Free Turning the Stones by Debra Daley Page B

blew out my candle and held my breath in the darkness. I could tell by the approach of her voice and her footsteps that she had marched across the parlour and was standing close on the other side of the door. I longed to rush away, but I was afraid that the squeak of the floorboards might find me out for an eavesdropper.
    The master shouted in a voice that was harsh and breaking, ‘You will attend my words, madam! Nothing has gone right since you brought that child here! Don’t you see how she causes our misfortune?’
    ‘A pox take your ravings!’ the mistress retorted. ‘She is nothing to do with it. How could you injure so grievously an entire shipment, and in front of the whole town, too?’
    ‘I tell you, she stood at my back and willed it to happen. The loss was designed!’
    ‘You mean like the fortune you promised me on our marriage. Gone, gone and never the fault of Bernard Waterland.’
    ‘God’s blood, Hetty, I have ordered you over and again to rid us of her. Now I will not—’
    ‘You may give me orders, Mr Waterland, when your account book warrants it.’ Mrs Waterland’s tone was haughty. ‘It is my money that keeps the wolf from our door. Your obsession with the past is an excuse for your own failure. Praise God we have a son to be man of the house.’
    *
    I stood in a wash of moonlight by the long table in the servants’ dining hall with the extinguished candle in my hand, my workbox under my arm and the master’s Rid us of her! resounding in my ears. His exhortation detonated in me the cold dread that lies dormant in the depths of any foundling: the fear of a return to the void. He brought that fear to the surface that day and ever afterwards I was to feel the precariousness of my position in the house.
    Truth to tell, I was bewildered by this flaring-up of his dislike of me, since I was as a rule so much out of his way and I could not think what I had done to cause offence.
    I could hear Abby in the scullery banging pots around and then she appeared with a stack of plates and began slotting them into the racks of the sideboard. She gave me a squinty look and asked why I was standing there like a stunned rabbit.
    I rushed away to the butler’s pantry without giving her an answer. In the pantry I found Mrs Edmunds seated at her accounts and Hester Hart bent over a piece of green baize on the table, cleaning cutlery. Mrs Edmunds looked up irritably, the lappets of her old-fashioned cap dangling like a beagle’s ears, and told me to make haste with my work. I placed the hat on the table and slid into a seat next to Hester, who gave me one of her unintentionally baleful smiles. It is the lack of eyelashes that gives her such an air of hostility. The smallpox took them and left behind lumps on her cheeks like pellets embedded in the skin. Sometimes she bridles when you speak to her, even if you are only after the time of day, as if you have commented on her scars for your own amusement. But her hair is lovely. It likes to escape the confines of her cap. On such occasions Mrs Edmunds says that Hester ought to be ashamed of going about like such a trollop. But that fall of hair like honey syrup is the only portion of her beauty that the pox has left to Hester and it is determined to show itself.
    I opened my workbox and brought out the yards of ribbon. As I guided a thread towards the eye of my needle, I glimpsed a shadow that made me start and my hands trembled and defeated my second attempt to thread the needle.
    Hester said, ‘Yer making a right mess of that an’ all.’
    Mrs Edmunds eyed me sidelong as if she had caught me sneaking a pie from the oven. She is as tough as an old boiling hen, and about the same size, and we are all cautious around her.
    I threaded the needle at last, but then the strangest thing occurred. I had the impression that the velvet tangles had begun to rise and subside of their own volition as if they were slopping about in a laundry basin. But of course it was a trick