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

Chapter 11

The Duke came on the last Sunday in June, a month before anyone expected him, having heard something at his club.

What he had heard, as it later came out through Mr. Hollis, was that a man named Ellery had dined at Bramworth the week before and had mentioned that he had lately been hunting in the county and had put up at an inn at Ashwell and had been given, at the inn, a plate of bread that the landlord’s wife said came down from the Court — and that he had eaten it and had been astonished, and had said so, loudly, twice.

So His Grace came down to see what it was he owned.

He sat that evening to a dinner of clear soup, poached trout from the estate stream, saddle of mutton with Crumm’s peas, a gooseberry tart, and a small dish of Hannah Blythe’s butter set beside the bread.

He ate slowly.

He asked twice who was cooking. He sent word through Mr. Hollis to the wing that his compliments were to be given to Mrs. Douty and to Miss Turner, and that he would stay a further week.

He stayed three.

And on the third day of the third week, in a coat far too fine for a stone passage, he walked down himself to the servants’ hall door and stood on the threshold with his hat in his hand — the Duke of Marabe, thirty-six years old, master of three estates and a house in town, standing at the door of the wing nobody in the county would enter — and he said, in front of Mrs. Douty and John Ayres and Louisa Marsh and Peter Small:

“I have not eaten so well in any of my houses. Whatever you need, write to Hollis, and he will sign it.”

Mary curtsied without bowing her head. Her mother had taught her that in a kitchen in Nether Ashwell, over a scoured deal table, when she was nine years old.

“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said. “We have what we need.”

The Duke looked once around the clean kitchen — at the blackleaded range, at the copper stockpots hanging bright in a row above it, at the scrubbed flags, at the boy in the corner holding a bucket with his mouth open — and went back up the passage to the house.

After he had gone, Mrs. Douty set the kettle on the range. She said one word.

“Well.”

And it was the same word she had said standing in the ruined larder in the rain in May.

Everyone in that kitchen heard it. Everyone in that kitchen understood that it meant something entirely different now.

Peter Small, who had been in the scullery doorway and had heard the Duke of Marabe speak to Miss Turner with his hat in his hand, said, later, to Louisa Marsh, in the attic, in the dark:

“Does she get to keep it, then? The wing?”

Louisa Marsh was quiet for a long moment.

“Go to sleep, Peter,” she said.

But she lay awake herself, because she had worked in a big house before, at Lady Hencham’s, and she knew exactly what happened to a thing that a great man suddenly discovered he wanted.