The Duke Gave Her the Servants No House Would Take—They Ran the Finest Kitchen She’d Ever Eaten In
Chapter 12
That summer settled into the wing the way good weather settles into a garden: slowly, and without announcement.
By the middle of July, Mary had begun to know the sound of the house at each hour.
The tick of the range cooling after the last kettle at night. The drip in the scullery when the drain was rinsed at ten. The creak of the third stair up to the attics, the one Peter Small always stepped on, which was how she knew he was safely up. The small firm closing of Mrs. Douty’s oven door at five in the morning, which was how she knew the day had begun even before the light came.
She kept the little red memorandum book. She kept the ring of keys at her waist. She kept Mrs. Peele’s chatelaine in her apron pocket, where her hand went to it a dozen times a day without her thinking — and the scissors and the thimble case and the pencil sheath and the little still-room key had all been worn a further degree smooth by her use, so that a stranger picking it up would not have been able to say where Mrs. Peele’s hand had ended and Mary Turner’s had begun.
The kitchen garden came back under Mrs. Douty’s direction and the gardener Crumm’s quiet connivance — seeds from the estate greenhouse, four rows of beans, cabbage set out late but growing, the rhubarb forced under a bucket, and a small bed of strawberries that Crumm sent down without a note because he was past needing notes.
The servants’ hall table was scrubbed with sand and rubbed with beeswax and turpentine mixed as Mary’s mother had shown her. The long split was pegged and glued by John Ayres with a wedge of oak from the coach house. The two settles were drawn up to the fire and stayed drawn up. The floor was done every Saturday.
By the end of July, eleven people sat down to a supper of mutton broth, new bread, and stewed rhubarb with cream from Hannah Blythe’s dairy; and Mrs. Douty said grace in a low voice; and Peter Small ate three helpings; and Mary looked down the length of the oak table at the faces of the servants no house in the county would take, and saw a household.
That was the night she sat last at the table.
When the plates were cleared and the last of the light had gone out of the yard, she went up to the attic where the maids slept and she stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened to the small sounds above her — a laugh smothered, a bedframe creaking, Louisa Marsh saying put that candle out, Peter Small, or I shall tell Miss Turner — and she thought about the county houses that had put those seven onto Ned Hawker’s cart.
And then she went back down and thought, for the first time in her life, about mercy as a business.
Seven names on a sheet of paper. A man in London signing a line without reading the letter above it. A wing nobody had wanted, in a house where the roof had been paid for twice and never mended.
The Duke does not know what he has done, she thought. And someone does know. Someone has been signing for my roof.
She went to the housekeeper’s room and unlocked the writing desk and took out the canvas purse and set out the sovereigns once more on the small deal table, and counted them.
Forty-seven sovereigns, six half sovereigns, and silver. Fifty pounds and a little over.
She had spent one pound nineteen and six.
She wrote it in the little red book under S.R., and then, below it, on a new line, she wrote a question she had written once before and had not yet answered:
Who has been drawing the money for this roof?
And then she banked the fire, and went to bed.