The Duke Gave Her the Servants No House Would Take—They Ran the Finest Kitchen She’d Ever Eaten In
Chapter 23
She laid them out on the long oak table between the tea things and the butter dish, and the boy Peter Small stood in the scullery doorway with his mouth open and was not sent out, and Mrs. Douty came and stood at the head of the table with her apron still on, and Louisa Marsh came down from the still room and stood by the fire, and John Ayres brought a chair for Hannah Blythe and stood behind it, and Betsy Row, who was the shy one, stood in the passage with the door open and did not come in and heard every word.
The three red bundles: the south field, the conveyance, the annual sums entered under repairs, service wing, and eleven years of a letter that said let it stand as it stands, the wing is not seen, nothing that is not seen will be asked about.
The black bundle marked TURNER: twenty-two years’ service, nineteen shillings a week rising to twenty-two, death in February in a trench, no pension, and the widow’s claim refused in the word economy three times, the last of them three weeks after the funeral.
The black bundle marked PEEL: thirty-one years, four months of wages withheld, a letter in the dead woman’s own hand that had never been answered.
And, in Mrs. Peele’s small deal writing desk, a copy of the paper Sarah Renn had written on the eleventh of March, 1841 — because Mary had made a fair copy of it herself in the little red book, and Louisa Marsh had written it out again properly and folded it inside the PEEL bundle, where it belonged.
Mr. George Ashby read all of it. He read standing up, because he had not been invited to sit, and because his brother was the owner of the table.
He read for forty minutes. Nobody spoke. The snow slid off the leaded panes of the yard window in small soft falls. Twice he put a page down on the table and looked at it without picking up the next one, and once he walked to the window and stood with his back to the room for a long moment and then came back and read on.
When he had finished, he took off his spectacles and wiped them with a handkerchief and put them on again, and looked at the paper in his hand, and said:
“This is my brother’s signature on the conveyance. He signed it in 1843, at twenty-one, three months after our father died, in his man of business’s office in London, and he signed it without reading it, because Ambrose has never read anything in his life except a sporting calendar.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Hurst’s signature, as trustee. Which means Hurst has held that land in trust for fifteen years, and has paid my brother a fraction of what it earns, and has paid Ashwell’s service wing nothing at all, and has entered the difference in the books every Michaelmas under the word he knew would never be questioned.” He put the paper down. “The word repairs.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There is a hundred and forty acres here. I remember being told, when I was younger, that they had drained the south field.” He looked up. “Who drained the south field, Miss Turner?”
Mary did not look away from him.
“My father, sir,” she said. “Thomas Turner, under-gardener, twenty-two years at Ashwell. He dug a drainage trench in the February of 1851 and caught a chill in it and died nine days later. My mother’s pension was refused three times in the word economy. I was eleven. My name is in that bundle, sir. It says the girl, Mary, aged eleven, no claim.”
Mr. George Ashby stood at the head of the long oak table in the servants’ hall of a house he had visited twice, holding a paper in both hands, and did not say anything for a very long time.
Then he said, “Miss Turner, will you tell me the rest of it? The part that is not in these papers.”
And Mary said, “Mrs. Douty.”
And Mrs. Agnes Douty, who had been turned out of Meridale at Michaelmas for a true word, came round to the head of the table with her apron on, and stood in front of a gentleman of Serle Street, and told him about Nancy Lamb, seventeen, kitchen maid, from near Hencham.