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

Chapter 24

He stayed three days.

He would not take a room in the house. He took a room at the inn at Ashwell village, where Ellery had eaten the bread, and he walked over in the mornings through the snow, and he talked to the people in the wing, and he did not write anything down while they were talking to him, which was the third thing Mary noticed, and which made her trust him almost entirely.

He talked to Louisa Marsh by the still-room cupboards and asked her what before the trouble meant, and Louisa Marsh, who had never told anybody in her life, told him: the still-room maid below her at Lady Hencham’s, dismissed for a fault she had not committed, and Louisa had written a letter to the mistress to say so, and had been put out of the house for writing it, and the mistress had put it about that there had been a matter with a man, which was not true, and nobody had ever asked.

He talked to Mrs. Kite in the laundry yard about why she had repointed a copper’s brickwork with her own hands on her second morning in a house that had not yet spoken a kind word to her, and Mrs. Kite said that the bricks had wanted doing and there was no man on the estate who would come down to the wing. He asked her why she had been turned out of Witcom and she said she would rather not go into it and he said that was perfectly all right and did not press her. (She was turned out of Witcom three years before, for saying that the mistress’s brother had struck a horse in the stable yard; she told Mary this in the kitchen in February, and it was the only time in seven years Mary ever heard her mention it.)

He talked to John Ayres about Bramworth in the coach house with the snow coming in under the door, and about the difference between a man who is insolent and a man who is only honest once. He talked to Hannah Blythe in the dairy, and to Betsy Row, who would not say three words together to a gentleman but who showed him, in silence, her larder shelves scrubbed down to bare slate.

And on the third day he talked to Peter Small, in the kitchen, sitting on a stool by the range, and asked him where he had been before Ashwell, and Peter Small said three houses in two years, and Mr. Ashby asked why he had left the last one, and Peter Small, who was fourteen years old and had been at three houses in two years, took the piece of string out of his pocket, and showed it to him, and said:

“The second house. The girl there used to tie me to the table leg with this when she went out. I kept it because she said she’d want it back when I came again. I never came again. I don’t know why I kept it.”

Mr. George Ashby of Serle Street, who had spent his life reading documents, looked at a fourteen-year-old scullery boy holding a piece of string.

“Give it to me,” he said.

Peter Small gave it to him.

Mr. Ashby put it in his breast pocket.