Patricia Wentworth - Pilgrim’s Rest

“I’m afraid his room is going to be rather tiresome for you. You will have to do it whilst he is in the bathroom, but that will give you quite half an hour, because he shaves there as well as having his bath. He wouldn’t shave for a long time because of the scar, but I am so glad he has begun now. He’s so sensitive about the disfigurement, and it’s so bad for him, poor fellow.”

“Doesn’t he come down at all?”

“Oh, yes, he does as a rule-on his good days. But it really is an ordeal for him to meet a stranger, and he’s dreadfully afraid of frightening your little Penny. What a perfectly lovely child she is. I don’t wonder you feel you can’t part with her. And so good!”

The last of all this was the best. Penny was being the authentic angel child, and she had gone down in the most miraculous way. It was too good to last, but just as well to begin with a buttered side. For this evening at least, Penny had done all the things which even the Victorian child was supposed to do-had said “Yes, please,” and “No, thank you,” had dropped no crumb on the floor, spilled no drip on the table, and had reserved for the privacy of the bath an enthusiastic appreciation of Miss Columba. “Wouldn’t she make a lovely big yelephant!” With a sleepy giggle Judy drifted out of waking thought.

The sun shone next day. Penny could be loosed in the garden whilst Judy coped with the housework. There was going to be quite enough of it-she could see that. Early morning tea to all the bedrooms, but she didn’t have to collect the trays. The child from the village did that. Her name was Gloria Pell, and old Pell the gardener was her grandfather. Gloria had red hair, and a free and impudent tongue when out of earshot of the Robbinses, who had somehow managed to inspire her with awe. Judy had her till eleven o’clock, when she descended to the kitchen to be at Mrs. Robbins’ beck and call. She came at eight, and stayed until six.

This first day she was being uppish and superior and showing Judy how, but friendly underneath.

“It’s not a bad place if you don’t get across Mr. Robbins. He’s a one, he is-and Mrs. Robbins too. But she’s a lovely cook. My mum says it’s a opportunity, and I’ve got to watch and see how she does everything. My mum says there’s going to be good money in cooking. My Auntie Ethel, she cooks for one of these British Restaurants, and she says they’re going to be all the thing. But I dunno. My Auntie Mabel says my hair ’ud be just right for me to go in for the hairdressing line- waves up lovely with a curler or two, only Mrs. Robbins makes me brush it flat when I come of a morning. A shame, I call it. I bet she couldn’t get her hair to curl, not if she took the kitchen poker to it.”

The house was big and rambling. Behind the Victorian glazed passage was an eighteenth-century façade, and behind that a perfect rabbit-warren of rooms on different levels, with steps going up and steps coming down, and passages all over the place. A lot of the rooms were empty. Judy said to herself, “The housemaid’s nightmare!” But it fascinated her all the same. One fairly level corridor ran right and left from the top of the stairs.

Gloria, full of importance, pointed out the room where the ceiling had fallen.

“It’s in ever such a mess, but I can’t show you, because Mr. Roger’s locked the door and taken away the key. He’s moved in next door. This is the best bedroom, on the other side of the one where the ceiling’s down. Mr. Pilgrim’s room it was. And the ceiling is all the same as the one that come down. I shouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t any too safe either. Too heavy by half, my mum says, with all those dancing girls and bunches of flowers-and not too decent, she says. She used to be under-housemaid here before she married my dad. And look at the staff they kept then! Mr. and Mrs. Robbins were here same as they are now-evergreens my mum calls them. And there was a kitchen-maid, and a house-parlour under Mr. Robbins, and a head housemaid, and my mum, and a woman to scrub, and a boy for the boots and knives.”

Judy contemplated the big room, and felt glad she would not have to do it every day. There were acres of old-fashioned Brussels carpet and a great deal of monumental Victorian furniture. But the bed was much older-a huge eighteenth-century four-poster, stripped of its curtains now, but with what looked like the original valance showing just how heavy and gloomy they must have been. The colour had gone away to a rusty brown, but where the pleats shielded it from the light there were streaks of the old deep red. The walls had a flowered paper-rose-garlands tied up with blue ribands, but there were so many pictures that they only appeared in bits. Most of the pictures were portraits. Mr. Pilgrim had obviously liked to have his family around him.

Gloria, very full of herself, did showman.

“That’s Mr. Roger when he was a baby-they didn’t ever think he’d live. And that’s Mrs. Pilgrim-she died when he was a week old. And that’s Miss Janetta and Miss Columba, took together when they was presented at Court. And that’s Mrs. Clayton-Miss Mary Pilgrim that was.”

Judy turned from a thin, gawky Miss Columba and a quite recognizable Miss Janetta, both in white satin, to the portrait of a handsome smiling young woman with a baby on her knee.

Gloria dropped her voice, but went on at full speed.

“She died quite young. That’s Mr. Henry Clayton on her lap. And that’s him grown up. My mum says he was the handsomest young gentleman you could see when that was took.”

Judy looked at the portrait of Henry Clayton. The name meant nothing to her. She had never heard it before. No shadow of the time when she was to hear it again and again reached out to touch her. She saw a lively, handsome young man of six or seven and twenty. He had his mother’s features, the dark eyes of her family, and an air of assured charm that was his own. She was aware of Gloria slipping away to the door, shutting it, and coming back again.

“The queerest start there ever was, his going off like that.”

“Did he go off?”

Gloria screwed up her eyes and widened her mouth in a most expressive grimace.

“Didn’t he just! And he wasn’t so young neither. That picture was took a long time before-he didn’t go off no more than about three years ago. He was going to be married to Miss Lesley Freyne. Lots of money she’d got, and they did say that was why he was marrying her. Anyway he come down here for the wedding, but it never come off. My mum says she wasn’t surprised-not about its being broke off, you know. But nobody knows what come of him. Three days before the wedding, and he went off and nobody’s never seen nor heard of him since. My mum says he did ought to be ashamed of himself, serving Miss Lesley the way he did. Everyone likes Miss Lesley ever so, and if she wasn’t pretty, well, he’d knowed that all along, and if he wasn’t in love with her, he knowed that too, and he didn’t ought to have gone so far- coming down for the wedding and all! My mum says she don’t wonder he couldn’t show his face here after the way he served Miss Lesley. But don’t you say I said nothing about it, because if Mrs. Robbins knowed she’d give me what for.”

She edged towards the door and opened it cautiously, as if she expected to find Mrs. Robbins with an ear to the keyhole. Confronted by an empty corridor, she giggled and resumed her narrative.

“Those two rooms opposite is the Miss Pilgrims’. This one’s Miss Netta’s-and it takes her all the morning to dress, so you can’t ever get in to do it till after twelve. That other door’s their bathroom. There’s another one at the other end of the passage past the stairs. That’s Mr. Jerome’s room next to it-and you can’t get in there except when he’s in the bathroom.” She gave Judy an impudent sideways grin. “Pretty old bag of tricks, isn’t it? And that’s Miss Day’s room opposite so she can go in to him if he gets one of his bad turns. It’s in the night he gets them. Something awful, they say. I wouldn’t sleep here, not for love nor money, and my mum wouldn’t let me neither. Shouts and calls out fit to curdle you, poor gentleman. I wouldn’t like to be you, sleeping so near.”