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

Chapter 21

You have to understand what the wing was by the middle of December.

The kitchen range was black and drew clean. The copper stockpots hung bright above it in a row, and there were six of them now, because Mrs. Douty had found two more in the game larder and had them retinned out of the last of Sarah Renn’s purse.

The larder was cold and sweet and full, with the slate shelves scrubbed white and every jar labeled in Louisa Marsh’s small clear hand and stood in order of use, and in December there was salted pork and a crock of dripping and a shelf of Mrs. Douty’s preserves that had made the county sit up and take notice in a way that no set of accounts ever could.

The wine cellar had been swept and the nine dozen bottles counted and the ledger brought up to date; John Ayres had done that in November without being asked, because he did a thing once and then held his tongue, which was what insolence looks like to a man who has just been told the truth.

The back corridor was dry, and had been since June. The dairy was sweet. The laundry had two girls from Nether Ashwell that Mrs. Kite had chosen herself, and the sheets came back so square and white that Mary had them counted against the list twice.

The linen press held fifty-eight pairs of sheets, mended and folded with lavender laid between them out of Mrs. Peele’s still-room stores, and nineteen pairs past mending had become dusters and dish cloths and, in one case, a very good winter shift for Peter Small, who had come to Ashwell in May with nothing at all but the clothes he stood in and a piece of string in his pocket which he still would not explain and which Mary had never asked about.

Louisa Marsh had the still room in an order Mrs. Peele herself would have owned, and had begun teaching Peter Small his letters of an evening by the housekeeper’s great, because he had asked.

Hannah Blythe’s butter went up to the house table when the Duke came and down to the servants’ hall when he did not, and was the same butter in both places, and in November it had won the Ashwell village Michaelmas show, which is a thing that had not happened to the produce of that wing since anyone could remember, and which had caused Mr. Abel Hurst’s man of business no inconvenience at all, because he had never in his life heard of the Ashwell Michaelmas show and did not know that a prize had been taken in a tent, in the rain, by a woman who had been sent to Ashwell because she had quarrelled with a mistress.

Ned Hawker’s cart came twice a week, and Ned sat ten minutes in the kitchen with a cup of Mrs. Douty’s tea and a slice of her seed cake, and touched his cap to Mary, and called her Miss Turner, which no one at Ashwell had done before the summer.

William Crumm had begun coming down on Fridays as a matter of course. He had known Mary’s father for twenty-two years, and he had begun, in November, to teach Peter Small to prune.

And every evening Mary sat at Mrs. Peele’s small deal writing table with the little red book and Sarah Renn’s nearly empty purse and the accounts of tallow and beeswax and blue, and she planned a week ahead and a month ahead and a season ahead as she had been taught, and she wrote good marks against the names of people no house in the county would take.

She kept the little red book still, and the ring of keys at her waist, and the chatelaine in her apron pocket, where her hand went to it a dozen times a day without her thinking.

Four things lay in the still-room cupboard behind the marshmallow jar, wrapped in a square of linen: a worn silver thimble, a pressed sprig of rosemary tied with blue thread, a brass chatelaine, and a little cloth pouch holding a brass wedding ring.

You’ll do. Follow me, and don’t chatter.

I have been happy in this room more days than not. God keep you, Sarah Renn.

It kept me on my feet, and it will keep you on yours. Don’t let them see you tired.

And, from a kitchen in Nether Ashwell, from a woman who had taken in laundry from the vicarage and taught her daughter how to salt a side of bacon so it kept through a wet summer, and how to speak civilly to people who thought themselves your betters without ever quite bowing your head.

On the fifteenth of December, the evening before Mr. George Ashby was to come down from London, there were eleven people at supper in the servants’ hall, and it was mutton broth and new bread and a dish of Mrs. Douty’s preserves, and outside the yard window it began to snow, the first of that winter, in large slow flakes that lay along the sill and did not melt.

Mary looked down the length of the oak table with its knife marks and its pegged split and its sheen of beeswax.

Forty-five pounds, one and six, she thought. Ten days to quarter day.

And then she went up the first-floor passage to the end where it turned and there was no window, and unlocked the lumber room, and brought down the three red bundles and the two black ones, and stacked them on the writing table in the housekeeper’s room, where they would be ready for the morning.