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

so swollen and distended it looked as if she’d overbalance. Her bones strained through her skin. Eyes large, lips cracked and white, she could have been a ghost from one of Aoife’s stories. It was only when she noticed the tartan shawl – sparkling with frost, now – that Eleanor, horrified, recognized her.

‘Leah! Good God, I—’

Leah’s hand clutched at her arm. A cold sore oozed at the corner of her mouth. ‘Give us a penny. Enough for a cup of hot soup, that’s all I ask.’

‘I don’t have any money. It’s all at the house.’

Leah gave her a rictus grin. ‘You must have something. Anything. Just enough for a night in the flophouse. Please.’

Eleanor led Leah over to the nearest soup stall. ‘I really don’t have any money,’ she said, as the stall-holder waved them away. ‘Leah, where are you sleeping?’

Leah didn’t answer. They stopped in front of another costermonger’s cart. A pot of soup was bubbling there, and the smell of the onions made Eleanor feel sick. The stall-holder, a middle-aged Indian woman wrapped in shawls, gave them both an appraising look.

‘Madam,’ Eleanor said, ‘will you feed this poor woman a bowl of soup a day, please? She’s a good girl, but fallen on hard times.’

The stall-holder looked at Eleanor critically, her eyes flicking between her dress and her much finer shawl. ‘It’s a shilling a week.’

Eleanor thought of Mr Pembroke, drunk and stinking in his bed, and hatred sparked through her like lightning. He would never have to worry about where his next meal came from.

‘You may send the bill to Granborough House,’ she snapped. ‘It will be paid.’

The costermonger sighed. ‘I might’ve known. All right, love. Come back same time tomorrow. I don’t want you hanging about the stall, mind. You’ll put off my regulars.’

Leah grabbed the cup of soup the woman handed her. She gulped it down, snorting and lapping like an animal, and sucked the splashes off her filthy fingers. Anger and shame roiling in the pit of her stomach, Eleanor turned away.

Daisy was in disgrace. She had persuaded Mrs Banbury to let her try and make an oyster pie. ‘Family recipe,’ she’d said. ‘Gran used to make it all the time.’

Eleanor hunched over the chamber pot and retched. Family recipe, she thought, bitterly.

At least she was not the only one, Eleanor consoled herself. Aoife was outside, hurling into the rose bushes; Mrs Fielding was in her rooms insisting that she had ‘a slight headache’; Mrs Banbury was swearing listlessly at Daisy in between bouts of vomiting. Mr Pembroke had taken one look at the pale, sweaty faces of his maidservants and left for his club.

‘I’m sorry!’ Daisy wailed. ‘There must’ve been a dodgy one!’

Mrs Banbury let out a bark of mirthless laughter.

The others were better in a few days, but Eleanor found it harder to shake the illness off. She never felt as though she had finished being sick. It was worse in the mornings, and when she caught a whiff of a strong smell. No matter what she did it was always in the background, like the stench of the Thames on a hot day.

Charles doted on her. His father’s absence had let him rifle through all the rooms and make several trips to the pawnbroker’s, but he regarded this as taking advantage of Eleanor’s illness. To make up for it he fed her morsels of crystallized ginger, and bought her tonics and tinctures which, he said, had been guaranteed to work. Eleanor tried a few; most of them were sugar water. She drank them anyway, because Charles had tried.

After that, she had the best Christmas she could remember.

She threw up six times and her dress uniform was too tight, but that did not matter. When the maids were home from church, they all filed into the drawing room and received presents from the family. They all got the same thing: enough cloth to make a new uniform and a handshake from Charles while Mr Pembroke snored in the corner.

Mrs Banbury and Daisy – relegated, now, to chopping vegetables – created a feast. Roast goose, vast tureens of potatoes, Palestine soup, chestnuts, sausage meat, pickled walnuts and a plum pudding smothered in brandy butter. It was far too much for Mr Pembroke and Charles to eat themselves, so when they sent down their leftovers the maids fell upon them, gorging themselves on fluffy roast potatoes and crackling golden goose-skin.

Eleanor stole away when Aoife and Daisy were still groaning. Charles was waiting for her upstairs.

He gave her a present – dove-grey kid gloves, soft and supple as silk. She handed over hers – a book of sonnets – and it felt cheap by comparison. It was so small, and the blue dye was coming away on her fingertips. But when Charles read the inscription – ‘for C, with love’ – he beamed, and all her shabbiness was forgotten. His smile mended all her faults, and when he kissed her, she was made new.

January dragged its freezing fingers through the house. Water pooled on windowsills and made the curtains sag. The smell of damp forced its way into Eleanor’s mouth and made her stomach roil. She retched into a chamber pot and cursed all oysters. She was never eating anything that came out of the sea again. It was the servants’ diet; she didn’t have the strength to fight off illnesses now. When she was a girl she had eaten what she liked, and she’d never been sick until her first bleed.

Eleanor wiped her mouth and straightened up. The truth dawned.

She was tired. She was sore. Her dresses were growing tighter. Smells choked her, she’d been throwing up every morning and she could not remember when she had last bled.

But that could mean anything. There were lots of things she couldn’t remember; she’d learned not to rely on her memory. Her monthly bleeds had never been monthly. Her dresses were growing tighter because Charles was smuggling her half his dinner. And everyone had got sick