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

Chapter 6

They came over the next four days, one and two at a time, under the same fine drizzle or under skies of low pearl-gray cloud, and each of them stepped down off Ned Hawker’s cart with a bundle or a box and the same watchful look of creatures that have learned not to expect kindness at a strange door.

Mary met every one of them at the yard gate.

She learned their names before she showed them anything else. She had decided this on the first night, lying awake, listening to the wind come through the missing slates; she had decided that whatever else this house did to these people, it would not begin by making them wait in the rain while she decided what to do with them.

The kitchen maid from Hencham was called Betsy Row. She was twenty-two and thin as a whip and she came down off the cart holding her bundle against her chest like a shield, and when Mary said come in out of the wet, she flinched — a small, complete flinch, the whole body — and Mary understood something about the broken dish without being told anything at all.

The footman from Bramworth was called John Ayres. He was thirty, with a soldier’s back and a soldier’s way of standing, and he looked at Mary the way men of that kind look at people who have never had to hold a line: politely, and from a distance, and with an opinion already formed and kept to himself.

The dairy woman from Witcom was Hannah Blythe. She was forty and had brought, in her canvas bag, four half-pound butter molds stamped with a wheat ear, wrapped in flannel. She unpacked them in the dairy on the second morning and set them on the marble slab in a row, and stood back and looked at them, and that was the first thing in the whole wing that looked as if it belonged to anybody.

The scullery boy was Peter Small. He was fourteen, and small for fourteen, and he had been at three houses in two years, and he arrived with nothing at all but the clothes he stood in and a piece of string in his pocket that he would not explain and that Mary did not ask about.

The laundress was Mrs. Ellen Kite. Nobody had ever given a reason for her going, and Mary did not ask, and Mrs. Kite did not offer. On her second morning, before anyone had set her any task at all, Mary found her out in the laundry yard kneeling in the wet with a trowel and a pail, repointing the brickwork of the copper’s base with mortar she had mixed herself out of lime and sand she had found in the stable.

She had mixed it well. She had mixed it better than the man the estate sent would have.

And the still-room maid was Louisa Marsh, and she arrived last, on the Friday, in a black bonnet with the ribbon gone, and Mary took her through to the still room and showed her the cupboards with their jars of lavender, tansy, wormwood, marshmallow root and beeswax, and Louisa Marsh stood in front of them for a long moment with her hands at her sides.

Then she said, in a very quiet voice, “May I?”

Mary said she might.

That was on the Friday afternoon. On the Saturday, Mary came into the still room to find every jar relabeled in a small clear hand, in order, in ink.