Chapter 9

The Duty Roster

The head maid Martha's room was across from the half-basement laundry, next to the servants' dining hall, and when one opened the door, the smell of starched aprons and beeswax reached the nose first. Martha, fifty years old, wore her grey hair pinned up without a single strand out of place, and even when she sat, she did not let her back touch the back of the chair. At what hour the twenty maids of this manor rose in the morning and at what hour they lay down at night, which rooms they swept and which silver they polished in between, was all decided in this room.

Sion Arden sat before the narrow table in that room. When he said he had come with His Grace the Duke's permission, Martha merely nodded once, without expression. Then she took a thick ledger from the cupboard and set it down on the table. It was the duty roster from two years ago.

"You're looking for the day the basket was packed."

"That's right. The basket Her Grace sent to House Harold."

The ledger Martha turned to show him had one week to a page, with the days of the week written across and numbers written down the side, and every cell crammed with short symbols. Sion peered at the cells and, realizing there was not a single name among them, frowned.

"You don't write down the maids' names?"

"I write numbers. If I write names, the girls peek at each other's duties and complain. If I write numbers, only I know."

Martha's finger stopped at the cell for the Thursday ten days after the engagement was announced, and that cell held more symbols than the others, so Sion struggled for some time to read it. A few numbers, an arrow, and, written small in the corner, the letters "sub."

"What is this?"

"A substitution. A day when the girls traded duties among themselves. If someone's ill or has family business, or if their days off simply clash with someone else's, they trade. They need only my permission."

"Does it happen often?"

"Two or three times a week. They're young girls."

Sion copied the numbers in that cell into the small new notebook he had bought, and this time he did not open the notebook on the table but wrote on his knee. Martha saw this and moved her eyebrows for the briefest moment, but asked nothing.

"Can you tell who these numbers are?"

"If I had that year's number list."

Martha opened the cupboard again and this time searched it for a long while; she took out a few sheets of paper tucked between the ledgers, leafed through them, and at length shook her head.

"The number list is drawn up fresh every spring. Because girls come and go. The one from two years ago... it seems I threw out the old one when I drew up the new list last spring. My mistake."

"Do you remember nothing?"

"Sir, this manor has twenty maids, and two years ago it had twenty-three. Seven of them have left since. If there were a head maid who could remember who traded duties with whom on some Thursday two years ago, I would hand this room over to her."

There was no edge in Martha's voice; it was simply the voice of someone stating a fact. Sion closed the notebook with the numbers in it. There were numbers, but no people for those numbers to point to.

"Then what do you remember about the basket?"

Unlike when she had searched for the number list, Martha did not hesitate in the least at this question.

"I had three girls pack the baskets. Her Grace's lady's maid Elsa brought the list, and the girls took the goods out of the pantry and packed them. They were finished around sundown, but the coachman Hans said he had to rest the horses that evening, so it was loaded and sent off the following morning. So the basket spent that night in the pantry."

"Is the pantry locked?"

"It's locked at night. The keys are held by me, the cook, and Mr. Claude. And one more is held by whichever of the maids has the morning duty that week. She has to take out the bread dough at dawn."

"Who had the morning duty that week?"

Martha looked again at that week in the ledger. Beside the single number written in the morning-duty cell, an arrow had been drawn in the Thursday cell alone. A substitution.

"Without the number list, I couldn't say, Sir."

Leaving Martha's room, Sion opened his notebook again. The basket was packed at dusk and spent a night in the pantry. Four keys to the pantry: Martha, the cook, the butler, and that week's morning maid. The morning maid traded duties with someone on Thursday, and who that someone was had vanished along with the discarded number list.

Then those who could have laid hands on that basket that night did not stop at the four with keys. Keys could be borrowed, doors could be left unlocked by someone who forgot, and any one of the twenty-three maids could hide her name in that single cell where duties had been traded.

Halfway up the servants' stairs, Sion stopped on the landing, struck through the arrow he had drawn beside the duchess's name twice, and wrote beneath it: twenty-three maids.

That evening Adelaide Crowell stood at the window of her study, looking down toward the servants' entrance. The news that the knight had gone to the head maid's room had already reached her ears around midday. In this manor, when someone went down to the half-basement, the news took less than an hour to climb the stairs.

She returned to her desk and lifted the board of the drawer. On the first page of the black notebook, she stopped her finger among the small writing beneath the first line. It concerned the night before the Harold basket left the manor.

That night she had been unable to sleep and stayed late in her study. It was the tenth day since the engagement had been announced, and also the day she had first heard the rumor that Edwin had gambling debts. When she went downstairs a little past midnight for a drink of water, she saw, at the end of the corridor by the pantry, the back of someone carrying an oil lamp up the stairs. A woman in a grey cloak. She had written it down in the notebook. Around midnight, pantry corridor, woman in grey cloak, stairs toward the duchess's quarters.

At the time, she had taken it to be Elsa. The duchess's maids wore grey cloaks, and those stairs led to the duchess's quarters. Supposing she had come down late at night to fetch something on an errand for the duchess, Adel had drunk her water, gone back up, and slept.

Adel looked at that line for a long while. For two years that line had been nothing. Until today, when she learned that the basket had spent that night in the pantry.

Elsa left that autumn.

And it isn't only the duchess's maids who wear grey cloaks. Every winter cloak in this manor is grey.

She took up her pen and added in small writing beside that line: Likely Elsa, but unverifiable. Grey cloaks shared by all servants.

And beneath that she wrote one more line. Red Circle trading house, near the southern canal. Go in person.

As she set down her pen, there was a knock at the door. Adel put the notebook in the drawer and replaced the board. It took her the space of three breaths.

"Sister, it's me. Open the door."

It was Céline. It had been months since her half-sister had knocked on the door of her study. When Adel opened the door, Céline stood with her arms crossed, not stepping over the threshold, and said they should go to the dressmaker's together tomorrow. Mother had said Adel should have a gown made too; she herself didn't want to, but it was Mother's order, so there was nothing for it.

Adel bent her knees slightly and bowed her head to her sister, and answered in the small, trembling voice she always used in front of people.

"...Not tomorrow. There's somewhere else I have to go."

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