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

Chapter 26

The thaw came in the second week of February, and on the nineteenth of that month — nine days past the anniversary of a trench, and seven years since a girl of eleven had been told there was no claim — Mr. George Ashby came down from London and walked the wing across the fields to the south field with the stream along it.

All eleven of them went. Mrs. Douty in her good black, Peter Small in new boots that he had refused to wear in the wet since December and had finally been ordered into, Louisa Marsh, John Ayres, Hannah Blythe, Mrs. Kite, Betsy Row, Mr. Hollis with his hat in his hand, and William Crumm, who had known the man.

The field was brown and wet and full of the smell of thawing earth, and the stream was running high along the bottom of it, and in the corner nearest the water, where the ground dips and drains and a man would choose to cut a trench if he were told to cut one, there was a stone.

It was a plain gray stone, about the height of a knee, set upright in the ground with the earth packed hard around it, and it had four lines cut into it in neat square letters:

THOMAS TURNER UNDER-GARDENER AT ASHWELL 22 YEARS HE DRAINED THIS FIELD

Mary Turner stood in front of it for a long moment with her hands at her sides while the wind moved along the top of the hedge and eleven people stood behind her and said nothing, because there was nothing that could be said and none of them were the kind of people who said things anyway.

Then she crouched down and put her hand flat on the top of the stone, where the rain had already been.

“Twenty-two years,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Nineteen shillings a week rising to twenty-two.”

Behind her, Mr. George Ashby took off his hat.

“Miss Turner,” he said. “There is one more thing, and then I shall go back to town and leave you to get on with the roof. I have had a letter from a solicitor at Meridale. Lord Meridale’s eldest son has been abroad for some time. He is expected back in England in the autumn, and there is a young woman at Hencham by the name of Lamb who has been told for two years that she has no character and no friends and no case.”

Mrs. Douty, standing in the wet grass in her good black dress, went very still.

“I have written to her,” said Mr. Ashby. “On the estate’s paper, in my own hand.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The stream ran along the bottom of the field.

Then Mrs. Agnes Douty, forty years among pastry and hot pans and sharp steel, who had been put on Ned Hawker’s cart at Michaelmas for saying a true thing out loud, said one word.

“Well.”

And everybody there heard it and everybody there understood exactly what it meant, because it was the same word she had said in the ruined larder in May, and the same word she had said in the clean kitchen in June, and somewhere in the seven months between the two, the word had stopped meaning God help us all and had begun, permanently and for good, to mean this will be a pleasure.