Mary Reilly Read online

  “And what did you think of it?”

  “I thought it was a most interesting book, sir, and so well writ that I was distracted from me duties and caused you to be displeased, so now I don’t think so well of it.”

  He turned to me then and I saw that he was still mightily amused at something, which put me off as I was struggling not to burst into tears from the quizzing and didn’t see any humour in it.

  “I’m not the least displeased with you, Mary,” he said. “I’m delighted to have a housemaid who can not only read but be distracted by Macaulay’s style.”

  “I can read well enough, sir,” I said, “and I do whenever I can, but servants’ fare is mostly high-life novels, so I’m no student and have no way of judging what’s good or bad except as it pleases me.”

  “And you can write as well, I suppose.”

  “Of course, sir,” I said.

  “Then I want you to write something for me, Mary,” he said. “Will you do that?”

  “If it’s in my power I will try, sir, though I fear you’ll find my way of writing too mean to be of interest.”

  “I’ll bear with that,” he replied. “I want you to write me an account of the manner in which you came by this rodent. That you could be so badly bitten and not have seen the animal has piqued my curiosity.”

  “It was in a closet, sir, and it was black as Egypt, that’s all the mystery there is to that.”

  “And why were you in a closet, Mary?”

  “It were a punishment, sir.”

  He took in his breath a little, as if I’d said something that confirmed him in his thought. “Write it out for me, then, Mary. As you can,” he said. “And bring it to me here tomorrow evening, so that I may read it at my leisure.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir,” I said.

  “Good, then. I know you will.” He turned back to the fire and took up his fire-gazing, which he does more than any man I’ve ever seen. The fireplace in our drawing room is a big one and puts out enough heat to roast a haunch in my view, but Master is thin-blooded, as gentlemen are I suppose, and don’t mind the heat. I stood there watching him, thinking how odd it was that he should want me to write on my own history, but I couldn’t find any harm in it and already I was thinking just how to start that would make it interesting to him. Then I come to myself and said, “Sir, may I go now?” and he said, “Yes,” without moving a muscle but his mouth, so I ran out of the room and along the hall to the back stairs. Then I went up to the attic very slow, as if I didn’t want to get to the top, milling over the whole business.

  I’d have to get up an hour early as there would be no time to sit during the day, though I thought I might get in a little at tea if Mr. Poole didn’t come up with some errand or chore, as is often the case. At last I got to the room, undressed in the dark and climbed in with Annie, who was dead asleep and didn’t even know I was there.

  I lay thinking about Master, who was down below me in his drawing room, gazing at the fire no doubt and thinking Lord knows what. Then I fell on thinking of his cool fingers against my neck, which was a thought I knew I had no business to be entertaining and I gave myself a talking to on the subject of a servant’s foolishness and how wrong it is ever to have fancies outside one’s station as it always leads to misery, as I’ve observed myself often enough, and in the midst of lecturing myself I fell asleep.

  It was hard to get up the next morning because it was so rainy and dark, but I knew I had my writing to do and with the rain there would surely be no time to do it during the day as Mr. Poole is always in a state when it rains (which is much of the time) and seems to have a passion for sending those under him out into it and then fussing if a bit of mud comes in the door. So I got myself out of bed and wrote up my story as best I could. Annie woke up and spoke to me in the dark (I was working by candle as we’ve no lamps in our room) but I told her I was just at my journal, which I do keep for my own pleasure, so she thought little of it and went back to sleep. Annie is a good girl and a hard worker, but I believe her health is not good as whenever we’ve a free moment she is asleep and seems to have no life but working and sleeping, which is sad.

  All day I had heavy work: carried up coal and water, scrubbed the kitchen floor out on my knees, cleaned the pantry, polished the silver Mr. Poole had left out and took up the rugs in his parlour, but couldn’t hang them out for the rain. So I took them all and hung them in the backyard where there’s an overhang, and while I was beating them I saw Master cross the yard to his laboratory, his head down and his shoulders slumped as if he was being trod on by the rain.

  I was behind the carpet, so he didn’t notice me, though I kept beating at it, making a thudding sound. Yet he didn’t look my way. When I saw him I thought I might sing out that I’d done as he asked and would bring it along in the evening, but many other thoughts, and something about the worried, tired look of Master as he hurried along to be at his work (which Mr. Poole says is very scientific and important, not like a common doctor who sets bones and tells sick folks they mun stay in bed, for Master sees no one and is interested in the cause of things, not how to tinker and mend, as Mr. Poole says), something in all this kept me quiet and I even stopped my beating to watch him go by. He let himself in with a key (we are none of us ever allowed in Master’s laboratory and sometimes I think we should be as surely it must need a cleaning such as he cannot do himself), but just before he went in he stopped and looked back towards the house with a look so sad, as if there was something there he was leaving and he wished he never had to go. He looked all up and down the house, but not at me as I was off to the side in the overhang where the two wings come together, and then he went in and closed the door.

  So I worked all day with the thought of giving my writing to Master in the evening like the promise of a fine day out before me and I thought over my writing to see had I left anything out or said anything too crudely so that he would be offended. But at dinner Mr. Poole told us that Master was taking his meal in his cabinet, as he does sometimes when he is working hard, and there would be no need to lay the fire in the drawing room, so once the dishes was put up we could all be off to bed. Mr. Bradshaw asked leave to go to his mother’s in P__________ Street, as she is ill and has no one to look in on her, and so he got consent and went off directly. I sat with my beer after everyone had got up, trying to think of a way to see Master without telling Mr. Poole my reason, for though he never said it, I felt he wouldn’t want Mr. Poole to know we had our conversation the night before and also Mr. Poole is very disapproving of the servants ever speaking to Master, or calling themselves to his attention in any way as he says Master should never be distracted from his work and that he is always working in his head, even when he looks like he’s at rest, which is surely true.

  Mr. Poole was at the sideboard making up Master’s tray and complaining that he had to go into the cellar for a bottle of claret which is Master’s particular favourite and Cook had served up the plate too soon so the food would be cold. I thought this were an opportunity at least to speak with Master about how I should deliver my writing so I said, “Mr. Poole, I can take the tray out now if you like and you can come behind with the claret.” But he only stopped and gave me one of his cold, dead looks, like a fish’s eye when you know it’s none too fresh and said, “Mary, you know Dr. Jekyll forbids anyone but me to go to the cabinet door. I wonder you could forget this simple direction.”

  So I just ducked my head over my beer and said I was sorry but I had forgotten. After he went off I said to Cook it seemed to me someone ought to go in and clean for Master. She agreed with me and told me the side door and steps was a disgrace and every time she walked by them on the street she felt relieved that none of Master’s friends knew they belonged to our house (for the corner house comes between). But I said, Master didn’t have much in the way of friends that I ever saw, except his solicitor Mr. Utterson, who comes around now and then, but Cook said before I come Master sometimes gave large dinner parties and d
oubtless he would again when he was ready to take a rest from his work.

  After we’d done up the dishes there was nothing to do but go off to bed and as it was ten and I was tired from my work I didn’t mind much, but I kept wishing I had some way to deliver my writing as I promised.

  Then when I was in bed, I thought mayhaps Master doesn’t even remember he asked me to write out my story for him and it was just his whim at the moment so he wouldn’t have to listen to me tell it and he could have some quiet in his drawing room. This cast me down very much and I went to sleep feeling tired to the bones and sad, which shows what comes of wanting to be important and feel different from others in the same station.

  The next morning I was washing the front steps when Mr. Poole came out the door and spoke to me very coldly. “The Master has sent for you to come to the drawing room,” he said, and I knew he was displeased and suspicious, for Master never pays much attention to the servants and hardly knows their names, or so it seems, though that may be partly due to how determined Mr. Poole is to keep Master from any bother having to do with the house and what a free rein he has over everything that goes on, including who is hired and let go. In most houses I’ve been in this is not the case and though I know I’m answerable always to Mr. Poole, as he is above me, still I can’t help but feel that in the end I’m answerable to Master alone.

  I brought my bucket in and emptied it out in the yard, then washed as best I could and put on a clean apron. My skirts was black but there was nothing to be done about that and I thought Master might not expect more from one he calls in with no more notice than he’d given me. Mr. Poole was following me about, full of disapproval and as gloomy as a cloud, but I paid him no mind. I was wondering how I would get my writing down from my room, since I felt sure it was for that Master had called me.

  And so it was. As soon as I made a curtsy before him, Master put down his teacup and asked if I’d done as he requested.

  “I have done it, sir,” I said. “But I had no means of giving it to you, as you was in your laboratory last night.”

  “I see,” Master said. Then he took up his tea again and sat looking into the cup as if he thought the next thing to say might be written in there. I stood it as long as I could, then I said, “I haven’t got the pages on me now, sir. They’re in my room and I don’t like to go up there just now as Mr. Poole has his eye on me and is likely to ask what I’m about.”

  He gave his tea a weak smile and then I stopped being nervous for myself and noticed that he looked very unwell. His face was as pale as paper and his eyes had dark circles underneath. “And you think Mr. Poole would have some objection to your doing as I ask?” he said.

  This put me in a difficulty as it could never be my place to speak ill of another servant, but particularly one like Mr. Poole who is over me and has been in this house nearly twenty years, so Cook says. “Mr. Poole would never object to anything you wished done in your own house, sir,” I said, “but it’s his place to tell me what you want and not the other way around.”

  “I see,” he said, giving me his mild, amused look. “Mary, you seem to have a fairly profound view of social order and propriety.”

  “It’s nothing extraordinary to know, sir,” I said. “Every servant knows as much if he’s any wish to stay in service.”

  “So how do you propose we solve this problem of circumventing the indefatigable Poole without compromising your position?”

  “I mun tuck the pages in my sleeve after tea, sir,” I said, “when I sometimes go up to my room, and then put them somewhere as you direct, so that you may pick them up at your leisure.”

  “You seem to have given this plan some thought,” was all he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I have.”

  Then he just sat looking at me in that kind, sad way he has, but he looked so tired and ill that I felt I would ask him if he wasn’t knocked up, though I wouldn’t have put it that way to him. Before I could speak he said, “Will you be working in the library this afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll have to dust and black the grate.”

  “Then you could put your pages in the book we discussed before and close it up.”

  “I could, sir,” I said.

  “Good, then,” he said. “That is how we will circumvent the virtuous Poole.”

  I did as Master asked, but not with an easy mind. It seemed to me no good could come of it as I’ve never known a gentleman or lady either who would encourage one servant to deceive another. Order in a household is as important to us below stairs as above and though I have no liking for Mr. Poole, who is so vain of his intimacy with Master he seems to have no other cause to live, I could not feel easy about the way Master had spoken of him as “the virtuous Poole,” showing me his contempt and taking me, whom he don’t know, into his confidence. I’ve been in service ten years now, since I was twelve, and I’ve never seen such a case, though it isn’t uncommon for ladies and gentlemen to play their servants off on each other and many’s the husband who seeks to lay his wife low by showing his contempt for her to her own dressing maid.

  After tea I looked over my writing and changed a word here or there, feeling proud of it all in all, pleased with the way I’d started out particularly, and anxious to have Master’s opinion, as I have always had a great respect for those as can write things up, which is why I’ve kept my journal whenever I could over the years, though every time I’ve left a house it seems I lose them. I tucked the pages in my sleeve and in the afternoon I put them in the book as I had promised. Then I cleaned and blacked the grate, laid the fire and dusted out the room, reading as many book titles as I could without slowing my work. Many of Master’s books are scientific and I wouldn’t make sense of them if I was to open them, but there’s two shelves, one of history and one of poetry, that I would dearly like to look into.

  When I went back into the kitchen, Mr. Poole was at the sideboard decanting a bottle of port and as I come in he gave me a sharp, critical look which, because of my guilty heart, I could not meet honestly, which shows what comes of sneaking about and, as the saying goes, “trying to serve two masters.”

  Five days passed and I neither saw nor heard Master. He took all his meals on a tray and the only words he had with any of us came to Mr. Poole who sometimes found orders to chemists tossed on the laboratory stairs which he filled himself, so he was in and out, always in a bad humour. My patience was worn thin on several scores. The weather was bad, rainy and unseasonable cold, so even if I got a few minutes to myself during a day (which mostly I did not get) I spent them standing under the eaves in the court looking out through the rain at the little garden (as it is called, though it is just a green patch with low misshapen bushes at either end) that separates the house from Master’s laboratory, and this only made me gloomier still. I’d always fancied that someday I might have a garden of my own, and it is to this end that I am always saving and live so frugal my fellow servants wonder at me, but I know I mun be in service twenty years and be not much closer to this goal than I am now, and here Master has this fair bit of earth. Though, closed in as it is by buildings, the sun has heavy work to get to it, still it seemed to me something could be done with it if anyone had a mind to. But Master is absorbed in his studies and so he crosses and recrosses this bit of garden and never sees there’s no need to leave it bare. And here’s this big house with six servants in it, all busy enough to be sure, just keeping it in order, keeping all the fires lit and the larder stocked, as if there were a dozen ladies and gentlemen expected any moment, though no one comes much and Master disappears for days at a time, so it’s like serving a ghost, who may see what you do or may not.

  I brooded on these things when I had the chance and my fellows seemed not much gladder than I. Mr. Poole was like a dog told to wait at the shop door; he was anxious for his master and would jump at every footstep. Poor Annie got a lot of his sharp tongue and bore it, as was her way, silent and drowsy. Cook and I were of the opinion
that hard work is the best cure for low spirits, so we made it our project to scrub out the kitchen from top to bottom and even made the narrow windowpanes sparkle. While we was at it, she told me stories of her childhood in the country, for she was a country lass, and how she come into service first working in a grand estate at S___________, as a scullery maid, and what fine hunting parties the ladies and gentlemen had there, and how the mistress was killed falling from her horse and the master closed the whole place up forever and come up to town. That is how Cook come to be in London, which she declares is a vile, filthy place not fit for anyone to live in and she vows she will go back to the country whenever she can.

  That was how we passed the days when Master could have been on the moon as across the yard, for all we knew of his doings. Then on the sixth morning Mr. Poole bustled into the kitchen early, looking as cheerful as I imagine he can, and announced that Master would have his breakfast on a tray in his own bedroom and that I was to look sharp and get a fire up in his room as fast as ever I could, for Master was chilled to the bone and the room was that damp he might die of it.

  I put my cap on, as it was so early I’d hardly dressed yet, and a clean apron and hurried up to Master’s room. I knocked at the door and heard him say, “Come in,” but his voice sounded weak and peevish, so I kept my eyes down, giving him a quick curtsy as I went in and made straight for my work. Even though I scarcely looked at him I took in enough to see that he was propped up on his pillows like an invalid looking as pale as death. It didn’t take more than a few moments to get the fire up, as I’d laid the grate three days earlier, so I was soon done and stood up to take my leave when Master said, “Mary, let me have a word with you.”

  I approached him but couldn’t look at him as I felt uncomfortable to be spoken to while he was lying in his bed, though he seemed to think nothing on it.