The Shifting Fog Read Online Free PDF Page B

young and privileged today wear their cynicism like a badge, their eyes blank and their minds full of things they never sought to know.
    It is one of the reasons I have never spoken of the Hartfords and Robbie Hunter and what went on between them. For there have been times when I’ve considered telling it all, unburdening myself. To Ruth. Or more likely Marcus. But somehow I knew before beginning my tale that they were too young to understand. That I would be unable to make them understand. How it ended the way it did. Why it ended the way it did. Make them see how much the world has changed.
    Of course, the signs of progress were upon us even then. The first war—the Great War—changed everything, upstairs and down. How shocked we all were when the new staff began to trickle in (and out again, usually) after the war, full of agency ideas about minimum wages and days off. Before that, the world had seemed absolute somehow, the distinctions simple and intrinsic.
    On my first morning at Riverton, Mr Hamilton called me to his pantry, deep in the servants’ hall, where he was bent over ironing The Times . He stood upright and straightened his fine round spectacle frames across the bridge of his long, beaked nose. Soimportant was my induction into ‘the ways’, that Mrs Townsend had taken a rare break from preparing the luncheon galantine to bear witness. Mr Hamilton inspected my uniform meticulously then, apparently satisfied, began his lecture on the difference between us and them.
    ‘Never forget,’ he said gravely, ‘you are fortunate indeed to be invited to serve in a great house such as this. And with good fortune comes responsibility. Your conduct in all matters reflects directly on the family and you must do them justice: keep their secrets and deserve their trust. Remember that the Master always knows best. Look to him, and his family, for example. Serve them silently … eagerly … gratefully. You will know your job is done well when it goes unnoticed, that you have succeeded when you are unnoticed.’ He lifted his gaze then and studied the space above my head, his ruddy skin flushed with emotion. ‘And Grace? Never forget the honour they do you, allowing you to serve in their home.’
    I can only imagine what Sylvia would have said to this. Certainly she wouldn’t have received the address as I did; would not have felt her face constrict with gratitude and the vague, unnameable thrill of having been lifted up a step in the world.
    I shift in my seat and notice she has left her photograph behind: this new man who woos her with talk of history and nurses a hobbyist’s affection for the aristocracy. I know his type. They are the sort to keep scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs, to sketch elaborate family trees about families to which they have no entrée.
    I sound contemptuous but I am not. I am interested—intrigued even—by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.
    I close my eyes again. The sun has shifted and now my cheeks are warm.
    The folk of Riverton have all been dead so long. While age has withered me, they remain eternally youthful, eternally beautiful.
    There now. I am becoming maudlin and romantic. For they are neither young nor beautiful. They are dead. Buried. Nothing. Mere figments that flit within the memories of those they once knew.
    But of course, those who live in memories are never really dead.
    •
    The first time I saw Hannah and Emmeline and their brother David, they were debating the effects of leprosy on the human face. They had been at Riverton a week by then—their annual summer visit—but to that point I had caught only occasional wafts of laughter, tattoos of running feet, amid the creaking bones of the old house.
    Myra had insisted I was too inexperienced to be trusted in polite society—juvenile though it might be—and had conferred on me only duties that distanced me from the