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

Chapter 18

It took three days to write out, and it was in the little red book when it was finished, in the careful round hand, in four headings, the way Mrs. Peele had taught her to plan a season.

First. The papers stay where they are, and are not moved, and are not spoken of.

Because a person who takes papers is a thief, and a person who leaves them exactly where the estate keeps them is the only person in the world who can prove what they say.

Second. Copies are made tonight and witnessed.

Not all fourteen bundles. The three red ones, and two black: her father’s, and Mrs. Peele’s. Copied by Louisa Marsh in her small clean hand, because Louisa Marsh could write a fair copy of anything, and witnessed by Mrs. Douty and John Ayres and Hannah Blythe, who could all sign their names, and by Mr. Hollis, who could sign his, and whose position as estate agent made his attestation especially important.

That was the evening Mary put her hat on and walked over to the estate office in the dark and stood in the doorway while Daniel Hollis read.

He read for a long time. He read the conveyance. He read the letter that said Hurst will manage the Turner business. There is no claim. He read Mrs. Peele’s request for four months of wages and the fact that it had been put at the back of a bundle without a reply.

Then he set all of it down on the desk and took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Miss Turner,” he said, “this is theft of a very particular kind. It is theft by a solicitor, done in writing, in London, over fifteen years, in the accounts of a man I serve. And you have brought it to me because you know that if it goes anywhere at all, it has to go through a man who has been writing letters about that roof for six years and being told the matter is not urgent.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You understand that if His Grace takes the other side of this, I lose my position, and my character, and my living, and I am forty years old with a wife and three children.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Hollis looked at the papers for a long moment.

“I’ll witness the copies,” he said. “And I will sign a statement of what I know. And I will send them to my brother at the Chancery bar, who has been telling me for eleven years that I am wasting myself on a man who does not read.”

Third. Nothing goes to His Grace’s man of business, and nothing goes to His Grace.

Because the man in London was the one who wrote no claim at the bottom of things, and His Grace did not read.

It goes to His Grace’s brother, Mary wrote.

The brother. The Honourable Mr. George Ashby, of Serle Street, who was the Duke’s younger brother by four years and who appeared in the bundles exactly once, in a letter of 1854, asking a perfectly ordinary question about the south field — where has the acreage gone in the schedule, Ambrose? — and to whom, so far as Mary could discover, no answer of any kind had ever been sent.

Every house has a man in it who asks the question once. Every estate has a letter of that kind, filed without reply, at the back of a bundle. Mary Turner had spent three days in a lumber room and she knew, with the perfect clarity of a person who has been trained to read a household the way other people read a book, that the man who had asked that question in 1854 was still asking it in his head in 1858.

Fourth, the little red book said, nothing is thrown at anybody. We do not accuse. We ask.

Which was the hardest division in the whole plan, and the one she was least sure of, and the one she had learned from the woman who had put fifty pounds under a floorboard and written I hope this house has used you better than it used some of us — a sentence which had not one word of anger in it, and which had been strong enough to build a kitchen on, three rooms and seventeen years away.