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

you a good deal hardier. Go and scrub the hall floor; it’ll take your mind off it.’

Eleanor curtseyed and fetched a bucket, scrubbing brush and soap, clutching her triumph tight, so that it would not show.

That Sunday, Mrs Fielding took them all to church. Mr Pembroke never went, but Mrs Fielding insisted that the maids be seen in the family pew every week, so that people would not talk. It did not work. The whole parish could see the number of maids dwindling, and Mr Pembroke hovered over them all in his absence like a malevolent ghost.

They walked to church two by two, heat already rising off the cobblestones. Deeper into Mayfair, the streets were quiet, with only the creak of water pumps and windows being opened to be heard. In those streets, Sunday was sacred. But turn a corner and the shriek and rattle of the markets rang across the road, costermongers sweating over their barrows as they tried to sell people their Sunday dinners. Little girls ran from door to door, selling watercress grown on filthy flannels. Great trays of fish stank in the heat. Cheese sweated through its muslin wrapper, kidneys dripped blood quietly onto the pavement.

Eventually the church came into view. Eleanor felt a prickle of unease. She had sold her soul. Would she be able to enter holy ground? She pinched the skin of her wrist. Of course she would. The wishes weren’t evil, surely.

Aoife sighed as they went through the lychgate. ‘Mrs Fielding, couldn’t we go to a proper church, just once?’

‘None of your papacy here, Aoife!’ Mrs Fielding hissed. ‘People will hear you!’

Aoife rolled her eyes. ‘It doesn’t even smell right,’ she muttered.

Eleanor stared straight ahead, ignoring the parishioners who whispered as they passed. She could feel them counting the line of maids, staring at Leah’s empty place the way people peered into cages at the zoo.

‘… only a matter of time, of course. Bachelors are always getting into these sorts of scrapes …’

‘… but the girls weren’t brought up properly. They can’t help themselves …’

‘You know he calls them all by their first names? Oh, yes! Well, it makes sense when you consider it. Who’d want to get into bed with a girl called Hartley?’

Eleanor stumbled. The speaker, a middle-aged woman in an arsenic-green dress, turned away with a titter when she saw the look on Eleanor’s face. Eleanor curled her hands into fists. The parishioners giggled and gossiped about what went on at Granborough House as if it were the plot of an operetta. Mr Pembroke was cast as the lovable rogue, an ageing Don Juan in a smoking jacket, and the maids were buxom girls who laughed too loud and could be won over with a bawdy wink. None of them had seen the bruises.

The reverend came and found them before the service. She’d thought he might. Reverend Clarke was a small man with a voracious interest in the lives of his parishioners, particularly the young, unmarried female parishioners who kept falling pregnant at Granborough House. He had an instinct for gossip that was so unerring it might have been divine guidance. Eleanor was surprised he hadn’t beaten a path to their door, when the news of Leah’s dismissal got out.

Eleanor watched the reverend tease more details about Leah’s departure out of Mrs Fielding, with all the tenacity of a terrier chasing a rat from its hole. Eleanor tried to listen to another conversation – Mrs Kettering’s son had married a local girl he’d met in India and was bringing her home, Colonel Hardwicke’s daughter would be converting to marry her Jewish sweetheart, a shoemaker’s had been burgled two streets away – but the whispers about Leah tugged at her like insistent hands. Eleanor held her head high and stared into the distance, proud and fierce. She’d find a way to stop their whispering, soon.

The laundry copper at Granborough House was rusting in a big, hulking heap in a vault of a room off the kitchen. Maintaining the machinery and the three laundrymaids who’d worked it had been expensive, and when it broke Mr Pembroke had dismissed the three maids and started sending his laundry out instead of having it fixed.

Eleanor was going to pick it up. Brandy was not too expensive, she’d noticed. Neither was Mr Pembroke’s subscription to his club. It was only women who seemed to be too expensive, she thought, no matter how low the cost.

A fug of heat hung over the pavements, but Eleanor pulled on her gloves and wide-brimmed hat. Even this far away from the river, she could still smell the Thames, dank and fetid under the summer sun. But in Mayfair, the doors were not propped open, the windows were not thrown wide. It would be crass to admit that the occupants of such grand houses could sweat.

They all pretended to be perfect. The other servants that Eleanor passed nodded to her politely, and enquired after her health if she looked like she might linger. But a few weeks ago, they had been just as cordial to Leah, and now it was as if she’d been lifted right out of their memories, like stitches being unpicked from a sampler. Leah might never have been there. It had been the same when Eleanor’s mother had taken ill. Kind neighbours closed their doors to her, not wanting to risk consumption, even when Eleanor cried on their doorsteps.

Eleanor heard the noise and bustle of Marylebone before she met it. Away from the mausoleum streets of Mayfair, the city was teeming with people. Fruit-sellers lost in clouds of flies. A line of men wearing sandwich-boards, dripping in the heat. A woman selling coffee from a barrow, face shiny with sweat. Crossing-sweepers drooped on street corners, slumped on their brooms. Omnibuses and carts and hansoms and private carriages clattered up and down the street, and the reek of horse dung, rotting fruit and burnt coffee made Eleanor feel dizzy.

She could not wait to take herself away from