The Shadow in the Glass JJA Harwood (book recommendations for young adults txt) 📖

pretended she’d never even seen the inside of a coal scuttle and smoothed down all her sharpness. She would become the pretty, perfect thing she had no choice but to be.

She would not make a wish. The black-eyed woman would get no more blood from her.

Of course, finding a patron might be easier if her neighbours visited. But Eleanor could not remember the last time she’d spoken to someone who wasn’t a servant or a shopkeeper. Bessie was hardly a companion: she went out at every opportunity, and when she was in the house she was working. Eleanor didn’t even get any letters; she had only Charles to write to her, and his father had forbidden it.

She missed the way Charles’s eyes softened when he looked at her, the way he murmured her name, all his secret smiles. Sometimes she dreamed they had run off together, and he sat beside her while their child grew, and when she awoke her grief throbbed like an old wound.

The back door opened. Bessie had come home.

Eleanor got up, desperate for company that would take her mind off Charles. Bessie shut the door behind her, humming, and took a few steps down the hall. Then, she stopped, and Eleanor heard the rustling of paper. No, Eleanor thought, her temper rising. Bessie wouldn’t dare.

Eleanor burst out of the drawing room. Bessie had her hand in the letter basket. She flinched, turned, and knocked the letters all over the hallway floor.

‘What do you think you are doing, Bessie?’ Eleanor snapped.

Bessie still had her shawl on. She folded it neatly over her arm as she spoke. ‘Checking through your letters, miss.’

Eleanor flinched. ‘You admit you’re going through my correspondence?’

‘’Course I am,’ said Bessie, without a trace of guilt. ‘It’s what I’m paid for.’

‘It is not what you are paid for,’ Eleanor snapped, ‘you are my maid! You are here to cook, and clean, and that is all! How dare you speak to your employer this way?’

Bessie grinned. ‘Ain’t you who pays my wages, miss.’

She winked at Eleanor and strolled back into the kitchen.

The next day, Eleanor waited in line at the duty sergeant’s desk, praying that nobody had recognized her when she came in. After weeks away from the press and clamour of London, it seemed louder than ever. Noise pressed in on every side. Constables trooped in and out, rattling keys, whistling, calling for telegraph boys. A woman in a threadbare dress trudged past, her shawl draped over her hands; Eleanor caught the jingle of handcuffs as she passed. From a distant corridor came the sounds of the cells – drunken singing, crying, a truncheon clattering against the bars. The station was not far from Mayfair; Charles might have seen her go inside, and what would he think then? Eleanor forced her shoulders down and kept her head held high, determined not to seem furtive. She had done nothing wrong.

She reached the sergeant’s desk and asked to see Inspector Hatchett. She was shown into his office and the Inspector stood up at once, stooping a little.

‘Miss Hartley! This is a surprise. How can I assist you?’

Eleanor sat down. ‘You once told me, Inspector, that if any of the maids at Granborough House should find themselves in trouble I should come to you.’

The Inspector snatched up his notebook, his face dark.

‘One of the maids is in particular danger,’ Eleanor said, relief flooding through her as he scribbled her words down. ‘A young woman named Aoife Flaherty, fifteen years old. I saw Mr Pembroke conversing with her in a corridor. He means her harm, I know it!’

‘Miss Hartley, conversing in a corridor is hardly a criminal offence.’

‘You didn’t hear him!’ Eleanor snapped. ‘He was … insinuating things. And whenever she had to be alone with him she always came back in tears! She was so frightened – she’s fifteen, Inspector!’

The Inspector laid his pen aside. He rubbed his eyes, letting out a long sigh.

‘Miss Hartley,’ he said, ‘I am aware of the kind of man that Mr Pembroke is. I do not doubt it when you say that your friend is in danger. But what do you expect me to do? I need more evidence to pursue this further.’

Eleanor felt sick with disbelief. ‘Will you wait until she is attacked?’

The Inspector’s jaw tightened. ‘I cannot pursue this case without evidence. My hands are tied.’

Eleanor stood up. The Inspector had offered to help her, but she may as well have been screaming into the void for all the good he’d done her.

‘Then you will excuse me, Inspector,’ she said, desperately trying to rein in her temper. ‘I do not have time to wait for Justice to remove her blindfold.’

Eleanor wrote letter after letter until her shoulders ached and her hands began to cramp. It was the only way she could think of to help Aoife. Eleanor seethed as she wrote. The Inspector had been worse than useless, she thought. Why would no one help her? Inspector Hatchett, Mr Pembroke, Mrs Fielding, even Lizzie – all of them were supposed to have had the maids’ best interests at heart, and all of them had let her down. Now, Eleanor was reduced to begging from strangers, calling on connections she could barely remember because they could not be trusted. It made her want to spit.

Among all her letter-writing, Eleanor often thought of Leah, too. It was hard not to. If things had been different it might have been Eleanor scrabbling in the street, and Leah tucked up in a warm, clean bed. But Leah, she realized, would be easier to help than Aoife. Eleanor could find Leah without Mr Pembroke breathing down her neck.

Not that she would use a wish. There were far too few of them for that – only three left now, and that included the one she must never use. She wrote to the workhouses instead. Leah must have given birth by now and with a child to think of, surely she would have to go there. Eleanor’s