"How on earth did you scratch your hand whilst dusting?" Mrs Channing asked as she unscrewed the lid of the bee balm jar and started to smear it on the scratch across my palm.

"It was an accident; I caught it on a shelf," I lied.

"Well, it's not deep so you should be alright to continue working. Just be careful in the future, Jane."

"I will."

Mrs Channing nodded at me and gestured for me to take my seat at the supper table as she cleared away the bee balm. I had no intention of telling her that I had scratched my hand, but she saw it as Mary and I were preparing supper in the servants' hall and I could hardly hide it once it had been spotted. Still, the bee balm was a good idea and I never would have put it on myself.

Mary still had the locket tucked away in her pocket as we sat down for supper, the conversation kept to a dull hush as the usual evening exhaustion took its grip on the servants. After a full day of working, the evenings often became the hardest part of the workday since we had spent all day on our feet and longed for the semi-comfort of our beds. There was work still to be done for all of the staff before we could retire.

After supper, I spent the rest of the evening stoking fires, making beds and ensuring that the family would be comfortable for the rest of the evening. Since there were no guests staying in the house, Mary and I were able to retire early and quickly returned to our room to examine the locket. We sat on my bed and Mary fished the locket from her pocket.

"I've been trying for the rest of the day to get this open, but I'm not having any luck. It's stuck fast," Mary said.

"There has to be a way to open it, otherwise what would be the point?" I accepted the locket and ran my fingers over the design. "What I don't understand is why it was under the floorboard if the journal was in the chimney."

"Maybe she was going to move the locket as well and never got the chance, but why keep it hidden? Lady Catherine had plenty of jewellery and I doubt anyone would have noticed this one."

"It must have something to do with what's in it. If the locket contains a photograph of whoever it is she was infatuated in, Lady Catherine wouldn't have wanted it to fall into the wrong hands. She said in her journal that Lady Abigail was always poking around her room, maybe she kept it from her."

"That would make sense. Even more so now since all of Lady Catherine's jewellery went to Lady Abigail."

"But why not put the two objects in the same place? We know she moved the journal, so why not move the locket at the same time?"

We both stared at the locket, more confused about the entire thing than we had been upon discovery of the journal. I doubted that the locket had come from the person Lady Catherine spoke of in the journal as no servant would be able to afford such an expensive piece of jewellery. However, if she already owned the locket, Lord and Lady Richardson would have realised it was missing when they went through her things.

I climbed off my bed and headed over to the dresser, opening the top drawer. Inside was the journal I had purchased on Sunday. Although I had no real need for it when I originally decided to buy it, the journal might help us to sort our thoughts out a little more. We had a lot of information but also very little and in doing so had become rather confused with everything. All we wanted to know was who the mysterious man was, but our quest kept leading us down different avenues.

After retrieving a pen and some ink, I returned to the bed and sat cross-legged on the mattress, writing out everything that we knew.

We knew that it had to have been a servant you had given Lady Catherine the journal for her sixteenth birthday. We knew it had been hidden under the floorboard in her room. Now, we had a locket that we couldn't open and could hold the identity to whoever Lady Catherine's mysterious suitor might have been. Even if we read to the end of the journal, something told me that we might never discover who the mysterious suitor really was.

"You don't honestly believe that Henry might be the mysterious suitor," Mary said, reading my writing upside down.

"Why not? He got rather emotional over breakfast just talking about her. It's possible."

"Except the owner of the stationery shop said he sold the journal to a young man, and despite being seven-and-twenty, Henry looks like he might be mistaken for a man in his late forties."

"That doesn't mean anything. The owner of the stationery shop had said his memory wasn't what it used to be. Maybe he was mistaken."

"I just don't think it was him." Mary stifled a yawn. "We should go to bed, I'm exhausted."

"Alright, fine."

I screwed the lid back onto the link bottle and returned the ink and pen to the dresser whilst I slipped the journal under my mattress. The locket was tucked behind the dresser with Lady Catherin's journal so that no one else might uncover them if they looked around our room. We changed into our nightdress and snuggled down beneath the blankets, footsteps outside cutting through the silence as Mrs Channing carried out her nightly checks.

When the footsteps retreated, I rolled over so I could face Mary's bed, her outline barely visible in the darkness. All I could see were her eyes staring back at me through the impenetrable darkness.

"Do you think we'll find out who the mysterious suitor was?" Mary whispered.

"I hope so. I would have hated to scratch my hand for no reason. Although, I didn't think there would be so many different avenues to the story."

"It certainly is a strange one. More so that Lady Catherine started writing about the suitor months before she died. If he had been the one who gifted her the journal, why did she turn her nose up at it?"

"Maybe she didn't know how she felt when it was first given to her."

"Maybe. It just all appeared to have happened so quickly." Mary yawned. "You know, writing in the journal, her death a few months later, it's strange."

"No one can predict an accident," I said.

"That's true." She yawned again."

"Goodnight, Jane."

"Goodnight."

Mary rolled over and pulled the blankets up over her head as I continued to stare into the darkness. When I finally closed my eyes, I couldn't help feeling someone was watching me.

~~~

First Published - February 15th, 2022