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

Chapter 3

He was not a bad master. He was a worse thing. He was an absent one.

He came down twice a year: in autumn for the birds, in early summer to sign whatever was put in front of him. He signed forward and never backward. He did not know the names of the men who dug his drains, though one of them had been Thomas Turner, who had died of a chill caught digging a drainage trench in February when Mary was eleven, and whose service was recorded in the ledger in Mr. Hollis’s own hand as 22 yrs, no pension, widow to be relieved at 2s weekly.

That widow had taken in laundry from the vicarage at Nether Ashwell and had taught her daughter plain, useful things: how to render lard, how to bank a fire, how to salt a side of bacon so it kept through a wet summer, and how to speak civilly to people who thought themselves your betters without ever quite bowing your head.

She had died the winter Mary turned fifteen. Mary had carried her mother’s brass wedding ring in a little cloth pouch at her neck ever since, because it was the only thing that had been given to her freely.

Mr. Hollis had written to London on the day Mrs. Peele died. He had written a careful letter, three paragraphs, recommending that a new housekeeper be engaged, and suggesting, obliquely — because in six years he had learned how to suggest to a man who did not read — that the young woman lately trained under Mrs. Peele might be worth the transfer.

The reply had come back by return, and it had been a single curt sentence.

Mr. Hollis read it twice. Then he went down the stone passage to the little sitting room off the still room, and he stood with his hat in his hand, and he told Mary Turner that she was housekeeper of Ashwell Court from that hour, at twenty-two pounds a year, with the servants’ hall and the kitchens and the still room and the linen presses and the wine cellar hers to manage as best she could.

He watched her take the ring of keys. Her hand did not shake. She thanked him in a low, steady voice — the voice her mother had taught her for men who hold ledgers — and she curtsied without bowing her head, and Daniel Hollis, who had been an accurate man for forty years, looked at her for a moment longer than accuracy required.

“I’m sorry it’s only this,” he said.

“Sir?”

“The wing.” He turned his hat over once in his hands. “Nobody’s wanted it since Peele’s predecessor. I’d have had a proper survey done. I asked twice.”

“And what did His Grace say?”

Mr. Hollis put his hat on.

“He said the roof hasn’t fallen in yet,” he said, and went back up the passage to his office.