Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bereford House had seventeen rooms if one did not count the servants’ quarters, and Elizabeth intended to learn every one of them before her first week in residence was out.
Not because she wished to take inventory, as her mother would have done, but because she intended to be the mistress Mr. Darcy required.
Part of that was knowing where the linen cupboard was located and the silverware was kept.
She began on the ground floor. The morning room she already knew; it was where Georgiana had dragged her on the first afternoon, a bright, south-facing room with cream walls and furniture that had been chosen by someone with excellent taste and then largely ignored for a good deal of time.
The drawing room was formal and seldom used, its holland covers only recently removed.
The dining room was handsome but cavernous for four people, and Elizabeth made a note to ask whether there was a smaller room in which the family took their meals when they were not entertaining.
Elizabeth stopped briefly outside her husband’s study. The door was closed; she could hear the low murmur of the colonel’s voice within. He must have been delayed, for he had mentioned at breakfast that he would be calling on his commanding officer.
Mrs. Aldworth’s highly refined sense of organization and memory for the history of every part of the home was proving indispensable.
She answered Elizabeth’s questions with great patience, produced household accounts without being asked, and offered opinions when invited, though she clearly held a great many more in reserve.
The servants, meanwhile, were engaged in a close study of their new mistress while they pretended they were not.
A housemaid polished the same candlestick twice as Elizabeth passed through the upper passage.
One of the footmen appeared at the end of every hallway she turned down, always with a perfectly reasonable errand that happened to take him in her direction.
A chambermaid brought a coal scuttle into the same room twice.
Elizabeth could not fault their technique, for they were very nearly as subtle as they believed themselves to be.
“The linen is rotated on a regular schedule, madam,” Mrs. Aldworth said, leading Elizabeth through the hall and shooting daggers at the offending footman. “Mr. Darcy’s mother kept a very particular system, and I have maintained it.”
“Twelve years is a long time to maintain a system without a mistress to answer to. You have done admirably on your own.”
“One does one’s best, Mrs. Darcy.”
“Then I shall rely on your judgement and try not to disarrange what clearly works.” Elizabeth paused at the door to the small stillroom.
“Though I confess I have strong views about the stillroom. At Longbourn we kept the jam on the highest shelf and the pickled vegetables below so that my youngest sisters could not raid the preserves without a ladder.”
“How many sisters?”
“Four.”
Mrs. Aldworth’s expression suggested she was revising her estimate of Elizabeth’s capabilities sharply upward. “Four sisters, and the preserves survived?”
“Mostly. We lost a great deal of gooseberry in the summer of 1807, but I prefer not to speak of it.”
Something happened then that Elizabeth suspected was the housekeeper’s version of a smile.
It vanished so quickly that a less attentive observer might have missed it entirely.
But there was a gleam in the woman’s eye that was both speculative and approving, something that Elizabeth recognised a half-second too late.
Oh no.
She had just told the housekeeper of a large London house how she would arrange things for small, raiding hands.
Fortunately, the woman seemed more pleased than scandalised, for that might have gone very badly indeed.
“I shall rearrange the stillroom as soon as may be, madam,” Mrs. Aldworth said, with a look that suggested she was already mentally inventorying the nursery linens. “Jam above. Pickled vegetables below.”
Could she explain without making things worse? Elizabeth thought it over and decided the best approach was to pretend that part of the conversation had never happened. “There is no rush, but thank you, Mrs. Aldworth.”
By the third day, Elizabeth had learned the names of all the servants, even the lower ones.
She knew the location of every cupboard, closet, and coal hole.
She had also discovered the creak of the sixth step on the main staircase, which produced a footman at the bottom of the stairs with such reliability that she began to suspect it was not a flaw in the woodwork but a feature.
She tested it a third time. Another footman appeared, politely enquiring whether madam required anything.
She had ordered flowers for the drawing room and the breakfast table, not extravagant arrangements, but small, bright ones that made the rooms feel less like a portrait gallery and more like a home.
She had consulted with Mrs. Aldworth about the weekly menus and discovered that Bereford House had been subsisting on a seven-day rotation of meals that had not really changed since the previous Mrs. Darcy’s death.
She asked whether the cook could join them in Mrs. Aldworth’s office.
Mrs. Carroll arrived, clearly anxious about being summoned. But her confirmation of the schedule left Elizabeth stunned.
“Twelve years of the same Tuesday supper?” Elizabeth said.
Mrs. Carroll, the cook, folded her floury arms. “Mr. Darcy has never complained.”
“Mr. Darcy was a bachelor. He ate at his club and his friends’ homes and would likely eat the same meal every day of his life without complaint so long as someone put it in front of him.”
Mrs. Carroll considered this. “What would you suggest?”
Elizabeth had, in fact, several opinions about béchamel sauce and her husband’s objection to it, but some teases could be taken too far, and she was not yet certain enough of the cook’s humour—or Mr. Darcy’s—to risk it.
“I would suggest that a cook of your evident skill has not spent twelve years in the same kitchen without wishing to try something new. If you have receipts you have wanted to attempt, Mrs. Carroll, I should be very glad to have you try them on us. We are four people, we are not particular other than the few things you have already noted, and Mr. Darcy will benefit from the discovery that Tuesday is not required to taste the same every week.”
Mrs. Carroll unfolded her arms, the domestic equivalent of a drawbridge lowering. “I do have a few things I have been considering. There is a receipt for a fricassee of chicken with tarragon that I have long wished to attempt.”
“Then by all means, attempt it. It sounds delightful. And if Mr. Darcy complains, we will simply tell him that it was my idea.”
The cook’s mouth twitched. “Very good, madam.”
As she was forging alliances with the servants and learning Georgiana’s schedule—the girl was at the pianoforte for two hours every day after breakfast and studied after—Mr. Darcy was much occupied with business. Much of that business, it seemed, involved his cousin.
The colonel was still in residence. His parents and brother would not be in town until Parliament sat, which meant that Matlock House was shut up, save for a minimum number of servants.
The two men shut themselves in the study for hours at a time, emerging for meals with a distracted air.
Elizabeth did not press, though she wished to.
She was willing to be patient, but she was not willing to be blind.
While she waited, she had Georgiana to attend to, and the house to learn, and a stillroom to rearrange.
If she and her husband passed each other mostly at breakfast and dinner, their exchanges were not unpleasant.
He asked after her and Georgiana. She asked after him and the colonel.
He enquired whether she had everything she needed.
She said she did. It was not intimacy, but it was not coldness either, more a careful, courteous circling of two people who had not yet determined what they were to each other when other people were watching.
She missed the cottage.
It was only on her fourth morning in London that Elizabeth had time to search for the library.
She had known it existed, of course. Georgiana had pointed out the door on the first day’s tour. But Elizabeth had been occupied with the practical business of learning the house, and the library had waited for her with the patience of a room that knew its worth.
It was magnificent.
A full story of shelves lined three walls from floor to ceiling, the upper level accessible by a narrow gallery with an iron rail.
A rolling ladder, dark oak with brass fittings, stood against the far wall.
The windows were tall and south-facing, and the light that poured through them fell in broad, golden bands across a carpet that had been chosen, Elizabeth suspected, by the same hand that had chosen the décor in the sitting room.
Nothing outdated about the rug, though. It was both beautiful and timeless.
There were two stuffed chairs by the fireplace. One bore the unmistakable impression of long use—its cushion slightly flattened, the leather worn smooth on the right arm where a hand might rest. The other was newer, or at least little used.
She ran her fingers along the spines on the nearest shelf.
History, philosophy, natural science, political economy.
The collection was serious, scholarly, and exhaustive.
It was not, however, without some frivolity.
A set of novels occupied a lower shelf near the second chair, half-hidden as though someone had been embarrassed to place them there but could not bring himself to remove them.
Elizabeth glanced at the door, the shelf, and the ladder. She was alone in the room.