Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle by Helen Humphreys Page A

things before, tries to imagine both a sweetheart and an amorous Lord. “I don’t know,” she says. The thought of too much attention makes her feel uneasy. Having a sweetheart would be like the Lady Isabelle looking at her when she took that photograph. It would be that close, the scrutiny. She is not sure she wants this. In Mrs. Gilbey’s house she often felt invisible, and this, she thinks now, is sometimes a better thing.
    “Well, I would,” says Tess, getting tired of waiting for a satisfactory answer from Annie. “I would get rid of my sweetheart quick as anything.” She says it with such force that Annie can almost believe it will happen, that Lord Montagu will swoop down out of nowhere and carry Tess off, away from the laundry and the Dashell household. Away from this night, from Annie and the whispery trees outside this window.
    “Tess,” says Annie. “What are the Dashells like to work for? To live with?”
    “They’re mad, aren’t they?” says Tess. “Mrs. Dashell dressing us up in bed sheets, making us stand around in that draughty henhouse. The Master and his mouldy old maps.”
    “Mr. Dashell,” says Annie carefully. “He’s not interested in servants, is he?” She thinks of her walk with Eldon, how both wrong and pleasant it felt.
    Tess is quiet for a moment. “Oh,” she says at last. “Has he been after me for a kiss? Is that what you mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “They’re mad,” says Tess, “but I think they’re harmless. But then I haven’t been here that long myself. Just got here before you.” She’s quiet for a moment. Annie can almost hear the slow tick of her thinking. “They aren’t out to bother us,” says Tess finally. “The Lady isn’t wanting to catch us up. The Master isn’t chasing after us. Not like my last position.” There’s the shuffling noise of Tess turning in her bed. “Shall I tell you about that?” she says.
    “No,” says Annie quickly.
    “Well,” says Tess, “you’ll know soon enough.”
    “Why?”
    “Thought you weren’t interested?”
    “I just…” How to explain that listening to Tess’s story would make Annie judge her and that this is something Annie wants to avoid. “I’m not interested,” she says, and goes back to listening to the wind searching the trees outside the window.
    Soon there is the shuddering noise of Tess’s sleep from across the room. Annie lies in the dark. She is afraid to fall asleep, afraid to fall into her dream of the road. The sound of the shovels and axes chipping at the hard ground is already playing in her head, a rattling, sombre tattoo, like the sound of bones knocking together.
    Tess is a sound sleeper, doesn’t wake when Annie rises and leaves the room. The stairs creak as Annie walks slowly down to the front hall, her candle flickering in the draughty night air of the house.
    Eldon’s library is as she remembered from that first day. Annie shuts the door carefully once she is safely inside. The candlelight stutters along the shelves.
Cartography. Geology.
Annie slides Richard Hakluyt’s
Voyages, Trafiques, and Discoveries of the New World
from its seat on the shelf, tucks it against her chest, and goes back upstairs to her bedroom.
    Sitting up in bed, reading about perilous ocean voyages, Annie is able to stop imagining her family on that road in Ireland. The words of the book cover her as comfortably as a blanket on a cold night. She can wrap herself in the warmth of them. She can rest here. The noise of the shovels and axes is replaced with the sweet drop of words falling from her mind into the empty chamber of her heart.
    At breakfast the next morning, when Tess and Annie are hurrying through their cups of tea at the table, Cook suddenly bursts through the kitchen door with a kettle of water in either hand. “Would this do?” she says.
    Tess looks up, looks down again. “Why is that interesting?” she says.
    “It’s my work.”
    “One chore, out of all the work you do. Is that how you