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

Chapter 25

The letter came down from London by express on Christmas Eve, and Mr. Hollis brought it round to the wing at nine o’clock at night in the snow, and would not wait, because he wished to see her face when she read it and did not wish her to see his.

Mary read it in the passage outside the housekeeper’s room while eleven people pretended to be doing other things within thirty feet of her.

It was one page long.

Madam,

I have written to Gray’s Inn this day, and Hurst’s client, Mr. Hurst’s practice, and the trust in the south field are in my hands of yesterday. On the twenty-seventh, an inventory of the whole of it will be made and the sums restored, together with interest of fifteen years, to the estate; and the sums so restored will be applied, on my instruction, and in my own hand, to the repairs and the pensions of the service wing of Ashwell Court, and I shall see the book my brother signs on that point, and I shall stand beside him while he signs it, and my brother will read it before he does, because I intend to read it to him aloud.

The commission of the twenty-fifth of December is cancelled. No person in the wing is to be removed at the quarter day; and the appointment of the housekeeper is confirmed, by my hand, as a thing done by His Grace’s brother, who has the estate’s interest at heart.

There is a hundred and forty acres in the south field. I have caused a stone to be set in the corner of it by the stream, and I have written a name on it, and I shall be pleased if the wing will allow me to walk over and show it to them in the spring.

I am, madam, your very humble servant, George Ashby

Mary read it twice.

She did not read the last paragraph aloud. She read the first three, standing in the passage, in her flat steady housekeeper’s voice, and at the third one — the appointment of the housekeeper is confirmed — somebody in the kitchen made a sound, and it was Mrs. Douty, and it was very brief, and everybody pretended not to have heard it, and everybody had heard it.

Then Mary Turner said, “And it says the quarter day is cancelled, and nobody goes, and Peter Small is to have new boots.”

“I am to have new boots?” said Peter Small.

“You are to have new boots.”

The wing of Ashwell Court had, on that day, everything it needed to make a Christmas, because it had been working for seven months as though the twenty-fifth of December were an ordinary day in an ordinary house, which is the only true way to have a good Christmas.

They had a goose.

It came from the estate’s own farm — the farm whose accounts were kept by the estate office and not by Gray’s Inn, and which Mr. Hollis had signed out that morning with a chit that read for the service wing, as necessary repair.

They had Mrs. Douty’s pudding, made in October from a recipe she had refused to write down in the presence of any of them, and served with Hannah Blythe’s cream from the dairy that smelled faintly of cold grass.

They had new bread, and preserves, and a plate of the butter with the wheat-ear stamp on it, and the butter went up to the house that day because the house was empty and there was nobody in it, and down to the hall because that is where everybody was.

They had Mr. Hollis, who came at four o’clock, for the first time in six years, and stood in the doorway of the servants’ hall with his hat in his hand, and was invited in by three people at once.

They had William Crumm, who came down at five with a sack of walnuts from the kitchen garden wall and a note that said, Only for the wing, from Crumm, and who stayed and drank a glass of the estate’s ordinary port out of the butler’s pantry and told them what a drainage trench was like in February in 1851, and that Mary’s father had been a man who would not go in from the wet until a job was finished, and that the job had been finished, and that the field had grown wheat on it every year since.

They had a candle each, lit from the fire, which was eleven candles for eleven people, which cost a great deal more than the estate’s accountant would have considered necessary.

And when they were all sitting there, Mrs. Douty said grace in a low voice, and Peter Small ate three helpings of everything, and at nine o’clock, when the last of the plates had gone and the fire banked and the wind had got up outside over the new slates, Mary Turner went into the still room alone with a candle.

The room was cold and clean and smelled of lavender and beeswax. She opened the cupboard behind the marshmallow jar and took out the square of linen and untied it on the deal table, and laid the worn silver thimble and the pressed sprig of rosemary side by side.

She took Mrs. Peele’s chatelaine from her apron and laid it down beside them.

She took from around her neck the little cloth pouch holding her mother’s brass wedding ring, which she had carried since the winter she was fifteen, and laid that down too.

She took out the folded paper that Sarah Renn had written on the eleventh of March, 1841 — the original, not the copy — and set it at the head of them, and put the flat of her hand on it, the way she had done in the first week of May in an empty room with a biscuit tin in front of her.

Four women who had loved somebody and worked with their hands. A woman whose name was not on any stone; a girl who had died of a fever at nine; a housekeeper of thirty-one years who had been left without four months of her wages; and a mother in a village two miles down the lane, who had sewn a sovereign into a hem and taught her daughter to speak civilly without bowing her head.

Take the money and do not be ashamed of it. Spend it on what you need.

I have been happy in this room more days than not.

Mary Turner sat in the still room of Ashwell Court on Christmas night with a candle burning and thirteen pounds four shillings and sixpence still left in a canvas purse in the writing desk next door, and she did not weep, because weeping was a thing to be done alone and at night, and because there was work to do in the morning.

She tied the linen back up around the thimble and the rosemary. She put Sarah Renn’s paper inside the still-room press, behind the marshmallow jar, where it had been hidden once before by a woman who had trusted a stranger thirty years away.

She put her mother’s ring back around her neck.

And she sat for a while in the cold with her hands in her lap, thinking about a girl of fifteen who had come into service and put by sixpence and a shilling at a time for two and thirty years under a floorboard, and had written to nobody knew whom: I hope you are a young woman as I was. And I hope this house has used you better than it used some of us.

It has now, thought Mary Turner. You did it. You did it from under the floor.