She Said: “I Need a Place to Stay”… He Replied: “ I Need a Wife to Give My Dying Bloodline an Heir.”

Chapter 8

The house found out about the orchard inside four days, and did not say one word to either of them about it.

What happened instead was that Mrs. Trant came to Ellen in the stillroom at the end of that week with a list.

It was two pages, in her own hand, and it had plainly been written over about three evenings. It began with the chimneys on the west side, and went on through the dairy roof, and a bridge on the north drive, and about nine other things. And at the bottom of the second page it said: The long gallery. Not this year. But it should be looked at by somebody who knows.

Ellen read the whole of it, standing up.

“How long have you had this, Mrs. Trant?”

“I wrote it this week.” The housekeeper’s chin was up. “But I have had most of it in my head about six years, your grace. And I want to say that plainly, because I have been three days deciding whether to bring it at all.” She took a breath. “Every single item on that paper is a thing I have looked at, and thought that wants doing, and then thought not yet. And I have been doing that so long that I stopped noticing I was doing it. And then his grace ordered nine trees planted in September, and I could not sleep.”

Ellen looked at that list for a moment.

“We shall not do all of it,” she said.

“No, your grace.”

“There is about four hundred pounds on that paper, and I am not a fool.” She handed it back, then held it a moment longer. “Then choose four. We shall begin with those in the spring — and you will choose them, not I. And I want the long gallery on the list for next year, in your own hand, so that it does not get lost.”

Mrs. Trant took her paper back.

She got to the door and stopped, and said, without turning round:

“I have been in this house nineteen years. And that is the first list I have written in eight of them.”