Free The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons Page B

my hair, over my cheeks and trickling down my neck. It was not unpleasant, and the rush of water crowded out my tumbling worries. The pump squealed and whined, filling the empty yard with the sound, so that it took me a moment to realise someone was speaking to me.
    ‘Hullo?’
    I scrambled to my feet, banging my head against the pump. A pain exploded above my eye and I crouched, rubbing my forehead. The next moment, a man was kneeling beside me, pushing my wet hair out of my face with his fingers.
    ‘Are you bleeding? Or is this water? I can’t see. Come into the light.’
    I allowed myself to be led into the corner of the yard, where a yellow oil lamp rested on a mounting block. The man touched my forehead, where I’d cracked it against the pump. I was too embarrassed to look into his face, and stared at my bare, slightly grimy toes.
    ‘No, you’re all right. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to frighten you like that.’
    I looked up and saw in the gloom a man of about forty with dark hair, and a slight smile playing around his eyes. Anna would have called him handsome, but I knew that men of forty were far too old to be considered any such thing.
    ‘Christopher Rivers,’ he said.
    ‘Elise Landau,’ I said, offering him my hand.
    He glanced at my proffered hand for a moment, before clasping it warmly between both of his. I reddened, suddenly remembering that I was a maid now, and didn’t shake hands with gentlemen. I realised how strange I must appear to him, standing in the middle of his stable yard in the middle of the night in a pair of drenched pyjamas. When he released my hand, I folded my arms tightly across my chest.
    ‘It is very pleasant to be making your acquaintance Mr Rivers . . . sir,’ I added as an afterthought, recalling that this was the way English maids addressed gentlemen.
    ‘Charming to make yours, Elise,’ said Mr Rivers, doing his best to repress the smile that was spreading from his eyes to his mouth.
    I glanced back down at the cobbles. No man other than my father had ever addressed me by my first name before. In Vienna, only fathers, brothers and lovers used a lady’s familiar name. The few men I knew always called me ‘Fraulein Landau’ or ‘Fraulein Elise’ at the very most, and when this tall man called me by my first name alone it sounded intimate.
    ‘May I suggest that you go back inside? You are rather wet, and I would not like you to catch cold.’
    ‘Yes . . . erm. Mr . . . erm. Sir.’
    ‘Mr Rivers is just fine.’
    I nodded and squeezing out the water from my long plait onto the yard, I turned to go inside the house. As I reached the back door, he called out to me.
    ‘Elise?’
    I hesitated, my hand on the door handle.
    ‘I think it best that neither of us mentions this meeting to Mrs Ellsworth. We meet in the morning as strangers.’
    ‘Yes, Mr Rivers.’
    I can’t be certain that the moon was full, but if it wasn’t it ought to have been. Whenever I think back to that night, I see a white lantern of a moon hanging over the stable yard, the wind shivering in the marram grass. As in a dream, I am both the girl in the scene and some other self, watching her. I see Mr Rivers sliding back the girl’s hair, and I feel the warmth of his fingers on my forehead. I watch that other Elise cross the yard and slip into the dark house.
    And then I lay in the dark, staring up at the blackened ceiling beams of my little attic room, twisting my wet plait round my arm, twisting, twisting.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    Like Samson I will not cut my hair
     
     
     
    Mrs Ellsworth ushered me through the green baize door and into the main part of the house. That door was the dividing line between our domain and theirs, as inviolate as any national boundary. She walked me around the west drawing room, pointing out an alarming array of precious china bells and antique netsuke that I was not to break. A collection of stern-faced ancestors glared down upon me from shadowed walls, the curtains