“If you finish your dinner,” for instance, “you will be given an extra custard.”
Or, “Girls who wash their feet deserve a finer pair of shoes.”
Or, “You may do whatever you like, so long as you leave me in peace this afternoon.”
To these and other inducements, Molly answered with defiance, until at last she swept through the house like an unchecked fire, and all that Mrs. Wickware could do was treat her own burns.
Leeches kept appearing in the unlikeliest places: baked into Mrs. Wickware’s puddings, folded into her towels, writhing in her bedsheets. One slithered from a bookshelf and landed in her hair. The weekly bleedings were abandoned and the earthenware jar was taken from the house, and yet the leeches not only persisted but increased in size and number.
Nicholas stole Mrs. Wickware’s personal belongings. At first he merely moved them into adjoining drawers or rooms; she assumed that she herself, scatterbrained and often tipsy, was responsible. Later he kept whatever he took and encouraged the staff to follow his lead, provided every item was delivered straight to him.
By midwinter, Mrs. Wickware was starting her days with wine and ending them with peach brandy. She continued to wake at daybreak, but Molly woke earlier to dress herself, eat a secret breakfast in her room, and spy on her governess’s movements through the keyhole.
One morning she heard the clink of the decanter on a glass once, twice, three times before a glow filled the hearth and Mrs. Wickware could finally be seen, disheveled in her nightgown. The governess lifted her personal lockbox onto a table and opened it using a key she wore at all times around her neck. Her firelit face immediately shadowed. She clawed through the box and finally overturned it, scattering the contents on the table and still not finding what she wanted. Then she ran toward the keyhole, fumbled for the bedroom key, and opened the door to find Molly, prettily dressed, standing there before her with a curious expression.
“Where is it?” Mrs. Wickware said, leaning close to Molly’s face. “What have you done with it? You have to give it back!”
“What?” Molly asked.
Mrs. Wickware shook her by the arms, repeating herself and panting with a sweet-sour breath. But since Nicholas or one of the servants must have stolen the item in question, Molly’s puzzlement was wholly unfeigned and Mrs. Wickware could spot no glimmer of deceit. She released Molly’s arms and backed away, seeming about to fall and supporting herself in the doorframe.
“It was my husband’s,” Mrs. Wickware said. “My husband, dead and gone … I keep it to remind me of him. Please, Molly, please. It is worthless, but to me— Oh, you must give it back! You won’t be punished, not a whit. You don’t believe me. No, of course! You’re worried I’ll be angry. Leave it out where I will find it, anywhere at all, and we will never have to speak of it again. You have my promise!”
Molly watched without a word—even with the firelight behind her, Mrs. Wickware’s tears were easily discerned—and took a small step forward, reaching out to hold the governess’s hand.
Mrs. Wickware flinched like a child from a wasp. She retreated into her own room, inhaled sharply through her nose, and tried to conceal her trembling limbs by hugging herself and narrowing her stance.
“I’m sorry,” Molly said. “I don’t know what you’ve lost.”
Mrs. Wickware staggered from the warmth in Molly’s voice, unsure if it was innocence or masterful dissembling. Either way it meant despair—her treasure had been taken—so Mrs. Wickware returned to her table in a slump, where she locked the rest of her possessions into the box and raised her glass of sherry.
She had poured the drink in the dark, but now that the fire had brightened the room, she was able to see the dead, tumid leech in her decanter. She shoved it away with a spasm of her arm, overturning the decanter and spilling the sherry upon the rug, but after staring at the leech where it lay inside the crystal, she turned to the glass she had already poured and drank anyway, moaning as she gulped.
* * *
Before the dawn of a late winter day, Mrs. Wickware awoke from a dream in which she and her husband rode together in a hansom. He was younger than she had known him in life, ruddy with success—he had just cured a government minister’s daughter of dropsy—and was wearing a splendid blue ribbon on the tail of