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

Chapter 10

Mrs. Douty went with Mary through the kitchen garden on the third Sunday, and named what could still be had of it.

Rhubarb by the wall. Sorrel in the corner, gone to seed but usable. A row of last year’s leeks running to seed and still good in a broth. Mint and thyme alive in the herb bed and a great beast of a sage bush that nobody had cut properly in a decade. And two old apple trees — the one nearest the wall split at the fork, the other sound — that would bear if they were pruned.

“Who does the pruning?” Mary asked.

“The head gardener does not come down here,” said Mrs. Douty, in a tone that described a law of nature.

But John Ayres pruned them. On a Sunday afternoon, with a saw borrowed from the head gardener’s boy at the price of two ounces of Mrs. Douty’s seed cake, he went up the wall tree on the gardener’s ladder and took out the dead wood and opened the middle of the crown, and did it well, and took his time.

And the head gardener, whose name was William Crumm and who had known Mary’s father, Thomas Turner, for twenty-two years — had stood beside him in that trench in February and had watched him take the chill that killed him — came down to the wing the following Friday to see who had been at his trees.

He stood at the bottom of the garden for a while, hands behind his back, watching John Ayres not be a footman.

Then he came as far as the servants’ door, and Mary gave him tea in the kitchen because it was the only room fit to be seen, and William Crumm drank it standing up and did not say much, and on his way out he said, “Your father would have liked this kitchen.”

That was all he said the first time.

The next Friday he brought a basket of early peas down with a note in pencil, and the note said:

Only for the wing, from Crumm.

Mary read it twice, standing in the passage, in the smell of black lead and new bread. Then she opened the little red book and laid the note between two pages, because it was the first written kindness the wing had had from anybody on the estate, ever.

Peter Small, who had been standing in the scullery doorway watching her with a bucket in his hand, said, “Is it bad news, miss?”

“It’s peas,” said Mary.

Peter Small thought about this for a while.

“Peas is good,” he said, and went back to the drain.

That was also the week the drain ran clear.