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

Chapter 16

She wrote to London on the first of October.

Not to the Duke. Mary Turner was eighteen and had risen as far as a service wing and she knew precisely how far a housekeeper’s letter travels: it travels as far as the man of business, who puts it in a bundle with red tape and writes no claim at the bottom in a looping hand.

So she wrote to Abel Hurst, of Gray’s Inn, solicitor.

She wrote it at Mrs. Peele’s small deal writing table over two evenings, and she wrote it four times before it was right, and what it finally said was this:

That she was the housekeeper of Ashwell Court, appointed by His Grace’s own letter of the second of May. That she had found in the ordinary course of her duties a number of the estate’s papers that appeared to be unaccounted for, relating to the south field, to a conveyance bearing Mr. Hurst’s signature as trustee, and to certain annual sums entered in the estate books under repairs, service wing. That she had no wish to trouble His Grace with matters that were not his, but that she had an obligation to her office and to the estate. That she would be obliged if Mr. Hurst would inform her, in writing, of the proper place for these papers to be kept, as she could not in conscience keep them where they were without the estate’s instruction.

She did not accuse anybody of anything.

That was Mrs. Peele’s teaching, delivered in a linen press three years before: Never write the thing you mean. Write the thing that makes the other man write it first.

She posted it herself on the Ashwell village road on the Monday, walking the two miles in and two miles back with the letter under her cloak, and she did her evening accounts as usual and slept four hours and rose at five.

She got nothing.

Not a refusal. Not an acknowledgement. Nothing at all — through October, through the back end of the year, while the wing came into its winter, and the beans came in and were salted down, and the last of the rhubarb was forced under buckets for Christmas, and Mrs. Douty began on the mincemeat, and Peter Small learned his letters at Louisa Marsh’s elbow by the housekeeper’s fire and got as far as particular, and Hannah Blythe’s butter went up to the house every week there was a house to send it to, and down to the hall every week there was not, and it was the same butter in both places.

Nothing came from London. And then, on a Tuesday in the third week of November, a letter came from Ashwell instead.

It was not from Abel Hurst. It was from the Duke’s man of business — the same man, in the same ugly looping hand, whose name Mary had learned by now from the papers in the red bundles. And it did not come to the wing. It came to Mr. Hollis in the estate office, with the Duke’s seal on it, and it said that the housekeeper of Ashwell Court was to be informed that her services would not be required after the quarter day of the twenty-fifth of December, 1858; that the practice of appointing a housekeeper without the approval of the man of business was not one that London would continue; and that Miss Turner should prepare the keys, the inventories, and the accounts for a handover.

Mr. Hollis brought it down to the wing himself, in the rain, at four o’clock in the afternoon, with his hat in his hand.

He read it to her standing in the passage outside the housekeeper’s room, because he wished her to understand that the order came from London directly and not from him. His voice did not change at any point in the reading. He read it exactly as he would have read a schedule of timber prices.

And when he had finished, and folded it, and put it in his coat, he said, “I am sorry, Miss Turner. I have already written to His Grace. I have had no answer, and I do not expect one.”

Mary stood in the passage with the smell of Mrs. Douty’s bread coming up from the kitchen.

“When?” she said.

“Quarter day. The twenty-fifth of December.”

“Forty days,” said Mary.

“Forty-six,” said Mr. Hollis. “I would start counting from today.”

He went back up the passage to the house.

Mary stood in the corridor for a while, listening to the wing — the tick of the range, the drip of the scullery, the third stair creaking as somebody went up to the attics, all the small night noises of a house that had begun, against every reasonable expectation, to sound like a home.

Then she went up the first-floor passage to the end where it turned and there was no window.

She unlocked the lumber room and went in and lit a candle and opened the red bundle she had tied with her own hands six weeks before, and took the letter she had found, and folded it, and put it in her apron pocket.

Then she went down to the kitchen.

Mrs. Douty was there. So was Louisa Marsh. So was John Ayres, mending a hinge on the hall settle. Peter Small was in the scullery, and Betsy Row was at the table with a bowl of dripping and a cloth, and Hannah Blythe had come up from the dairy with her keys.

Mary stood in the doorway and looked at the six of them.

“There is something I have to tell you,” she said.