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was not going to be as
meager as it had been for far too long—
    While
Alison and the girls were lingering over their tart, she went upstairs and
turned down the beds, picked up the scattered garments that they had left on
the floor and laid them ready for Howse to put away. She swept out the rooms
for the last time today, then went back down to the kitchen to wait for them to
leave the table. When she heard them going back up to their rooms for the
evening, she went into the dining room again to clear the table and return the
ham and a few other items to the pantry. But she smiled as she did so, because
once she had closed the pantry door, she made a little test of opening the door
again—and found that she could.
    Ha
!
    It
was her turn to linger now, and she did so over the dishes, over cleaning the
kitchen, until she heard all four sets of heels going up the stairs to their
rooms. Then she waited, staring into the fire, until the house quieted. Oddly,
tonight there seemed to be more than a
suggestion
of creatures dancing
in the flames—once or twice she blinked and shook her head, sure she had
also seen eyes where no eyes could be.
    And
then she stole to the pantry, and opened it again. There was a faint feeling of
resistance, but nothing more. And the culinary Aladdin’s cave was open to
her plundering.
    Now,
she knew this house as no one else did, and she knew where all of the hiding
places in it were. One, in particular, was secure to herself alone. There was a
hidden hatch under the servants’ stair that for some reason her father
had never shown Alison. Perhaps it was because Eleanor had been the one to
discover it, and as a child had used it to store her secret treasures, and
sometimes even hid in it when she had been frightened by storms. The hatch
disclosed a set of narrow stone stairs that led down into a tiny stone cellar
that
he
thought was a priest’s hole, perhaps because of the
little wooden crucifix, about the size to fit on the end of a rosary, they had
found on the floor of the place. Eleanor had always thought it was a place
where Royalist spies had hidden; perhaps it had served both functions.
    Here
Eleanor kept those few things she didn’t want to fall into Alison’s
hands, such as most of the books that she had been using to study for the
Oxford entrance examinations, other volumes she managed to purloin in the
course of cleaning, and her mother’s jewelry. Alison and her daughters
didn’t know about the jewelry, and never missed the books, which didn’t
much surprise Eleanor, as they seemed singularly uninterested in reading. Now
the place was going to serve another purpose, as the repository for her stolen
bounty of food, in case Alison managed to strengthen her magic, and there was
not another chance for a while.
    For
the next hour or so she went back and forth between the pantry and the closet,
never carrying much at a time, so that if she heard Alison or the girls coming,
she could hide what she had. Jam, jelly, and marmalade, two bags of
caster-sugar, some tinned meats and bacon, tinned cream and condensed milk, and
many more imperishable things went into that cellar that night. She was very
careful not to take the
last
of anything, and in fact to take nothing
that was not present in abundance, removing items from the back of the shelf
rather than the front. By the time she was finished, she had a small wealth of
foodstuffs hidden away that made her giddy with pleasure.
    Then
she cut herself a generous slice of ham and a piece of buttered white bread to
go with her soup, cut a little slice of the tart, and added milk and sugar to
tea made with fresh leaves. And she had the first filling meal she had gotten
since Mrs.Bennett left. She felt
so
good, and
so
sleepy with
content, in fact, that she didn’t bother to go up to her own room.
Instead, she cleaned up every last trace of her illicit meal, and pulled the
pallet she used in cold weather out of its cupboard, spreading it out in