Free The Shifting Fog by Kate Morton Page A

here.’ She shook her head. ‘Fine girl, your mother. Guilty of nothing that aint been done a thousand times before.’
    Then she turned and bustled back to the kitchen as suddenly as she’d appeared. Leaving me alone in the darkened hallway, wondering what she’d meant.
    I turned it over in my mind all the way to the village. It was not the first time Mrs Townsend had perplexed me with an expression of fondness for my mother. My own puzzlement left me feeling disloyal, but there was little in her reminiscences of good humour that could be accorded with the Mother I knew. Mother with her moods and silences.
    She was waiting for me on the doorstep. Stood as she caught sight of me. ‘I was beginning to think you’d forgotten me.’
    ‘Sorry, Mother,’ I said. ‘I was caught up with my duties.’
    ‘Hope you made time for church this morning.’
    ‘Yes, Mother. The staff go to service at the Riverton church.’
    ‘I know that, my girl. I attended service at that church long before you came along.’ She nodded at my hands. ‘What’s that you’ve got?’
    I handed over the bundle. ‘From Mrs Townsend. She was asking after you.’
    Mother peeked within the bundle, bit the inside of her cheek. ‘I’ll be sure and have heartburn tonight.’ She rewrapped it, said grudgingly: ‘Still. It’s good of her.’ She stood aside, pushed back the door. ‘Come on in, then. You can make me up a pot of tea and tell me what’s been happening.’
    I cannot remember much of which we spoke, for I was an unconscientious conversationalist that afternoon. My mind was not with Mother in her tiny, cheerless kitchen, but up in the ballroom on the hill where earlier I had helped Myra arrange chairs into rows and hang gold curtains around the proscenium arch.
    All the while Mother had me performing chores, I kept an eye on the kitchen clock, mindful of the rigid hands, marching their way closer and closer toward five o’clock, the hour of the recital.
    I was already late when we said our goodbyes. By the time I reached the Riverton gates, the sun was low in the sky. I wove along the narrow road toward the house. Magnificent trees, the legacy of Lord Ashbury’s distant ancestors, lined the way, their highest boughs arching to meet, outermost branches lacing so that the road became a dark, whispering tunnel.
    As I burst into the light that afternoon, the sun had just slipped behind the roofline, giving the house a mauve and orange afterglow. I cut across the grounds, past the Eros and Psyche fountain, throughLady Violet’s garden of pink cabbage roses, and down into the rear entrance. The servants’ hall was empty and my shoes echoed as I broke Mr Hamilton’s golden rule and ran along the stone corridor. Through the kitchen I went, past Mrs Townsend’s workbench covered with a panoply of sweetbreads and cakes, and up the stairs.
    The house was eerily quiet, everyone already in attendance at the recital. When I reached the gilded ballroom door I smoothed my hair, straightened my skirt and slipped inside the darkened room; took my place on the side wall with the other servants.

ALL GOOD THINGS
    I hadn’t realised the room would be so dark. It was the first recital I had ever attended, though I had once seen part of a Punch and Judy show when Mother took me to visit her sister, Dee, in Brighton. Black curtains had been draped across the windows and the room’s only brightness came from four limelights retrieved from the attic. They glowed yellow along the front of stage, casting light upwards, glazing the performers in a ghostly shimmer.
    Fanny was onstage singing the final bars of ‘The Wedding Glide’, batting her eyelids and trilling her notes. She hit the final G with a strident F, and the audience broke into a round of polite applause. She smiled and curtseyed coyly, her coquetry undermined somewhat by the curtain behind bulging excitedly with elbows and props belonging to the next act.
    As Fanny exited stage right, Emmeline