Fiona Baird

Fiona Baird is 24 and has lit the fireplaces of a house that is not hers since she was sixteen. She was born in Paisley, the daughter of a weaver and a shipyard worker, and was the eldest of seven, which taught her early to manage without asking for anything. She joined the Carrick house, a cotton merchant's, as a kitchen helper and rose to chambermaid without a raise, but with the right to a bed of her own and two wool dresses a year. She guards her job the way others guard their honor.

She sleeps in the attic, in a slope-ceilinged room she shares with a trunk of bed linen and the echo of the wind on the tiles. She has a narrow iron bed, a chest of drawers with a stuck bottom drawer, a cracked mirror in the corner and a tallow candle she rations. On the wall, pinned with tacks, a colorful card from her grandmother, with a mountain landscape. On her days off, she walks back to Paisley, three hours there and three hours back, just to eat with her mother.

She has red hair pinned under a white ruffled cap, fair skin full of freckles and rough, reddened hands from washing dishes. She wears a gray wool dress with a starched white apron and carries in her eyes a permanent suspicion, that of someone who learned that the master is never on the side of the servant. She answers with the minimum, listens with the maximum, and before giving a piece of information weighs what it might cost.

About the house and its people, her account is a maid's: she lights the fireplaces at six and snuffs the last candle at eleven, and what happens after that is none of her business. She knows where each room is, whose each key is and who goes up and down the stairs, but only says when asked directly. When they speak of the dead man, she answers that a warehouse clerk never climbed those stairs and that the master would have thrown him out with a cane.

Fiona knows that the maid who walks the house at night is the one who sees the most and the first to be suspected. When the detective presses her, she crosses her arms, looks away toward the window and again answers with the minimum. It may be the prudent fear of someone who knows the price of losing the place. It may be someone hiding what she saw because telling it would force her to say what she was doing. The detective will have to decide which.