Loose Leaves from Milton #2
‘Hmmm. Upon consideration, the wallpaper is not peeling because of damp, but because of an inferior application using weak paste. And for your information, Mr Thornton, olfactory comes from the Latin and . . .’
‘I am well aware of the derivation, Miss Hale. Classics is not taught only south of Oxford. Only circumstance prevented me from continuing the study of Latin beyond my thirteenth year, and it is a matter of regret to me.’ Mr Thornton frowned again, aware that he had divulged too much about himself to these soft, southern strangers.
‘It is?’ An idea hit Mr Hale.
‘You need not sound so surprised, Mr Hale. We in The North are not ignorant.’ Mr Thornton was offended, and the former parson made haste to explain that he was hoping to take in pupils for Latin and Greek, and that if there were more men like Mr Thornton in Milton, perhaps he might find more mature students seeking improvement, rather than only adolescents being pushed into it by parents.
Margaret, now prodding the ceiling with the ferrule of her umbrella, muttered something unintelligible, and gave an angry shove which brought down a lump of plaster which occasioned Mr Hale rather more pain than the idea.
She could not admit her violence sprang from the thought that if there were more men like Mr Thornton in Milton, her life might become complex.
‘Is there another property we might inspect? I do not think this will suit us at all. Mother is not to be subjected to precipitation of plaster and loose laths.’
‘I think the next house ought to be better suited to delicate southern constitutions, Miss Hale. It is but a short walk away in Scotland Yard.’
‘Then lead us there, Mr Thornton, and I hope I detect neither worm, nor mould, nor rot within it.’
Leaf Two - Tea Break
‘What are they like, Mr and Mrs Hale?’ Hannah Thornton set aside her stitchery, on which she was embroidering the flowers and leaves of camellia sinensis.
Tea was her son’s favourite beverage, and she felt that he was secretly even more interested in tea than cotton.
She had encouraged him in the years after his father’s death, for tea was acceptable where the ‘C word’ was not.
‘The late Mr Thornton’ had brought ruin upon himself and his family through an injudicious speculation on what he had been assured were coffee beans from Columbia, and had turned out to be jelly beans from Columbus, Ohio.
Since such confectionery was already made locally, his imported goods were too expensive to attract buyers, and had lingered in the warehouse right up until his creditors had taken possession of them.
Driven to taking his own life from the shame, he had left his wife and two children in penury, from which his son’s unstinting hard work had delivered them.
None of them ever touched or mentioned the brown beans.
Tea, ‘the cup that cheers,’ had been a solace, to the extent that Hannah fondly called her son ‘J Tea.’ It was her one concession to softness, which she regarded with suspicion.
‘Mr Hale is a mild-mannered man, rather diffident, I should say, and I did not make the acquaintance of his wife, whom I believe to be of an invalid tendency. His daughter, Miss Hale, was with him.’
‘And what manner of young woman might she be, J Tea?’
‘She is haughty, Mother, very haughty. And she has not one good word to say about Milton and The North.’
‘Hmmm. I do not like the sound of her at all. By the way, who is that other young woman I keep seeing in this house?’
‘That is your daughter, my sister Fanny.’
‘Really? Oh. I did wonder why she turns up at the breakfast table so often.’
The Hales moved into the house in Scotland Yard within the week.
Their only servant was Dixon, Mrs Hale’s maid, originally from the hamlet of Dock Green, just outside Helstone of blessèd memory.
She was also now cook-housekeeper, though a woman whose idea of haute cuisine was a pork chop with apple sauce.
Her efforts to find a subordinate, prepared to work very long hours for even less money than the prevalent sum in Milton, proved fruitless.
On the bright side, she said, fruit was expensive, so fruitlessness was a good thing.
Margaret did not agree. With an ineffectual father and a mother who was permanently listless, having no energy to write any more lists, Margaret took the drastic step of entering the below stairs world beyond the baize door, and taking up duties which would have been unthinkable in beloved Helstone.
Her own culinary attempts showed that she could pen a very nice menu card, but actually cooking anything was merely making burnt offerings to some unknown domestic goddess.
As the daughter of a former parson, this smacked of idolatry, so she desisted forthwith.
Thereafter she applied herself to the laundry, making the beds, and sweeping out the grates each morning before laying new fires.
At least the outside world might never know of these demeaning tasks being performed.
It was in the second week that Margaret finally gave in to Dixon’s pleading to discover the whereabouts of the key to the silver cupboard.
Although the Hales’ silverware was limited to a visiting card waiter, a pair of serving spoons, a toddy ladle, and a teapot of melon form that had belonged to Mrs Hale’s Aunt Hysteria, Dixon was convinced that they were all going to be murdered in their beds if the silver was not properly protected.
Margaret’s argument, which was that if intruders wanted the silver, they would not need to threaten the family if it was not locked away, fell upon deaf ears.
Thus it was that on Wednesday morning, Margaret placed her depressing brown hat carefully upon her head, took up her reticule, and sallied forth to Marlborough Mills.
It was some distance, and as Margaret toiled up the hill through the churchyard, it felt like three hundred miles, not three.
This was another northern inferiority. Beloved Helstone was broadly flat, with a slight incline that permitted walkers to gaze upon it from about fifty feet, and without having undue exertion.
Milton was all hills, and for every respite of a downhill there was the misery of another uphill.
When she reached Marlborough Mills the gates were shut like some mediaeval fortress. Indeed, the image it brought to mind was from one of the storybooks of her youth, with Robin Hood about to gain entry to Nottingham Castle, despite a multitude of guards.
She was about to knock at the wicket gate set into one of them when there was a creaking sound, and they began to open.
Margaret was faced with two Shire horses drawing a heavily laden cart, and a peremptory command to ‘Move tha’ sen, lass,’ which she correctly interpreted as a request to get out of the way.
The courtyard was a scene of activity, but Margaret managed to get a response she understood, by way of a pointing finger, when she asked a young woman where Mr Thornton’s office might be found.
The office might be located, but Mr Thornton was not there, His minion, who seemed affronted that a young lady should come into the hub of the ‘empire,’ requested her to wait.
She waited, without even the offer of a cup of tea. She waited, and waited, and eventually gave vent to a huffy exhalation, and decided that she had been forgotten. There was no help for it; she would go and find Mr Thornton for herself.
Having failed to find him in three cupboards, a bale shed and the privy, she climbed the stairs to the upper levels of a large building which thrummed from an unknown source.
She advanced to a door, and opened it cautiously.
She was assailed, if not assaulted, by the clacking of the looms and by clouds of cotton fluff that floated about her like a snow shower, and landed like impossibly large flakes of dandruff upon her shoulders.
She stood for a moment, open-mouthed, until a piece of fluff caught in her throat and she coughed.
Her eyes watered, and as they cleared she saw Mr Thornton, stood upon a gantry, looming over the serried ranks of looms. He was frowning, imperious, and Margaret could not but think him very much the matcha male.
Then he suddenly let out a roar, and almost threw himself down the steep iron steps and raced down an aisle, turning a corner, shouting.
Margaret followed, and put her hand to her mouth.
The tall, dark mill-master was shaking a worker so fiercely his teeth shook in his head, and was yelling at him so loudly that Margaret feared the man’s eardrums would burst.
‘I saw you, saw you sneaking off early for the tea break, and not outside. You were warned before. Where is it?’ The man was shaken again, and a very small cotton bag with perforations fell from a pocket.
‘How could you risk every life in this weaving shed for the sake of a swift brew of Heaven knows what? Get out! Get out, and never come back, you . . .’
Mr Thornton became aware of Miss Hale, staring at him, appalled. Whatever intemperate term might have been uttered was swallowed. ‘What are you doing here, Miss Hale?’ He was still shouting.
‘I - I came for the key to the silver cupboard.’
‘You came all this way for . . .’ He shook his head and the worker at the same time, though the man managed to wriggle from his grasp, and scurry away. ‘You have very odd priorities, Miss Hale.’
‘Odd to you, sir, but then, you appear to find it normal to mistreat a poor, uneducated man.’
‘He might be both, but he is also a very dangerous man.’
‘He was pathetic. How unfair of you to . . .’
‘I will give you the key and beg you to remove yourself from somewhere you could not possibly understand.’
‘I understand cruelty to one’s fellow man.’
‘You understand nothing, madam. Follow me.’