Whispers in the Dark by Jonathan Aycliffe Read Free Book Online Page B

was up in the mornings by five o’clock, creeping about in the darkness for fear of waking the others, laying and lighting fires in the kitchen, the drawing room, the doctor’s consulting room, the morning room, and the master bathroom. And I would be hard at work from then until late at night, ten or eleven o’clock sometimes. If there was a special dinner that went on late, we would all be hard at it in the kitchen until midnight or one. Mrs. Venables would let none of us creep off to bed until every last pan had been cleaned and put away. As for me, I had no choice in the matter, for the kitchen was my bedroom anyway. I still had to be up before dawn to light the fires.
    One incident from those days stands out in my mind. Ellen, the maid who normally did the dusting, had been taken ill, and I was sent to the drawing room to dust the furniture before Mrs. Lincott came in for morning tea with her friends from the ladies’ committee of the local hospital.
    As I was dusting, my heart all the time in my mouth for fear that I would drop and break something delicate, I came to a photograph on the wall near the fireplace. It showed a group of men in evening dress, very formal and starched. It seemed like something from another world, and yet gnawingly familiar. And then I realized that my father had had a photograph very like this one. I glanced at the caption written in copperplate on the mount at the foot of the picture: Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society Committee, 1884 .
    My heart beating, I looked at the photograph again. My father was standing in the back row, just as I remembered him from his own copy of the photograph, which he had kept in the study, where I had seen it every time I went to visit him there. For it had been his habit to invite me to sit with him for about half an hour every evening and to read to me. I remember Kitty’s Secret Wish and Little by Little, and his soft voice, and the security I felt sitting on his lap while the lamplight fell all round us.
    Now, looking at that familiar photograph, I felt my defenses give way and I burst into the most bitter tears. There had scarcely been time to grieve at his death before financial disaster had brought other, equally devastating blows on my head. In the workhouse, my mother’s death and Arthur’s absence had been all the sorrow I could handle. But now I felt more alone than ever, and nothing could hold back the misery or the tears.
    I did not hear the door open or footsteps cross the room toward me.
    “What is it, girl? What on earth’s the matter?”
    I was on my knees, crouching, my head in my hands.
    “Come on, child, speak up. What are you crying for?”
    When I looked up, I saw a woman standing over me. Not Mrs. Venables, but someone else, a rather younger woman and much better dressed. With a sinking feeling, I realized that this must be Mrs. Lincott, my employer, whom I had not so much as set eyes on before that moment.
    It took a long time, but in the end I managed to blurt out something about my father.
    “Father? Father? I don’t understand. What about your father?”
    “He’s. . .” I gulped and looked up at her. “He’s dead, ma’am.”
    She looked at me quite softly, with sympathy, I thought.
    “I'm sorry to hear that,” she said. “Have you just heard?”
    I shook my head and tried to explain.
    “But if he’s been dead all these years, why all this crying now? I don’t understand, really I don’t.”
    I pointed to the photograph, to my father, a man in side-whiskers and evening dress.
    “He . . . That’s my father,” I said.
    “Your . . . ? Nonsense, girl.” Her manner changed, now she could see how I was bamboozling her. “That’s one of my husband’s friends. Surely you can see that, you stupid girl. Does that look like a common laborer to you?”
    I had started to come around a little. I shook my head.
    “You don’t understand,” I said. “My father wasn’t a laborer. His name was Mr. Metcalf.