Jane watched Dorie color on a picture of a rabbit with blue chalk. The girl lay on her stomach, her cheek on her left arm as if she were too tired to lift her head. Her right arm scribbled randomly over the rabbit, but she was using her hand, so though Jane despaired, she did not say a word. Just sat and tried to quench the impotent rage inside her that wanted to jump on Dorie for the tiniest infraction.
She tried to turn her thoughts aside from her failure, but that just turned them back to Mr. Rochart, and the frustration of not seeing someone when you wanted to change what you said, wanted to rewrite the whole scene. No, that change of subject didn’t help one bit.
Jane breathed in and out on counts of three as she watched Dorie’s gloved hand creep back and forth across the page in short jerks. It was a good thing Jane had the mask on, or Dorie would feel her rage no matter how hard she tried to pack it down inside her where it belonged. What was it that Poule had said? Maybe the calming thoughts really did help? Jane breathed deeply, imagining water filling the mask, the rage steaming off and dissipating.
Dorie’s hand moved slower and slower and Jane reached out and gently touched her elbow. “Why don’t you sit up and try a new color?” she said. “Or a new page?”
Dorie’s fist opened and dropped the blue chalk. Jane placed a piece of yellow chalk on her mesh-gloved palm. Dorie did not look at the chalk, but just started scribbling on the page again.
“Do you want to color the ears yellow?” suggested Jane.
Dorie looked at the picture, moved her hand over the ears, and started her slow scribbles again. Her eyes closed as if they were too heavy to keep open.
Jane sighed, not understanding why Dorie wouldn’t at least want to do a good job. She liked pretty things—surely that would be a motivator for making the page pretty. Girls this age usually didn’t have to be enticed to attempt to stay in the lines, even if they didn’t always make it.
Of course, Dorie wasn’t like any other girls. Jane knew that.
But she watched Dorie’s limp curls and slow-moving gloved hand and wondered if they were making any progress at all.
“The old servants’ entrance got blown off with the north wing,” Cook said. “Like as not we’ll get the temporary staff wandering in at the front door today. You’ll be knowing where the side door is to show them if you see them? And the passageway to the kitchen? Little matter for today, but there’ll be none of this front door waltzing-in when the guests are here, I can tell you. Sure and I’m the closest thing Rochart has to a housekeeper, but I won’t see him humiliated for all of that.”
Jane sat huddled in the painted white chair in the kitchen, absorbing the unwanted news that there was going to be a house party in two days. “Extra staff,” she repeated.
“Yes, to whip this house into something not an embarrassment and to be serving the guests. We’ll be having to open up at least two bedrooms in the damaged wing and maybe three. As well as extra rooms belowstairs for those we’re hiring and the staff of the guests. Still, better pence coming in than pence going out, though why potential clients have to be romanced for a week and not just an eve, I’ll never know. Especially when that puts them here over May Day, and won’t they just be expecting a grand celebration, as if those city folk had anything to do with the ending of the war.…”
Dorie had just gone down for her nap, and her naps were longer these days, lasting from just after lunch to near dinner. Jane was torn between worry for the girl and the thought that Dorie was merely tired from the extra physical and mental exertion. Still, if this strange listlessness continued, she would have to go back up to the studio and confess that she was failing. The thought was not appealing.
“Is Mr. Rochart busy this afternoon, do you know?” she said.
“Rochart?” Cook dumped a bin of fresh new potatoes into the sink and ran an inch of water to loosen their dirt. “He hasn’t been here for a fortnight. He’ll be meeting with a wealthy client in the city. Left for town just after he finished with Miss Ingel. Were you not knowing?”
“Oh,” said Jane. “No.” So he hadn’t been avoiding her. Unless he’d been avoiding her by fleeing the house altogether, but that seemed unnecessarily silly for the owner of the house to do. No, he hadn’t even noticed her ridiculous advances in his study, and maybe that was more humiliating. She didn’t figure into his travel plans one way or another. He didn’t think of her at all. Breathe, she told herself, and let it go. Think about anything else—water, tar, potatoes.
“Sure and I don’t see why you would know,” Cook said. “Keeps to himself, don’t he, and why a young lass like you would care about the doings of a moody widower, even if he is your employer.”
Jane did not want to respond to that, so she turned the conversation back to Creirwy’s earlier speech and replayed her instructions, to fix on what might actually be expected of her. “The side door on the south, you said?” said Jane. “That’s where I should direct them?” She wondered what the temporary staff would be like—these local wives and daughters pitching in to pick up an extra bit of money and a hamper of leftover party food. Did they normally ward themselves when they went by Edward’s crumbling house? Did they rap on iron to come today, and did they come only because they were desperate, as desperate as she?
Cook nodded at the side door question, her nimble fingers rubbing the tender skin from the newest spring potatoes. Sloughed skin fell to the countertop in flaking bits of red-brown. “Some of the temporary staff were here at the last party two years ago,” Cook said. “The rest said they wouldn’t come back for love nor pence. Silly girls probably got themselves with babes by now. The old ones return, you’ll see. Ones with heads on their shoulders, with sense enough not to let their bellies turn at the sight of Dorie’s tricks. You have to be thirty before you have any sense at all.”
“I’m twenty-one,” said Jane.
“Sure and you don’t act it. You’ll be having an old heart, you will. My grandmam used to say that was the only thing that might save you.”
“Save me from what?” Jane prompted. Anything to derail her thoughts. She hooked her feet on the rung of the wooden chair, watched Cook’s fingers fly.
Cook stared off over the steam rising from the soup pot. The flames licked around its copper edges. “A cousin of mine was taken by the fey,” she said. “Well, her parents thought she fell off a cliff, but my grandmam said Eirwen was too clever to go tumbling off cliffs. Eirwen was that pretty and clever, and she had a little wooden recorder painted all blue that she played as well as the birds. She and I would go roaming, we would, through the woods and cliffs around the sea, where we lived then. But one day we separated and she never came back. The only thing we found of her was the blue recorder, half-buried in the mud of the path. Grandmam was certain the fey took her for their own.”
Jane realized she was holding her breath, that her elbows hurt from leaning on the side table. “But the fey didn’t take you? Was it because you had the old heart?”
Cook came back to herself with a laugh. “No, that was because I wasn’t pretty nor clever nor talented. May you be born plain, that’s the way of it. Grandmam said to me: ‘Creirwy, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars you’re ordinary, ’cause that’s why your mum isn’t bawling her eyes out right now.’ And you know, I did.” She slid the delicate potatoes into their own pot of cool water. “I suppose I’m too practical for my own good.”
“Did you ever see her again?” said Jane. It seemed like the worst way to lose a child—no clean break, but the agony of waiting day after day, holding out hope against the inevitable. She imagined Cook’s aunt turning the muddy blue recorder around in her hands day after day, watching it age as the years rolled by. First the dirt would flake off, then the blue paint. Then the wood would smooth under her hands until the recorder was merely a lump of wood with holes, out of tune and unusable. And still no child.