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

Chapter 5

The cart came on a Tuesday in a fine gray drizzle that had been falling since dawn.

Mary heard the wheels on the gravel before she heard anything else — the particular complaint of Ned Hawker’s old cart, which had carried goods between Ashwell village and the Court for thirty years and had a loose board in the tail that made a sound like a man clearing his throat. She pulled the shawl over her head and went out, and her boots were wet through before she reached the yard gate.

Old Ned touched his cap to her. Mary saw him do it and did not know what to do with it. Nobody at Ashwell had touched his cap to her in her life. She was not Mrs. Peele. She would not be Mrs. Peele for a long time yet, and possibly never.

Down from the back of the cart climbed a woman of perhaps fifty in a black stuff dress that had once fitted a better-knit body, carrying a canvas bag in one hand and a wooden box tied with twine in the other. Her face was broad and closed and her eyes went first to the servants’ door — and then, unmistakably, to the front of the house beyond it, the way a person checks a thing is still where they left it and still shut to them.

She stood in the wet yard and said nothing at all, as though she expected to be told to go round the back of that as well.

Her name, when she gave it, was Mrs. Agnes Douty, lately cook at Meridale.

Mary said, “Come in out of the rain, Mrs. Douty.”

She took the woman through the scullery into the kitchen, and set her down by the range, and put the kettle on with her own hands, because there was no one else in the world to do it.

And while the water came up, Mary watched her hands.

Red. Roughened. Scarred along the thumbs and the heel of the palm where a knife goes when you are in a hurry and have been in a hurry for thirty years. Those were not the hands of a woman who had been dismissed for idleness. They were the hands of somebody who had spent four decades among pastry and hot pans and sharp steel, and they lay folded in her lap now, quite still, the way a person holds a thing they are afraid will be taken away.

Rain ran down the leaded panes of the yard window. The kettle ticked.

Mary asked no questions about Meridale. Mrs. Douty offered nothing. They drank tea in the kitchen of a house neither of them belonged to, and after a quarter of an hour of civil silence the older woman stood up, set her cup down squarely in the middle of its saucer, and spoke for the first time since the yard.

“If you’ll show me the larder, miss, I’ll see what’s wanted.”

Mary showed her the larder.

It was a cold flagged room with a small north window behind iron bars, and its slate shelves wore rings of grease the size of dinner plates where jars had stood untouched since the previous autumn, and the ceiling above them was spotted with black mold like a spill of ink.

Mrs. Douty stood in the middle of it and looked at all of it for a long, slow moment. Then she drew a breath in through her nose — the long, appraising breath of a woman smelling a kitchen the way a doctor feels a pulse — and let it out again and said one word.

“Well.”

That was all.

Later, much later, the whole wing would come to understand that well as a kind of weather report, and that it could mean anything from this will be a pleasure to God help us all, and that the only way to tell the difference was to watch whether she put her sleeves up after she said it.

She put her sleeves up.