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

Chapter 20

The answer came in eleven days, which is very fast, and Mrs. Douty was the one who said so.

“Eleven days,” she said, in the kitchen, with her hands in the flour. “That means he wrote it the day he had it, and posted it the next. Nobody does that in December unless they’ve been waiting years to be asked.”

Mary did not open the letter at the table. She took it to the housekeeper’s room and shut the door and read it standing up by the window with the rain running down it, and it was three sentences long in a plain, businesslike hand, and it said that Mr. George Ashby would come down to Ashwell on the sixteenth of December, that he would come in his own carriage and not the estate’s, that he would be obliged if Miss Turner would be present and would bring whatever papers she thought fit, and that he would be grateful if this were kept as quiet as she had kept it so far.

He wrote please three times, Mary thought, and put the letter in the writing desk with the canvas purse.

It was that evening, in the kitchen, with the wind coming at the yard window and the range banked for the night, that Mrs. Douty told her.

Peter Small had been sent up. Louisa Marsh had taken her candle to the still room to finish the labels on the last of the winter preserves. Betsy Row had gone to the hall to mend a hem. There were two of them in the kitchen, and Mrs. Douty took off her apron and folded it and sat down at the table, which she had not once done in seven months, and Mary understood that something was coming and sat down opposite her.

“Meridale,” said Mrs. Douty. “You’ve never asked me what I did there, and I’ve wondered more than once why not.”

“I did wonder,” said Mary. “It wasn’t mine to ask.”

“No,” said Mrs. Douty. “Well.”

She turned her cup around once on the table.

“There was a girl at Meridale,” she said. “Seventeen. Kitchen maid, under me, and a good one, though that’s not why. Her name was Nancy Lamb, and she came from a place down near Hencham, and she had no people living. And in the February, Lord Meridale’s eldest son came home from abroad, and in the March, Nancy Lamb went to the mistress to say a thing about him. And in the April, Nancy Lamb was put out of Meridale without a character, and the reason given to the county was that she had stolen.”

Mary sat quite still.

“And you?” she said.

“I was her cook,” said Mrs. Douty. “And when the mistress told me to say, if I should ever be asked in the village or in a letter, that the girl had stolen — I said I would not. And I said why I would not, and I said it in front of the under-housekeeper and the still-room maid, and the footman heard it from the passage, and by the Tuesday it was all over the house that I had called the young master a thing I will not repeat in this kitchen.”

“Was it true?”

“It was true,” said Mrs. Douty. “That was the trouble with it.”

The range ticked. Outside, in the yard, the wind stirred the pump handle.

“They turned me out at Michaelmas, and I went to my sister in Marshham, and my sister’s husband was a chandler and did not want another mouth, and so when His Grace’s man wrote round the county in the May to say that Ashwell Court would take the unwanted off anybody’s hands, my sister’s husband wrote back before I knew it was being done.”

“And they put you on Ned Hawker’s cart,” said Mary.

“And they put me on Ned Hawker’s cart.”

Mary looked down at the table, at the knife marks and the split that John Ayres had pegged and glued and rubbed with beeswax in the summer.

“Mrs. Douty,” she said. “When Mr. George Ashby comes on the sixteenth of December — will you tell him that? Will you say it in front of him, the way you have said it to me?”

Mrs. Agnes Douty, who had spent forty years among pastry and hot pans and sharp steel, and who had been turned out of a better house than this one at Michaelmas for a thing that was true, looked at an eighteen-year-old housekeeper across a scrubbed oak table in the back end of a ruined wing.

“I’ve never once in my life,” she said, “been asked. I’ll say it all day.”