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

Chapter 13

She asked Mr. Hollis about it on the ninth of August, in the estate office, standing because he did not ask her to sit.

She had chosen her words on the walk over and she delivered them the way her mother had taught her to speak to men who hold ledgers: civilly, without apology, and with her hands still.

“The roof over the wing wants eleven slates on the yard side and four over the laundry. There is lead flashing gone at the corridor gutter. I am told the estate has paid for these twice. I would like to know what the estate has paid for.”

Mr. Hollis looked at her for a long moment. He had a pen in his hand and he set it down, which was, Mary would later understand, the single most consequential thing a man of his temperament can do.

“The accounts are His Grace’s,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you are asking a direct question about them.”

“I am asking whether the wing is to be mended before the autumn rains, sir. Because if it is not, I would sooner know now and lay in cloth to catch the water.”

Mr. Hollis almost smiled. It was the first time in six years that anyone had come into that office and told him the truth about a building in a way that did not require him to be delicate.

He got up and shut the door.

“Miss Turner,” he said, “I have been agent at Ashwell six years. In that time I have sent His Grace eleven letters about the roof of that wing. Eight of those letters were answered. All eight answers told me the matter was not urgent, and four of them used the word economy.”

“And the money?”

“There is no money,” said Mr. Hollis flatly. “There is a sum entered in the ledgers each Michaelmas under repairs, service wing, and it has been entered every year since 1853, and it has never — not once — left the account. His Grace’s man of business in London has his own views about what an estate is for. I have written. I have been overruled. I am telling you this because you have already worked it out, and because you are going to ask me to sign for lead and lye and slates anyway, and I would rather you asked me knowing what I am.”

Mary stood with her hands folded.

“Then I shall ask you knowing what you are,” she said.

“Ask.”

“I want the lead flashing and eleven slates and four for the laundry, and lime for the dairy, and I want them out of the estate stores. And I want it written down in the estate book as service wing, necessary repairs.”

“You have it.”

She curtsied. At the door she stopped with her hand on the frame.

“Mr. Hollis. There is a lumber room at the end of the passage on the first floor of the wing. The lock has been on it a long time. Mrs. Peele told me it was not opened in her time. Do I have the right to open it?”

Mr. Hollis considered this with the exactness of a man who had spent his life on the difference between what a person has a right to do and what they will be punished for doing.

“You have the keys,” he said, “to everything in that wing. It is in the schedule. Sign for the slates.”

Mary signed for the slates.

She went back across the yard in the sun, and she did not open the lumber room that day, or the next, because the slates came on the Thursday and there was a fortnight of hard weather coming and eleven people needed a dry roof before they needed a mystery.

But she thought about it. Every time she walked the first-floor passage, she thought about the door at the end with its lock and its dust and the fact that Mrs. Peele — who had told her the truth about everything else in that house — had said only that it was not opened in her time.

She thought about it at night, lying in the little housekeeper’s room with the chatelaine under her pillow, listening to the drip of the scullery and the tick of the range cooling.

And it was a full month later — on a wet evening in the middle of September, when the slates were on and the wing was dry and the last of the summer was running out of the sky — that she finally took a candle up the first-floor passage to the end where the passage turned and there was no window.

The lock was stiff. The key from Mrs. Peele’s ring turned in it only after she had oiled it twice from the little tin in the still room.

Inside, the room smelled of dust and cold stone and something else, something old and dry and faintly sweet, like a box of paper left in a drawer for fifty years.

She lifted the candle.

And what she saw made her stand in the doorway without moving for a long time, while the rain came down outside on the newly mended roof, and eleven people slept below her under the slates, and nobody in the county knew.

There were files. There were bundles of them, tied with tape, in rows along a shelf from floor to ceiling on the far wall — and on the nearest bundle, in the low, ugly, unmistakable hand of a man who had signed the estate accounts for thirty years, was written the word:

TURNER.