The Shadow in the Glass by JJA Harwood (any book recommendations txt) 📕

of the silence. Then, she’d crept along to the far end of the corridor and knocked on Charles’s bedroom door. There had been shuffling and thumping sounds coming from the other side of the door. They stopped, at once. She knocked again, and still heard nothing. She went back to her room with a lump in her throat. The next morning she found a note pushed under her bedroom door, in Charles’s rounded hand. He had urgent business in Oxford, the letter said, and had to set off immediately – three months before he had been due to go to university. He offered her the pick of all of the books in his room and a tin of gingerbread that he had hidden under his bed, and promised to write to her every week. Eleanor ran to say goodbye, but he had already gone.

Charles had not written. Eleanor had tried to tell herself that he was busy. But as days became weeks, and months became years, she realized he was never going to write at all. Now she was standing outside his room once again, with a housemaid’s box clutched in her hands and Aoife by her side, and in a few weeks’ time she was going to have to look him in the eye and stop herself from asking why he had not written to her.

Eleanor pulled herself up short. She had the wishes now. In a few weeks’ time she would not be in Granborough House. She would be somewhere decadent and splendid, eating pheasant and lobster that had been cooked specially for her, and Charles would be lucky if she deigned to notice him at all.

She pushed open the door.

Charles’s room looked like a junk shop.

In the three years he had been away from Granborough House, Charles had not come home once, and Eleanor envied him for it. He spent the university holidays with friends, or attaching himself to his professors’ expeditions. He had been everywhere. Shooting deer in the Scottish Highlands, tangled in purple heather and green bracken. Drinking red wine on the balcony of a Venetian palazzo, watching the city slowly flooding. Standing in the ruins of Pompeii, the sun bleaching the stones ash-white. But every time he went to a new place, he bought all the souvenirs within arm’s reach and sent them back to Granborough House before he moved on.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ said Aoife, leaning her brushes against the wall. ‘Where’d he get all this tat?’

Ornately worked pewter tankards were clustered around the foot of his four-poster bed. Painted scenes of ruins and fields winked up at them from china plates, several of them smashed. A cracked Venetian glass bottle lay on its side, next to a dusty stick of rock, a box of toffees, and four painted biscuit tins. Strewn across it all was a collection of cravats, handkerchiefs and scarves made of French silk, Irish linen and Indian cotton.

‘What are we supposed to do with all of it?’

Eleanor picked up the handkerchiefs and began shaking them out. She had to stop herself from checking to see if there was anything for her, even after three years of silence. ‘Put it away, I suppose. It’s all his.’

Aoife eyed the stick of rock. ‘All of it?’

Eleanor closed the door. ‘Nearly all of it.’

Aoife snatched up the stick of rock and wiped the dust off with her apron. Eleanor went for the toffees. She sat on Charles’s bed and offered the box to Aoife.

‘We’ll tell him that the mice got to it on the boat back home,’ said Eleanor, picking out a fat toffee. ‘He doesn’t ever need to know.’

Aoife hesitated. ‘You oughtn’t to sit on his bed. It’s not proper for us to sit on the furniture.’

Eleanor popped the toffee into her mouth and did not get up. Aoife was right. Servants should not sit on furniture that was reserved for their betters, but Eleanor would be damned if either Charles or his father had turned out better than her. Besides, if she was going to make herself a lady, she ought to get used to softness again.

She leant against one of the bedposts and spread out the red and gold hangings across her skirts. They suited her much better than her brown wool dress. ‘If you could do anything in the world, Aoife, what would you do?’

Aoife glanced at the door. ‘Would you get off the bed, Ella? What if someone should see you?’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘I’d cure Micheál,’ Aoife said at once. ‘Now will you stop lolling about?’

‘And after that?’

Aoife threw up her hands. ‘I don’t know! What kind of mood are you in, Ella, that you’re asking all these questions? There’s work to be done.’

Eleanor chose another toffee. ‘There’s always work to be done. And it’s always us that must do it. Don’t you think that’s unfair? Why shouldn’t we take a turn in soft beds and good clothes? Haven’t we as much right as—’

There was a shout from further down the hall – a man’s voice, incoherent and angry. Eleanor sprang off the bed at once, cramming the box of toffees under Charles’s blankets. Aoife jumped and cowered back from the door.

‘Is that the master?’ she whispered.

‘I think so. Wait,’ Eleanor said, as Aoife started for the door. ‘We’ll go together.’

Aoife nodded and waited for Eleanor to open the door. The two of them crept into the corridor, Aoife still clutching the stick of rock.

The door to Mr Pembroke’s bedroom was open. His jacket was discarded in the hallway, his coat slumped across the wide banister of the main staircase. The shouting – no, sobbing, Eleanor realized – was coming from his room. She laid a hand on Aoife’s arm and Aoife hid the stick of rock behind her back.

They shuffled towards his bedroom. The closer they got the stronger the reek of brandy became. Through the open door Eleanor could see Mr Pembroke in his shirtsleeves and a half-open waistcoat, cradling something