The Duke Gave Her the Servants No House Would Take—They Ran the Finest Kitchen She’d Ever Eaten In
Chapter 9
The scullery boy, Peter Small, was the first thing in the wing that worked.
He was set to the flue with a length of holly branch and a sack tied over his head, and he went up into the black of it without a word, and he came out coughing and streaked and grinning like a thing out of a coal pit, and that was the first time in eleven months that the range drew.
The whole kitchen changed within the hour. Mrs. Douty stood in front of it with her sleeves rolled and her hand held out at the height of the oven, not touching it, feeling the draught rise, and said well in a tone Mary had not heard from her before.
Betsy Row — the kitchen maid from Hencham, sent away over a broken dish — proved to have a hand for scouring. Not a quick hand. A patient one. She took the larder shelves down to bare slate with lye and sand and hot water over the three following days, working in the cold without complaining, and when the last shelf was clean she laid them fresh with clean paper cut to size, and set the jars back in order of use, largest at the back, most used at the front, the way a person does a thing they have done before and been praised for once.
Mary watched her do it. She said nothing. That night she wrote a good mark against Betsy Row’s name in the little red book, which was the highest praise she had in her, and she had learned to write such a mark from a woman who had learned it from someone else, and the chain of it went back past Mrs. Peele to somebody in a scullery thirty years before.
Mrs. Kite repointed the copper’s brickwork and then took the sixty-two pairs of sheets, and went through them one by one, sorting by the light of the laundry window into sound, needs a turn, and past mending, and did it so quickly and so accurately that Mary had the count checked against the list twice that first night to be sure it was true.
John Ayres — the insolent footman from Bramworth, who was not insolent at all but had simply told a man at Bramworth the truth once and been turned out for it — was set to the gutter above the back corridor. He borrowed a ladder from the coach house and went up on the roof in the drizzle, and came down wet through, and said, “The flashing’s gone at the joint. I’ll want a length of lead and a strip of cloth to lay under it.”
Mary asked Mr. Hollis. Mr. Hollis, who had a ledger full of repairs signed not required at present, looked at her for a moment and then wrote a chit for the estate stores.
The length of lead was issued. The corridor was dry within the week.
It was John Ayres who came down off that roof and said to her, quietly, out of the side of his mouth, “There’s four slates gone over the laundry and eleven on the yard side and it’s all been signed for twice. Someone’s had money for that roof, miss.”
“I know,” said Mary.
John Ayres looked at her. Then he nodded once, the way a soldier nods when an order has been given that he agrees with, and went to put the ladder away.
Hannah Blythe mended the two cracked setting pans with white lead and set the marble slab to rights with vinegar and salt and had the dairy sweet again by the tenth day, and the smell of it — cold, clean, faintly of grass — reached out through the dairy door into the passage, and everybody in the wing noticed it and nobody said anything, which is how a house tells itself it is getting better.
Louisa Marsh had the still room.
Mary asked her, on the second afternoon, where she had learned to relabel a set of jars in that hand.
Louisa Marsh kept her eyes on the shelf in front of her and said, “At Lady Hencham’s, ma’am. Before the trouble.”
Mary did not ask what the trouble was.
“Then keep on,” she said.
And Louisa Marsh kept on, and in a fortnight she had every jar in the still room not only labeled but recorded, in a small clear hand, in a book of her own making out of paper Mary gave her from Mrs. Peele’s drawer.
The cheese-woman, the boy, the cook, the laundry, the still room, the roof.
And in the middle of them, at the head of the long oak table with its knife marks, Mary Turner, eighteen years old, in a borrowed apron that still did not quite fit, with a brass chatelaine in her pocket and fifty pounds of a dead woman’s savings locked in her writing desk, learning the thing Mrs. Peele had tried to teach her in three years and she was now being taught in three weeks: that a household is a body of small parts, and that the trick is not to make them work but to see them.
By the middle of May there were eleven people at Ashwell where there had been four.
Ned Hawker brought lye and sand and black lead up from the village on his cart, and the first time he would not take payment, and took it the second. Mrs. Douty took the great kitchen range in hand as though it had been holding its breath for six months waiting for her, and by the end of the second week she was baking bread in an oven that had hung on a broken hinge, and the smell of it went along the stone passage and up the back stairs and out into the yard, where Peter Small stopped with a bucket in his hand and shut his eyes.
The traveling brazier came from Marshham and retinned the three copper stockpots in the yard over a charcoal fire for eighteen shillings, paid out of Sarah Renn’s purse in the housekeeper’s room, and Mary wrote the sum in the little red book under a column she had headed, simply:
S.R.