Her 20-Year Silence Ended When Her Daughter Came Back for Revenge novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Harrow Hill
Nesta starts as a maid in Lavinia's house, where the silent housekeeper writes LEAVE TONIGHT on a slate. In the memorial room Nesta finds her mother's laundry mark inside the coat Lavinia claims as her own, and Lavinia's stepson Rhys sees it.
The Mercer house sat at the top of Harrow Hill, behind iron gates with no heron on them.
I looked for one anyway.
I had burned the warning note in the laundry stove, kept the cash for Maud's burial bill, and gotten on the hill bus at six.
A driver in a gray coat let me in through the side gate and did not say a word.
The housekeeper was waiting inside the kitchen door.
She wore the same black dress and buttoned cotton gloves as at the gala, and she looked at my face for a long time.
She held a uniform out in both hands. Then she led me up the back stairs without a sound.
She walked slowly, and she kept one hand on the rail and the other close to her chest.
"Thank you," I said when she stopped at my room. "I'm Nesta."
She nodded once.
Her eyes went to my collar, where the chain was, and she shook her head, very slightly, at nothing I had said.
Then she took a small slate from her apron pocket and wrote on it with a chalk stub.
LEAVE TONIGHT.
I read it twice.
"Did you leave the envelope on my doorstep?" I asked.
She wiped the slate with her sleeve and walked away.
At nine Lavinia came down in a silk robe with her hair loose and her gloves already on, and gave me the tour herself.
"The dining room. The library, which you will dust but never read in, I'm afraid, because the books were my late husband's and I can't bear them moved."
She laughed at herself.
"This is the east hall. Mind the rug. It slides."
She was kind about everything.
She asked if I had eaten, and when I said I had not, she sent the cook for eggs.
She told the other maids that I was new, and that anyone who made me feel it would answer to her.
By noon, two of them had shown me where the good towels were hidden.
I disliked how easy it was to like her.
The last room on the east hall had a glass door and a brass lock.
"This one I show to everyone," Lavinia said. "Come."
It was a small room with a gray carpet and a single lamp.
Inside a glass case stood a tailor's dummy dressed in a long wool coat.
The hem was scorched black. The collar had burned through. Both sleeves were charred to the elbow.
A plaque on the case read: Worn by Lavinia Mercer the night she saved Gareth Wincott. Marlowe Hall.
"I couldn't throw it away," she said. "I had it mounted. Silly, isn't it?"
"No, ma'am," I said.
"Mind the glass. I'll have someone bring you tea in the pantry."
She touched my shoulder with a gloved hand and left me there, because I had said I would wipe the case.
The room was quiet.
I stood close to the dummy and looked at the sleeves.
The coat was too long.
The cuffs would have covered Lavinia's fingers and half her palms. She was a small woman, and the dummy had been padded out to a tall one.
My mother had been tall.
Maud had told me that, and I was tall too.
When I worked a stain out, I always checked the inside seams first, because people hide what shames them in the seams.
The glass case had a latch, and the latch was not locked.
I lifted the glass an inch and turned the hem over.
Under the burned edge, where somebody had unpicked a sewn-in label, three stitches of old ink remained.
It was a laundry mark, the kind rich houses put in every coat so the wash comes back to the right family.
It said A.L.
I stood with the hem in my fingers and my mother's initials in front of me.
Footsteps stopped on the stairs outside.
"You're in the wrong room," a man said.
He stood in the glass doorway with his hands in his jacket pockets, tall, dark-haired, with a scar through his left eyebrow.
He looked at the open case, and at my hands on the coat.
I let the hem go.
"Mrs. Mercer asked me to clean it," I said.
"She asks everyone."
He came in a step and looked at me properly.
"I'm Rhys," he said. "I live here when I can't help it. Is she giving you the speech about nobody being unhappy under her roof?"
"She said that."
"She says it to everyone." His mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Don't sign anything she hands you with a pen. She loves a pen."
Then his eyes dropped to the coat, and to the label I had been holding, and he stopped smiling.
He did not say anything about it.
He closed the glass gently, and walked out.
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