On Friday the coalman came with his filthy wagon and sacks, his wheezy, broken-winded horse and his wizened face netted with sooty wrinkles. The coal cellar was underneath the pavement in front of the house, accessed by a door from the courtyard below street level. That door had a weak latch, and Starling took up her usual position, bracing it shut with her back as the coal was poured in through a small hatch in the pavement. With each sack that was upended came a thudding at her back, a pattering noise and a cloud of black dust that curled out around the door to gather in her hair and clothing. She felt sharp little grains in her eyelashes when she blinked. She braced her feet against the flagstones, feeling them slide where the stones were damp and slimy. I am a doorstop, she thought ruefully. Alice brought me up a sister, Bridget trained me as a housekeeper, and now I am become a doorstop. In the silence after the last load came down the horse coughed, and the coalman halloed down to her. Starling stayed a while in the gloomy courtyard, quiet with her thoughts. She heard Lord Faukes’s voice, unwelcome as it was: But you were a starveling guttersnipe, so be content. Ever with a smile in his voice to belie the barbs in his words.
Starling washed her face and hands under the pump, wincing at the water’s bite, then stood with a stiff-bristled brush and swept the soot from her clothes and hair. Through the kitchen window she heard Sol Bradbury singing ‘Proper Fanny’ as she crimped the crust on an eel pie, and through the corridor window Mrs Hatton was berating Dorcas for something. Intrigued, Starling stepped closer to the window to listen.
‘Oh, madam, please don’t make me!’ Dorcas quailed, in that shrill, wobbling voice of hers.
‘Dorcas, this cannot go on! I understand that Mr Alleyn is not an easy man to serve, but serve him you do, and those rooms must be cleaned at some point. The stink in there is starting to crawl out underneath the door, for heaven’s sake. There must be some forgotten dinner plate or something in there, going foul. At least go up and find what it is, and clear it out. Throw the windows open for as long as you can…’
‘But he has devilish things in there, Mrs Hatton – wrong things!’
‘There’s nothing in there that can hurt you. You know as well as I do how rare it is for Mr Alleyn to come downstairs. We may not have this chance again for some time…’
Starling blinked, unsure whether she’d heard correctly, then she rushed inside to where the two women were standing.
‘I’ll do it, Mrs Hatton,’ she said hurriedly.
‘Thank you, Starling, but really, Dorcas is the housemaid, and she must-’
‘Is he truly come downstairs?’ she interrupted.
‘That he is. He has a visitor.’ There was interest in Mrs Hatton’s voice, however much she tried to hide it. For a moment the three women stared at one another in wonder at this unlikely turn of events.
‘I’ll see to his rooms,’ said Starling, and went up the stairs on nimble feet.
She crept over to the parlour door and listened for a moment, to check that it was true. Sure enough, Starling heard three voices within – Jonathan Alleyn, his mother, and another female voice that she didn’t recognise. She wasted no time wondering but hurried on, climbing the stairs two steps at a time. The visit might be short, and even if it wasn’t Jonathan might conclude his part of it at any moment. She burst into his rooms, holding her breath, and ran to open the shutters and the windows. The smell was quite awful. Grudgingly, Starling hooked the remains of the rat out from under his desk with the poker, and cast it into the fire. She could still be cleaning his rooms when he came back up, that would cause no outrage; she could not be caught searching them, however. Opportunities to do so were precious rare, since he spent so much of his time ensconced within. Even when he’d passed out with drink, she didn’t dare. He woke with the ease of a soldier, as readily as a guard dog. Several times she’d been sifting silently through the papers on his desk, only to look up and find his eyes on her, watchful and unblinking. She shivered at the memory. His silent scrutiny was somehow worse than his rages. Starling had no idea where he kept the letters. He had all of Alice’s letters, she was sure of it – the ones she had written to him, as well as the ones he had written to her; the ones she’d kept in her rosewood box, which had vanished from her room right after she had. Right after he killed her.
She opened the drawers of his desk in turn, running her fingers through the contents. Papers and journals; bills, receipts and military missives; small instruments like magnifying glasses and tweezers, and other things she could not guess the purpose of. One drawer was filled with tiny metal pieces – cogs, wheels, screws and spindles. It rattled as if full of money when Starling opened it, and she frowned, pausing to listen for any sound of his approach. Her heart thumped in her ears, sounding like footsteps. She continued to search until the desk was exhausted, but there was no sign of the rosewood box, or of a bundle of letters. Cursing, Starling went to the shelves next, which were laden with books and more strange instruments, and the glass specimen jars that so terrified Dorcas.
Jonathan had acquired them some years earlier. He’d gone to watch the dissections of several human cadavers at the hospital, though his mother declared such things an abomination; he’d been friends, for a while, with one of the doctors she sent to see him, who had dark theories about opening the skulls of living patients. Then the jars had started to appear – pale shapes preserved in alcohol solutions. A two-headed piglet, all wrinkled and white; a grey thing of wriggling, convoluted ridges, with two halves and a stem, which reminded Starling of the huge fungi that sometimes grew on the floodplain at Bathampton; a tiny creature that almost resembled a human baby, though its head was far too big and its body too small, and its eyes were nothing but large dark shadows either side of the translucent stub of a nose. The liquid in the jars sloshed as Starling reached her questing hands behind them, and her skin crawled away from them. She did not like to think about their origins, or how they would smell if the lids were opened up.
Then, from beneath her feet came the unmistakable sound of the parlour door opening, and footsteps in the hallway. Desperately, Starling returned to the desk and scrabbled through the jumbled papers and detritus on top of it. She nicked her finger on a scalpel, and left a drop of her blood on the blade. She heard the click of boot heels on the stone stairs. Then she saw a letter, just one; unsealed, the paper dog-eared and wrinkled. She stuffed it into her pocket and rushed into the bedchamber, where she was shaking up the eiderdown as Jonathan Alleyn came back into his rooms. Starling held her breath. He stopped as soon as he was through the door, as if trying to work out what was different, then turned his head towards the open shutters, the raised windows. She waited for the barked command for her to close them, but to her surprise Jonathan walked slowly over to the curving bay window, and stood in front of it, looking out at the damp, crisp autumn day.