Free A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney

the grate. A maid had come in, a small shy girl, barely half through her teens. She went straight to the window and drew back the heavy dark curtains. Whiteness. Hardly any sunlight came through.
    It was morning. There would have to be sunlight. Her life could not have got so odd that she would wake in a strange bed to a day with no sun. Charlotte was dressed in the same clothes she’d put on the day before, a black and brown wool shirtwaist, with a matching vest and short jacket. It was a good thing all her clothes were so loose on her. She had never before spent a night fully dressed.
    “Excuse me, missus,” said the maid nervously, cautiously.
    The glass was completely frosted in every pane, from top to bottom. “Frost,” Charlotte said to herself. “Something natural.” She had thought that, in the instant she looked from the fire to the window, something had gone wrong with her eyes, a sort of white blindness, as happened to people struck by lightning. You go through your life seeing nothing but the same white flash that hit you.
    That was what happened to her mother-in-law’s private maid, Miss Stanfield, as elderly as a prune, and everyone had seen it happen. It was summer, at the summer place, and she’d gone out in the rain, at the age of about eighty, which seemed crazy, but she was leather-tough and fanatically healthy; she ate nothing but lettuce and beans. She had lost the little key to her possessions box, which was metal, and which she was carrying with her, tucked under one arm. She thought she’d dropped the key in the grass by the broken elm in the middle of the yard, which had been hit by lightning years before and no longer had leaves or even branches, just a split-in-the-midsection dissipating trunk. Miss Stanfield liked to have her lunches there, picnic-style, alone, on a bench used only by herself.
    The box was where she kept her personal diary. She didn’t know as she carried it that it was empty. The three Irish maids had the diary, and Charlotte, too; they were reading it in the kitchen. A lot of it was addressed to Jesus, as in, “Jesus I am mindful of my faults that are legion,” and a lot of it was made up of reminders to herself concerning chores. “My missus said put out the green dress for airing that’s the green with the blue not the gold. She said the brushes and combs want polishing on Thursday.”
    It was a big disappointment. They’d just read, “Mr Heath what is her husband had five days go by with no activity of his bowels, & we discussed to send this time for the doctor, to be drained, tho’ he swore to not submit & to jump off the cliff instead,” when one of the yard-work boys, who was Irish, and who knew what they were up to, rushed in to say that Miss Stanfield was on her hands and knees in the grass by that tree, in what had now become a thunderstorm, and they all jumped up to run out to her; they weren’t sadistic.
    A general alarm had gone up in the main house and all the cottages around it; everyone had gone to a window or doorway or the wide side porch, calling to her. Charlotte was just coming out of the kitchen door, with the three maids behind her, when the lightning came. Miss Stanfield must have been worried by the first few small flashes, bristling and bright: she held up the box in front of her face like a shield.
    It was the third or fourth strike that hit her, and afterward, through the summer and fall, she wore a black satin cloth tied over her eyes like a blindfold, which was supposed to restore her sight, but it didn’t. There was only the whiteness, and then she went to live with a cousin, somewhere far away.
    The diary was put back, the key was put back, Miss Stanfield never knew. The three Irish maids had Confession to go to, they had Penance, they were Catholics. But what, Charlotte thought, about me?
    She was told back in school that if you swallowed an acorn—she was always casting about outdoors for things to eat, having never been