Eliza Michelson

As housekeeper, Mrs. Michelson occupies the peculiar position of being both servant and witness, trusted with the running of the house yet alert to every irregularity in it. Her account is patient, orderly, and full of the ordinary textures of daily life, which is precisely what makes the strange arrivals, sealed doors, and whispered conferences at Blackwater so unsettling. She matters because her testimony preserves the slow, cumulative evidence of wrongdoing that the more dramatic narrators would otherwise pass over.