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

Chapter 19

They worked.

That was the thing nobody outside the wing ever understood afterwards, when the story began to go about the county in the way such stories do: they did not stop working. Not for one day.

On the Wednesday Mary walked the whole estate with John Ayres and a chalk and the little red book, and made a true list of every repair the estate had paid for twice and never bought: the wing roof, the corridor gutter, the two field gates at the south field, the culvert in the lane where her father had died, the dairy’s north wall, the laundry boiler’s brickwork that Mrs. Kite had fixed out of her own pocket with stable lime — and they wrote each one on a separate sheet, with dates, and against each one the year the money had been entered in the book.

On the Thursday Louisa Marsh sat up until two in the morning copying, in her small clean hand, the three red bundles and the two black ones, and Mrs. Douty kept her company with a candle and a cup of tea and did not once tell her to go to bed, which was a kindness of a kind that Mrs. Douty had not offered anybody in eleven years.

On the Friday Mr. Hollis came to the wing with a black bag. He read every page of Louisa Marsh’s copies against the originals, one by one, and at the end of it he took out his own pen and signed his name on the back of eleven sheets in his clear sloping hand, which was the signature that had authenticated rent rolls and timber contracts at Ashwell for six years, and which gave the copies an independent witness from the estate office.

On the Saturday Mary wrote to the Honourable George Ashby, of Serle Street, London.

It was, when it was finished, one page long. It said that she was the housekeeper of Ashwell Court, appointed by the Duke’s letter of the second of May. That in the ordinary course of her duties she had found certain of the estate’s papers in a room which the last housekeeper had told her was not opened in her time. That the papers concerned the south field, and a conveyance, and a sum entered every year in the estate books under repairs, service wing. That she was not writing to any other person in the world on this subject, and that she had not yet written to His Grace. That she had certain other information which concerned the household of Ashwell in the years between 1841 and 1858, and the treatment of persons in the estate’s service, and which she would place before him if he wished it. And that she was asking, with all respect, whether he would come down to Ashwell.

She did not say what the information was. She did not need to. She was Mrs. Peele’s pupil and her mother’s daughter, and she had written the kind of letter that makes the other man write first.

She posted it on the Ashwell village road on the Monday morning, two miles in and two miles back, in the cold, with the letter under her cloak.

Then she went home and got on with the winter.