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

Chapter 7

To understand what those seven people walked into, you must see the wing the way Mary walked it on her second morning, with the ring of keys at her waist and a stub of chalk in her hand and a little red memorandum book in her pocket.

It had been built in 1738 as an addition to the older Jacobean house — not attached to it like a limb but bolted onto the north side like a lean-to built by men who were told to make it work and not to make it beautiful. A long, low range of local gray stone under a slate roof that was, in the spring of 1858, missing eleven slates on the yard side and four on the roof over the laundry.

Two stories and attics.

The ground floor, walked from the yard door: the great kitchen, with its wide floor of Yorkshire flagstones worn into shallow hollows in front of the range where two hundred years of cooks had stood in the same place. The scullery, with its two shallow stone sinks and its brick copper for boiling. The larder. The game larder, with iron hooks set into the ceiling beams for a quantity of game that no one had hung there in years. The dairy, with its marble slab and four earthenware setting pans. The still room, with its cupboards and its narrow deal worktable. The servants’ hall, with its long oak table and two settles by the fire. The butler’s pantry, with the safe for the plate — which held, Mary found, four spoons and a tarnished cream jug. The housekeeper’s room, with its writing desk and its little grate. And the wine cellar, reached by twelve steps of worn stone down into cold and dark.

The first floor: a warren of small chambers for the upper servants, the linen presses, the sewing room, and — at the very end of the passage, past the last door, where the passage turned and there was no window at all — a lumber room with a lock on it that Mrs. Peele had told her once was not opened in her time.

The attics, under the slates, where the maids and the boys slept on iron bedsteads beneath sloping ceilings that stained with damp every time the roof failed, which was every winter.

And here is what Mary wrote in the little red book.

Kitchen range — a closed iron range of about 1830. Not blackleaded in a year. Flues choked. Oven door hangs on one hinge.

Scullery drain — smells of old fat. Wants lye.

Larder — grease rings on shelves. Black mold above. Ceiling to be washed and dried.

Three great copper stockpots — green at the rims. Want retinning by a traveling brazier.

Dairy setting pans — cracked in two places.

Servants’ hall table — knife marks, beer stains, long split down one board where damp has opened the grain.

Wine cellar — nine dozen bottles, mostly ordinary port and claret. Dust. Ledger not kept since 1856.

Still room — least neglected room in the wing. Cupboards still hold the jars laid in last summer. Serviceable.

Linen press — 62 pairs of sheets, of which 19 are past mending. 41 pillowcases. 12 damask cloths gone yellow at the folds.

Back corridor — flagstones slick with damp. Gutter above the corridor has failed. Water running down inside the wall. MUST BE DONE FIRST.

Roof — 11 slates missing, yard side. 4 over the laundry.

Then, at the bottom of the page, she wrote something that was not a defect at all, and underlined it twice.

Beams sound. Stone good. Ranges whole. Built by careful men for hard use.

Because that was the thing the county had missed. The county had heard the disgraced wing and the servants nobody wants and had decided the place was rotting, and in the way of such places, the deciding had made it true. But Mary Turner had been raised in a low kitchen with a scoured deal table and a black range that smoked in west winds, and she had been trained by a woman who thought a week ahead and a month ahead and a season ahead, and she could read a building the way Mrs. Peele had taught her to read a person.

There was nothing here that hands and time and hot water could not do.

The mold was surface. The green on the copper was surface. The split in the table was damp, not rot. The draught wasn’t the house’s fault; it was eleven slates and a gutter, and a gutter could be fixed by a man with a ladder and a length of lead flashing from the estate stores.

The wing was not dying. The wing was untended, which is a different thing, and a far more hopeful one.

But the county had not missed everything.

Eleven slates. A failed gutter. A range choked for a year. A larder left with grease rings on the shelves since last autumn. Somebody had been signing for those repairs and somebody had been paying for them, and Mary had the estate ledgers in Mr. Hollis’s sloping hand on the other side of the door, and she was only eighteen, but she was her father’s daughter and her mother’s daughter and Mrs. Peele’s, and she could read a ledger too.

The roof will want doing before winter, she wrote on a fresh page. Question: who has been drawing the money to do it?

She put the little red book in her pocket and went to wash the still room.