Chapter Three: What the Staff Would Not Say

The solicitor arranged, at her insistence, an interview with the last of Edwin Vellsted’s household staff to have worked in the house directly — a housekeeper, Mrs. Aldous, retired now and living in the village, who had kept the place for eighteen years before Vellsted’s declining health had reduced the staff to a single daily visitor. Margaret expected reluctance. She had not expected the particular shape it took.

Mrs. Aldous would discuss any room in the house without hesitation — the kitchen’s temperamental range, the library’s damp corner, the dining room’s table that sat fourteen but had not seated more than one in a decade. She would not discuss the seventh door, not because she claimed ignorance of it, but because she treated the question itself as a mild social error, the way one might treat a guest who asked too directly about a family’s finances.

“Mr. Vellsted kept his study private,” she said, when Margaret finally named the door’s location plainly. “That was his arrangement, and it wasn’t my place to ask about it, any more than it’s mine to ask about it now.”

“There’s no study there. There’s no room there at all, as far as the plan is concerned.”

“I couldn’t say what the plan says.” Mrs. Aldous’s hands, folded in her lap, did not move, but something in her voice had gone carefully level, the tone of a woman crossing a floor she knew to be unsound. “I know what I was told, which was that the door wasn’t mine to open, and that if I ever found it open of its own accord, I was to close it again without going in, and not to trouble him with questions about why.”

“Did that happen? The door opening on its own?”

A long pause. “Twice, in eighteen years. Both times in winter. Both times, I did as I was told, and neither time did Mr. Vellsted ever thank me for it, which I always thought was strange, given how carefully he’d asked.” She looked up, and for the first time in the conversation, met Margaret’s eyes directly. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t ask what you intend to do about it. I’ve done eighteen years of not asking. I don’t see much reason to start now.”