Chapter Three
“You’ll not last the month.”
Mrs. Croft said it to the pot and not to Renae, a sort of courtesy, since saying it to the pot let them both go on pretending it had not been said.
“Then I shall take care to make the month a useful one.” Renae set her box on the one clean corner of a kitchen table that had not been scrubbed to the grain in a long while.
“Where are the household books kept? I should like to begin with the worst of the house. The worst is generally where the saving has been hiding.”
The cook turned round, a big raw-knuckled woman with flour to the elbow and a grief worn into her like a stain that would not lift. “There’s books. And then there’s what’s true. They’ve not been on speaking terms above a twelvemonth, the two of them.”
“Then I shall want both, and the quarrel between them most of all. A false figure in a ledger is only the truth standing where it hoped no one would trouble to look.”
“You talk very fine for a woman come to count my flour.”
“I talk as I was raised to, which I can no more help than you can help the Devon in your vowels.” She unpinned her bonnet and set it on the box. “You will find the talk is the cheapest thing about me, Mrs. Croft, and the only part of me that came free.”
“And the dear part?”
“Everything else, and I have paid for it in full. You need not warm to me. You need only let me work, and judge me by the state of your larder in a month, and not by my vowels in the first hour of it.”
Mrs. Croft weighed that, and the weighing was grudging, but it was a weighing and not a dismissal. “A month, then.”
“A month. I have survived on far less generous terms.”
Wells walked her through the rest, apologetic for the house as the others had not troubled to be.
“How long since there was a proper housekeeper here, Mr. Wells?”
“Two winters, ma’am. Mrs. Bellamy gave up her keys when her knees gave up the stairs, and no one’s been set over the house since. Things have settled, in the want of her.”
“Things have rotted. It is a different verb, and we shall make no headway if we agree to call the one by the other’s name.” She stopped at the larder. “Who holds the key to this?”
“No one in particular. Which is to say all of them, and none.”
She opened it, and the larder told the rest at a glance. “There is French brandy here by the case.”
“Laid in for the old duke’s table, ma’am. In the good years.”
“And never paid for.” She tipped the merchant’s bill off its nail and read it. “No one even troubled to hide the shame of this. The flour is alive with weevil, the ham is green to the bone, and the cheese has grown itself a coat against the cold.”
“It does seem a waste, ma’am, put so.”
“Waste is not abundance.” She lifted the ruined ham down by its own string and carried it to the slop pail herself, so no one in the house could say the new housekeeper gave orders she would not dirty her hands to keep.
“It is hunger wearing a richer gown, Mr. Wells, and I have known the both of them well enough to tell one from the other in the dark. Brandy on credit, and moth in the bread. This is not a house that ran short of money. It is a house that gave up the habit of looking at it.”
“And you mean to look.” The tall footman had come to lean in the doorway, arms folded, taking his time. “We’ll all be glad of that come quarter-day, I’m sure, when there’s grand new economies and the same old empty pay-box to keep them in.”
“What is your name?”
“Thomas, ma’am.” He put a small twist on the word, to be certain she caught the weight he had declined to lend it.
“Thomas, when the pay-box fills again, and it will, I should like you to remember you were the first man to tell me it stood empty.” She turned to the shelves before he could decide whether he had been thanked or warned.
“It is a useful thing to know which of one’s people will say the hard word to one’s face.
The dining plate, Mr. Wells. The good silver. I have seen none of it.”
“Most of it’s travelled, ma’am. To town. We’ve learned not to ask after where.”
“To the pawnbroker. You may say the word to me without flinching.” She moved into the passage.
“I have a great fondness for pawnbrokers. They are the only honest men left in a falling house, since they at least will tell you to your face what your dignity is worth by the ounce, and hand you the ticket to prove it.”
“You speak as one who’s had the ticket, ma’am, if I may.”
“You may not, Mr. Wells, but you are not wrong, and I shall like you the better for the guess and not at all for the saying of it. The books. Three sets, I am told.”
Wells gave it up. “Three hands keep them, and the late master’s the worst, may he find eternal peace. No two columns in the house agree on the same morning.”
“That is not theft, then. That is a house that has forgotten how to tell itself the truth, slower to mend than theft and cheaper to begin.” She made a note in her own hand. “The maids. How many, and paid through to when?”
“Four, ma’am. Through Lady Day, and not a farthing since. They stay for there’s nowhere going that’s any better.”
“Which is no kind of loyalty to build a house upon, though it is the kind most houses are built on, and it holds until something better passes the gate.” She wrote it down.
“We shall have to give them a reason to stay that is not merely the want of anywhere else. It is slower than wages, Mr. Wells, and it outlasts them.”
They came at the last to the north wing, a row of doors shut on a year of dust, the furniture beyond them humped grey beneath sheets.
“And through here?”
“Nothing kept, ma’am. Only shut. Closed since before things got bad, and his lordship doesn’t go in.” Wells dropped his voice, though there was none to hear but the dust. “I’d not advise the asking of him why.”
“I shan’t ask him why. When the rest of the house no longer wants its keys more than that wing does, I shall ask him for them, a different question entirely, and I shall know by then whether he is ready to be asked it.
” She wrote that down as well. “A house that bolts the doors on its own rooms does to itself only what grief does to a person. I have lived in one. I do not mean to keep a second.”
She had chosen Carrington for precisely this, the disorder and the distance both, a dukedom three counties clear of Lucien’s circle where her face carried no name. The chaos that shamed the staff had let her in without a character or an awkward question.
The linen press on the upper landing had swelled in the damp until its doors would not give, and she set her shoulder to it with no great result while the maids watched and Thomas, passing with an empty scuttle, slowed only enough to enjoy it.
A younger footman set his own scuttle down and put his weight to the far door without being asked.
“She wants pulling and lifting at the one time, ma’am. A contrary old thing in the wet, begging her pardon and yours.”
She straightened from the press. “What is your name?”
“Finch, ma’am.”
“Then on three, Finch, and we shall learn whether she has any manners left.”
The doors gave together, and a whole season of trapped damp breathed out into the passage.
“There’s a knack to her, ma’am. I’ll show you of a morning, so she don’t best you tomorrow.”
He had said ma’am as though the word cost him nothing and was owed her regardless. The butler of her own matrimonial house had not managed it in nine years.
By the afternoon she had a housemaid set to help her in the still-room, a thin watchful girl named Annie who did the work with her eyes down and her opinions kept plainly elsewhere.
“You needn’t be wary of me, Annie. I do not dock suppers, whatever you may have heard of the breed.”
“No, ma’am. Only there was a Mrs. Gorse came to see the place a fortnight back, and she said a great deal about supper.”
“I have met Mrs. Gorse.” Renae went on sorting the jars as she spoke. “She would have had you thin by Michaelmas and grateful for the privilege. I am not Mrs. Gorse. I am a good deal harder to please and a good deal cheaper to live alongside, and the two keep company more often than people expect.”
“Mrs. Bellamy was kind, ma’am, when there was a Mrs. Bellamy. We’ve not had kind since.”
“Then you are overdue, and I shall not promise you kind, for the word is cheap and I have heard it lie.” She set a jar into the girl’s hands.
“I shall promise you fair, and let you find the rest out by Michaelmas. Now hand me the dried lavender, the blue jar there, and we shall make this shelf smell of something besides its own long neglect.”
Annie almost smiled, caught it, and put it carefully by for later. Renae counted it the first honest wage the house had paid her all day.
By the time the light went amber she had the still-room half cleared and a list in her own hand of every quiet theft the house had committed against itself. She was up the library steps after a dust-furred ledger when Declan found her, and the second meeting came easier than the first.
“You have reorganised my entire still-room in an afternoon.”
She stayed where she was on the steps. “I have reorganised the idea of a still-room, my lord. The room itself will not be done before Thursday, and perhaps Friday, should the weevils prove to have opinions of their own.”
“And do you always work past dark on your first day in a house?”
“Only when the alternative is to sit alone with my own thoughts.” She came down a step, the ledger held against her chest. “They are poor company and worse conversation, and they keep returning to subjects I have asked them more than once to leave. The still-room at least answers a civil question when it is put one.”
“You have been under this roof nine hours. Give me your verdict on my household, since you appear to have formed one.”