at Burstead. How, when a girl was called in for a flogging, she would be surrounded by an army of onlookers – those men, tyrants past, with their shining eyes and satisfied smirks, their portraits as immovable as the headmaster’s intention, and she would stand in the red punitive glow of the stained-glass window and bite her lip while the first lash came…
Afterwards, when they couldn’t decide how the tragedy had happened, they brought us all in for a whipping; perhaps they thought the belt would draw it out of us as cleanly as it drew blood to the skin. The difficulty was that nobody except me knew the truth. Nobody else had been there. They sensed a secret, dark and dreadful, rippling through the dormitories like an electrical charge, but I was the only girl who knew and I wasn’t about to share it. So I kept my lips shut and I let the lashes come for me and for the others, and time passed and term ended and school finished not long after that.
I blink, and take my gloves off.
‘Where are the children?’ I ask. ‘I should like to introduce myself.’
Tom gives me a strange look. ‘The captain asked us to settle you in first, miss. The twins can get overexcited. They like to play games.’
‘Well, they’re children, aren’t they?’
He pauses, as if my query might have some other answer.
‘What happened to their previous governess? The woman before me?’
‘She left,’ Tom replies, too quickly and smoothly for it to be the truth. ‘One morning, suddenly. We had no warning, miss, honestly. She sent word days later – a family emergency. She was mighty sad about it, hated letting the captain down. We all of us hate to let the captain down. It’d be horrible if he was let down again, wouldn’t it, miss? After the effort he’s gone to, to bring you down here. There’s only so much a man can take. The captain said there was no way round it, and the world exists outside Winterbourne whether we like it or not. Because you do feel that way, miss, here, after a while. Like Winterbourne is all there is, just the house and sea. You find you don’t need anything else.’ His expression is unfathomable, doggedly loyal.
‘Do the children miss her terribly?’ I am not sure if I am talking about the governess or the children’s mother: this pair of doomed women, for a moment, seem bound in a fundamental, terrifying way, but the thought flits free before I can catch it.
‘Of course they do,’ Tom says. ‘But they’ll warm to you even better.’
I’m about to ask my predecessor’s name – it seems important to know it – when there is a noise on the staircase: a shuffle of footsteps, a slow, lilting gait, punctuated by the unmistakable point of a cane. When my employer comes into view, I take a step back. I have never seen anyone in my life who looks like this.
‘The new governess,’ he says bluntly, twisting his cane into the stair.
For a moment I forget my name.
‘Alice Miller,’ I say at last.
The man steps forward, into a pit of shadow so that I can no longer see his face. Captain Jonathan de Grey. The name that has followed me from London, from that interview that seems like years ago in spite of it being days – from before then, even, if that were possible. ‘I trust you had a good journey,’ he says, in a peculiar, remote voice. ‘We’re very pleased that you’re here. Very pleased indeed.’
New York, present day
Rachel Wright stepped on to the podium to address her guests. Pride filled her as she took in the gallery launch, the people mingling, the inspiring artworks and the sheer transformation of the space she had purchased six months ago from rundown warehouse to edgy exhibition. Immediately, she felt his eyes on her.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Paul, her assistant, announced as he tapped the microphone. ‘May I introduce the woman responsible for tonight: Founder and Director of the Square Peg Gallery – Rachel Wright!’ Paul smiled as he led the applause. He wanted to please her. Everyone did. Rachel commanded respect. Little was known about her private life and the care with which she protected it was a point of staunch admiration. Paul and the others knew about the big thing, of course. But nobody mentioned it.
‘Thank you all for being here tonight,’ Rachel began. ‘And thanks especially to our sponsors, without whom none of this would be possible – in particular White Label Inc. and G&V Assets.’ She deliberately named his firm second; it was a stupid power thing. More applause, for them or for her, it didn’t matter. She needed their funds and they needed her association. She’d said as much in her pitch. Where was their commitment to community culture? Were their rivals delivering on social responsibility? She remembered launching her petition in his boardroom, the way his black eyes had trained into her as they trained into her now, challenging her. How did he always manage it? Rachel could present to sponsors from here to Milan, could sit opposite the greatest creatives in the world, but with him, well, he made her feel the spotlight. It was the excitement of their arrangement, she supposed.
‘If this gallery hasn’t stopped to breathe, then neither have I,’ Rachel told her audience, thinking of the three hours’ sleep she had grown accustomed to snatching; of the caffeine she lived off and the cigarettes she was trying to give up but that sometimes pushed her that extra hour into the night, of the determination – ‘my mother had another word for it,’ she joked – that took an idea out of one’s head and made it a reality; of the team she’d had behind her; of her Upper West Side apartment that she never spent any time in and that had become overtaken by work. Talking about the gallery was like talking about herself, for she had given everything to it over the past eighteen months. Art was her passion and her purpose. She had always found sanctuary in it, in its possibility and lack of boundary, in its subjectivity and beauty, in its strength to innovate and energise, to change minds and start dialogues. Since she could remember, she’d been happiest staring into a painting or admiring a sculpture, imagining the stories that went into it and, in doing so, she was able to forget her own.
As always when Rachel spoke in front of big crowds, she wound up feeling they were waiting for more. Perhaps they were. They knew, after all, what had happened to her back in 2012. It had been in the papers, talked about over breakfast tables. Did they expect her to reference it? She wondered, sometimes, if she should. That maybe if she mentioned it once, that would be enough. That would sate their curiosity about whether it was an event she acknowledged and accepted, an event she had dealt with. Perhaps she didn’t ever bring it up because she hadn’t dealt with it.
Her speech closed to the sound of rapturous appreciation. Rachel dared herself to find his face. It wasn’t difficult. She could just imagine the scent of his aftershave, which she caught when they embraced, just inside the angle of his shirt collar.
*
Of course he followed her back from the launch. Mutually they had decided not to be seen together in public. On the surface neither wanted their position to be compromised – his investment muddied the waters somewhat – but deep down it was their shared reluctance to commit. A no-strings arrangement suited both fine. Secret liaisons at her apartment or his heightened the thrill. Being linked officially made it too serious, too much of a fact. Rachel wasn’t ready for that. She liked the emotional distance.
She was stepping into the shower when she heard the buzzer go.
‘Aaron.’ She answered the door in her gown. ‘It’s two a.m. Can’t you sleep?’
He grinned. ‘Not without you.’ He leaned in and she turned her face away, just a fraction, to tease him, even though she knew she would let herself be kissed.
‘You were sensational tonight,’ he said, his arms looping round her waist.
‘Thank you.’
‘I mean it. I was impressed.’
She could never tell how sincere he was being.