She was twenty-nine and she had been, until last spring, a kindergarten teacher in South Boston β the kind of teacher other teachers sent their difficult children to, because Nora had the gift of making a room feel like the safest place in the world using nothing more exotic than routine, snacks, and songs. Then her mother got sick in the fast, bankrupting way, and the little house in Southie where Nora had been raised β the house with the chipped blue door and the kitchen where every important conversation of her life had happened β went to pay for the privilege of dying with medical attention. Nora had signed the papers in a lawyer's office with a plastic plant in the corner and had understood, with perfect clarity, that she was now a person who lived where her work was. Which is why, when the agency described a live-in position in Beacon Hill with a room of her own, she had not asked the questions other candidates asked. She had asked one: when do I start?
The room was on the fourth floor, under the eaves, and it was the nicest room Nora had ever been given β which she noted, and then noted herself noting, because gratitude and grief are neighbours and she was tired of confusing them.
Mrs. Kowalczyk read her the rules in the kitchen, standing, the way scripture is read. Mrs. K was sixtyish and iron-grey and had run the staff of that house for twenty years, and she delivered the list with the worn efficiency of a woman who has delivered it to four previous women and expects to deliver it to a fifth.
"The children breakfast in their rooms at seven-thirty, trays. School at eight-ten, Shay drives, you do not. Home at four. Quiet from then β homework, baths. Supper trays at six. The children are in bed at seven-thirty, lights out eight. No noise after eight, and I mean none β Mr. Doyle works in the evenings and the house is quiet for him. The dining room is not for children. The parlour is not for children. The garden is not used. You do not go into the study. You do not ask questions about Mr. Doyle's business, his visitors, or his hours." She paused. "You do not ask questions about Mrs. Doyle."
"Can I ask about the children?" Nora said.
Mrs. K looked at her over her glasses with an expression that was not unkind. "Questions about the children are the job," she said. "Ask me. Not him."
"And if the children ask me questions?"
"Then you will be the fifth woman to find out that children in this house mostly don't." Mrs. K set down the list β it was typed, laminated at the corners by handling β and her voice, briefly, lost its parade-ground edge. "They are good children, Miss Bennett. That is the worst of it. They are so good you could forget they are children at all, and this house has forgotten. Keep your head down and it pays well. The others will tell you."
The others did, in the way of staff everywhere: in doorways, over laundry, in the grammar of warnings disguised as gossip. Shay Rourke, the driver, was a wall of a man with hands like upholstery, and he told her only that the boy would test her and the girl would not, and that both of those were information. Ellis on the door told her nothing at all, which Nora filed away as its own kind of telling.
Jack inspected her at four o'clock with the thoroughness of a sentry relieving a post.
He stood in the doorway of the schoolroom β a bright, unused-feeling room on the third floor with educational posters nobody had chosen with love β and he looked at her the way his father looked at men who came to the house after dark: measuring, unsmiling, deciding what she was for.
"You're the new one," he said.
"I'm Nora," she said. "I'm the new one until I'm not, and then I'll just be Nora. That's how it usually goes."
"How long are you staying?"
"That depends partly on you," Nora said, honestly, because she had decided on the stairs that she would not lie to these children even once, not even kindly. "The last lady left on a Tuesday. I know. Mrs. K told me. I don't leave on Tuesdays. I think leaving should at least have the decency to happen on a Friday."
Something moved at the corner of Jack's mouth and was disciplined away. He gave her a single nod, an officer's nod, and withdrew.
Maisie did not speak at all.
She was five, small for it, with her mother's face already assembling itself out of the baby roundness, and she regarded Nora from behind the schoolroom door with eyes that had clearly concluded some time ago that new adults were weather: they came, they were loud or quiet, they went. Nora did not pursue her. Nora, who had spent six years among five-year-olds, sat down on the schoolroom floor with her back against the bookcase and read aloud from her own tote bag to nobody in particular β a book about a bear who has lost his hat β doing all the voices, and when she got to the end she said, to the room in general, "I have to find out what happens tomorrow. Same time, I guess," and left the book on the floor where a person who had not been listening might pick it up if she happened to pass that way.
At six the trays went up. At seven-thirty she supervised the baths and the pyjamas and the teeth, hers to oversee now, and the children submitted to all of it with the terrible competence of children who have turned being cared for into a military exercise. She read nothing aloud; nobody asked. The lights went out at eight.
Nora stood in the dark hallway between their two doors and listened to the house settle into its famous silence, a silence with architecture to it, load-bearing silence, and she thought of her mother's kitchen, where nobody had ever once been quiet on purpose, and she understood that she had not taken a job in a house.
She had taken a job in a beautiful, well-run absence. And she had a month of it, at least, and a room under the eaves, and she was going to have to be very, very careful β because she already knew, the way teachers know on the first day, exactly what was wrong here, and fixing it was not in the laminated list.
Chapter 3: The First Dinner
Nora waited four days, because she was not a fool, and because Mrs. K had a phrase for the other thing: the fourth nanny had lasted eleven days and Nora intended, at minimum, to outlast the fourth nanny.