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Miss Cleo came into the room, rubbing her face, her dark flapper bob tousled from sleep.
    “What’s going on?” she said sleepily and then caught sight of Mrs. Denford. Her hand went to her mouth. After a moment, she wheeled around and walked blindly out of the room, rebounding off the doorway as she misjudged the distance. I could hear her footsteps running down the corridor and the faint sound of retching before the bathroom door slammed. After a moment, I could also hear Mrs. Carter-Knox calling faintly and querulously from her bedroom. For the moment, we all ignored her
    “We need to call a doctor,” said Mr. Manfield eventually and I leapt at the opportunity to do just that; anything to get out of the room filled with absence.
    The time in a house after a death is strange. Everything is muffled, but at the same time, individual noises are too loud. I dropped a saucepan when I was preparing lunch and the clang of it on the stone flags sent both me and Mrs. Cotting shooting into the air like fireworks. I’d worked in two houses before where someone had died. The first – and the worst – was one of the Jewish places I’d worked, where a newborn baby had smothered in its sleep, one night. Oh my goodness, that was a terrible time – even this horrible event at Asharton didn’t compare to that . No one in that house stopped crying for a week after it happened, servants and gentry alike. The second was another London place; there, the master’s brother had died after a long illness. He’d been gassed in the Great War and never really recovered. That was sad, but he’d been ill for so long that no one was really very shocked. As I chopped onions, wiping my eyes with my cuffs, I wondered whether that was the case here. Madam had been ill, after all, for months. Was that why she had died? It must be. It must be , I repeated to myself, in the privacy of my head, wondering whether I was trying to convince myself.
    Mrs. Cotting and I prepared lunch but no one was very interested in eating. We sat picking at our food and exchanging desultory remarks about nothing in particular. The mistress’s death hung over us all, but no one dared to mention it. We’d seen the doctor’s car drive off with a black hospital van behind him and knew that the mistress was taking her final trip from Asharton. I hadn’t been in the room when the doctor had arrived and I longed to ask Mrs, Smith what he had said, but knew that I couldn’t.
    The master arrived back on the express train that afternoon. We were all lined up in the hallway as he came through the front door, our hands clasped in front of us, our eyes demurely lowered. My gaze flickered up as he walked past me; his face was shut tight, like a locked box. I wondered what he was thinking or feeling. Had he loved his wife? Was he sorry that she was dead? I remembered her hissed remark to him at the dinner table that night. Was he sorry that she had gone or did he feel something more akin to relief? It was impossible to tell and I was thankful that no one around me could read my mind (or at least I hoped). I was burning to write to Verity and tell her everything, but work went on and, despite the gloom on the house, meals still had to be prepared, dishes washed, supplies ordered and everything made neat and ready for tomorrow.
    Again, I was the last one in the kitchen that night. Normally, that didn’t bother me but today I felt terribly jumpy, starting at the creaking of the floorboards in the rooms above me, jumping as the tinkle of a teaspoon in the sink sounded as loud as a clashing cymbal. I decided to make myself a mug of cocoa to take up to bed with me. It was as I was reaching for one of the cups on the row of hooks on the dresser that I realised what had been bothering me all day.
    The cups. The cups were wrong – or had been wrong - this morning, when I’d first walked into the kitchen. It seemed like a long time ago now, but I could still clearly recall that dart of