The Duke Gave Her the Servants No House Would Take—They Ran the Finest Kitchen She’d Ever Eaten In

Chapter 1

Rain came down in fine gray ropes across the yard, and Mary Turner stood ankle-deep in a puddle she could not feel, because she had stopped noticing the cold somewhere around the second hour.

The letter was folded in her apron pocket, softened at the creases. She had read it twice in the estate office and once more outside, under the eaves of the coach house, where a stable boy had come out and looked at her and gone back in without saying anything. She knew the words well enough now that she could feel them in her teeth.

Give the Turner girl the keys and be done with it.

Three sentences from His Grace the Duke of Marabe, written in London between a dinner and a card table, and a girl of eighteen had been handed the entire service wing of Ashwell Court — a long, low, cold-blooded range of gray stone built onto the back of the house in 1738 and never meant to be loved, only worked in. Forty rooms above it. Eleven servants below where there had once been thirty. Two dead housekeepers in living memory if you counted the girl who had come before Mrs. Peele and lasted four months.

The rain lifted a little. Mary wiped her face with the heel of her hand and looked at the door she had walked through every working day for three years and would now unlock with her own ring.

You’ll do. Follow me, and don’t chatter.

Three years. Four hundred and something days of following Mrs. Harriet Peele through still rooms and linen presses and dairy sheds, learning the science of candle tallow and beeswax and blue, the way to fold a counterpane so it lay square in the press, the way to mix furniture wax from turpentine and honey until it smelled like a warm afternoon. Learning that a household was a body of small parts. Learning to look at a new girl and know within a quarter hour whether she was lazy, or only frightened.

She had been sitting with Mrs. Peele one afternoon in April, when the old woman could no longer lift the teacup without both hands, and had been given a small object wrapped in blue flannel. A brass chatelaine on a short chain, worn smooth by thirty-one years of use, with a little pair of scissors and a thimble case and a pencil sheath still hanging from it, and a tiny key that opened the still-room press.

It kept me on my feet, Mrs. Peele had said, in a voice already thin. And it will keep you on yours. Don’t let them see you tired.

She had been buried at Nether Ashwell a week ago in the last of the rain. Mary had walked back to the great house alone.

Now she put her shoulder to the servants’ door and opened it onto a smell she had spent three weeks trying not to name: cold fat, old water, and under both of them the sweetish ghost of black mold.

The kitchen range had not been blackleaded in a year. The scullery drain breathed up at her like something with a grudge. Three copper stockpots hung green at the rims, and the great flagstones in the back corridor were slick through their whole length where a gutter had failed above and was running down inside the wall.

Sixty items on the list before she reached the still-room door.

But it was the still room itself that stopped her. Mrs. Peele’s kingdom, the one room in the wing the neglect had been too lazy to ruin: cupboards of jars she had helped lay in herself the summer before — dried lavender, tansy, wormwood, marshmallow root, yellow beeswax — and a deal worktable, and a narrow window with the rain running down it in slow threads.

Mary stepped inside, shut the door on the rest of the house, and stood with her back against it, listening to her own breathing.

She was eighteen years old. She had a brass chatelaine in her apron pocket and a single sovereign sewn into the hem of her dress by her mother’s own hand the winter before she died, and she had been given, in the private opinion of every servant and villager within two miles, a room nobody else in the county wished to enter.

The rain stopped at five. She banked the fire the way her mother had shown her — ash over embers, not smothering them, letting them breathe under the blanket — and she went to bed in the little housekeeper’s room off the still room with the ring of keys under her pillow.