The Misbegotten Read Online Free PDF Page A

enough. Now, calm down. You have work to do, and—’
    ‘No! I won’t go up there again! Not now and not tomorrow neither! It’s not natural , what he gets up to! He’s not natural, and no decent person should be expected to . . . to . . . have to see him, or serve him! And I won’t, even if it means I’m dismissed!’ With this Dorcas ran from the kitchen. Sol Bradbury and Starling exchanged a look, and Starling fought hard not to smile.
    ‘Lord, not another one running out,’ Mrs Hatton muttered; for a second, her shoulders sagged in exhaustion. ‘Starling, stop smirking. Go up to Mr Alleyn, if you please, and make his rooms for him. You’ll need to bank the fire well, there’s a nip in the air tonight. He’ll ask for wine but I have it from the mistress that he’s not to have any – the pains in his head have been bad this week, poor soul. Any one of us would be as volatile, had we to live with such suffering. Now, please, Starling – I don’t want to hear any argument.’ She raised one finger in warning, and then walked out in pursuit of Dorcas.
    Starling smiled at her retreating back. It served her well to let Mrs Hatton believe that she was reluctant to go into Jonathan Alleyn’s rooms. It would have caused suspicion, after all, if she seemed keen to go in, though keen she was. A strange kind of keen, because her pulse always raced and her breathing came faster, and on some level she knew she was afraid of him. Not afraid of the look of him, or the contents of his rooms, or of his rages, like the other girls; she was afraid of what she might do, and what he might. Because she had known Jonathan Alleyn since she was a little girl, and she knew things about him that the other servants didn’t. Things nobody else knew.
    She found the supper tray that Dorcas had abandoned on a table in the hallway outside his rooms. He had two adjoining chambers on the second storey of the house, on its west side, sharing a wall with the next house along the crescent. The room where he slept was towards the back of the house, plainly furnished but dominated by an enormous canopied tester bed, its wooden posts all gilded, its drapes of heavy crimson damask. Linked to this via double doors, the room at the front of the house was supposedly his study, and had an enormous bay window arching over the street, giving a far-reaching view of the city and the hills around it. A view almost always hidden by closed shutters. This room had filled a succession of housemaids with horror. Starling paused and strained her ears for the sound of Mrs Hatton’s footsteps, or anyone else who might be near, before adding a bottle of wine to the supper tray. A bottle she’d got especially, from Richard Weekes; dosed in secret with extra spirits to make it stronger. Mr Alleyn would drink it, she knew, even if he realised it was doctored. He didn’t seem to be able to stop himself. Perhaps – she almost smiled to herself at the idea – perhaps he even thought she did it to please him.
    Starling listened hard for a moment. She steadied herself. There was silence from within; no sound of movement, or speech, or violence. He would be waiting in the dark, but Starling was not afraid of the dark. Jonathan Alleyn never lit his own lamps; he liked to sit as the gloom gathered around him. She’d once heard him say that the shadows soothed him. Well, she would banish them. Why should he be soothed? Behind her, the lamp on the wall made a soft tearing sound as it guttered in a draught. That same draught brushed the back of Starling’s neck, and made the skin there tingle. That’s all it is , she assured herself. Just a cold zephyr where a door has been left open. It was not fear. She refused to be afraid of Jonathan Alleyn, even though the worst and biggest thing she knew about him, which nobody else knew, was that he was a murderer.
    He would be waiting within, nothing to betray his whereabouts but the ruddy gleam of the fire reflecting in his