Sweet Agony

CHARLOTTE STEIN

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.mischiefbooks.com

Copyright © Charlotte Stein 2015

Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007579518

Version: 2015–04–21

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

More from Mischief

About Mischief

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The advert says ‘Seeking Housekeeper’, which I guess sounds innocent enough. Even the other stuff underneath is only pretty weird, rather than very. It just asks for excellent tea-making skills, and no social huggers, and an enthusiasm for order, and to me all of those things sound reasonable. They don’t ring alarm bells in my head.

But the house does.

I sit for around ten minutes across the street from it, in my battered little Beetle with the red vinyl seats. Part of me really, really wanting to go in and save my own skin. But most of me too scared to do anything but stare in horror. Honestly, if you looked up Dickensian in the dictionary you would find this place. It looks as though someone called Mrs Migglethwump lives here, after her husband ran off with the maid on their wedding day.

The front of it is the kind of grey you only get after natural disasters. Some apocalypse happened to this place and this place alone, and now it sits like a bad tooth in a mouth of pristine white ones. It even seems vaguely crooked, in a way that should be impossible. The other houses are ramrod-straight. There is no space for it to slant to the side – it just looks as though it does.

Malevolence is probably making it happen. I think malevolence might be making a lot of things happen. All the windows are blank, black eyes, and each one seems to follow me wherever I go. I glance away for a second and can almost feel them, pressing into my body. Then I turn back and they pretend to be all innocent again. They never watched me reach for the newspaper on the seat beside me. They are just windows, busy minding their own business. There is nothing to worry about here.

Apart from the garden that time forgot.

Lord, the garden that time forgot. I get out of the car feeling strong and brave, almost proud of myself for getting so far in the face of this hideousness. And then I see the garden, and falter. My feet seem suddenly lined with lead. I think of what I will have to do to get across what is really only a small square at the front of the house, and have to wonder if this is all worth it. Those nettles alone look positively ravenous. Somewhere in amongst all the rubble and rambling weeds, I can see what looks like a bike.

I put one foot in there and I’m going to be eaten alive. They will probably find me three years later, with seven-foot dandelions sprouting out of my eye sockets. One false move and the hidden portal down to hell might swallow me whole – and that isn’t even the worst of the problems here. No, that comes when I attempt to get into the garden anyway.

And realise the gate is rusted shut.

If I want to get in, I am going to have to climb over the thing. I am going to have to hike my skirt up and lift my leg like a dog doing a wee, and when I do my underwear will be on display. Every eye in that evil house will see the two holes near the sagging elastic and the faded image of Spiderman on the bottom, then most likely curse me for all eternity.

All of which seems pretty silly, until I actually start my attempt. I bunch my skirt up into my fists and begin to step over, and just as I do I hear the person who lives here. They make a sound like someone moaning from inside some terrible abyss, so cold and alien that for a second I barely recognise it for what it really is.

Then it rushes over me in a hot flood: laughter. The person inside is laughing at me, in the bitterest, haughtiest way possible. You could stick that awful noise in the House of Lords and have it shout at the Prime Minister. It could attend a swanky soirée entirely independent of the person it comes out of, and no one would blink an eye.

But I do my best not to care. I grit my teeth and keep going, no matter what he does to throw me off. I think he actually snorts when I almost lose a shoe to a particularly vicious patch of brambles, and I know he laughs again at the state of my tights after a fight with the lost bike. This time it rings out as clear as a bell, if bells were super haughty and filthy rich.

Yet somehow I still make it to the door.

Only to be told:

‘Not today, thank you.’

He even sounds delighted to get the opportunity to say it. I can hear it in the back of his voice, buried beneath what can only be described as the most cultured accent the world has ever known. I swear my social standing plummets seventeen levels just listening to it. I feel as though I need to bow, and not just because of the sheer wealthy weight behind each of his words.

There is also the fact that he sounds amazing.

Oh, my Lord, no one in the history of the world has ever sounded as amazing as he does. For a second I actually overlook the ludicrous rudeness and just drown in that rolling, velvet-lined tone. He could probably read the news, if the news was specifically designed to make women come on command. Every syllable seems dipped in smoke, so deep and rich I stand there speechless for a second.

And it may well be a good thing that I do.

I think I would probably have gushed over that voice, if he’d given me another second. The words holy crap you could sear skin with that thing are on the tip of my tongue, and only stay there because he goes first.

‘You must be aware that you are completely inappropriate for the position,’ he says, at which point I realise that I’m supposed to be angry. He might sound like sin itself, but he is also quite clearly an enormous arse. I mean, I know that my tights are laddered and my clothes have holes in and I have the broad, plain features of a person not fit to shine his shoes.

But he need not have pointed that out so bluntly.

He could have pretended to be polite, like a normal person.

‘I had no idea dusting a shelf was such an advanced science these days,’ I say, and it comes out so dry it startles me. I had no idea that tone of voice was in me. Most of the time I back away from an argument, and it seems like that should go double here. I am standing on the expensive doorstep of a man with a voice like cigar smoke, trying to get a job that might possibly save me from starvation.

I should really feel more fear – and most likely would.

If I had anything in the world left to lose.

‘If you were appropriate you would be fully aware that it was.’

‘I was just testing you. Really I know how to use the lasers.’

‘You intend to use lasers to remove dust from my shelves?’

‘All the most professional dusters are doing it these days.’

‘I get the distinct impression you believe you are amusing. Therefore I feel I should inform you that I find amusing people tedious in the extreme.’

‘Oh, you need never worry. This is a shocking amount of amusing for me.’

‘Why do I suspect that is supposed to be a joke too?’

‘Possibly because you’ve never heard anyone being funny before? I bet most people just bow and scrape and tell you about their time at Eton.’

‘Yes, and they were all wildly inappropriate too,’ he says, and I’m ready to answer back. In fact, I think I might even be enjoying answering back. It makes my bones rattle and my dad’s words ring in my ears – ‘why do you have to be so clever?’ – yet somehow I don’t want to stop. I want to see what he says next. I want to be free to say silly things about lasers, and somehow his pomposity lets me.

I would probably keep poking and poking it for ever, if it were not for the sudden realisation that sinks into me, after those words of his. He said ‘all’, I think, as though it might not just be me and my awful coat and my Yorkshire accent.

‘How many people have you turned away, exactly?’

‘I hardly see how that is any concern of yours.’

‘You hardly see how it might be a concern of mine that I drove all the way here with my last drop of gas to get a job I desperately need only to discover that the person hiring might be completely unwilling to ever hire anyone?’ I ask, and then there is a sullen-seeming silence. Clearly, I hit on the right thing here – but he refuses to admit it.

‘I will have you know I let in many, many applicants. And despite her numerous flaws I almost hired the girl from Sweden.’

‘I feel like you are making up the girl from Sweden.’

‘That is a frankly outrageous charge.’

‘But you did though, right?’ I try, expecting further failure.

Yet I get this wonderful reply instead:

‘Yes, and I would appreciate you explaining how you managed to discern such a thing through a door while being harangued by a man who expects you to use lasers to dust.’

I just love that he takes the laser thing and runs with it. I feel as though I lobbed a ball of insanity at him and he just caught it and lobbed it back. No one has ever lobbed my ball of insanity before. I barely dared reveal I had one in my possession, prior to this discussion. Usually I keep it hidden, beneath seventeen layers of pretend ignorance.

But why pretend with him? He clearly values smartness.

I even hear the eagerness in his voice, after I tell him that it was a fairly obvious guess to make. ‘Tell me all the ways in which it was obvious,’ he says, like some word vampire starved of sentences by boring girls from Sweden. And, luckily for him, I am almost bursting with every letter in the English language. I’ve spent my whole life feasting on books and books and books, with no one to talk to about what I’ve found there.

He can have it all. Right now, right here on this doorstep.

Here are my guns blazing. Here is me going out in a blaze of glory.

‘If you intended to hire someone you would not be enjoying haranguing me quite so much. And you might have cleared your path. And you definitely would never have laughed when I stepped over the gate, or told me I was inappropriate before I spoke a word, or made up a girl from Sweden. Also you probably would have opened the door,’ I say, and for just a second I feel sure I’ve blown it. I spent too long being too smart. Now I’m no longer smart enough. I failed at the final hurdle, and will have to go away and starve in my car.

I even start to turn, but then I hear his voice. It’s like heavenly shades of cigar smoke falling. Like the trumpeting of a dozen angels, come to save me from this abyss.

‘I have no hope that you will succeed,’ he says.

I guess he has no idea that I already have.

Chapter Two

I try to respond in a normal manner to all of this. But the trouble is, everything just gets more fascinating from there on in. For a start, he somehow disappears before I can get through the door and see his face. I find myself in a narrow, slightly slanting hallway, so utterly alone I could have stepped through a portal to the netherworld.

And the room past the open door to my right does nothing to dispel this impression. I am ready to gasp when I see it, and probably not in the right way. Most people, I expect, faced with this, would be appalled or amused or feel some other emotion that I apparently don’t possess. Instead I think I reach something like giddiness. A grin immediately tries to smear itself all over my face, and only the sense that he must be watching somewhere hauls it back.

He must be behind some secret wall, spying.

Because that is what the room looks like – as though it has secret walls that someone could spy behind. It seems to have around twenty-seven corners, even though I could swear that twenty-seven corners are not possible for a fairly small rectangle. There should be no more than four, I think, yet, when I take a step in, twelve more jump out at me. I could swear the sides of the fireplace are that illusion where you step closer and a passageway is revealed.

I suppose the wallpaper helps. It looks at first glance to be made up of a million skulls, and it is no relief to realise they are just ornate black flowers repeated over and over. My eyes still cross when I look at it. I have to glance at other things, only to find that other things are just as brilliant and terrifying.

He has an old-fashioned street lamp in one corner, complete with a flickering candle behind the dusty glass panels. In fact, the street lamp is the only thing lighting the room. The sun has no chance of filtering through the closed and extremely heavy purple curtains, and where a ceiling light should be there is just a blank space.

But that only makes everything seem stranger and even more mysterious. It’s like looking through syrup at a scene from the nineteenth century. There are thick rugs on the floor and the fireplace is real and as I stand there I realise the sound I’m hearing is the somnolent tick of a grand old clock on the mantel.

By the time he speaks I think my limbs have gone a little weak. I want to sink into this heaven, and his voice does nothing to assuage that. It rolls into the room in one long ribbon, so deep and sinuous I could almost overlook his instructions. I could, if they were not completely bizarre and insane.

Oh, God, I think he might be insane.

‘Turn the chair beside you around, so that it faces the window. Once you have, you may be seated,’ he says, which I suppose is not that bad really. However, when you put it together with him speaking those words through a door, it all gets a lot stranger.

They suggest only one thing: he does not want me to look at him. He disappeared on purpose, so I could not catch so much as a glimpse – an idea that sounds bonkers but is pretty much borne out by all the evidence. I mean, what other explanation could there be? I thought he just wanted to leave me fumbling and unsure, then make some grand entrance. He seemed the type to make a grand entrance.

But now I feel less certain.

Maybe he has a problem, I think, a terrible and awful problem that he can never let anyone see. I read the other day about a man with a foot for a hand, and although I feel fairly confident that this was a lie it’s about all I can imagine now. He will come in with shoes on the ends of his arms and gloves on the ends of his legs, then scream in agony when he sees I ignored his instructions.

All of which is utter nonsense, I know, but I just go ahead and sit facing the window anyway. It seems best, considering all the real problems that he might actually have. He could have had his face blown off in the war, or some form of agoraphobia that means he can’t cope with people looking, and despite the high probability that he is just a haughty arsehole I want to respect these possible issues.

Though I will admit that it gets hard when I hear the door open. I want to turn so badly I can feel it in my teeth. I have to clench everything just to keep myself contained, but parts of me still do their best to escape. My heart almost lunges out of my chest at the sound of him drawing up his own chair. All the hair on my head seems to be prickling and bristling, as though he had taken a handful of it without me knowing.

And then just yanked.

‘I can see you fidgeting, you know.’

‘I would probably be doing it less if we were having an ordinary interview.’

‘And what would you consider an ordinary interview?’

‘Both of us occasionally making awkward eye contact.’

‘Sounds ghastly, if you ask me.’

‘I doubt I ever would.’

‘Would what?’

‘Ask you. You seem like the very last person to discuss the possible merits of eye contact with, considering our current positions.’

‘I have very good reason for this request.’

‘And that reason would be?’ I try, even though I know it will fail. I understand it will before he even emits his little snort of derision.

‘You ask too many questions.’

‘Well, I just thought if I was your housekeeper…’

‘If you were my housekeeper, what? You will feel the need to ask me irrelevant things in a constant and ever more intrusive manner?’

‘I would have thought it was necessary. I mean, what if you have a foot for a hand? I might accidentally kneel down to put on your shoes, only to find fingers where your feet should be. That seems at best like an embarrassment we could avoid,’ I say, then almost marvel at myself for doing it. That thing is happening again. That thing at the door where I got to say all the things I was never able to before. All of these insane leaps in logic just bound right out of me, so utterly ridiculous that he is rendered speechless.

God, I love rendering him speechless.

‘Did you really just accuse me of having a foot for a hand?’

‘I think “accuse” is a little strong. I have nothing but sympathy for your plight.’

‘There is no plight, you ridiculous creature. My hands and feet are where they are supposed to be, I can assure you.’

‘So the problem is your face.’

‘I see what you are clumsily attempting.’

‘I thought I was attempting it quite well, actually.’

‘Then allow me to disillusion you immediately. Your technique is that of a sixteen-year-old boy fumbling at the underwear of my mind.’

‘I could try harder. Probe more deeply.’

‘You believe I wish to be probed? No, dear me, no, that won’t do at all. See, it is exactly as I predicted: you are in every way unsuitable for this position. I cannot possibly have some snooping reprobate rummaging through my life,’ he says, at which point I know I should be insulted or annoyed. He said I was a teenage boy. He called me clumsy. He thinks I am some criminal who snoops.

Yet somehow all I can think is:

He said ‘reprobate’.

He said ‘disillusion’.

He uses the sorts of words I’ve waited all my life to hear spoken aloud – words I barely know how to pronounce because the only time I’ve ever encountered them has been in books. I had no idea that ‘reprobate’ curled that way, or that ‘disillusion’ sounded so small to begin with and then so big at the end. Though, granted, part of that might be down to the way he talks. His tongue practically makes love to each syllable.

I feel like his sentence should smoke a cigarette, directly after the full stop.

I think I might need to smoke a cigarette, directly after the full stop. Something is sure happening to me. I seem to be sweating just about everywhere and my breaths are coming hard and high, like he is a hill and I just ran up him.

Only that sounds agonising, and this is the opposite.

This is so sweet I would do anything for another taste.

‘Do you think you could say that word again?’

‘You honestly want me to repeat one of the things I just said, despite the fact that most of them were sneering insults?’

‘Are you kidding? The sneering insults were the best parts.’

‘Well, that settles it. I can’t hire you. You are quite mad.’

‘You cannot possibly decide that, based on me enjoying you saying the word “reprobate”. You turned the letter R into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. People will probably be playing that letter O at funerals. There is nothing unreasonable about enjoying how the whole thing sounded – not to mention the fact that you said it at all. I mean, who says “reprobate” these days?’ I ask, and again there follows a silence. A big one, that he seems very bitter about once he finally responds. How dare I make him momentarily speechless, I think, and what he says bears that out.

‘People who have read these things called books – you might have heard of them, papery things with lots of squiggles inside,’ he says, and I attempt to hate him here, I really do. I stiffen at the implication, and when I speak my voice is cold.

‘Oh, you mean the things I used to hide under my floorboards so no one would take them away from me?’ I tell him.

But then he goes and says this:

‘Are you suggesting that you had books stolen from you? That these books were somehow forbidden you? By whom? Tell me at once who this monstrous individual is so that I can immediately have them arrested,’ he says.

And I think he actually means it. There isn’t so much as a whiff of facetiousness about his words. He honestly thinks my parents were monstrous, just because they hated me reading. No one has ever thought they were monstrous because they hated me reading. A teacher once shouted at them for forcing me into shoes three sizes too small, and occasionally an official-looking person would come around and write things down about my bruises and the spoiled food and the constant cans of Carling everywhere.

But that was about it, when it came to outrage over their behaviour.

A fact that I then point out to him, in a roundabout way.

‘You can’t have someone arrested for flushing books down a toilet.’

‘Well, that just speaks volumes about our current justice system. If I had my way I would not only arrest this miscreant but have them flogged in the town square,’ he says, and I feel sure he means that too. So much so that the urge to look at him again is suddenly too keen to withstand. I have to take deep breaths just to stop myself doing it.

Then sublimate it into something else.

‘Tell me honestly: did you time-travel here from 1865?’

‘I wish I had. And possessed the means to travel back.’

‘Even though people bathed a lot less then.’

‘I could accept body odour in exchange for a bit of peace.’

‘You think being alive in 1865 would give you peace?’

‘I think at the very least I would fit in more than I do here,’ he says, though I don’t think he means to. At least I don’t think he means to sound so despairing about it. After the words pop out he seems to make a little tutting noise, and it isn’t aimed at me. It’s aimed at himself. He let out some dark hint of who he is, and it irritates him.

It irritates him so much that he immediately tries to get rid of me in what may be the most ludicrous way possible. ‘Well, it was nice meeting you, farewell,’ he says, as though we just finished on a pleasant note and he is now up and shaking my hand.

Despite the fact that we are both still seated.

And he hasn’t asked me a damned thing.

‘But you haven’t even interviewed me yet.’

‘Of course I have – I enquired about your reading habits.’

‘That hardly constitutes an interview.’

‘Very well then, tell me what you would expect of an interview.’

‘You should ask me my name.’

‘Assume that I have.’

‘Molly Parker.’

‘I see. And then…?’ he asks, and here’s the best thing:

I think he genuinely has no idea.

He needs me to tell him.

‘Then you tell me yours.’

‘Why? I’m not interviewing for any position.’

‘So you want me to go around your house calling you something I just made up,’ I suggest, and practically hear him shudder. It almost makes me want to do it anyway – think up ridiculous monikers and have him be disgusted by all of them.

Snooty McBogtrot, I could call him, then I have to suppress a laugh.

Twenty-two years of never having anything to laugh about, and suddenly it overwhelms me to the point where I have to hold it off. I have to use both hands.

‘That sounds like the very worst thing I can imagine. You may call me Mr Harcroft.’

‘Seems rather unfriendly and impersonal.’

‘I think you will find that I am a rather unfriendly and impersonal man. You will also shortly discover that I am singularly exacting, ruthless in my attention to detail and completely without regard for any and all emotional whims. I brook no challenges to my authority and expect to be deferred to without exception when it comes to the precise system I use to govern my household,’ he says, then quite obviously waits for me to be horrified. The problem is, though, that if he is, he will be waiting for ever. I don’t know how to be horrified by all of this. It seems so strange and fantastical that all I can do is marvel at all of it, from the seating arrangements to his furniture right the way through to his every odd word.

He governs his household, I think.

Is it any wonder I say what I then do?

‘So I got the job then?’ I ask.

After which there is a silence so delicious I could grab it in my hands and eat it alive. He honestly thought I would balk at that, I can tell. He even tries to go one better a moment later, with his directions as to what I should do next. ‘You will be sleeping in the attic,’ he says, as though the attic is his version of the top of a terrible tower. He wants to be the evil wizard who has somehow imprisoned a princess.

But he has to know he can never be. My life before was the prison: this is the escape. And it continues to be, no matter what he says or does. ‘Go there directly and remain until your duties begin in the morning,’ he tells me, and the very last thing I feel is fear. I fizz with the idea of finally seeing his face instead. I wonder and wonder about how a man who uses the word ‘miscreant’ will look, and am actually disappointed when I turn and find he has already disappeared.

Though even that soon fades.

There are other delights to uncover – like the pictures on the walls on the way up the narrow staircase, each one creepier than the one before it. I think they might even deserve the label gothic, which sounded so exciting to me when I first read about it that I secretly dyed a net curtain black and wore it as a headdress in the middle of the night. Now I get to live amidst it, in the form of faded photographs of old bearded men who could well be his ancestors.

He has ancestors.

And if that were not exciting enough, there is the room I am supposed to stay in. Does he understand how exciting this room is to me? I imagine he could never do so, since this is his ordinary and everyday life. But to me none of this is ordinary and everyday. The very presence of a brass double bed is enough to place it outside those boundaries. Even the mattress crosses the line, because at home I used to sleep on folded-over towels and two sleeping bags.

Certainly I’ve never had anything like this.

Nor have I had experience of a room that just belongs to me. I have no concept of drawers that I can just stuff with my things – to the point where I can barely fill one of them, and then only because of my two big jumpers. And though the window is more of a skylight, it lets in the dying glow of the day like nothing I’ve ever seen. I stand on the bed just to look through it, and see all of London spread out before me.

I see my life, as it could really be.

Chapter Three

I try not to feel too excited when I wake up. It seems best to keep my expectations low, considering some of the things he said and did the day before. I mean, no one could possibly call him a pleasant person – he confirmed that much with his laughter and his insults alone and even if he hadn’t there have been other signs.

Like the uniform he has hung up in the bathroom for me, swaddled in plastic and so ominous-looking that I take a step back when I see it. For a second I think someone is standing in there waiting for me, and want to scream. Then I realise the someone waiting for me is the person I am supposed to be, and almost do it anyway. Somehow, I suspect I’m going to fail very badly at this. The stockings are silk, which I am almost certainly going to snag, and the shoes have the sort of heels I can never walk in.

Plus, he has to know that the whole thing is never going to fit me. The skirt portion of the dress is way too narrow around the hips, and that bodice will never contain my enormous bust. All those buttons down the front are going to pop open the moment I move – but maybe that was his intention. He wants to see me thoroughly humiliated, after failing to put me in my place yesterday. I was much too amused by him and far too talkative, and this is the lesson I get in return.

Or at least it would be usually, I think.

But then I forget that he is not usual at all. I judge him by the standard my family set, instead of the alien one he actually operates under. I think of my mum telling me to stop wearing short sleeves and my brothers jeering at my jiggly parts, rather than understanding that this is never going to be like that.

For a start, I have to speak to him through the parlour door. I knock on it and he tells me to stay where I am, rather than do anything normal like asking me in. Then, once I tell him that the uniform is never going to fit me, he lets out the most derisive little snort. I can practically see the eye-roll that goes with it, shortly followed by a sentence I could never have expected in a million years.

Though he seems to think I should have.

‘Of course it will fit you. I had it made to your exact measurements,’ he says, as though there could be no other explanation. He even seems somewhat offended that I could imagine anything else, despite how insane that is. He only met me yesterday. He must have seen me for all of two minutes. There is no way he could have done what he claims.

And I make the mistake of telling him so.

‘How could you possibly know what my measurements are?’ I ask, and receive an answer that damn near makes my hair stand on end. As he goes on, my eyes almost roll out of my head, but I cannot blame them. Who could, in light of this?

‘If you recall, I observed you walking up to my front door. It was not exactly difficult to extrapolate based on the variables at hand. You only managed to step over my gate by standing on tiptoe, which tells me that you are no more than five foot three, and once you had traversed it I could clearly see the distance in inches between each of your hips and the edges of said gate. As I know the exact width it was fairly easy from there to surmise your lower measurements, and only a little more difficult to ascertain what sort of bodice you might require. As you quite clearly wear a bra two sizes too small for you, it took me a little longer to absolutely be sure, but, judging by your relative self-consciousness, the way you hold your arms when you walk and the other parameters of your body, I believe I have the right of it,’ he says, after which I want to be appalled, I do. I probably should be, all things considered. He examined me so minutely I am surprised my skin isn’t trying to walk off my body.

But I understand why it stays on. Everything he says is so lacking in sexual intention that even my keen senses cannot detect it. No part of me suspects he is lying in order to cover up some transgression. I don’t imagine he secretly snuck into a room and measured me with a ruler, and even if I did I am not sure I would mind much. There is something so calm and clinical and clever about everything he just said that all I feel is awe.

And the awe makes me do some frantic and ill-advised things. It just builds inside me to the point where I can no longer contain it, and suddenly I seem to be tearing at the plastic around the dress. I have to see for myself if he is right, but the problem is that seeing is apparently not enough. Once I have the material in my hands – that liquid silk all lined and smartly stitched just for me – I go one step further. I start pulling off my clothes right there in the hall, so eager to have it against my skin that I barely stop to think about being naked ten feet from where he is. I do not care that he is calling through the door at me. ‘Ms Parker, I insist you answer me at once,’ he says, but I just keep going.

I even take my bra off – though, in my defence, I sort of have to. The dress has this whole support structure actually built into it, and oh, my sainted aunts, when I put it on…how can I regret stripping to nothing when I put that thing on? He was absolutely right about the ‘two sizes too small’, because after I do up some of the buttons I want to break down and cry.

I think my body breathes out for the first time. Everything feels gently held rather than squeezed, yet when I move nothing wobbles or jiggles or tries to escape. There are no unsightly lumps or bumps, and every part of it ends exactly where it’s supposed to. Even the sleeves are the right length. Even the flare of the skirt is perfect, to the point where I want to ask again how he did this.

Though I appreciate that part of it is just a desire to hear him say so. To hear him tell me all those tiny details a second time, in that voice of his like liquid intelligence. Just the thought of it makes my heart beat long and slow in my chest, in a way that seems insane. No one should feel like this over something so small. People need more than cleverness to start breathing hard and having illicit thoughts. At the very least you should have seen a face or a body or even a hand or two.

None of which is the case here.

He could be hideous, I think.

He probably is hideous, all things considered. What other reason can there be for him to keep himself hidden from me? None, I think, none, and even if there is one, his manner suggests something grotesque. He is still barking orders at me through the door. I tell him I’m just trying on the shoes and he keeps on going. He has to be an eight-hundred-year-old hobgoblin – an idea that should probably calm me down somewhat.

It should, yet somehow that is not the case at all.

Partly because I think the missing key to my excitement might be a brilliant mind.

But also because at that moment he decides to march to the door and fling it open, and when he does I think my insides plummet around seventeen floors. They wind up somewhere just north of hell, thanks to a face he should not have. No one should have a face like that. It has to be a crime against womankind for someone to walk around wearing that weapon of mass destruction, and anyone doing so needs to be immediately jailed. Someone call the police, I think.

Though I have no idea how they might help me. I suppose they could close my mouth or maybe stop me gasping, but even if they did there are still my eyes to contend with – my enormous and no doubt wild-looking eyes that will not stop staring at him. For a second I actually consider poking them out, to spare me further embarrassment.

But I fear it may be too late. He is quite possibly the cleverest person I have ever met. There is no doubt he already knows why I am gawping at him like a drowned fish. No one could look like that and not understand – though oddly he does an excellent job of pretending. The longer this agonising moment goes on, the more disconcerted he seems, until finally I want to glance away, just to erase that hint of a frown between his elegant eyebrows.

It only makes him more beautiful.

God, I had no idea a man could be beautiful. I thought that was just something people said in stories, yet here it is in a thousand different ways. His eyes are lovelier than a lonely ocean in winter, so cold and still and pale I can feel them freezing me where I stand. I want to check my fingers for frostbite, until I realise that the idea is mad. I’m not actually cold.

In fact I’m blazing hot. I thank God I only did up three of the buttons, because the air on my back is a glorious blessing. I think it saves me from sweating, and for that I am very grateful. He already knows my eyes have been hypnotised. I would rather he stayed in the dark about my over-heating body – though somehow I doubt he will for much longer. I mean, most of his face is bad.

But his mouth is worse.

His lips have almost no outline at all, as though they were made when someone kissed against the glass of his face. Give it a moment and they would probably disappear altogether – though most of me hopes they will stay a little longer. I haven’t quite finished looking at them yet. I need a second to marvel over the middle of his upper lip, which seems to be unlike every other lip on the planet. Most people have those soft hills, one after the other. They have a bow.

He has two sharp peaks, barely visible but still definitely there.

It makes his lips seem both cruel and at the same time so utterly soft that I would give almost anything to feel them against my skin. I consider smacking my face into his, as if by accident, despite how intrusive that would be. Most likely he would fire me.

But I think it might be worth it.

Christ, am I really thinking that? I have to pull myself together – and not just because I seem to be having ludicrous thoughts. He is looking at me now as if he would probably murder me where I stood if he thought he could get away with it. His hands are twitching a little, in a way that suggests his preferred method would be strangulation.

And to my horror the only response I can come up with is: what a way to go. He has long but fine fingers, and I find myself wondering what they would feel like around my throat. Probably heaven until you began to run out of air, I reckon, and then I really have to change the subject in my head.

Though it’s a shame I do it by blurting out:

‘Sorry, I just wanted to see.’

It sounds so feeble he flinches.

Or is it more the content that makes him mad?

‘You wanted to see if I was lying.’

‘Well, not lying exactly.’

‘Then what?’

‘Maybe making things up.’

‘There is no appreciable difference between that and telling a falsehood, Ms Parker – a fact I am sure you are aware of, considering that almost keen mind of yours.’

‘Could be the “almost” part that stops me short,’ I say, then wish I hadn’t.

Now does not seem like the best time to get funny with him, no matter how much it makes my heart sing to do it. At the very least I should probably wait for him to forget I ogled him – though somehow I doubt that will ever happen. He still looks disgusted about it, halfway through this conversation about something else altogether. Or, at least, I think he does.

His expressions are nearly impossible to read.

He could be offended by my suspicions.

He might wonder how I dare to be amused.

All seems possible, when he speaks.

‘Well, as you can see, it does indeed fit, despite your every effort at putting it on incorrectly. It may come as a surprise to you, but buttons are supposed to go in their corresponding holes rather than bizarre diagonals of your choosing. Honestly it seems a wonder to me that you ever manage to get dressed at all.’

‘There are a million of them and you only gave me a minute.’

‘Of course I only gave you a minute. I had no idea you had decided to strip off and yank everything on in my hallway. You are aware you are in my hallway, are you not?’

‘In the excitement I forgot,’ I tell him, and know immediately that I used the wrong word. His eyebrow flickers the moment I say it, and I can’t stop my face heating. Most likely he sees right through me. He probably knows where my thoughts are going, and even if he has no clue his next demand seals my fate.

‘Turn around,’ he says abruptly. So abruptly I can only blurt out a startled ‘what?’

And then he says it again.

‘Turn around, Ms Parker.’

This time I obey. I go slowly, of course, most of me nervous about what he might be going to do. I’m so used to rough treatment that I think of him manhandling me out of the hall first, rather than anything sweeter or finer. I don’t imagine for a moment that this is going to feel like someone stroking a hand over my cheek as I sleep. I don’t think it will make my body buzz, but oh, God, it does.

The very second I feel him touching the buttons I slide away on a wave of something strange. Bliss, I think, but how can I know for sure? No one has ever fastened me up like this before, and even if they had I doubt they would have done it like this. I have the barest sense of unbelievably deft fingers arranging and rearranging without making contact.

He doesn’t brush my skin. There is no real sense of him.

So it seems outrageous that the non-existent contact should flood my body with heat. That it should leave my cheeks flushed and other parts of me burning. All the funny things I want to say suddenly die on my lips. I can’t tell him that he’s a supercilious control freak, when my nipples are tightening inside this infernal dress. I can’t accuse him of wanting to cop a feel, when this was the furthest thing from that.

He steps away as though he barely did a thing – and why not? He did barely do a thing. Any excitement I may feel comes from me and my apparently insane libido. Once the door closes behind me, I have to take deep breaths, and even afterwards the currents of sensation do not ebb away.

Only my dignity does that, despite my best efforts to hold on to it.

Chapter Four

I tell myself that I am not going to react in an inappropriate way to him again. He gives me no reason to, after all. He may be extremely clever and very attractive and always wear ridiculously sexy things like cravats and velvet jackets, but that is no reason to lose my head. I have to be better than that. I am better than that. I am practical and level-headed. I know that life is not a novel by Charlotte Brontë, and even if it was I would probably hate it.

I bet it was cold all the time back then, and miserable, and when you think about it Rochester seems like a complete arsehole. He abandons his first wife and sluts his way around Europe, then has the nerve to complain about it all as though the world did him wrong. Is that really the kind of man I like?

Because that is undoubtedly the kind of man Harcroft is. No one could be that gorgeous and not have treated at least one woman really badly. I bet she writes him sad letters all the time and he just laughs and tells his haughty friends at the Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club about it, even though he doesn’t go to a Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club. In truth, I’m starting to suspect he never goes anywhere or does anything. He seems to have no real job, though that could be explained by an enormous inheritance.

That he never leaves the house, however, is slightly harder to explain.

And especially when he seems so uncomfortable around me.

Sometimes he stops in the hall when he sees me coming, then goes in the opposite direction. When he wants to say anything to me he usually writes notes, some of which I suspect come by carrier pigeon. They just appear on my windowsill at the oddest times, on the sort of stationery I feel should be reserved for writing to the Queen. In fact, it’s probably too good for the likes of her.

He uses tiny envelopes, and writes my name on them in narrow but elegant handwriting – as though there could be anyone else he might want to write to in his own house. And, in case that’s not spectacular enough, he seals the envelopes with wax. Honest to God, that is what he does. Each one has a little red circle of the stuff, with what I assume is his family crest pressed into the centre.

I have to crack the seals to get at the contents, the way Anne Boleyn probably did when Henry wrote to say he was chopping her head off. In truth, when I open the first one, I almost expect it to say something similar, like ‘Due to the weird moment we had in the hall I expect you to report to the parlour promptly for your beheading,’ and I’m not far wrong. ‘I insist you refrain from making eye contact with me,’ it says, and the second one isn’t much better. That comes after I’ve just finished sweeping the hallway with one of his many brooms – so many, in fact, that I suspect he may be a witch – and it has just three words printed on card that probably cost more than my car, in ink that looks like unicorn blood.

‘You swept wrong,’ it says.

At which point I get a little bit annoyed. Not as annoyed as Anne Boleyn probably was when she realised Henry was a serial killer, but not far off. I start planning what I would say back to him, if only he would stop disappearing behind doors and bookcases and that probably fake wall in the parlour. More than planning really – my mind damn near overflows with clever comebacks and silly leaps in logic. It’s as though our previous conversations turned some faucet on inside me, and now the water is flooding everything. It gets under my guard and makes a mess of my thoughts, until finally I just have to let it out somehow.

The third note practically forces me. ‘Do you understand what sweeping is?’ it says, and then there is nothing else I can do. ‘It’s the thing I’m going to do to your face if you send me one more note about it,’ I write, in the most careful cursive I’ve ever used. I even fashion an envelope, and blob a little wax on it from the candle in the lamp. Of course I have no family crest, but somehow I feel a swirly M carved into the seal says enough. It certainly gives me a great deal of satisfaction to set my little makeshift letter on the table by his favourite chair – and even more so when he responds.

Oh, my God, when he responds.

I think it’s then that I fully understand what we are doing here. It just comes over me the second I see the first words, so willing to just go with this absurd idea. As though he was just waiting for this all along, and now finally he has me, he has me, he has me so damned hard. ‘If you can explain to me how a face might be swept I will concede the point,’ he writes, and I almost run to the desk in my room. I sit down at it with sweating palms and shivering insides and my heart nearly bursting out of my chest. He never meant to just insult you, my giddy mind yelps, and my giddy mind is right. He wants me to write back. He wants to correspond with me.

Holy mother of fuck, we are corresponding.

‘First I lift the broom from the floor,’ I write, and I could swear my insides sing when I do. My pen flies across the page, no longer concerned with creating some fancy swirling script. I just want to get the words down and send them back, so I can see what he has to say next. No doubt he will point out that ‘swirling the bristles until his eyebrows come off’ is not possible. He may even suggest I look up ‘broom’ in the dictionary to improve my sweeping knowledge.

All of which sounds very exciting to me.

But not as exciting as what he actually says.

‘If your object is to remove my eyebrows, wax applied while I am sleeping would obviously make a good deal more sense. However, as I never sleep there is a very slim chance of this ever happening,’ he writes, now so hasty all of his words are starting to slant to the left. He forgot to cross half of his Ts and is pressing down much too hard. When I hold the paper in my hands I can feel each word like a strange Braille beneath, spelling out for me what I can already see.

He is passionate about whatever this is.

It fires him up, in a way I can tell he is not used to. He can’t quite handle it, as evidenced by the typos and the pressure but most importantly by how wide open he leaves himself. Seriously, I could drive a bus through those sentences. I have to reverse a little and just nudge into them, because, God, if I said what I really wanted to…He can never know what I would say if I really wanted to. He gets the edited version, and even that goes a step too far. ‘You should probably refrain from tempting me into random acts of waxing you in the middle of the night,’ I write, then add in a fit of madness, ‘I might not stop with your eyebrows.’

As soon as I leave the letter for him I want to take it back. I keep cringing over it as I spray the bathrooms on the second floor with Flash, so sure that this is the thing that will get me fired. Or if not fired, then at least a long, long silence. I even prepare myself for it, by not going back to my room for hours and hours. I pretend I barely care whether there’s a letter there, and plan on shrugging when I find nothing. Maybe I won’t even look towards the windowsill, where one always sits.

That way, I pre-empt my own disappointment.

I get it, before it can get me – which sounds insane but has worked for me so many times in the past. I never really wanted to go to the library anyway; I wasn’t actually interested in that notebook for Christmas; I don’t even know what Christmas is. Christmas is just like any other day, so macaroni cheese alone in the bathroom is fine. All of my life is fine, everything is fine, I swear it is, it really is…until I get to my room and the letter is there.

Until I open it and find the following:

‘Are you threatening me with theft of my chest hair, Ms Parker? If so you should know I barely have enough to make such an enterprise worthwhile. You could probably remove it all simply by blowing in my general direction, though doing so will earn you as much admonition as if you had snuck into my room and plucked each one with a pair of tweezers.’

And then I finally understand what I was really doing all along. I wasn’t fine at all; I was just settling. I didn’t stave off disappointment by opening the door for it; I just let it into the room with me sooner. I pulled up a chair for it and pretended we were friends, even though it spat in my face and stole everything I had.

It took the joy out of my life, and I know that now because when I read those ridiculous words all of it comes flooding back into me in one long glorious gush. My body fills with a delirious happiness – and all over something so simple and small. He just plays along with me. That’s all he does and yet that is all it takes.

Just someone to write insanely overblown letters about hair thievery with. Someone who is so into it that when I go to take out a pen and paper to reply I find stationery, the same sort as he has been using. I find beautiful envelopes and little cream cards and a pen, oh, God, a fountain pen. Does he know how often I sat in my diseased mess of a high school and dreamed of using a fountain pen? How I would close my eyes and will away the biro in my hand and replace it with something so like this I could cry?

I do cry, when I come across the wax and the seal.

He has even gone to the trouble of making a seal for me. It has my initials linked in a regal-looking loop, as though when he time-travelled to another century he took me with him. Now we get to live out this nineteenth-century fantasy together, and, oh, it is bliss. So much so that the next note I send almost tells him that very thing.

‘This is the best thing that has ever happened to me’, I think of writing, and even though I manage to contain myself I do a lot of other inadvisable things. I step too jauntily and search for him without meaning to and, most ridiculously and unexpectedly, I catch myself singing. I have never sung in my life.

But I do. There I am, minding my own business, when suddenly it just bursts out of me. And, true, his dusty old record collection is probably partly to blame. I saw the title of one of them only seconds before, and it was a song I happened to know. Yet, even so, it kind of shocks me – and not just because it’s me trilling away.

There is also the line I choose to sing.

‘When you kiss me heaven sighs,’ I sing, so full of feeling that I want to stop before it gets any worse. Before he hears me, and thinks I mean that he is the kisser I’m imagining, when I promise he absolutely is not. He is not my ‘La Vie En Rose’, all right?

Not even when I hear a sound from the other side of the house.

One that falters and fails and fumbles into something, when I sing the next line of the song. ‘Give your heart and soul to me,’ I sing, and there it is again. First one note, fine and high, and then another and another, each clearer than the last, until I have to accept the stone-cold truth: that is him playing the piano. Somewhere in the house he is tentatively accompanying my painful singing, and so beautifully that I could never mistake it for anything but what it is.

He is saying back to me what I swear I was not suggesting.

Good God, is he really saying back to me what I swear I was not suggesting? It seems impossible, but, no matter how hard I sing, he keeps up. I practically reach for the sky with the line about ‘angels singing from above’, and still he responds in kind. By the time I get to the last ‘La Vie En Rose’ he is adding chords to other chords and running them together one after another in a way the song doesn’t even call for.

My voice dies away, and his is left behind.

And, by God, his is heart-shakingly good. No, more than heart-shakingly good, much more. He is so good it roots me to the spot, as though he has unleashed a musical storm and I have to take shelter. It comes pouring out of some unseen room in a great gush, all of it so incredible that even I can identify what he is. I have only a slight knowledge of the pieces he plays or how they should sound, but I still know it.

He is obviously a virtuoso.

This is what he must do for a living, I think. He must make recordings of the amazingly elastic sounds he seems to effortlessly squeeze out of the piano, and probably performs them too. He has to perform them, because seeing him do it is even more amazing than hearing it. I follow the sound until I find him in an oddly spare and quite depressing little room on the second floor, so engrossed in playing that I’m able to watch unobserved for several minutes.

I see those long fingers almost seeming to tangle with each other, rolling and flowing over the keys. Even more amazing, at one point in this intense and obviously passionate playing, he does the strangest thing. He leans down and rests his cheek on the top of the piano, eyes closed as though to savour the sound of that great and glossy beast breathing.

Not that I can blame him.

I can feel the music from here. God knows what it must be like for him. I bet he can sense Brahms pulsing through his bones. I bet he aches with it the same way I do – so strongly that I find myself crossing the bare floorboards to be nearer to him. And when I get there, the feeling only becomes stronger.

He’s so lost he doesn’t even sense my approach. His eyes stay closed and his fingers keep rolling over the keys, Brahms giving way to something I think might be Liszt and Liszt giving way to what I know is Chopin. He picks out the final heartbreaking notes of Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, and after that I just have to do it.

I have to put a hand on his shoulder. I think I want to partly just to alert him to my presence, but as soon as I touch him I can tell that was a lie. Oh, the things we tell ourselves, just to get by. I should have known that I am doing it purely out of greed. We spent the last week only talking through notes, and now he is so close.

What else could it be but my own desire?

Though, God knows, I wish it wasn’t. As soon as I make contact I want to take it back, because his reaction is like nothing I’ve ever seen. I might as well have shot ten thousand volts into him. He stands up so quickly that the piano stool flies backwards, though I could have sworn the thing was seven foot across and made of lead. When it hits the floor it makes a sound like thunder trapped in a tin, and the whole house seems to shake.

I know I shake – though that might be because of his anger more than anything else. He looks like he would kill me with his eyes if he could. His face is suddenly all lines and angles, and when he finally manages to spit out words his voice is not the rich roll I know. It seems to splinter and break over each syllable, half in fury, half in despair.

‘How dare you intrude in this manner?’ he says, and at that moment it comes to me in one long, embarrassing rush: the intimacy I thought we had created with those notes was all in my imagination, all an illusion, brought on by my hunger for the barest sign of human interaction or affection.

He was just being mean, I think, and I want to slide through the floorboards.

‘I just thought that you –’ I start to say.

But he cuts me dead.

‘You thought what? That I would welcome you flouncing in here to run your filthy fingers all over me? I told you clearly that you are to knock before entering a room. I explained the rules and you have broken them. You have flaunted your insubordination in my face and yet the first words out of your mouth are not an apology,’ he says.

Though maybe ‘says’ is the wrong word. ‘Snarls’ would be more appropriate. He is so fierce that I have to obey.

‘I’m sorry, all right, I’m sorry, I had no idea you –’

‘You had no idea that I wish to have privacy to play?’

‘You can hear it all through the house! You were playing what I was singing so I just assumed that you –’

‘I haven’t the faintest clue what you are talking about. Do you honestly think I would perform a duet with my housekeeper? That seems at best a ridiculous leap and at worst the delusions of a diseased mind.’

‘You really don’t have to be so horrible about it.’

‘I am horrible. I told you clearly when I hired you – I am cruel and hateful and ill- tempered, and if you find any of that objectionable then you should leave now. In fact I believe it would be better if you did, considering your consistent inability to maintain boundaries,’ he says, in a way that to me seems pretty unfair. He can have the delusions-of-a-diseased-mind thing – that’s fine. But how can I fail consistently to maintain boundaries when we’ve hardly ever been in the same room together?

‘I’ve barely spoken to you for days and days,’ I say, half-sure already that my protests are only going to make things worse. Yet somehow, I still don’t fully understand by how much. I imagine him just telling me to go, and instead receive something so awful that I am wincing before he even finishes.

‘And that is precisely the way I like it. If I never saw your moonish face again I would be deliriously happy. If you were to refrain from placing your greedy hands on me again I could live something resembling a contented life. But instead you force your presence upon me – worse, you touch me on the shoulder as though that is something I could ever wish for,’ he says. And at that point I have to get out of there. If I stay he will probably say something even more diabolical than ‘moonish’, and that was bad enough. The second he said it I just wanted to crush myself into a tiny cube and mail myself far away from here. I am still feeling that as I stand out in the hall, legs slightly wobbly and with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Why did I do that?

Why did I touch him?

I should have been able to tell how that would go down. Just because we shared those letters does not mean we are bosom buddies, and the idea that I thought so makes me want to kill myself. At the very least I want to peel off my own skin, before it can finish roasting me alive.

And things stay that way for a long time. I will be dusting a shelf or making some dinner or drifting off to sleep, and suddenly there it will be: a searing flash of mortification to remind me. You saw a friendship or connection that was not really there, my mind will kindly explain, and of course I cannot argue. It seems sound to me, this theory. It has no holes.

Or at least I think so until I see him some time later. He stops at the end of the hall when he notices me coming from the other direction. And the second he does he goes to turn around, but not before I see his hand go to his shoulder, just as it did in that room. As though protecting the place I touched, I think.

From a wound I never intended to give.

Chapter Five

I consider writing him a note of apology but have almost no idea where to begin. I’m still not sure what happened. I want to believe that he is just an awful nightmare of a man, driven mad by a deep desire to insult me. But the more I think about it, the less it looks that way. I keep seeing my hand on his shoulder, as though I was giving him an injury. He was just defending himself, in a way I would probably understand better, if the imaginary intimacy argument was not so good.

But unfortunately it is. It sounds like something I would do. I could probably build a castle in the sky out of nothing more than stones, given half the chance. And God knows I want to, considering the state of my life to date. I grew up in a two-bedroom house with four brothers, all my feelings crammed down to nothing to avoid pain. In truth, before I came here I thought my feelings had died. I thought giddiness and singing were for rich girls.

I had no idea I could be happy.

And happiness, once felt, is hard to get rid of. It stays with me even as I try to dismiss it as unreal. I get down on my hands and knees and scrub his floors, and when they are all gleaming I do them over again. I fight with his frightening garden, clearing away the weeds and debris inch by inch until my hands are sore and sometimes bleeding.

But even as I do, even as I do my best not to tell myself over and over that he just thinks I am gross, or that some transgression of mine has driven him mad, it creeps up on me just the same. How else could it be when the very house I’m living in is him? Everything in it represents some aspect of his personality, and all of it is so fascinating that I can’t help looking and touching and exploring. I can’t help being interested in him all over again.

And especially when I find his study.

Oh, God, his study. Why did he have to leave the door unlocked? He never has before, but for some reason on Wednesday morning I find it standing ajar. Like a beckoning finger, I think, then quash that image. He probably just wants me to clean there, I tell myself, though I can see the problem with that rationale the second I let it out.

It still means I end up in the room, looking at his things. Though really, can I blame myself? The room is a million times more intense than his parlour. It belongs to my dreams of dark towers owned by witches. Every shelf is heaving with extraordinary items, from antique pocket watches to stoppered bottles to actual honest-to-God glass eyeball collections. The latter I find behind a bust of some bearded old dude while I’m dusting.

Not that I am really dusting at all.

After a while I can admit that I’m just rifling through his things, like a thief in the temple of him. I mean, I barely know how to dust. Mostly I just move layers of it around, sneezing. More of it ends up on me than on the duster, and the room doesn’t look any better for my being in there. If anything it looks worse, because now all the stuff has been moved around. There’d been a certain order to it all – and now that I can see that, I wonder what his reaction will be.

Death by firing squad for touching his things, I think.

Yet even that doesn’t put me off. It has almost no chance of doing so, once I’ve noticed the book on his desk. A book that he is most likely reading? There’s no way I can resist that. I was beginning to think his love of literature was exaggerated. Twice I’ve found myself searching cupboards for all those words that must be waiting for me somewhere, and now here they are.

The mere idea of restraining myself is ludicrous.

But God knows, I try. With the end of my duster I try to push the book further under the newspaper he has folded over it. And when that doesn’t work, I do my best to imagine his reaction. I conjure up that apoplectic face and that voice filled with vitriol, then wait for it to subdue. I wait, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be holding me back. I always thought my thirst for literature would one day kill me, and this is pretty much proof.

Though I swear, I only intend to take a peek. Just a little peek, but of course a little one leads to a bigger one, and a bigger one leads to me sitting down, and me sitting down leads to me greedily devouring the whole thing. Partly because Charles Dickens is ten times better than anyone says, and he drags me along despite my best intentions.

But mostly because his is not the only writing in the book. There are other words, written in the margins. Harcroft’s words, written in the margins. I know they are his – I recognize the cramped, narrow writing from his notes. It always makes me think the strain of talking to me makes him press too hard on the paper, but now I can see it’s just how he is.

I can see everything about how he is.

His character is in every line, so that I can almost hear his voice in my head when I read. ‘I would possibly give your heartfelt opinions on the poor a little more credence if you had not divorced your wife for a teenager via a letter in the newspaper,’ one of the notes says, because apparently even Dickens does not escape his contempt.

Or his withering analysis.

His seven-paragraph screed on the final scene between Little Dorrit and Arthur is so excruciating that I think I have secondhand embarrassment for a fictional couple. My face gets hot, not just because he is more or less right but because this is what he thinks of two people having intimate contact. He thinks it seems like two birds squabbling over a wet crust. He thinks it an inexplicable turn in an otherwise just about passable story.

God, he probably thinks my hand on his shoulder was an inexplicable turn in an otherwise just about passable story. I bet he thought I was ruled by sloppy, inconvenient emotions that he has no use for. Hell, I think I might have to agree. Here I am practically licking the words he wrote in a book, when I should be dusting or cleaning or bringing him a cup of tea. At the very least I need to be doing something other than snooping in this desperate manner.

If only to spare me the expression on his face when he catches me.

He looks even worse than last time. His lip curl is so exquisite it hardly seems like one. You could probably call it a pout and paint a fancy picture of it, though it would need a rather ominous title. And Now the Hour Cometh, I think. But then I want to explain my heinous actions – really quickly. Before he decides to murder me.

Is he going to murder me?

It certainly appears that way when he just stands there staring, without speaking, for what feels like half an hour. By the time he does say something my insides are practically in a knot. I have to wrench them apart before I can do what he asks me to, though most of me would rather not. ‘I think you had better follow me,’ he says, and all I can think is: oh, my God, now I’m going to meet my doom for repeatedly daring to transgress against him in a bird-squabbling-over-a-crust manner.

It even seems that way, as I mimic his long, slow pace. Like I’m taking part in my own funeral march, I think, then want to stop and run in the other direction.

Doubly so when we get to the door.

For some reason the wood is painted red, which never bodes well in this situation. Not when every other door in the house is a normal, natural colour. Behind this one he probably has a room full of whips and chains – or maybe the bodies of his former wives. Why else would it be locked? He has to take out a big bunch of keys to open it, and they are not the kind to reassure someone like me. They are heavy and rusty-looking, on a big ring that he has to turn and turn to get to the right one.

And the right one is a curling knot of wrought iron. It makes me think of spooky stories about haunted mansions, and even more so when he fits it into the lock. It screeches when he turns it, as though no one has been in this room for a thousand years. He only ever has sex with the ghost of his long-lost love once a millennium, because the rest of the time she is as mad as hell. I bet she’s going to bite my head off for daring to have lustful thoughts about her husband.

A thought that seems silly, I know.

But it still makes my heart thunder in my chest when he tells me to go in, and at first all I can do is put my head around the door, with my eyes closed. I want an extra second to gather myself before I have to face whatever this is. One more moment before I get eaten by God knows what. Most likely his terrible proclivities, I know.

Then I open my eyes, and see the most beautiful thing in all the world.

Not a torture room for disobedient employees who break the rules.

He has a library, a goddam library, a real honest-to-God library, right here in his house.

And not just any old library. This is a gigantic, amazing, brilliant repository of books, like nothing I’ve ever seen or even hoped to. It spans two fucking floors. Somehow, he has hollowed out two floors of his seemingly small house and made this cavernous room of wonder. And I know he did make it, too, because every part of it is so him that I could put this picture under his name in the dictionary. Every book in here is terrifying or beautiful or ancient-seeming or all three, and whatever order they might once have been in has long ago dissolved into chaos. There are tomes piled on pamphlets piled on paperbacks, and none of them at normal angles.

One shelf has been divided into triangles. Another is crammed so full I doubt anyone could ever pull anything out of it, though, by God, I am going to try. My very bones are already itching to do it. No force on earth could prevent me, not even him telling me that as punishment for my snooping I must spend all my days in here tidying up. After all, most of me knows what he really means.

It comes over me in a great relief-filled rush, telling me all the things the letters and the open doors and the left-behind Dickens tried to. This is not my imagination. I didn’t see something that wasn’t there. If I had, he would never do this in a million years, because he has to understand what it is to me.

I know he understands what this is to me.

He saw me reading.

And so gave me books.

He can pretend all he wants but anyone would understand that much. He even tells me he expects some improvement when he returns in a week’s time, then begins to leave me amidst all this glorious wonder. He is going to leave me for a week, as though that is going to seem like some awful punishment. But to someone like me it never could. He overplayed his hand, and now I can see.

Yet, when I thank him, he reacts almost strangely as he did before.

‘Why are you like this?’ he asks, voice so cold and faint I could almost believe I have it wrong. I say, ‘Like what?’ and brace myself for a blow. As it turns out, I was right to, just not in the way I thought. I expected a quick knife under the breastbone, bloody and brutal.

And instead I get something that swells my heart.

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