Chapter Two #2
“You speak very plainly for a woman wanting a place from me.”
“I speak plainly because I want the place and not the pretense of one. You may engage a housekeeper who flatters you, or a housekeeper who keeps your house. They are seldom the same woman, and I should think you cannot at present afford the both of them.”
He turned the ledger over, though it had already been lying face down. “You have kept a large household before.”
“I have kept one that did not wish to be kept, for a master who did not care to pay for the keeping, on an income he preferred I never inquire into.” Her chin stayed level.
“This will be a light matter indeed .You are at least honest about the poverty, which spares us both a quantity of pretending.”
“I am honest because I have run clean out of the means to be otherwise. Poverty is clarifying.”
“It is. I have found it improves a number of people whom prosperity could do nothing for. Present company I shall leave you to weigh.”
He came near to smiling, the first time across this desk in a year. “Then tell me what you would do with my still-room. Mrs. Gorse, who sat where you are sitting an hour ago, would have starved it into virtue by Michaelmas.”
“Find out first whether it is idle or only badly led, since the two wear the same face at a distance and want opposite handling.” She answered as though she had already walked the room and found it wanting.
“Then I would have it inventoried, the spoiled stores out and the sound ones locked, and the girl who keeps it told once, kindly, what is expected of her, and once only. People do better work for being trusted than for being frightened. It costs more to set going and far less to keep, and it does not lose you two girls to make a point about supper.”
She had heard Mrs. Gorse leave, then, or read the whole of her from the doorway. Either of them answered the question he had meant to spend a week answering.
“It is unusual,” he said slowly, “for a woman of your evident breeding to come looking for a post of this kind.”
“It is unusual for a good many things to befall a woman that she did not choose for herself.” Not so much as a blink crossed her face.
“I have stopped finding my own circumstances remarkable, my lord, and I would take it as a kindness if you would consent to do the same. I am a housekeeper who can read a ledger and run a house. The remainder is no longer anyone’s affair, including, on the better days, my own. ”
He let it lie, since she had set it down so plainly. The afternoon held a ledger with no kindness in it and there was no reason on earth to keep a tired woman standing in an unheated room, and he found he was not yet ready to end the conversation.
“There is something you should know before you take it. The staff have not been paid in full since the spring, and have mislaid the habit of obedience along with the habit of being paid. The butler left us in March. There has been no one set over the cook since.”
She took the news without the smallest surprise.
“Then the cook has been keeping your house, my lord, and resenting every hour of it, for a cook wishes to cook and not to keep ledgers she was never taught. She will fight me a fortnight out of pride, and then hand me the keys with relief, if I am patient and take care not to shame her in front of the maids.”
“You are very sure of a kitchen you have not seen.”
“I am very experienced. It is not the same article as certainty, but the two keep similar company.” She paused, and for the first time the question came the other way. “May I ask you something, my lord, before I take a post in a house I have seen only the cold rooms of?”
“You may ask. I reserve the right to be of no use in the answering.”
“Do you mean to save it? The house. Or only to preside decently over the dying of it, so that you may say afterward that you tried?” Her voice did not soften the asking.
“I have kept house for a man who had given the thing up and called his giving-up economy. I will work myself to the bone for a house with a future and not lift one finger to lay out a tidy corpse. So I should like to know which it is to be before I unpack my box.”
No one had asked him the question. Not Wells, not his father, not the men of law who took the land and gave back the longer words. He turned it over once in the cold and found he could only answer it honestly.
“I mean to save it. I have not the faintest notion how. Six women I turned away this morning, and engaged the seventh chiefly because she alarms me a good deal less than the prospect of the winter does. But I mean to save it.”
“That will do.” She felt the thing settle in her chest, the quiet click of a key turned in the one lock it was cut for.
“A man who knows that he does not know is a far easier master than one who is certain and wrong. I have buried one of the second sort. I have no wish to keep house for the slow burial of the first.”
“You will do, then,” he said, “if you will still have the post knowing the worst, and you have met the most of the worst on the stairs already.”
“I will have it.”
“Then it is settled. You may begin when you are able.”
She inclined her head, carefully confined a stray lock of her honey-blonde hair behind her ear, and the smallest lift touched the corner of her mouth and was gone before it had properly arrived. “I am able now. I have brought my box up on the coach with me.”
He should have sent her off to find her room. He kept her one moment longer.
“You wear no black.”
“I wore it the year the law asks of a widow, and not one hour past it.” She met the question straight on, where most of them would have looked away.
“Black is for grief, my lord, and I never mastered the trick of manufacturing what I do not feel. I keep what little I have for my father. He earned it. The Earl of Whitmore. The name will mean nothing to you now.”
It meant a garden party fifteen summers gone.
It meant a girl with a muddied hem, and a loose ring of his brother’s friends laughing easy in the sun, and himself at fifteen steering her without a word round the next puddle, because it was the one kindness within his reach, and saying nothing at all to the laughter was the kindness past it.
The silence had shamed him for a week. Then he learned, as one does, to lay the matter down.
He said nothing now either. He inclined his head and let her go to find her room, and held the same silence he had held in the garden at fifteen.