Restitution #4
“You do that, sir. After you’ve taken your wares to market.” Robson nodded casually towards the gig. “Never took you for a market gardener, sir, but I tell you what, I’ll tie that tarp a little tighter for you if you like. I was a drayman for a few years.”
He expected Heaver to forbid it, thus proclaiming his guilt, but was disappointed.
“Help yourself,” the butler said, negligently, “It’s empty.”
Robson jumped up and peered in anyway. The gig was indeed empty.
“Where are you off to, anyway, sir? With an empty cart.”
“None of your business, Robson. But I’m going for the post.”
Mr Heaver wrenched himself around on the box to glare at the footman.
“Don’t you forget,” he said, wagging a finger, “that I know about you. It’s more than a drayman you’ve been, oh yes, I know.
Poaching is a crime. You can be transported, even hanged.
Old Mr Jennings liked you, but he’s out now, and I’m in, and I could end you whenever I want with a word to the master.
You think a gentleman like Mr Bingley would want a poacher for a footman?
He’d have you out in two minutes and no reference. You remember that.”
So saying, he struck Bouncer hard with his whip.
Robson stepped from the gig as it moved down the drive, then onto the main road into Denstone.
Then his eyes turned to the hill that descended to a stream and to the fringes of Hanger’s Wood beyond.
Not a mile through the trees, a footpath ran on a wooded ridge parallel to the road, all the way to the village.
His heart started beating fast as it had used to; the excitement of moving quick and quiet, seeing without being seen.
Why not? Just to see where the man was going.
He set off running full tilt from a standing start and was among the trees in two minutes flat.
Pay was handed out on Friday afternoons.
Mrs Kerridge stood at the door of Mr Heaver’s pantry with the cash box and passed the coins to each member of the household on their way down the passage to eat lunch together in the servant’s hall, all having two hours off for the purpose.
They proceeded alphabetically so that, after Lucy, the downstairs maid, had collected her reward with a soft chink of coins, it was Sarah’s turn.
Mrs Kerridge paid her with a bland smile, her eyes already looking to the next in line.
Sarah pocketed it and moved forward by mere habit, but she frowned as she sat.
The weight was entirely wrong. She withdrew the handful of coins and counted them discreetly in her lap.
It was enough for a whole quarter’s wages, not a month’s.
She returned the money to her pocket, but her frown remained as the room filled and the meal began.
Mrs Kerridge, having said grace, began cutting her beef into tiny chunks.
Her placidity felt, somehow, dangerous. Perhaps it was a test to see if she would try to keep quiet and take the extra. Sarah set down her fork.
“Mrs Kerridge,” she said, “I think there’s been a mistake.”
Silence descended. Mrs Kerridge lifted one eye from her plate.
“Feel yourself underpaid, do you, Sarah? Have I done the sums wrongly?”
“No,” said Sarah, pulling the coins from her pocket and sifting through them in her palm with a finger. “It’s not that. It’s too much. I get three and ten a week, and here’s eleven shillings and sixpence!”
All eyes were already on her, but they now widened. Only Mrs Kerridge seemed completely uninterested.
“Well,” she mused, attention back on her plate as she transfixed a potato with her fork, “the payroll passes through the mistress’s hands after mine.
If she has chosen to favour you, I’m sure that’s her right.
You are certainly in a position to endear yourself to her now, and I’m sure none of us could blame you for taking full advantage of it.
” She looked up in mild reproach. “Only I do think you mightn’t mention it before us all.
Gratuities are nice for those who get them, and you are London-trained after all, but us provincial servants can hardly hope for so much.
I shouldn’t like you to demoralise the others.
It can feel hard to see someone making three times as much for the same work. ”
A kind of numbness began in Sarah’s stomach and progressed, like a pool icing over, into her chest, up her neck, and down each arm until it reached her fingers.
She glanced left and right, to Mary, the other upstairs maid, and Norah, the scullery maid.
Neither met her eye, though they had always been good enough friends.
Mary and she had shared a room before Sarah had been given her own as lady’s maid, and it had been a great pleasure to her how cosy they had been together.
Now she only went on eating, her lips a tight line even as she chewed.
She looked hurt. Norah only looked angry.
“And have you seen the sheet?” asked Poll, the laundry maid from near the door. “She’s only on dressing and bedroom fires every day, and only one dusting on Fridays. Two ‘frees’ a day. It’s disgusting, is what it is.”
Again, Mrs Kerridge was the picture of detached disinterest, as though it were not she and she alone who made up the sheet which assigned duties for the month. She dabbed mustard on a forkful of food and transferred it to her mouth.
“Now then, Poll”, she chided, once she had swallowed. “I’m sure we’d all be delighted to do a little less for a little more pay. We should not begrudge Sarah her success, but only hope that we, too, may one day enjoy such favour.”
“Little chance of that stuck at the tub all day,” Poll said, stuffing her coins roughly into her pinafore pocket. “I’m off. Some of us have work to do.”
“But I never…” Sarah started to say, turning to Mary with a pleading look, but Mary shrugged her shoulder away as though Sarah had tried to touch her.
She got up and left as well. Norah very deliberately turned her chair the other way, putting her head together with Peggy, her colleague in the scullery.
A lump formed in her throat so hard that she couldn’t speak and could barely breathe.
Sarah returned her money to her pocket with shaking fingers and left the room.
She walked to the stillroom, reached a covered bucket down from a shelf with trembling fingers.
She just got the lid off before she doubled over and was sick.
Robson entered furtively via the coal room door and peered around the doorjamb into the servants’ corridor. His trousers were liberally coated with mud, his jacket scratched by the briars and thorns of the hedgerow. He carried his filthy boots in one hand. The corridor seemed deserted.
He had nearly reached the stillroom, where he planned to clean his boots and person sufficiently to reach his room and pack for his journey, when he heard the sound of muffled weeping.
He paused, hand on the latch, wondering if he should avoid getting involved, but the sound of footsteps coming from the kitchen made him open the door and slip inside.
There was a small noise of distress as he closed the door again softly, and he was concerned to find Sarah sitting on the cold flags with her back to the wall, a covered bucket beside her. She hastily wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
“Oh,” he said, awkwardly. “I… I beg your pardon, miss, I only—” he indicated his boots.
She sniffed and shook her head.
“No, no, Mr Robson, that’s quite all right, it is I who…” She gestured at herself, the room, the whole house around them, and stood. “How did you become so muddy?”
“Oh, just a… little walk. What’s the matter, if I might ask?”
Sarah shook her head.
“Mrs Kerridge has got it in for me. She’s turning everyone against me. It’s so stupid! Nobody would listen if she made up some story to my discredit, but she only has to hint that I’m a favourite with the mistress, and they swallow it whole, and denial only makes it seem more likely.”
“What, just because of that business with the linen and the receipts?” asked Robson.
Sarah frowned.
“I… I don’t think so. I just thought she was jealous of how much time I spend with the mistress. Why?”
Robson considered her. His had been a curiously headlong life, going from this to that without much thought.
Yet he had always had a good sense for people.
Sarah was good. Sarah was honest. Sarah was new at the very least, brought in from London rather than being tangled up with this place, and clearly no friend to Mrs Kerridge. He moved closer and lowered his voice.
“Because I think she and Heaver are robbing the master, that’s why.”
Sarah digested this news.
“Have you proof?”
Robson shook his head. “Not yet. Not for want of trying. That’s where I’ve been just now.” He indicated the boots again.
She raised her eyebrows, so he continued.
“Ever since that business with the linen, I was thinking it’s like…
ordering too much and selling it, right?
So when I saw Heaver going into town with the gig today, I followed him and watched where he went.
” He held up fingers as he listed: “Graves the poulterer, Wreathe’s haberdashers, and Tom Fiennes, who does the wine. ”
“He was selling things to them?” Sarah asked.
Robson shook his head. “No. That’s what has me stumped. I looked in the gig before he set off and watched him every step of the way. He never stopped to pick anything up. He took nothing into those merchants. He brought nothing out.” He spread his hands and let them drop to his side.
Sarah’s eyebrows rose. “You followed him there and back, and he never saw you? Even at Fiennes’ Vintners? There’re no bushes anywhere near there!”
“Oh, there’s a lilac tree in Mr Timms’ garden across the way. I can hide in anything, I can, why…” He stopped himself and finished lamely. “I grew up here and… ah… got up to a few scrapes as a lad.”