Testing her further, I beckoned her to follow me to the refrigerated room and watch as I collected our patient for the morning – an elderly woman who had lived close by.A wealthy local who had filled in her forms and paid for her own casket and service years ago. She was parcelled up in her bag, though I wasted no time in unzipping her and revealing her to Grace.
I watched her expression, sure that if ever there was a moment when she might suddenly baulk, it would be now. She did no such thing. Her expression remained polite and respectful, as if she saw dead bodies every day.
“You weren’t lying when you said you were comfortable around death, were you?” I asked.
“No, not at all,” she said. “It’s a natural part of the life cycle, after all.”
“Good,” I said.
I was satisfied that she had been telling me the truth, and that we weren’t wasting one another’s time. She may be new and unqualified, but her stoicism was the perfect foundation for this kind of work. I was feeling ever more hopeful.
“This lady’s name is Ethel Bates. Ordinarily, you will have met with the family or the person who is responsible for arranging her service, and you will have some idea of who she was when she was alive. It’s important at all times to remember that they are a person who is loved, and deserving of respect at all times. They aren’t just a number, not to us, not ever.”
Grace met my eyes and nodded her agreement. Her small, bow-like lips betrayed no anxiety at all, if she had any.
“Now, using the sheet beneath her, help me slide her onto this worktop, and we’ll get started.”
Grace rolled up her sleeves.
Over the hours that followed, Grace surprised me ever more. Not only did she wash Ethel from head to toe, even shampooing her thin, silvery-grey hair, but she assisted me in massaging her limbs, forcing her muscles to relax. Even during the embalming process, she watched closely as I inserted the cannula into Ethel’s neck, and assisted me again as we encouraged the blood to drain from her limbs, to be replaced by my concoction of chemicals.
She shone, particularly, when it came to dressing and styling. She fell into deep concentration as she studied Ethel’s photograph and gently curled her hair with hot tongs, even applying hair spray and manipulating it with a brush to get the appropriate effect. Her breaths came slow and steady as she twirled the locks of silver-grey around her fingers to encourage a perfect helix.
“It’s the solitude you enjoy, isn’t it?” I asked, watching her expression with my heart thumping hard in my chest. “You enjoy working alone in the quiet.”
Grace’s eyes wandered to me and sparkled as she smiled, delighted to be recognised. Knowing she was understood, and that she understood me in turn.
My breath caught in my throat to see it. To know we had that love of solitude in common.
Chapter Five
Grace
Crowthorne House, my new home. For the present.
Each day when I awoke in the beautiful pastel pink bedroom, I found it harder to believe. I was no longer the dull, reclusive, lost daughter of Heather House. No longer a prisoner inside its crumbling walls, flinching at the echoes of mother’s stick pounding the rotten floorboards. Even Tom, whose friendship I had taken comfort from my whole life, had become a spectre of Heather House, another ghost to flee from.
Here, between the house and the mortuary, it seemed there were plenty of ghosts, but at least they weren’t mine.
I sat up in the thick, dusky-pink embroidered bedsheets and watched the rain snaking its lazy way down the window panes of the terrace. I wondered again at Louisa, the woman who laid in this bed before me. Did I really remind Nicholas of her? Did it cause him a great deal of pain, then, to look at me – let alone to keep me in this room, where he once slept with her?
What about her funeral, I wondered. Did he conduct his fiancé’s funeral? Did he wash and caress her pale,lifeless body, the same way he cared for every body he was entrusted with?
I pictured him, with his jacket hung on the peg, his white shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, his eyes cast down at her pale face. His large hand stroking the delicate strands of her hair, letting them run through his fingers like silver threads.
Cherishing her. Holding her head.
The same way my mother held my father’s head in her lap when he died.
I remembered it all too well, because it happened right in front of me. I remembered how the light faded from his eyes like the dimming of an oil lamp. Mother cradled his head as if it was severed, and wailed, her tears turning his hair to soft damp curls. I watched him until his oil lamps were extinguished, never to reignite.
My father was my first dead body. The one that hardened me to death. Now I was able to take up this job at Crowthorne House, and Nicholas could make me his apprentice, because the bodies didn’t bother me a jot. In fact, I quite enjoyed their silent dignity, the process, the time to reflect in the quiet, just the body and me.
Thank you for that gift, father, I thought to myself.Your cruel death was the only gift you ever gave me.
The sound of knuckles rapping on the door startled me from the memory. I pulled the bedclothes up around my chest and called out.
“Come in, Maggie.”
