But it was none of these.
‘Oh!’ I cried as I opened the door, for it took me a while to remember the woman’s name because she was not wearing her usual uniform.
‘Do come in,’ I said at last, realising that I was echoing the words that she had used to me so often when she had opened the door to me at Haughten Hall.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Ryland,’ she said, and only then did I realise that it already was.
‘Please sit down,’ I said, and when she looked to the chair by the window, I pointed quickly at the rocking chair by the hearth. She sat down awkwardly, folding her coat underneath her.
‘Dora,’ I added a little too late and the word seemed to hang in the air but I was glad that I had, at last, remembered her name. ‘Will you have some tea?’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
I scurried into the kitchen. The kettle was still warm from breakfast and did not take long to boil. I brought the pot back through on a tray with milk, sugar and some slightly stale slices of the tea loaf that Roy had brought round a couple of weeks ago. Dora was not the lady of Haughten Hall but her association with the place was enough and I felt the need to impress her with my hospitality.
I sat back down and poured a little weak tea, which she took with a ‘thank you’ but little else, so I busied myself serving cake. I fancied that she was a little younger than me, and thinner than I had thought – the cut of her stylish day dress quite different from the shapeless uniform she wore at Haughten Hall. Her hair was also curled and set, a smudge of rouge on her cheeks – the red, chapped skin on her hands the only suggestion that she was not some smart woman about town.
‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ I said. ‘Or were you just passing?’
‘No, Mrs Ryland,’ she said. ‘I…’ Then she seemed to hesitate a little. ‘Well, firstly I think that it is a shame that you have been visiting Sir Howard all these years yet we have barely spoken.’ She spoke quite formally but the words didn’t quite flow and I thought her to be mimicking the fine speech she was used to hearing at Haughten Hall. ‘And it has been such a long time since I visited you at the parsonage.’
‘The parsonage?’ I repeated.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you not recall, I visited a couple of times for…’ But when she came to say the words she faltered as if she wished she had not spoken at all. ‘It was personal advice,’ she said after a while. ‘We would pray together. I think that I even helped you to sew part of a quilt with pictures on – some biblical themes.’
‘The life of Eve,’ I said.
‘I don’t blame you for not remembering, Mrs Ryland,’ she said quickly. ‘I think that I was not the only lady to help make that quilt. There were already many panels when I first saw it, and each looked as if it had been sewn by a woman with a different style and ability.’
‘You were not the only one,’ I confirmed, but then I realised that I knew nothing of Dora’s life or what might have happened to her after she had left the parsonage, and the tone of her voice did nothing to suggest the outcome of our meetings.
‘But that is not why I am here,’ she said shortly. ‘As you know, I have spent many years at Haughten Hall, so I know Sir Howard’s affairs…’ She paused as if searching for the right word. ‘…Intimately.’
‘So you should,’ I said quickly. ‘It is your duty as a housekeeper.’ But there was something about what she said that unsettled me.
‘I don’t like to pry, Mrs Ryland,’ she said, ‘nor do I generally eavesdrop, but you might remember that when you were last at Haughten Hall, I was hoovering the landing and skirting boards outside the study. It must have made a terrible noise for your visit.’
‘I do recall,’ I said and waited for her to say more.
‘I know what you and Sir Howard spoke of.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid that Sir Howard and I have never agreed about Sam Denman, and I’m afraid we did squabble. We were talking a lot louder than we usually do so I am not surprised you overheard.’
‘Not that,’ she said shortly.
‘Not that?’ I echoed. Suddenly I remembered how the sound of her vacuum cleaner had stopped while I made my clumsy marriage proposal, and I felt my embarrassment return.
She opened her mouth, but then shut it again as if she could not find the right words and she looked down at her chapped hands. ‘There is something you should know about Sir Howard,’ she said after a while.
‘What’s that?’ I said bitterly.
‘I don’t think you are the right type of woman for him,’ she replied, ‘at least not in the way you want.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ I cried. ‘Sir Howard would be first to admit that we have much in common. We are both widowed, we are of a similar age, we have a certain social standing—’
‘He never got over his wife,’ she cut in.
‘Oh,’ I said, and then I found that I could not say more because I knew that she was right. It was something that should have been obvious to me. Sir Howard barely left Haughten Hall, even for church, and spent all his time in his study – a room full of paintings of a woman he loved. She was a woman whose beauty had inspired the portraits, a woman who he imagined as a Pre-Raphaelite maiden, or ethereal nymph, and she was a woman that he had seen reborn for a short time in his daughter. Iris had been a constant reminder of her mother until she too was taken from him. Lady Caldwell was a woman he mourned twice.
‘I just didn’t want you to feel bad, Mrs Ryland,’ she said, her tone changing now that she felt I understood her. ‘In fact, I think that you would be a good match for Sir Howard, but he would never see it that way and nothing that you have in common would change that.’
I nodded.
‘I just thought that I should tell you,’ she said, ‘for I was worried that you would be hard on yourself.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it so happens that Sir Howard has shown himself to be lacking in compassion recently so I see that my marriage plans were folly. He is not the man I thought he was. He does not care for living people who are homeless and vulnerable. He cares more for a ghost than—’
‘She died in childbirth,’ she said quickly, then added, ‘The ghost you speak of.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. It is very sad. I meant no disrespect to the late Lady Caldwell.’
‘I knew Lady Caldwell only a little,’ she said. ‘The house had more servants back in those days and I was barely thirteen years old when she died. My mother was the cook and they were training me up. I was not yet out of the scullery.’
‘Of course,’ I said again.
‘The thing I am trying to say is…’ She paused, as if she could not approach the matter after all, then said, ‘How long were you and your husband married?’
‘Fifteen years,’ I said. It was something I had never had cause to think of while Thomas had been alive, but it was a question I had become used to answering whenever I had to say that I was a widow.
‘You had some good years then,’ she said, ‘although he was taken too soon.’