“I have nothing. Sorry.”
“A ball. Like there was in the note I just read?”
“Oh!” How stupid do I feel? “But if she’s a servant, how come they were at a ball together?”
“This is the bit you’re going to love. I found this…” He waggles the list, forgetting that it could genuinely fall apart at any second – then remembers and panics, laying it down on the table. He pats it carefully with his fingertips, just to make sure it’s okay. “So I went back to the housekeeper’s book. And I found this.”
The book is open to a new place, the pages covered in notes and columns and numbers. But the bit that catches my eye – the bit that Hal has to be talking about – is at the top. “A servants’ ball? As in, a ball for the servants?”
“It was a thing they did. Servants had the night off and got to have a big party, dancing – a ball. And the family would come down to their dining hall and dance with them, and sometimes they’d act as their servants…stuff like that. It was the only time they actually got to interact as people. Just for one night.”
“How do you know all that?”
Hal wrinkles his nose. It makes him look about eleven years old. “I like history. But look – a ball.” He jabs his finger at the paper triumphantly.
“Exactly what a romantic story needs, I guess. And they danced. They danced!” The roller-coaster feeling in my stomach is back, and a shiver runs the full length of my spine. I’m not sure if it’s because of the story or because a picture of being spun around a ballroom by Hal flashes through my head and is gone again before I can even work out where it came from.
“But this is the best part. You keep saying we need proof?”
“I was talking more about the history of the house, but…”
I stop talking as he slides one more page across the table in front of me.
Thank you for the ribbon you enclosed with your letter, and which gives me cause to hope. I will keep it with me always, to remind me of how it felt to dance with you in a room full of people.
It’s addressed to my Iris, and signed with an A, on the same monogrammed paper.
The roller coaster meets the shiver, and turns into a cloud of furiously fluttering butterflies inside me.
“This is it, right?”
“This is really it, Flora. I told you I don’t believe in coincidences. It’s them. It’s definitely them. It’s real.”
Hal’s eyes are blazing, and his voice is full of light and life, and suddenly the room feels both smaller and larger at the same time.
The butterflies in my stomach swirl in formation.
“‘To dance with you in a room full of people…’”
“Sorry?” Hal catches my words, even though they were muttered under my breath.
“Oh. Nothing. I was just thinking – that’s kind of a weird thing to say, isn’t it? Why not just say, ‘how it felt to dance with you’? Why the ‘room full of people’?”
“Because,” he says, finishing my thought for me, “they were used to being together. Just not where anyone could see them.”
It makes perfect, perfect sense. “Of course! They aren’t meant to be together, but they are. In secret. He’s wealthy, she’s the maid…imagine if they got caught! She’d lose her job and be out of the house like that.” I snap my fingers.
“And nothing would happen to him, obviously, because…”
“Because society only punished women for that kind of thing?” I raise an eyebrow at him.
The faintest tinge of pink passes across his cheeks. “I was just about to say that, actually.”
It’s very hard not to laugh. Very hard.
Everything feels different this morning: the library, the paperwork, the whole hotel. Hal.
Me.
I feel different. I feel…almost like me again. Like I’ve been wearing a mask, a shell, a suit of armour – and suddenly I can let it open just a little, because in here it doesn’t matter. I don’t need it so much. Do I?
The school nurse’s shoe squeaks as she leads me down the corridor to the office. Only one shoe – not both. And it suddenly seems so important that she knows that I want to yell it at her at the top of my voice. I would, too, if my head didn’t feel so weird. They don’t know what to do with me – should they punish me? Should they call a doctor? They leave me on the little sofa in the office reception while they decide. Outside, a couple of Year Sevens lean around the door to stare at me. “Is she okay?” one of them whispers to the other. I’m about to tell them I’m fine, to get lost, when I realize my face is wet. I’m crying, and I didn’t even notice. And now that I know, I can’t seem to stop.
I peer into the closest box. “Is the ribbon in there?”
“No. I checked. Maybe it got lost, or fell apart?”
“Or maybe he really did keep it with him.”
“Maybe.” He considers this, his eyes fixed on a spot somewhere halfway up the shelves covering the walls. “There’s been nothing of hers, though. Only his. Why?”
“You mean there are no letters from her – all these are technically hers, aren’t they? He wrote them to her. Maybe they got packed up and moved to an archive or something. Maybe the only reason these are here is because they got put away and forgotten, or lost. Maybe she hid them somewhere and then couldn’t get to them again?”
“Because it was a secret?” Hal scratches at his eyebrow.
“Exactly! We’re always finding stuff in the rooms – things people have hidden and then forgotten. Maybe that’s what happened.”
This seems to catch his attention, because he folds himself into the nearest chair, stretching his legs out in front of him and looking curiously at me. “Stuff like what?”
“Small things, mostly. Although Mira did find an engagement ring once, shoved under a mattress. It was still in its box.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “I’m guessing things didn’t go to plan.”
“And what about you? What have you found?”
“A pair of shoes.”
“Shoes?”
“I know.” I lean on the table just along from where he’s sitting. “It sounds rubbish. But they were…I don’t know. They felt like they were special.”
“Shoes?” he says again – but it’s the warmth in his voice that I hear.
Even though I found them ages ago, back when this was just a Saturday job, I can still see them. “They were black patent shoes, with a strap across the front – the kind little girls wear to parties. You know the kind I mean?”
“Not personally.”
“Well, you get the idea. They were really small, maybe for a six or seven year old? And they were sitting in the cupboard by the bed, all lined up.”
Why are you telling him this? Why does he even care about you finding somebody else’s shoes in a cupboard two years ago?
I don’t know. All I know is that telling him feels…easy.
From his chair, Hal watches me. His expression doesn’t change, but his eyes do. They soften and warm, and the colour of them shimmers from faded blue to sea-green. The line of his jaw shifts…and everything about him is a question. A puzzle. A secret.