“You need not thank me. That is rather the point of it.”

· · ·Scene break

Sibyl had a tray in her own room. She sent word down by Joan that she was not being cold, she was being tired; that she would go on Tuesday by the carrier as she had said; and that the still-room accounts were in the third drawer with the wine book, and somebody had better look at both before Christmas.

Héloïse went up at six and was gone twenty minutes.

“Well?” Nell said, when she came down.

“I have told her there is a house here for her as long as she wants one, on the three things and not on any others.” She stood at the drawing-room window with her back to the room. “She said she would think about it in Harrogate, where there is a fire in every room and nobody says anything true before March. And then she asked whether I had eaten anything today, and heard herself do it, and we both pretended she had not.”

“That’s a better afternoon than either of you were going to get.”

“Yes.” A pause. “I have never in my life been so tired.”

· · ·Scene break

Dinner was at half past seven, because Mrs Pardoe said that was when it would be ready and she was not taking instructions on the subject from anybody in the house including the mistress of it.

What she did take upon herself was the table. Nell came in at the half hour and found the twelve-foot stretch of mahogany laid with two places in the middle of it, side by side, the candles moved down to them, and the empty head of the table off at the far end in the dark like a thing in a field.

“I’m not walking twelve foot with a dish at my age,” Mrs Pardoe said, coming in behind her with the soup. “Sit down, both of you, and eat it hot.”

She served it herself, which was not her office, Bess having been crying in the scullery since three. And when she had put the tureen down she did not go away. She stood at the end of the table with the cloth over her arm and her chin up, the way a woman stands who has been rehearsing on the stairs.

“I’d like to say a thing, your grace, and then I’ll get back to my kitchen.”

“Say it, Mrs Pardoe.”

“Twenty-seven years I’ve been in this house. I’ve been asked what I call it by the rector, and by four of these guild people, and this morning by an inspector with rain on him, and they’ve all had the same answer, which is that I call it the house.” She set her hand flat on the table. “That’s not the whole of it, and it’s time somebody said the whole of it in this room. I never once called it a haunting and I never will, because it was never a haunting. It’s yours. I’ve known it was yours since your second winter here, in the way a body knows a thing she couldn’t sit an examination in, and I said nothing because it wasn’t asked and it wasn’t mine. It’s yours, ma’am, the same as your hands are yours. And if there’s anybody in Ambry with something to say about it, they can come up the back way and say it to me.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Nell looked at her soup, because the alternative was looking at anybody’s face, and it seemed to her that the whole fourteen days had been running towards a cook standing at the end of a table with a cloth over her arm.

“Thirteen years,” Héloïse said. Her voice was not steady. “Mrs Pardoe. In thirteen years you never said.”

“You never asked, and you’d not have thanked me. And I’ll tell you something else while I’m at it, since the house is all upside down anyway and my pastry’s ruined.” Mrs Pardoe picked up the empty tray. “You’ve eaten nothing since Saturday. That’s not the inspector’s business and it’s not Miss Sibyl’s business either any more, so it’ll have to be mine. There’s a pudding.”

She went out. The door swung and settled.

“I have paid that woman thirty-two pounds a year,” Héloïse said, to the candles, “for twenty-seven years.”

· · ·Scene break

They took the pudding into the library, where the fire had been lit at six by a human being with a match, and Nell put her boots on the fender and ate it and thought that she had never in nine years finished a case with nothing to write.

Héloïse sat in the low nursing chair the house had brought up to the hearth on the seventh day and left there ever since.

“It is the fourteenth day,” she said.

“It is. It’s the end of it, near enough. Four hours in it.”

“Then ask me.”

Nell put the plate down.

“Did you want him dead?”

“No,” Héloïse said.

She said it immediately, and then she went on, unhurried and exact, in the way she had of laying words down one at a time as though each one had to bear weight.

“I want to be accurate, because I have had eighteen months to be accurate and have used almost none of it, and because you asked me on my own staircase an hour after you met me and I have thought about the question every week since.

“I did not want him dead. I wanted him to go away, which is a different thing, and a smaller one, and very much harder to arrange. I used to lie awake and plan an illness for him. Not a mortal one — I was never brave enough for that, even in the dark. A long convalescence, somewhere warm, with a doctor who would forbid travel and a nurse who would write to me once a month with a good account. I planned it in some detail. I chose the coast. That is the whole of the wickedness in me on the subject of my husband, and it is a very small amount of wickedness to have been frightened of for a year and a half.

“He fell on the eighteenth of April and I was in Ambry, in a shop, having a bonnet re-trimmed, and the man came in and told the woman serving me before he told me, because he could not think how to begin. What I felt first was nothing whatever. What I felt second, before the carriage was brought round, was that I should never again have to work out whether he wanted the library to himself. And then I was sick, in the carriage, on the Ambry road, twice.

“Grief and relief, every day since, in no particular order. The county has only ever had room for one of them at a time, and neither version it has settled on is what happened. That is why I would not answer you on the stairs. Not because the answer was bad. Because it is two answers, and I had nobody to give two answers to.”

The fire moved.

“And the stairs did nothing to him,” she said. “I should like that part in words as well, to you, who put her hand on the fourth tread on the first afternoon and told me there was no mark on it before you had any reason to be kind to me. There is nothing of him in that wood. Whatever is in this house is mine and it has never once gone near him, living or dead. He fell. It was ugly and ordinary and it was nobody’s doing.”

“I know,” Nell said. “I’ve known since the first day. It’s the only thing in this whole business I’ve never had a doubt about.”

“Yes. You have been unbearable about it.”

· · ·Scene break

“Now,” Héloïse said. “I shall take my turn, since it is the fourteenth day for both of us.”

“Take it.”

“On the first day you asked me a question nobody in this county would put to a duchess, and I told you that you had thirteen days to earn the right to ask it again. Nobody has ever given me that right over anybody, so I shall take it, as one takes a chair when there is nobody to offer one.” She sat forward. “May I ask you the question that nobody asks a guild woman?”

“Ask it.”

“Did you do it for me?”

Nell had seen it coming from about the second course, and had been glad of the warning, because it was the only question that could have poisoned the rest of the night.

“No,” she said. “And yes. You’ll have both, in order, because you’ve had a fortnight of me being exact and I’ll not stop on the last night of it.

“No, first. I did not do it for you. I did it for a big-boned woman of forty with a plait pinned up, who took her bread out of the oven and set it on the sill because the house would be cold after. I’ve been going to do it for her for nine years and finding reasons not to, and Ambry post office at half past eleven this morning was where I ran out of reasons. And I did it for a girl of twenty-one on a kitchen floor who looked at the boards. If there had never been a Wexhall, that was coming out of me in some other house in some other January, later and worse and probably too late again.

“Now the yes. On the third day you stood at that table with your hands behind your back and asked whether my guild had ever taken out a working that was not dead. Nine years. Forty-one houses. Not one client ever asked me the question that was actually dangerous, because nobody asks the exorcist whether the cure has a side to it. You did, before you had any reason to trust me and with a great deal of reason not to.

“So no, I did not do it for you. I did it because of you. That’s not the same sentence and it isn’t a smaller one, and it’s the truest thing I own.”

Héloïse sat with that for a while.

“Thank you,” she said. “I find I can carry that. I could not have carried the other.”

“I know. That’s why you asked.”

· · ·Scene break

“Then there is one more thing,” Héloïse said, “and I shall be exact about this as well, because you do not take a hint and I have stopped wishing you did.”

She stood up out of the low chair.

“I want to kiss you. Not to thank you; I have nothing to thank you with, and you have spent the whole of today arranging matters so that I could not if I tried. I want it for myself. Tonight, in this room, with nothing owing in either direction. I am asking rather than doing it because you are the first person I have ever met who would rather be asked than obliged, and because on Friday, in that cupboard, you stopped, and you were right to stop, and I am not owed a different answer now.”

“Say it again without the paragraph round it.”

“I want to kiss you.”

“Aye,” Nell said. “Good.”

She got up off the fender.

“Then here’s mine, and it’s shorter, because I’ve not the vocabulary and you know I’ve not. I’ve wanted it since Friday morning in a cold cupboard with vinegar on my hands, and I’d have said so then if I’d had the right, and I hadn’t, and three days of being a professional about it has been the longest three days of my working life. I’ve no licence and no bond and no fee and nothing to hold over you. So I’m asking too. Come here, and I want you to, and I’m saying it in words so there’s no mistaking it in the morning.

“And if you get halfway across that carpet and you don’t want it after all, you stop. You stop where you are, and we’ll sit down and talk about the magistrate at Ambry until it gets light, and I’ll not be strange with you tomorrow, and there’ll be nothing wrong. Say you’ve heard that.”

“I have heard it,” Héloïse said. “And it goes the other way, and I shall expect it to.”

“It goes the other way.”

She came across the carpet.

It was not quick, and neither of them shut her eyes, and when it came Nell found that her own hand had gone up to the side of Héloïse’s face on its own account, the way her hand went flat on timber, reading; and that there was nothing under it to read at all except a woman who was warm, and breathing badly, and holding on to the back of a chair with her other hand as though the floor were not entirely to be trusted.

It went on. Then it stopped, and started again differently, which was Héloïse’s doing and not hers.

Afterwards Nell stood in the middle of a library with her forehead against Héloïse’s, in the ordinary coal warmth of a fire a human being had lit at six, and listened to a great house going about its evening: the range drawn down, the pipes knocking twice, rain on eleven windows ninety feet away.

No instrument in her pocket, no ledger on the table, no book anywhere in the room with ruled columns in it. For the first time in nine years, nothing that had happened to her in a house was going to be written down by anybody at all.

“Fourteen days,” Héloïse said, against her mouth. “You were very nearly too late.”

“I was on time,” said Nell, “to the minute, and I’d like that in the record.”