Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [43]
‘Yes, Miss Charlotte. She likes me,’ Lily said with some pride. She gave a gasp. ‘You should see the parlour and the drawing room! They have a jug with bluebirds on it!’
‘Do they really?’ Grace said, stroking Lily’s work-worn hands. ‘But when is it that Miss Charlotte finds time to speak to you?’
‘Oh, she sometimes comes into the garden when I’m out there on my own, or talks to me in the kitchen when the others are busy upstairs.’
‘Really?’ Grace asked. Stranger and stranger. ‘And what do you talk about?’
‘Oh, funny things. Sometimes she makes up stories – like you used to.’
‘Does she? How kind of her,’ Grace said. Perhaps the tales she’d heard of Miss Charlotte were not true, then. ‘What are the stories about?’
‘Oh, about Mama and so on,’ Lily said vaguely. ‘All sorts of things. She’s really interested in me.’
Grace thought to herself how kind it was of Miss Charlotte to bother to make conversation with the lowest of their servants. ‘Then she must be a true lady,’ she said to Lily.
x
Chapter Sixteen
‘I’m sure you want the best, so I suggest nothing less than highest-quality swansdown for your dear mother’s coffin mattress,’ said George Unwin.
‘Oh,’ said the bereaved woman. ‘We were thinking of wadded wool.’
‘Never!’ said Mrs Unwin.
Grace, hands in a mute-like position of prayer and eyes lowered, gave no indication that she’d heard a word, or even that she was a living, breathing person. It was a week after she’d gone to Kensington to see Lily, and she’d been summoned into the red room as an indication of the type of mute available for a high-cost funeral.
‘Swansdown is expensive, but reassuringly so,’ chimed in Mrs Unwin, ‘and of course one wants the very best for one’s venerable parent, doesn’t one?’
There came a sigh. ‘Well, if you deem it necessary,’ said the woman.
‘Swansdown it is,’ said Mr Unwin.
They paused in front of Grace. ‘Have you thought of mutes?’ asked Mrs Unwin.
‘Well, no . . .’
‘This is Grace, who is one of our most respectful and passive mutes. She can be supplied by the hour to stand, bereft and grieving, outside a door or by a graveside.’
‘Surely that isn’t . . .’
‘Grace would be especially appropriate for an elderly lady’s grave,’ said Mrs Unwin. ‘It would look very caring.’
‘Well . . .’
‘And to complement Grace, your mother would surely appreciate having a candle lantern kept alight on the grave for a whole month,’ added Mr Unwin.
‘But who would benefit from that?’
‘Her memory would,’ Mrs Unwin admonished gently. ‘You must remember that old people don’t like the dark.’
And so it went on, until, mutes, monuments and mourning flowers chosen, Grace returned to the small sewing room, took off her bonnet and veiling and set her stool beside the meagre fire.
How quickly we become used to things, she thought, picking up the piece of embroidery she’d been working on earlier. How soon she’d adjusted to a life without Lily, to sharing a room with a stranger, to being confined within four walls and to measuring out her life in a series of shrouds sewn, funerals attended and embroideries completed. And, strangely, although she was living this life and growing accustomed to it, it didn’t seem to be her life so much as that of someone whose identity she’d assumed by mistake. What would happen next? When would her new life start – the life she’d promised herself the day she’d gone to Brookwood?
She picked up her sewing. That day she was embroidering a tiny picture using human hair with a needle so fine that if she put it down on the workbench she knew she’d never find it again. The picture would show a tombstone under a weeping willow tree and would be put into a small gold frame and worn as a brooch. The customer had wanted her husband’s name embroidered on the tombstone, but Mrs Unwin had said that this was impossible, for the man’s name was William Wilkins-Boyes-Haig and even if anyone could have embroidered it, it would have been too small to read.
Before she began sewing, Grace paused for a