Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [37]
Miss Bodenham stood up, flexing her fingers, and lit candles on the table and mantelpiece. Outside a summer dusk had settled on Store Street. ‘Have you finished? Put it in the envelope with the character reference. You’ll find the address on the back of the letter.’
I thought it was as well to read the reference before I sealed it. It seemed that I had given perfect satisfaction to my previous employer for three years, that my manners were ladylike and my three young charges had become perfect paragons under my instruction. They had parted from me with great regret and could most warmly recommend me to any gentleman’s household. The phrasing had all Blackstone’s stiffness, but it was copied in a flowing and feminine hand. The thoroughness of his preparations scared me and I tried one last attempt.
‘Does Mr Blackstone often perform this kind of service?’
‘Please don’t plague me with questions. I’ve neither the knowledge nor the time to answer them. Seal it up and I’ll deliver it first thing tomorrow.’
She opened a drawer in the table with her left hand and threw me a stubby piece of sealing wax, her right hand still writing. It was all brutally clear. My poor father was judged to be an impulsive blunderer so his daughter was to be used but not trusted. The address was St James’s Square, so presumably Lady Mandeville was at her town house. I lodged the application on the mantelpiece and, with nothing else to do, sat and watched Miss Bodenham copying. She was amazingly sure and quick, like a weaver at his loom. I noticed the pages she was copying from were a horrid mess of scratching out and over-writing, some lines travelling at right angles down the margins, others diagonally into corners. When, around midnight, she paused to mix some more ink, I risked a question.
‘Is it a novel?’
‘Not this time. Political economy. After a while it doesn’t matter much whether it’s one or t’other. Words, words, words.’
For the first time she risked a smile, a little roguish twist to her lips that made her look younger and friendlier.
‘You are copying it for a friend?’
‘I am copying it for money. Printers are very clever on the whole at deciphering an author’s intentions, but there are some writers whose hands are so vile the printers won’t take them. The publishers send them to me to make sense of them.’
The fingers of her right hand seemed permanently bent, as if fixed for ever in the act of holding a pen. Once she’d mixed the ink she yawned and said the rest would wait for tomorrow after all. Nearly unconscious with tiredness by now, I expected to be shown into a bedroom, but she bent down and pulled out from under the table two straw-stuffed pallets with rough ticking covers and a bundle of thin blankets.
‘You can put yours by the fireplace. I’ll go nearer the door because I’ll be up earlier in the morning.’
Quite true. Around four o’clock in the morning, just as light was coming in through the thin curtains, she was up and out, taking with her my letter from the mantelpiece and the cold teapot from the grate. I rose soon afterwards, tidied our pallets and blankets back under the table, and found a kind of cubbyhole on the first landing with a privy, a jug of water for washing and a piece of cracked mirror. With nothing else to do, I looked round her room trying to find some clue to her connection with the man in black, but it was as barren in that respect as the stones she used for paperweights. Her bookshelves were interesting though, old and well-used books, mostly from reformers and radicals of previous generations: Tom Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, even Rousseau himself in the original French. If they were her choice, then Miss Bodenham and I had views in common. It might even account for her caution, since reforming views were no more popular at present than when Tom Paine was threatened with hanging as a traitor.
Before six o’clock she was back with the teapot, a small loaf and a slice of ham.
‘Your books …’ I said.
‘Are my own business.’
She pushed papers aside and we had our breakfast at the table: