Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
A long, low baritone rumble boomed up from the burning hole in the floor of the ballroom with its ranks of clockwork nurses, each beside a steel framed bed where the defaced portrait of a plump blonde woman in an old-fashioned nurse's uniform presided over all.
Frowning, Mrs. Schmidt, the newly promoted housekeeper paused, vinegar-soaked newspaper in hand, atop the strange little metal stepladder she'd found one hot, ashy morning in the middle of the perpetually dirty ballroom - the gardening man was very loud today.
Which meant Mrs. Schmidt would have to be especially careful around the Master.
Seeing without seeing, the dark girl watched the mechanical nurses shift as one towards the source of the call, heads cocked identically towards the cold-burning hole in the ornate parquet floor.
The gardening man spent a lot of time singing wordlessly in the wine cellar beneath the pale flames of the burning floor among the voles and field mice –Mrs. Schmidt, who by way of promotion had been married to the house, learned to hear him without listening just as she deliberately notice the little brown birds who sang and nested among the thick vines printed on the wallpaper as the days grew warmer.
'Tis perfectly normal for birds fly out of wallpaper and a red fox to watch you from the latticed shadows of blackened beams overhead as you bring the Master his tea and crumpets!
As for Mr. Sebastian, after telling her one morning she was now married to the rambling structure with a sideways little laugh, he'd sent her to the wine cellar to fetch a bottle for the Master's lunch, and then another, and then another. While on one of her repeat trips, she'd noticed without noticing that the ceiling, which was the ballroom floor above, wasn't on fire with no gardening man in sight!
This realization sent Mrs. Schmidt to her knees clutching her head among the old jumble of sun-warmed blackened stones and shattered wine bottles where lizards sunned and slow worms left long trails in the dust beneath the wildly tangled blackberry thicket she'd had to push her way through to get to the bottles the Master demanded an endless supply of.
"Ouch!"
Blinking back the white-hot stars too much direct thinking caused, Mrs. Schmidt shook her head in its lace cap, deliberately sidestepping the pain before she could be distracted from her unthoughts— and why did the heavily bundled up gardening man with his trailing heavy cables only sing faint scratchy sounding tenor songs in the ornate glass hothouse with its melon vines and little orange trees, grapes heavy overhead, crippled wife silent at his feet smiling blindly upward all wrapped in dirty ragged blankets?
The hothouse was far nicer than the wine cellar – you'd think (ow) he'd be singing arias among the orchids! It was almost as odd as the violin she found beneath the little bed in the plain room with its little parlor just off the kitchens her promotion had gained her!
There'd been a note inside the little stack of sheet music inside the battered case, which read, "Thought this might keep you company, my dear dark lady. Yours with all my humble heart, Tommy A. P.S. Would you some afternoon after tea, care for a duet? I shall bring my flute should the door in the Liminal ever let me in."
Flutes? Doors? Don't be silly!
Anyway, if Mrs. Schmidt was a slave, why could she (ow) read? Slaves, especially black slaves like her, weren't supposed to be able (ow) to read AT ALL, especially sheet music, Mrs. Beeton, or messily scrawled notes on blue lined paper in red ink… (ow)
Mrs. Schmidt put a hand to her forehead – the little stabs and jabs of pain getting easier to bear the more she practiced thinking without thinking, seeing without seeing. Ignoring the deeply unhappy moans underfoot, she began dusting the mechanical nurses while giving the stinkeye to the memories of charred curtains and Persian carpets waiting for her to turn her back so they could return… creep-creep-creepity-cree—
"Don't you dare!" Mrs. Schmit cried, and then clutched her head.
"…dare…dare…dare…" the room echoed mockingly back at her, startled little brown birds flying unseen but seen upwards into the hot cloudless blue sky overhead.
Eventually, Mrs. Schmidt straightened, wiping sweat from her forehead with the stolen silk hankie she'd stolen from the Mistress and kept tucked into her sleeve, "Oh, that was a bad one." She murmured, "Well, this room won't stay clean by itself!"
"Moooooooooooooooooooo…. Oooooooo…..ooooooooo…?" the gardening man's low cry spiraled up from the hole in the pale burning parquet as if agreeing with her.
"Oh, shush!" Mrs. Schmidt snapped while scrubbing the baseboards where the filth she'd removed out the day before had snuck back in, a bright-eyed coppery little snake slithering away from her efforts with a struggling grasshopper in its mouth. "Nobody's interested in what you have to say!"
"OOooaAAAAooooooooooo…" the gardening man moaned apologetically.
Mrs. Schmidt scowled: the rusty brown stain beside the hole was back.
She'd removed it and polished the parquet it hid so that it shone like new yesterday with elbow grease and the tin of floor polish she'd found on her washstand along with another note, which she hadn't bothered to read. Pocketing the tin and her favorite polishing cloth (a piece torn from the stained white apron decorated with a red cross she'd found among the mountains of dirty laundry), Mrs. Schmidt refilled her old rusty bucket from the courtyard pump in a swirl of ash, added a few curls of lye soap, grabbed the worn brush from beside the eternally dish-filled scullery sink, and got down on her hands and knees, furiously scrubbing, the ticking nurses stirring and twitching around her deliberately unheeded.
"Ooooo… moooOOOoooooOOO?" it almost sounded as if the gardening man was asking her a cautious question.
"What makes you so special so that you can laze about?" Mrs. Schmidt exclaimed mid-scrub, the boards beneath her tired hands weathered and rough, "You should be out pulling weeds or polishing the lawn or whatever it is you do when you're not tending the melons!" Wiping sweat from her eyes, Mrs. Schmidt sat back on her heels, a delicate stippling of pain dancing behind her eyes, "Least you could do instead of grizzling down there is help with the cleaning!"
Cleaning… "Keep scrubbing, never stop. If I stop, the filth comes back when I'm not looking– filth, filth…how I'd love to dump this filthy water on the Mistress's pretty red shoes… it'd be worth another beating…
"Oooooooo…ooooooooo…" the gardening man below sounded like he agreed that the Mistress needed a thorough application of dirty water even as the boards of the floor she was scrubbing became satin smooth.
…not just the Mistress's shoes, but that scandalously knee-baring skirt – like a whore, splash! Just like the Wicked Witch of the West, only plump and blonde… splash…nasty water everywhere… yo, bitch! Who's the Wicked Witch of the West now, huh?
"Owwwwwww!"
Mrs. Schmidt dropped the worn scrub brush and clutched her forehead, rocking.
"Ohhhhh… shush!" she snarled from between gritted teeth before lugging the heavy bucket and worn brush past the tumble of scorched clockwork nurses frozen mid-tumble one by one into the hole, faces half-melted like so many altar candles.
"Ohhhhhhh…errrrRRRRRMMMM?" The lowing noise trailed off questioningly beneath her sensible shoes.
Mrs. Schmidt cautiously leaned over the jagged edge on all fours to peer irritibly down at the broken bottles, flames, and the large heat-blurred being below.
Something behind the housekeeper… scuttled.
Mrs. Schmidt froze, telling herself it was just… rats.
(Only rats don't have little human faces and six legs which click like bones.)
She stood and cautiously backed away, bucket and brush in hand, mind deliberately blank.
It's. Just. Rats.
She then eased the bucket and brush to the floor.
Rats, is all.
Rats meant she needed to set out more traps like Mrs. Beeton advised, and hope Mr. Sebastian would empty them for her so she wouldn't have to question why rats had hard, segmented shells like woodlice and no tails as she drowned them in the rain barrel beside the scullery door. Or for that matter, why the wide-mouthed butler would be all but purring after taking care of such dirty matters for her. It was almost as if he'd had a really, really nice bit of seed cake with his afternoon tea…
Just don't think about it, thought Mrs. Schmidt as she bent to glare down at the annoying stain, one hand absently slipping the heavy revolver laying near the stubborn stain into her apron pocket along with a few shiny brass cartridges. Just don't think about it.
The gardening man sounded like he agreed.
But tonight, the calf is alive and in the north field with his mother.