Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

The maid looked down at the floor. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Good, then see you follow the procedure extremely carefully, because this gentleman — being an Englishman — is something of an expert when it comes to the question of tea.’

She had said it lightly, almost as a joke to put the girl at ease, but Jenny took it deathly seriously.

‘I’ll do my best, ma’am,’ she said. ‘I always do my best.’

‘I know you do,’ Mary said, kindly.

The girl couldn’t have been more than two or three years older than Isobel O’Brien, Blackstone thought, as he watched the maid leave, but there was a world of difference between them. Isobel, while she clearly knew her place in the order of things, was open and confident. Jenny, on the other hand, had a pinched, haunted face and wore her insecurity like a thick, suffocating blanket.

‘You’re quite right, Mr Blackstone, she is a frightened little thing,’ Mary O’Brien said.

‘I never meant to. .’ Blackstone began.

‘Other people we are acquainted with hire their maids through agencies,’ Mary said. ‘We take ours from the orphanage, and because my husband is the man he is, he invariably chooses the girls that, for one reason or another, no one else wants to take. They are always difficult at first, but I persevere with them, and train them until they are first-class housemaids. And then Patrick finds them a position in a much grander establishment, and we begin the process all over again.’ She gulped. ‘I’m talking about him as if he were still alive, aren’t I?’

‘That’s understandable,’ Blackstone said.

‘And worse than that, I’m talking as if I disapproved of what he did, and I never meant to suggest that. He was right to help the girls to better themselves — he wanted everyone to better themselves.’

‘I’m sure he did,’ Blackstone said soothingly.

‘You really shouldn’t be alone in this apartment, you know, Mary,’ Meade said.

‘But I’m not alone,’ Mary replied. ‘I have my children and my faithful Jenny with me.’

‘But no one whose shoulder you can allow yourself to cry on,’ Meade pointed out.

Mary sighed. ‘I try to convince myself that I’m waiting for the right moment to tell the children about what happened to their father,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t true. What I am really doing is trying to gather up enough strength to tell them. But until I have told them, everything must go on as normal, and if the house was suddenly flooded with sobbing relatives and friends, it wouldn’t take the children long to work out that something was wrong, now would it?’

‘You can’t afford to leave it too long before you tell them,’ Alex Meade said.

‘I know I can’t,’ Mary replied. ‘It’s impossible to keep them imprisoned in this apartment for ever, and the moment they step out in the wider world, they’re bound to hear it from someone else. And so, sometime soon — perhaps as soon as you leave — I will tell them.’

‘I could do it,’ Meade suggested, though it was clear from the expression on his face that it was not a job he would relish.

‘You’re a sweet boy, Alex. .’ Mary said.

‘I meant it!’ Meade protested.

‘I know you did, but it really is my responsibility.’ Mary took a deep breath, and then continued. ‘But this is not what you’re here to talk about. You came to ask me some questions, so please ask them.’

‘Do you know anything about the case your husband was working on when he died?’ Meade asked.

‘ The case?’ Mary repeated. ‘Patrick never worked on just one case in his entire career. He saw abuse and corruption everywhere, you see, and he wanted to end it all at once. He did the work of ten men, but, of course, however hard he tried, he could never really hold back the tide.’

Jenny returned, clutching the tea tray so tightly that her knuckles had turned quite white.

‘Shall I. . shall I pour it, ma’am?’ she asked, laying the tray fearfully on the table, as if she thought that — even at this late stage in the process — something was about to go disastrously wrong.

‘No, I’ll serve, thank you,’ Mary said.

But still Jenny lingered, almost — Blackstone thought — as if she was desperate to hear what they were talking about.

‘Is there something else, Jenny?’ Mary asked.

‘I–I was wondering what the master would like for his supper, so I can begin. .’

‘The master will not be dining at home this evening,’ Mary told her.

The news seemed to unnerve the girl. ‘Then what shall I. .? I mean, there’s things. .’

‘One of the virtues that I’ve endeavoured to teach you is the ability to think for yourself,’ Mary said, sounding much more like the mistress of the house now. ‘And I thought I’d been fairly successful in that particular undertaking.’

‘Oh, you have, ma’am.’

‘Then I see no need to break off my conversation with these gentlemen in order to give you specific instructions. Look around the apartment, see what needs to done, and do it.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Jenny said, then she bobbed down into an awkward curtsy and fled.

‘She’s normally much better than this,’ Mary said. ‘In fact, of all the maids who’ve passed through this apartment, she’s one of my biggest successes.’

‘It’s probably our unexpected visit which has unsettled her,’ Blackstone suggested.

‘It probably is,’ Mary O’Brien agreed. She shook her head sadly from side to side. ‘She’ll have to go, of course — the poor little thing. I simply can’t afford to keep her on now that we won’t be receiving Patrick’s salary any more. I’m not even sure the rest of us will be able to go on living here.’

Meade coughed. ‘I’d. . I’d be more than prepared to loan you some money,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t take it,’ Mary said immediately.

‘Why ever not?’

‘Because I have no means of ever paying you back.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to pay me back.’

Mary O’Brien fixed Meade with a penetrating gaze. ‘You offered to give Patrick that same kind of loan, didn’t you, Alex?’ she asked.

Meade squirmed like a bug under a microscope. ‘I’m a rich man,’ he said. ‘And I so admired what your husband was doing that I wanted to free him from the daily concerns of having to-’

‘But Patrick wouldn’t accept that kind of loan from you, would he?’ Mary said, in a voice which would not be denied an honest answer.

‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Meade admitted, like a guilty schoolboy who has realized there is nowhere left to hide.

‘If Patrick wouldn’t accept it, then neither can I.’ Mary lifted the teapot. ‘I’d better pour the tea before it goes cold.’

‘I know you said that your husband always worked on several cases at once,’ Blackstone said, ‘but I was wondering if there was one case that he was giving special attention to.’

‘Patrick never talked about his work at home,’ Mary said. ‘I think he was trying to protect me from the seedier side of life.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Why is it, Mr Blackstone, that all men — even a thoughtful, understanding man like my Patrick — so underestimate the characters of their women that they are forever trying to shield them? Some women don’t want to be shielded.’

‘No,’ Blackstone agreed, thinking of one of his women — Dr Ellie Carr — with whom he had once hoped to make a life. ‘Some women don’t.’

‘I do know, if this is of any help to you, that Patrick has been spending a great deal of his time recently in the Lower East Side,’ Mary O’Brien said. ‘But the person who you should really be talking to about Patrick’s investigations is his partner, Sergeant Saddler.’