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

Chapter 4

Four days later, on the sixth of May, the second letter came down from London, and this one Mr. Hollis brought himself.

He had been told to make the economies, and economies, to a man who had never once opened a coal ledger, meant only one thing: fewer hands and cheaper ones. But the Duke had been dining at his club, and at his club a man had mentioned that old Lady Ellery’s people at Bramworth were shedding staff, that the rector at Hencham had put a girl off for a broken dish, that Lord Meridale’s cook had gone — and the Duke, between the second glass and the third, had conceived a scheme he considered rather clever.

The wings at Ashwell stood half empty. The other houses in the county had surplus. Why not take their unwanted at Ashwell, where there was room and no consequence to the reputation of the house, since nobody of quality ever went down to the servants’ side anyway?

Miss Turner has been reported as capable, he wrote. She can no doubt make what she will of them.

Mr. Hollis read it aloud in the little sitting room, because he wished her to understand that the order came from His Grace directly and not from him. Then he unfolded the second sheet, and there were seven names on it.

A cook lately turned out of Lord Meridale’s establishment — reasons unstated.

A kitchen maid dismissed from the rectory at Hencham after a matter concerning a broken dish.

A footman put out at Bramworth for insolence.

A dairy woman from Witcom, let go after a quarrel with the mistress.

A scullery boy of fourteen who had been at three houses in two years.

A laundress whose reason for dismissal no one would name.

And a still-room maid whose last place had ended in whispers that Mr. Hollis, folding the letter, declined to repeat.

They would arrive on Ned Hawker’s carrier cart over the course of the following week, one or two at a time, as their old houses could spare the trouble of sending them.

Mary asked, in that same steady voice, whether she might refuse any of them.

She might not. The Duke had given his word.

“It is,” Mr. Hollis added, not quite looking at her, “a kindness on His Grace’s part.”

Mary said she understood. She thanked him. She stood until he had gone, and then she sat down at Mrs. Peele’s small deal writing table with the letter open in front of her, and she put her hand around the chatelaine in her apron pocket and held it, exactly the way a person holds something they are afraid will be taken away.

Seven people no house in the county would have. Into a wing with sixty items on the list, a dead drain, a green range, and eleven slates missing over the yard.

She did not weep. Her mother had told her once that weeping was to be done alone and at night, which she had come to understand was not an instruction to grieve less but an instruction to be found grieving never.

She took a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer.

In the careful round hand Mrs. Peele had taught her, she wrote out the beds in the attics that must be aired, the ticks that must be beaten, the blankets to be fetched up from the linen press, the candles to be issued, the soap portioned, the tea and sugar weighed, the places to be laid at the servants’ hall table for a household that had shrunk to four and was about to grow to eleven.

She wrote until the candle guttered. Then she banked the fire, and lay down, and did not sleep for a long time.

Somewhere in the dark the house let out its small night noises: a board cooling in the range, a drip in the scullery, the wind making a thin note through the missing slates above her head.

Tomorrow the first of them would come.