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

Chapter 22

He came at eleven o’clock in a plain black carriage with no crest on the panel, and he came to the yard door and not the front.

That was the first thing.

Mr. George Ashby was thirty-two and did not look like his brother. The Duke of Marabe was tall and dark and carried his shoulders in the way of a man who had never been contradicted by a person of consequence; his younger brother was a head shorter and slightly stooped, with spectacles and a white, thoughtful face, and the look of a man who spent most of his life at a desk reading things nobody else wished to read.

He came up the wet gravel between the pump and the woodpile. Snow had fallen in the night and lay along the wall tops. He stood at the door of the servants’ hall with his hat in both hands and he waited, one heartbeat, for somebody to come and tell him where he might be permitted to go — and Mary Turner came out into the yard herself, in her second-best dress and Mrs. Peele’s chatelaine on the outside of her apron where it could be seen, and said:

“Mr. Ashby. You’ll want to come in by the kitchen, it’s warmer.”

He almost smiled.

“I have never in my life,” he said, “come into a house by the kitchen.”

“Then this is the first,” said Mary.

She took him through the scullery and past the blackleaded range where Mrs. Douty stood with her hands in the flour and did not curtsey and was not asked to — and into the servants’ hall, and sat him down at the long oak table with its knife marks and its pegged split, and Peter Small brought in the tea, and spilled a third of it in the saucer, and was not sent out of the room.

Mr. Ashby looked at the table. He looked at the butter dish. He looked at the boy.

“Where is the rest of it?” he said.

“Where is the rest of what, sir?”

“Ashwell Court. I have been in the house twice in my life, both times in the first week of a January, both times to see a lawyer’s appointment signed. There is a drawing room I recall as quite blue.”

“There is, sir. It’s a very fine room.”

“And you are — how old?”

“Eighteen, sir.”

“And you have the keys to forty rooms.”

“I have the keys to the service wing, sir. Eleven people sleep in it, and I feed them, and they do the work of thirty.”

Mr. Ashby drank his tea.

“Miss Turner,” he said, “I have received exactly one letter about you, and it was from my brother’s man of business, in October, and it informed me, as I had not asked, that there had been some difficulty with a servant at Ashwell. I have received one other thing, which is your letter of the fourth of December. And in between, I have thought about very little else.”

“Then I’ll say what I wrote, sir, and no more of it.”

She went to the housekeeper’s room and brought the bundles.