Loot, p.19
Loot, page 19
She takes his arm as they move down the hall. At the top of the stairs, she stops. “Ah, I left my glove in the Peacock Room. Monsieur, would you mind…”
He leaves her holding on to the top of the banister and goes to retrieve the glove, which he finds on the floor between the window and the automaton. The lace is delicate, still warm from her touch.
He is on his way out of the room when he hears it—a shocking series of thuds. He bolts down the hall.
Miss Jehanne lies motionless at the foot of the steps, her cheek against the floorboards, her eyes shut. The valet is crouched by her side, pressing her throat for a pulse, his fingers dark against the pale of her skin. He looks up at Rum, alarmed. “She has fainted,” the valet says. “Is there a bed where I may place her?”
By this point, Fellowes has come running; it is more running in one day than he has done in a month. “What happened?”
“The lady fainted,” says Rum. “Let’s get her to the Holbein Room.”
Slight though he seems, the valet lifts her without strain and climbs the stairs, every so often adjusting his arm to brace the back of her neck. Fellowes goes to inform Lady Selwyn and bring water at once.
The valet waits until Rum has peeled back the blankets, then eases her beneath the sheets, quickly covering her stockinged calves.
As the valet steps away, Lady Selwyn enters, demanding explanations. “But how did it happen?” she asks Rum. “You were with her, weren’t you?”
“I’d left her to retrieve her glove from the Peacock Room,” says Rum. “I had no idea she would…”
“Look, she’s trying to speak,” says Lady Selwyn, leaning over the Frenchwoman. “Miss Jehanne?” She takes the hand, pale and limp, in both of her own. “Miss Jehanne, can you hear me?”
Miss Jehanne blinks once, slowly. “Oui.”
“Her lips are a bit bluish. Do they seem so to you, Rum?”
He squints, but sees no bluishness.
In comes Fellowes with a jug of water and a glass, which sloshes as Lady Selwyn takes hold of it. “You must drink something, Miss Jehanne. Come, help her sit up, Rum.”
Miss Jehanne allows him to prop her against the pillows. The effort seems to revive her a bit. Between small sips, she shakes her head. “I feel so silly, madame. Arriving as your guest and leaving as an invalid.”
“Leaving? In this state?”
“I will trouble you no further, madame. In ten minutes, I shall be rested and able to take the coach back to town.” Here, Miss Jehanne pauses and places a hand to her breast, concentrating on her breathing for a moment.
“Absolutely not,” says Lady Selwyn, watching her. “You are too frail. And the journey would be bumpy.”
“She did say the coach rode smoothly,” Rum offers, before Lady Selwyn mutes him with a look.
“I insist that you stay,” says Lady Selwyn. “Cloverpoint will put you on your feet.”
“I have none of my clothes,” says Miss Jehanne.
“I can supply you with clothes. Or your valet can bring them. We can find him a room down in the Cloisters, with the other servants.”
After much couldn’t and shouldn’t, it is settled. Miss Jehanne and her valet will stay for several days. She will take sweet walks in the gardens and rest as much as possible.
Rum knows better than to question Lady Selwyn’s decision in the presence of others. He also knows that she is lonely for the friendship of women sometimes, that he cannot supply her with the feminine whimsy and gossip exclusive to her sex. And yet. There is something about the two of them, their sudden and mutual ease, that unsettles him. This he chalks up to his usual aversion to houseguests.
* * *
—
Long after Mrs. Chapman has left for the evening and Fellowes has gone to bed, Rum retires to his bedchamber. His is the Blackstone Room, with walls of silk damask and matching chairs, as well as a glass cabinet that contains one of her favorite curios: a black stone from which an Elizabethan necromancer used to summon ghosts. (“There’s no one I trust more than you to guard it,” she said to Rum, who could not imagine the person who would choose to thieve a round slab of rock.) He would have preferred a humbler room, but there are no humble rooms in Cloverpoint, except for the vaulted basement where Fellowes and seven other servants live. Lady Selwyn has dubbed this “the Cloisters.”
Traditionally, only the mistress keeps a room upstairs. Yet it is hard to dispute the fact that Rum doesn’t exactly belong in the Cloisters, either. He is neither gentry nor servant but something in between, an offensive characteristic to the English, who pride themselves on putting a man in his proper place.
Yet Rum is of the opinion that his place is wherever Lady Selwyn says it is. Which is why, in the middle of the night, he goes to her room.
Their meetings take place on Mondays and Fridays. If Lady Selwyn hasn’t slept well, or is feeling otherwise disinclined, she skips dessert. This is a code only Rum can read, meaning I need my sleep tonight, dear.
But this happens very rarely, in times of excessive fatigue. For a woman of advanced age, she has appetites.
* * *
—
On the night in question, Rum enters Lady Selwyn’s room without knocking. At the far end of the room is a high canopy bed, framed by a pair of ornate screens. The room is dark; a guttering candle by the bed throws an inviting light. With every step, he can make out a bit more: the dark arches of her eyebrows, the silver plait of her hair, falling down her shoulder. She is wearing a cream kaftan with gold stitching, her knees drawn up behind an open book. She is reading; he loves the lost expression on her face when she reads.
A floorboard creaks beneath his foot, prompting her look.
“My dear,” she says, closing the book. “What kept you?”
He climbs into his side of the bed, which was at one time Colonel Selwyn’s side of the bed. The first time Rum claimed this space for himself, five years ago, he was curious to find that he felt almost no guilt at all.
She blows out the candle on her nightstand.
“But I want to look at you,” he says.
“Look with your hands.”
The sex is lively, in spite of the dark. He loves the sag and splay of her breasts, the sweat beneath them, her soft belly, her dappled thighs, her throat. He buries his face in her hair. Camphor and lavender and some other aged scent. She has ruined camphor for him; he can’t smell it without finding himself aroused. But what is wrong with that? What could be more right and fortunate than two people finding one another in the twilight of their lives, their bodies too old to be anything but honest? A shudder rolls through her and then she melts into laughter.
“Hush,” he says, though he is pleased with himself. The pattern on the canopy seems to be writhing with his every breath.
“The servants can’t hear us from the Cloisters,” she says.
“I’ve run into Fellowes before, wandering around. Said he heard a noise.”
“ ’Tis a wonder he can hear through all that ear shrubbery.”
He chuckles. Her fingers idle in the field of his chest hair.
Eventually she rolls away and opens the drawer by her bed. “Deary, have you seen my meerschaum? Oh, there it is.”
The meerschaum was her father’s pipe, a long and rustic-looking thing with the profile of a scowling bearded man on the front. It is the one thing Rum dislikes about Lady Selwyn—this nasty, mannish habit of puffing after sex.
She exhales into the dark. “I know what you are thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“That snuff would be more ladylike, but snuff—”
“—makes you sneeze.”
“And the meerschaum brings me close to my father.” She puffs contemplatively. “I can almost feel his presence in the room.”
“Likewise,” Rum says dryly.
A sweetish smoke fills the air. He grows drowsy with it, nearly dozing off until she taps the bowl empty into an ashtray.
“Tell me something,” she says, shifting her weight in the bed. “Are you certain the cushions aren’t genuine?”
“It’s the lady I find ingenuine. And the Musulman.”
“Who? Oh, the valet—how do you know he’s a Muslim?”
“It’s their names, always sounding like an elephant stomping on something. Mah-fuz. Mu-stafa.”
“His name is Mahfuz Mustafa?”
“No, I am simply making a point. And what kind of woman travels with a manservant? A lady should travel with a maid.”
“A bad lady.” Her hand moves downward, taking hold of him. “Very bad.”
But it is too soon for Rum to resurrect himself. He shivers and pulls her hand to his chest. Eventually she drifts off; he can tell by the gentle hiss of her snore. He eases out of bed, and, as noiselessly as possible, ties his robe and leaves before he can be discovered by one of the morning maids.
II
Rum is up early the next morning, long before breakfast. He stands at a window in the Long Gallery, gazing out over the meadow, his hand pressed against his neck. Must have strained a muscle sometime last night. (Is it possible he can no longer make love without sustaining an injury? Humiliating thought.) The morning chill gives no comfort, nor does the general gray gloom.
It is September already. The summer was too short, albeit warmer than the year before, when the snows of February turned into summer storms, one frigid wet month passing into the next and the next, all runny noses and drafty rooms, the sun concealed behind a wall of cloud.
But what was a sodden hem compared to the sufferings of Lady Selwyn’s tenant farmers, their crops washed away by floods? Such was the case all across the country, so that for the first time in memory, grain had to be imported into Liverpool. Imported! The price of bread shot up. One of Lady Selwyn’s tenant farmers committed suicide, hanging himself in the barn where once he’d hung wheat to dry. Terrible years. On one of their trips into town, Rum and Lady Selwyn had been astonished and horrified by the number of beggars along the road, like some army of the damned. Reaching through her window, Lady Selwyn dropped as many coins into palms as she could, as did Rum. Afterwards, they refrained from these monthly trips, preferring to send for their supplies.
Perhaps it was this period of isolation that piqued the villagers.
The weather had been cold and rainy, so that was the main reason. Another reason, shared only between Rum and Lady Selwyn, was the sense of some brewing ill will among the villagers. Rumors of reform and agitation. Oh, but that was Scotland’s problem, Lady Selwyn had said, Scotland and maybe Northumbria. Such unrest would never touch their lives.
And yet there has come a change in the air, as hard to identify as it is to deny.
Hopefully the sun will break through the clouds by late morning, when he and Lady Selwyn leave for town. They have revived the twice-monthly tradition, for it is crucial that Lady Selwyn see and be seen. He sighs, not thrilled about himself being seen. But he feels dutybound to accompany her.
His breath has marked the glass. He wipes the window with his kerchief, leaving a smudge.
Below the smudge, he catches sight of two figures making their way across the lawn: Miss Jehanne and her valet. Miss Jehanne limps along, as to be expected after yesterday’s fall. A green shawl covers her shoulders, a wide-brimmed bonnet surrounds her face.
They pause beneath an old pin oak. She places her hand on the trunk and looks up into the branches. She is speaking, presumably to the valet, who stands some paces behind her, though Rum cannot make out the shape of her words.
Then she turns to face the valet, allowing Rum a good look at her. Straight back, sober face, quite different from the chirpy version on offer the day before. He cannot blame the Frenchwoman for posturing. Lady Selwyn has that effect on people. One badly wants her approval and never goes to bed with the feeling of having fully obtained it. There is always the sense that she is looking past one, out yonder, to the possibility of something more exciting on the horizon.
Rum wonders if the valet is a little bit in love with the Frenchwoman. He doesn’t seem so. In fact, he seems only vaguely engaged by whatever she is saying and even—to Rum’s utter shock—turns away from her to face the river!
When Rum first joined the Selwyn household, he read twelve times cover to cover The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness; Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman’s Conduct in All His Relations Towards Society. He read it so many times that the spine broke, loosening the pages like old leaves. Now Rum can summon up the authoritative voice of Cecil B. Hartley at will. Remember, however, “once a gentleman, always a gentleman.” Nowhere in the book did Cecil B. Hartley permit the valet to turn away from his master in the midst of the master’s speech. A valet is meant to wait on his master—or, in this bizarre case, his mistress—and to present the master with his undivided attention.
Rum is still stewing over this breach of etiquette when Miss Jehanne glances back toward the house. He retreats behind the curtain, nearly certain he hasn’t been seen. He takes another peek to find her looking in the same direction as her valet—toward the river, framed by trees—as if keeping the company of an equal.
* * *
—
“He is watching us,” says Jehanne, turning to face the river.
“Who?”
“Don’t look. The Indian fellow.”
“Why?” Abbas asks. “Did I do something wrong?”
“I don’t know, I never had a valet. That was your idea.”
They look rigidly at the river.
She would have thought a fellow Indian would make her feel at home in this place, having spent most of her life searching for the faces she’d known in her youth. Not this Indian. His courtesy is superficial, his scrutiny runs deep. Though she is equally curious. At their first meeting, she’d glanced at him whenever possible, wondering Are you…? while he was glancing at Abbas, clearly wondering Are you…? Abbas kept his face cool and incurious.
“Nicely done,” says Abbas. “With the falling and everything.”
“Thank you. Again, your idea.”
“I wasn’t certain you would go through with it.”
“Neither was I…” She recalls the automaton, the faded gold of the blazes, the musty smell that hinted at—or maybe this was simply a trick of the mind—Lucien’s favorite tobacco. As she’d walked slowly around the automaton, she’d kept inhaling, trying to hold the fragrance in her chest. She’d released her breath as they left the automaton, but something else had seeped into her, a need. The automaton was within reach, and so was the revival of the shop and a version of life she could live with.
“Now what?” she says.
“Now you charm your way into her favor. Win her trust.”
“You make it sound as simple as winding a toy.”
“She is alone, growing old. You are beautiful and charming. How complicated can it be?”
A strong blush rises up her throat. She feels him staring.
“Are you all right?” he says.
“Why?”
“You have a rash on your neck.”
She places a palm at the side of her throat. “It’s not a rash.”
Abbas narrows his eyes. “It appears to be spreading to your face.”
“Shall we go inside?”
He turns to go.
“Abbas.”
“What?”
“Your arm. Offer me your arm.”
Awkwardly he angles his elbow, stiff as a coat hanger. She takes it. Like so they walk toward the house, their shoes lightly squelching in the grass.
Halfway to the house, Abbas slows, forcing her to take note of what has drawn his attention: a young man of less than twenty, whetting a scythe with a smaller knife. The man has pockmarked cheeks and light blue eyes, his brows so golden they seem almost nonexistent. Between passes, he nods a greeting, each zzzing grating her nerves.
“I do miss that sound,” Abbas says quietly.
Jehanne says nothing, only looks back over her shoulder at the man, who is still watching them.
* * *
—
Rum greets the guests with a nod that sharpens the pain in his neck. The Frenchwoman asks him if he is quite all right, her face suddenly alight with enthusiasm and innocence. Yes, thank you, he says, giving no explanation, and says that Lady Selwyn is waiting to take breakfast with Miss Jehanne in the Yellow Parlor.
“Then I shall not keep her waiting,” says Miss Jehanne with a superfluous curtsy. She moves past him, followed by her valet.
“I thought your man and I might have breakfast together,” says Rum. “Down here. In the Servants Hall.”
The Frenchwoman looks back at the valet, determined to conceal her unease as best she can, which, in the presence of Rum, is not quite enough.
After delivering Jehanne to Lady Selwyn, Rum returns to the portico, struck by the way Abbas is standing, looking dreamily ahead, his arms clasped behind him, one hand gripping the other elbow. He turns his head. “Mr. Rum.”
“Yes, shall we? Do you speak English?”
“Well enough.”
As they pass through the French doors into the Cloisters, Rum informs Abbas that the floors are made of expensive Baltic pine. Abbas looks down. Rum points out the long vaulted ceilings, modeled on the ceilings of the side aisle in Westminster Abbey. Abbas looks up. “When Lady Selwyn throws parties,” Rum goes on, eager to evoke some sort of reaction from the young man, “which we call festivos, we bring musicians into the Cloisters so that their song can flow up through the ceiling and into the Long Gallery, where there is much dancing and revelry.”
“We?” says a voice. It is the surliest of footmen, Mr. Flood, eating toast at one of the tables. Rum makes a terse introduction. He and Flood have been on unfriendly terms ever since a bottle of wine was discovered in the footman’s empty boot. At least this was the rumor. By the time Rum confronted both the footman and the butler, the two had formed a sort of partnership, and the firm of Flood & Fellowes denied any knowledge of the theft.
