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

Chapter 8

She began with the still room, because it was the room she knew best, and because she wanted — before the others came, before the drizzle and the watchful eyes and the seven names on a sheet of paper — one clean and orderly room in the wing that she could point to and say: this is what we are working toward.

She washed the shelves. She wiped the jars and put them back in order of use. She swept the flags, and set a fresh candle in the sconce, and scrubbed the little deal worktable until the grain came up pale and honest under her hand.

And it was on the third afternoon, while she was dragging the deal table out from the wall to sweep behind it, that she found the loose board.

It was in the corner nearest the still-room press — a floorboard about four feet in length, oak, cut noticeably narrower than the boards around it, running with the joist rather than across it in a way that no carpenter would have chosen. Someone had cut it to be lifted. Someone had done it with patience, and hidden the seams with a smear of floor wax the exact color of the surrounding boards.

Mary knelt, and put her thumbnail to the edge, and could not move it. She took Mrs. Peele’s chatelaine from her apron pocket, and used the point of the little scissors as a wedge, and the board came up with a soft, dry, reluctant sound like a held breath let go.

Beneath it, in the shallow space between the joists, lay a tin box.

It was the kind of tin in which biscuits came from the grocer at Ashwell village — painted dark green, lettered in gold with a name half worn away. It was, Mary thought as she lifted it, heavier than a biscuit tin ought to be. Considerably heavier.

She carried it to the deal table and set it down and stood a moment looking at it before she opened the lid.

Inside, wrapped in a piece of oiled linen, lay a small canvas purse tied with a bootlace.

She untied the bootlace. She turned the purse out onto the table.

Gold. Sovereigns, one after another, stacking into little bright columns as she slid them out — and then six half sovereigns, and a heap of loose silver that ran across the deal like water. She counted twice. Forty-seven sovereigns, six halves, and silver besides. Fifty pounds and a little over.

Fifty pounds. Twenty-two pounds a year was her wage. Fifty pounds was two years and a quarter of her life, sitting in a biscuit tin under a floorboard, in a room in a house nobody in the county would have set foot in.

Beneath the purse lay a folded sheet of writing paper, yellowed at the edges, and beneath the paper, a thimble of worn silver and a pressed sprig of rosemary tied with a scrap of blue thread.

Mary sat down on the still-room stool. The rain moved against the little window. She unfolded the paper very carefully, holding it at the edges, and read a careful upright hand — the hand of a woman who had learned to write well and had been made to write small for most of her life.

To whoever finds this,

I am Sarah Renn, still room maid and later cook’s helper at Ashwell Court from the year 1809 to the year 1841, being here two and thirty years.

I came to this house at fifteen, and I never married, and I had no child of my own, though I had a little sister I raised, who died at nine of a fever the year I came into service.

I have put by from my wages sixpence and a shilling at a time this money that lies with this paper, which is fifty pounds and some over, and I have hid it under this board, because I have no one of my blood to leave it to, and I do not trust the parish.

If you are the one who lifts this board, then you are working in this room as I worked, and you have looked into this corner as I looked. And I hope you are a young woman as I was. And I hope this house has used you better than it used some of us.

Take the money and do not be ashamed of it. Spend it on what you need. The thimble was my sister Anne’s, and the rosemary is from her grave in Nether Ashwell churchyard. And I ask only that you leave them together somewhere quiet.

I have been happy in this room more days than not.

God keep you, Sarah Renn

This 11th of March, 1841.

Mary read it once. She read it again.

Then she set the paper down on the deal table, and put her hand flat upon it, and sat in the still room for a long time while the rain came against the little window and the smell of lavender stood in the cupboards around her, and Sarah Renn’s fifty pounds lay in its bright columns on the wood.

She had never met this woman. Sarah Renn had been two and thirty years in this room and had gone out of it in 1841, which was seventeen years ago, and nobody had ever spoken her name in Mary’s hearing, not Mrs. Peele, not the oldest man in the stables.

And yet she had put five sixpences into the space between two joists for thirty-two years, and the price of mercy for this room and everyone in it was sitting on the table.

At length Mary folded the paper and put it into her apron pocket. She wrapped the thimble and the rosemary together in a fresh square of linen and set them in the still-room cupboard behind the marshmallow jar, where she could reach them and no one else would think to look.

Then she carried the canvas purse to the little housekeeper’s room, and locked it in the writing desk with Mrs. Peele’s chatelaine key.

She did not tell the others what she had found.

The next morning, she gathered them in the servants’ hall around the long oak table with its knife marks and its split, and she said that they would begin with the range and the larder and the drains; that there would be money enough for what was needed, because she had spoken with Mr. Hollis and the estate would advance against the quarter.

That was not quite true. It was also not quite false: she had already written to a traveling brazier at Marshham asking his price on three copper stockpots, and had not yet had an answer.

Mrs. Douty listened with her hands folded on the table and said only, “Then we shall want lye and sand, and a bucket of black lead, and a boy for the flue.”

And Mary wrote each item in the little red book.