Edna bit her lip. “It is,” she conceded. “But—”
“But nothing! Which do you think Ivy would like?”
“Ivy?” Edna snorted. “Whichever is the strongest!”
Mina sniffed the remaining two bottles. “Then, I think the jasmine,” she muttered, setting this to one side. She reached the last item, which was the most intriguing. The pink tin was done up with a rosetted ribbon on the top, so it looked almost like a hatbox.
“The gentleman in the apothecaries had to help us pick out the other things,” Edna admitted. “As auntie had no more knowledge than I about balms and lotions and such like.”
Mina levered off the lid and looked down at the three fancy pots within. Bloom of Roses she read on one pot. Restores youthful freshness. Its fluffy, whipped contents smelt good enough to eat. Emulsion of Almonds, she read on another, reduces wrinkles and blemishes she read. Magnolia cold cream was the third which apparently reinstates natural smoothness of complexion. “Which would you rather?” she asked Edna. “Restore freshness, reduce blemishes or reinstate smoothness?” Edna merely looked bewildered. “What do you think of the scent of this one?” Mina said passing her the Emulsion of Almonds.
“I couldn’t accept another gift, Mrs. Nye,” Edna began dubiously.
“Nonsense. I only bought three so I could share them with you and Ivy.”
Edna hesitated at this, clearly loth to miss out if Ivy would receive a share. “I’ve never held with artifices,” she muttered, looking flustered.
Mina reached across and pointed at the label on the bottle. “It says that one is a tonic and made from nature’s ingredients,” she pointed out. Edna removed the stopper and sniffed the milky-looking contents. “It doesn’t smell,” she said with surprise.
“You see,” Mina encouraged her. “Try a drop on the back of your hand.” She poured a second cup of tea for them both as Edna sampled the lotion. “It’s not as though it is rouge or powder, Edna. It’s a treatment for your skin.”
“My skin does get very dry,” Edna admitted, accepting the second cup.
“Then it’s settled.”
They smiled at each other over the rim of their teacups.
As it was Edna’s afternoon off, Mina threw her own supper together. An impromptu meal of cold mutton, pickles, cheese and bread and butter was partaken of, followed by her cream slice. After weighing the likelihood of being discovered by Nye eating in the kitchen, she resisted the temptation and instead took her plate through to the parlor. She still felt unsettled after their confrontation earlier and did not want to risk escalating matters. She dined in silence, washed hurriedly in the scullery alcove, and then extinguished the lamps and mounted the stairs with her candle in one hand, the bag of shopping in the other and her new curtains under her arm.
On reaching her room, she dragged a chair over to the window and set about fixing the curtains to the hooks. Once they hung in place, she stepped back to survey the results and thought they would look a lot better if they had a lighter pair underneath for decorative purposes, such as Nottingham lace. Pulling them to, she had to admit the heavy fabric provided a barrier against the cold blast which emanated from the attic window. It also served to muffle the intermittent bursts of rain which drummed against the panes.
Slipping across to Ivy’s room opposite, she left the bottle of jasmine perfume and the magnolia cold cream on the barmaid’s dresser before returning to her own room. She was not sure that she liked the lily of the valley scent that remained, but she set it on the dresser anyway as the bottle was pretty, telling herself she did not feel guilty about keeping the Bloom of Roses for she thought it was by far the nicest of the three lotions.
It was still early, but she did simply did not feel like taxing her eyes further over letter-writing or reading. Stripping down, she set her clothes neatly over her chair, donned her nightgown and spread some of the scented cream sparingly on her elbows, knees, and décolletage. Then she did her neck, face and hands and braided her hair in one long plait and climbed into bed.
Perhaps because she had spent the whole day sat in a chair, she did not feel tired once her head hit the pillow. Instead she lay there, her mind wandering again and again in the same direction. William Nye. Doggedly, she steered her thoughts away from the width of his shoulders, the strong column of his tanned throat and the way his dark hair fell across his forehead and toward his general objectionableness.
He had made it entirely clear, she thought, that he intended for them to lead entirely separate lives. The parlor bar had been converted for her exclusive use and she was to be confined to it, leading an unconnected existence to the rest of the inhabitants of The Merry Harlot. It scarcely seemed practical, she thought, but he seemed determined to promote the scheme.
Fleetingly, she allowed herself to remember how he had come after her when she had fled to the cliffs, then hastily pushed such recollections away, before she had to examine her own behavior that day. It was too bad that he seemed determined to deprive her of any company, even if it was only Edna’s. If ever she tarried too long in the kitchen or scullery he seemed to pop up and send her away. She had almost expected him to show up that morning and chase Gus Hopkirk out of the parlor. It seemed funny now, that he hadn’t, she pondered. Almost as funny as Nye sharing with Gus that she was a schoolteacher.
She simply couldn’t imagine Nye indulging in idle conversation let alone with her as the topic. And yet, he must have, for how else could Gus have known? She shifted over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling beams. It was most odd. Irritably, she twitched at her bedsheets and remembered something that had been niggling away at the back of her mind since that morning. Namely, where she had heard the name Grayking before. Finally, she remembered. Edna had told her it was the name of Werburgh’s favorite goose! Mina sat up in bed.
Gus had said that the monastery was a place of pilgrimage because they housed the holy bones of St Grayking. St Grayking? Mina frowned. Surely the early church had not sainted a goose, even if he had been miraculously raised from the dead by his mistress? Who would travel miles and weather untold hardships to pray at the resting place of a bunch of old goose bones? Mina lay slowly back down, clutching her blanket. Had Gus been spinning her a yarn, she wondered? The words had certainly tripped off his tongue easily enough.
But why would he? What would be his motivation in telling her a bunch of untruths like that? Ghost stories were meant both to entertain and to frighten the listener. Slowly, she turned his words over in her mind. She had found Gus’s tales entertaining and when it came to the sounds the hauntings were supposed to evoke—the dragging and the rolling of the monk’s cart—she had been scared. For those were the sounds she had heard now several times from her window in the early hours of the morning. Involuntarily, her eyes darted to the closed curtains.
Had he known that? And if so, how could he? He would only know if the sounds were of an earthlier nature, she thought. If they were made by men, intent on some dishonest purpose, then it was not beyond the realms of reason, that they might try to mask their actions by spreading tales of ghosts and apparitions. It would not be the first time such a device had been employed. Mina was sure she had read of such things in her women’s periodicals. Cutthroats and thieves who had sought to ensure their hideouts were shunned by law-abiding folk, by the spreading of false rumors of specters and ghouls.