The Housekeeper’s Secret

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Coldwell Hall, Derbyshire

April 1911

It had been a cool spring and the blossom was late that year.

The Chinese vase Eliza carried up to the Kashmir Bedroom contained only a few stems of lilac, just beginning to turn brown and go past their best. As she set it on the washstand a scattering of tiny star-shaped flowers fell onto the marble.

‘Mr Gatley says he’s sorry but that’s all there is. Daffodils are over. Peonies aren’t out yet. There’s bluebells, but Susan said they’re bad luck in the house. If you bring bluebells in—’

Mrs Furniss cut her off with an edge of impatience. ‘Thank you, Eliza, the lilac will do very well.’

With the visitors about to arrive everyone was feeling the pressure, but in Eliza’s book that was no reason to be rude. She watched the housekeeper reach for the watch that hung from the ornate silver clasp at her waist, snapping it open and looking at it distractedly. ‘Is Davy Wells watching out for the carriages? He hasn’t forgotten?’

‘No, Mrs Furniss.’

Honestly, you’d think it was the king and queen they were expecting, not Mr Randolph and some middle-aged spinster he’d plucked off the shelf in desperation, and boring old Lord and Lady Etchingham. (No point in putting on any airs and graces for them; Lady Etchingham was Sir Henry’s daughter and had grown up here, so knew better than most what a mouldy old pile it was.) Mrs Furniss was usually all right, as housekeepers went, but she had a bee in her bonnet about this visit and was treating them like idiots. Which was fair enough in Davy Wells’s case, but hardly reasonable for the rest of them. ‘Joseph went up to the gatehouse to check. Mrs Wells said Davy’s had his eyes pinned to the road since Johnny Farrow left for the station. He’s ready to run down and ring the bell as soon as he sees them coming.’

Davy might not be the brightest spark, but he’d lived in the gate lodge at Coldwell for all of his twenty-odd years and knew every hill and hollow of the park, and the quickest shortcuts across it. There might be precious few visitors to Coldwell these days, but that didn’t stop Davy from watching out for them. It was his life’s purpose, probably because it was one of the few things he could do, being mute and simple. On the rare occasions a horse or a carriage turned between the gateposts, he ran ahead of it, cutting across to the estate’s little church to ring the bell and alert the servants. The carriage drive was almost a mile long and hilly; before the visitor had appeared within view Mr Goddard, the butler (who was as old as time and moved as slowly), could get his dusty old tailcoat on and make his way to the front door.

Mrs Furniss swept the fallen lilac stars into her hand. ‘Good,’ she said crisply. ‘Off you go, then, and get the tea trays ready.’

‘Yes, Mrs Furniss.’

Eliza was in no hurry to go back downstairs, where Mrs Gatley, the cook, was just as uptight as Mrs Furniss but a lot louder with it. Lingering in the stillness, Eliza caught sight of her reflection in the looking glass above the washstand. It was at least four times the size of the mean little mirror in the attic room she shared with Abigail, and the glass was clearer, so it didn’t look like she had the pox. She turned her head slightly, noticing that the spring sunshine gave her hair a buttery sheen (the sun hadn’t struggled up as far as the attic when she’d got dressed this morning) but also showed the spot she’d felt swelling on her chin. She touched it tentatively.

‘ Eliza Simmons —tea trays, now!’

Eliza slouched to the door with a sigh.

She and Abigail were fond of moaning that nothing ever happened at Coldwell. Thudding down the back stairs (which smelled of cabbage and chamber pots), she wasn’t sure she didn’t prefer it that way.

When Eliza had gone, Kate Furniss looked around, repositioning the vase on the washstand, turning it so the two painted figures were at the front.

It wasn’t the smartest vase—a cheap English factory copy, not one of Coldwell’s genuine Eastern treasures—but she didn’t suppose Miss Addison would notice. A couple of branches of lilac hardly made a sophisticated floral display either, but they brightened the room and distracted attention from the flaking plaster cornice and threadbare carpet. (At least she hoped they did.)

The Kashmir Bedroom was the best Coldwell had to offer to guests. It might once have been a luxurious place to stay, but the pale blue painted walls had darkened over time to a dingy grey and the embroidered Indian silk bed hangings were faded and frayed, their exotic blooms unravelling. Like the rest of the house, their glory days were long past.

Kate had checked the room already, making sure that the bed was made up to her satisfaction, that there was soap and fresh towels on the washstand and a pot in the bedside cupboard, but she went over it all one more time. It wasn’t the servants’ place to get involved in Sir Henry Hyde’s personal business, but you’d have to be deaf or stupid not to realise that an awful lot rested on the next few days; specifically, the marriage hopes of Sir Henry’s son Randolph (whose bachelor status had seemed fixed) and, by extension, the future of Coldwell Hall and all who worked there.

She went to the window, removing the handkerchief from her sleeve to rub at a smear on the pane, and stood for a moment, watching the shadows of clouds slide over the hills. Her gaze moved uneasily to the crest of the drive where the carriage would first appear.

They were unused to guests at Coldwell, and she felt overwhelmed by the task that lay ahead. Four staying guests to look after, and their servants to accommodate below stairs; five more guests for dinner tomorrow night. Three days of marshalling her small troop of girls, ensuring that there was enough hot water; that trays were prepared properly, beds aired and turned down, fires lit and kept burning, the correct linen and china taken from the store cupboards and replaced again, and that everything went according to her meticulous plan.

Kate sank down onto the window seat and rested her head against the cool glass. Everything was under control, she knew that; control was what she did best. She was too vigilant to make mistakes, too careful to leave anything to chance; but still, it felt like her head was full of jangling bells, summoning her to the hundred small tasks that needed her attention.

With only elderly Sir Henry inhabiting Coldwell’s endless upstairs rooms, the staff below had dwindled to a skeleton of what it had once been—enough to look after the needs of one reclusive baronet but woefully insufficient to maintain a fifty-room mansion, never mind provide for a house party. Mr Goddard had finally accepted that they needed to replace the footman who had left last Christmas, but he had placed the advertisement in the Sheffield Morning Post too late to engage someone for this visit. Kate had written to Mrs Bryant, housekeeper of Sir Henry’s London house in Portman Square (where Randolph Hyde had taken up residence since his return from India) to ask that a footman be sent, to ease the pressure on poor Thomas, though the London footmen tended to be overconfident and troublesome. She would have to make sure that the extra pair of hands didn’t stray where they shouldn’t.

She let out a breath, misting the glass by her cheek. Through its haze she caught a movement in the park beyond.

A figure was standing on the top of the hill in front of the house. A man; tall and well built. Youthful. He was wearing a pale shirt, the sleeves rolled back, a jacket and a knapsack slung over his shoulder. Without thinking, her eyes firmly on him, she stood up. The breeze lifted his hair and made his shirt billow back and flatten against his chest. She was too far away to see his face properly, but she knew she hadn’t seen it before.

A stranger, then.

For a second, it seemed he looked straight at her; and in spite of the distance between them there was something dark in his stare, something searching. Instantly, she darted out of view and pressed herself against the wall panelling, the instinct to hide still overwhelming after all these years. Her heart rattled against her ribs and her palms were clammy as she waited, before edging back the stiff curtain and peering out.

He was gone.

Emerging cautiously, she looked out, and saw that he had put his jacket on and was walking towards the house with a loose-limbed, easy stride. His footsteps left a silvery trail in the damp grass.

She watched until he disappeared from view beneath the window. Taking a steadying breath, she gathered herself, brushing away the shadow of suspicion, the whisper of what if…? She collected her pile of clean towels and went to check that all was as it should be in the remaining guest rooms.

It wasn’t much of a place.

Oh, it had been once, there was no doubt about that. The house itself was a palace: a great big stone monument to wealth and power, with rows of windows stretching on forever and a huge triangular portico on the front supported by four mighty pillars. It had obviously been built to impress, and the fact that it was so hidden away just made its extravagance more arrogant. Its magnificence was not meant to be shared, its luxury intended only for a select few.

But it seemed that the plan had gone awry, and somewhere along the line seclusion had become isolation, sliding towards abandonment. Time and the elements had blackened the buff stone, and the windows were grimy, many of them shuttered. Paint flaked from frames and weeds sprouted from guttering.

Getting off the train at the tiny station in Hatherford, he’d asked directions and been told it would take two hours to walk the seven miles to Coldwell. He’d saved himself at least a mile by climbing over the high stone wall and cutting across the park, instead of following the winding road round to the gates. The ground was rough and tussocky with bracken, boggy enough to soak his boots. Labouring up the hill he’d noticed a squat stone church half-hidden by a vast cedar tree and, just beyond, the crumbling ruins of a tower.

At a distance it was impossible to tell whether its collapsed state was one of those deliberate things rich people built as novelties or an old structure that had simply been allowed to fall into disrepair. The top was crenellated, like a row of broken teeth, the high-up windows black and blind, and a tangle of brambles had been allowed to clutch and clamber around its walls. Drawing level with it, he’d seen a heavy iron padlock hanging from the door.

As he reached the top of the hill a cloud moved across the sun, extinguishing the weak spring sunlight like a candle being snuffed out. The house below shrank back into the shadows. Some recent attempt appeared to have been made to clear the weeds from the semicircle of gravel in front of the wide steps, but it had done little to dispel the air of shabby neglect or the slight sense of menace. Of something sinister, lurking out of sight.

Or perhaps he was imagining that.

A movement in one of the first-floor windows caught at the edge of his vision. He looked, and saw a face behind the glass: a pale oval, which vanished almost in the same second but left an impression of large eyes and sharp cheekbones. Blue eyes, he thought, though that seemed ridiculous. The glass was dirty, and he was too far away to tell.

But anyway, he had been seen, which meant he either had to make himself scarce before someone came after him or go through with it. Something in him recoiled at the thought of entering the great dark house, as if it might swallow him up completely, but he had come too far and waited too long to turn back now.

Shrugging on his jacket, he picked up his pack and smoothed down his hair, then set off down the slope.

Coldwell Hall had been built on the site of a remote sixteenth-century hunting lodge belonging to the Dukes of Northumberland (where, local legend had it, Henry VIII had once slain a rare white stag) on the expanse of bleak moorland that lay between Manchester and Sheffield.

The old lodge had been demolished—all except the tower of its gatehouse—and a grand baroque mansion constructed in its place by the first Baronet Bradfield, who had made a vast fortune as a colonial administrator in the East India Company. Coldwell Hall was intended to showcase his newfound wealth, do justice to his new-minted title, and house the collection of ancient Indian treasures he had amassed while imposing British rule on recalcitrant locals in Calcutta and Bengal. It had been designed to draw guests from distant London, to surprise and delight them with the contrast between the house’s wild, windswept surroundings and the cultured comforts inside.

But that had been more than a century ago.

Ironically, the coming of the railways had served to cut Coldwell off from civilisation more completely: the seven miles to the nearest station made it a far less convenient destination for a country house gathering or shooting party than properties with private railway platforms placed discreetly within their parks. These days the only visitors to Coldwell were Sir Henry’s physician, Dr Seymour; Reverend Moore from the parish church in Howden Bridge; and (less frequently) Mr Fortescue, the Hyde land agent. In the drifts of conversation that echoed through Coldwell’s quiet corridors during these visits Kate often heard the name of Sir Henry’s bachelor son, Randolph, along with the words ‘irresponsible,’ ‘feckless,’ and ‘profligate.’ On spidery half-written letters abandoned on the bureau in the Yellow Parlour, she read ‘ debauched and dissolute—like history repeating itself. Another disgrace on the name of Hyde. ’

After inspecting the guest rooms, Kate went down the main staircase, trailing a finger along the dado to check for dust, feeling the dank air enfold her as she descended into the marble-floored entrance hall. The house was set in a dip and the sun struggled to find its way into this cavernous space, where the heads of animals stared down from the walls, seeming to offer visitors more of a warning than a welcome.

The rocky ground of Derbyshire’s Dark Peak district didn’t lend itself to riding, so successive generations of Hydes had found their sporting pleasure in shooting grouse and stalking deer on home turf, and slaughtering more exotic prey while out on the subcontinent. Around the walls, red deer from the Derbyshire moors touched antlers with antelope and gazelle, and the fearsome horns of cattle whose faded, balding hides had once felt the warmth of the Indian sun. The centrepiece of the trophy display was a tiger, which appeared to leap out of its mahogany mount, ears flattened, teeth bared, green glass eyes fixed on the portrait of his nemesis on the wall opposite. Aubrey Hyde, the second Baronet Bradfield, secured in family legend as the black sheep, and the tiger hunter.

Kate always hurried past this portrait. There was something about the second baronet that unsettled her: something lascivious in his parted lips and the moist glisten the artist had given them; something disturbing in his watchful, hooded eyes and the way they seemed to follow her across the marble floor. His pose was relaxed, his hand resting casually on a stone balustrade beside him, and that unnerved her too.

She knew how deceptive such nonchalance could be. How quickly a hand loosely held could tighten into a fist.

The layers of silence were suddenly disturbed by the distant note of the church bell. Its thin chime was rapid and insistent, and she pictured Davy Wells hauling on the rope, red-faced and breathless from his race through the park. She felt an odd lurch of foreboding and her hand went to the Indian silver chatelaine fastened at her waist, touching the items suspended from it like a rosary—the scissors, the buttonhook, the thimble and pencil, the keys to her parlour and her desk. At the foot of the stairs she took in a breath, composing herself into the character she had taken such care to create. Mrs Furniss, the housekeeper. Calm, capable, conscientious, always in control.

All of it a fiction.

Her footsteps echoed in time to the clang of the bell as she crossed the hallway to the heavy door concealed beneath the staircase. Pushing it open, she left behind the stillness and went down the worn steps into the heat and noise of the servants’ basement.

The air in the kitchen passage was damp, hazy with game-scented steam. Passing the kitchen door, she saw Mrs Gatley hefting a great roasting tin out of the range, while Susan, the sole kitchen maid, whisked frantically at something in a pan. Tension simmered in the air like fat on a hotplate. Mrs Gatley was the head gardener’s wife and had taken on the job of cook as a temporary stopgap when finding someone willing to put up with Coldwell’s isolation, poor pay, and lack of modern kitchen conveniences had proved impossible. Ten years on she was still there, and rarely missed an opportunity to grumble about it.

‘Oi—hallboy! Let’s have some help with this luggage!’

A shout sounded through the open door to the kitchen yard, its London accent jarring. The wagon bearing Mr Hyde’s and Miss Addison’s luggage had already rumbled under the stable arch and the Twigg boys—Stanley and George, from the stables—were beginning to unload it. The Portman Square footman clearly considered himself above manual labour and superior enough to issue orders to Joseph who, as hallboy, was at the bottom of the pecking order.

Kate was about to go and disabuse him of this notion when Mr God dard emerged from the butler’s pantry, settling his tailcoat over his shoulders and tugging at his lapels.

‘Positions everyone!’

In the subterranean light of the passageway, he appeared taller and more cadaverously thin than ever, his half-moon spectacles glinting dully on the end of his long nose. ‘Smarten yourselves and make your way upstairs, please.’

The London footman would have to wait. Kate turned into the stillroom passage that led to the housekeeper’s room, almost colliding with Abigail hurrying the other way.

‘Sorry, Mrs Furniss.’ The girl’s eyes were bright and her cheeks faintly flushed. Kate stepped aside to let her pass.

‘Oh, Abigail—did someone come to the servants’ entrance earlier? A man?’

‘Yes, Mrs Furniss.’

‘And what did he want?’

‘He was asking about the footman’s position.’ Abigail began to untie the coarse work apron she wore over her black afternoon dress, in preparation for swapping it with a finer lace-trimmed one. ‘He saw it in the newspaper and came direct. Eliza took him to Mr Goddard’s room. Thomas is finding him a livery now.’

‘He’s been engaged? Just like that?’

The girl shrugged apologetically and edged away.

There was no time to verify this improbable story. There was no time to brush out her hair and repin it either, so she stood before the looking glass in the small housekeeper’s parlour and tried her best to make it tidy enough to go take her place on the front steps alongside Mr Goddard, and welcome the visitors to Coldwell.

June 24th 1916

Somewhere in France

Dear Kate,

The commanding officer has told us that if there’s anything we want to say to loved ones at home, not to put it off any longer. Things are happening here, the whole of the British Army seems to be assembling in these small villages and country towns, bringing guns and shells and supplies and setting up first aid posts, so I know it will be something big. Something that I might not survive.

And, Kate, there is so much I want to say.

This morning, our guns and trench mortars started a bombardment that has continued all day without stopping. The noise is indescribable. We spent the day unloading crates of shells, and in the distance the artillery bursts like fireworks, which makes me think of you.

Everything makes me think of you. For five years I have tried to look forward and build some sort of life without you, though it would never have been the life I would have chosen. Now the prospect of any sort of future seems unlikely and there’s nothing to stop my mind from returning to the past.

I wish I could go back too, and do everything differently, but of course it’s too late for that. The only thing I can do is try to explain. I have little hope that you’ll ever get to read this letter, but I believe that setting it down on paper counts for something. If I don’t come through this, at least the facts will be recorded, for what that’s worth.

At least I will have let it be known that I loved you, and I’m sorry.