Chapter Six #2
“It’s short again, madam… Your Grace, begging your pardon.
” Bett scrubbed at her eyes with a floury wrist. “The Cook says the sack is never the weight it’s written down for, and it’s been going on and on, only the bill comes in for the full.
Mr Hollis’s man says she’s calling him a thief, and he’ll go to the master with it, he says he will.
” The words came faster the longer she went.
“And the Cook’s that frightened of being turned off with the new mistress here, so she’s been making the bread short to hide it, and now they’re all saying downstairs that she’s skimping us, but she is not, Your Grace. She would never do that.”
“Then she has been robbed twice, once of the flour and once of her name.” Theodora put her own handkerchief into the girl’s hand. “Stop crying. Tears salt the flour, and then it is short and wet, and we shall have neither bread nor a case. Where are the bills?”
“Mrs Denholm’s got them, Your Grace, only she is not to trouble you with the household. His Grace was that particular on it, she says.”
“He is not here, and I am, and this is not the household. This is a man robbing a duke and frightening a cook in order to do it. That is a different matter entirely, and it is one I take.” She was already moving toward the kitchen.
“Fetch Mrs Denholm, every bill of Hollis’s she can lay a hand on, and the weigh-beam out of the scullery, and do it before the man’s cart is out of the yard. ”
It took her eleven minutes. The three most recent bills lay on the kitchen table in their order; the sacks came off the cart onto the beam, one after another, and the shape of it stood up off the paper before Mrs Denholm had finished explaining that His Grace had been particular.
“There it is,” she said. “He bills a hundredweight to the sack, twelve sacks to the load, one load in the week. I have weighed all twelve off this morning’s cart.
The heaviest is five pounds under the hundredweight and the lightest is nine, and the twelve of them together are eighty-four pounds short of what that bill says I have.
” She set a finger on the figure at the foot of the page.
“Eighty-four pounds is three quarters of a hundredweight. He charges forty shillings the hundredweight. So, he has had thirty shillings out of this kitchen in one week, and given us a receipt for it, and been thanked at the gate.” Her finger went to the second bill and the third.
“Seventy-nine pounds short on the load before that, and ninety-one on the load before that. Now attend to the part that matters. An honest short measure wanders both ways. Look at these three. Every one was light, and every one was within ten pounds in the sack, because ten pounds is where a housekeeper stops and asks a question. Not one has ever come in heavy.” She let that sit.
“Carelessness does not know where the walls are.” She squared the bills.
“A house in mourning for its old duchess and waiting on a new one is a house where nobody is adding the loads. That is why he came here. He has been at it a good deal longer than these three papers, and I intend to find out how much longer.”
Denholm stared at the beam, at the bills, and at the duchess who had refused for four days to touch a single thing in the house and had just taken a corn-chandler apart on the kitchen table in the time it took to boil a kettle.
“Your Grace, I have passed those bills myself, month upon month. I have paid the man at the door out of my own hand. I never once thought to set a sack against its own bill.”
“Nobody weighs a sack against its bill. That is the whole of his trade.” Theodora set the last weight down on the beam.
“He does not steal from careless houses. He steals from trusting ones, and they are rarer, richer and slower to look up from their grief.” Her tone was almost admiring.
“The old duchess trusted him, you took the trust on with the keys, and he has been eating it by the pound since she died.” The admiration went out of her voice.
“It is no failing in you, Mrs Denholm. It is a failing in him.” She squared the three bills into a stack.
“I want it stopped, and I want the Cook told tonight, in front of whoever said she is skimping, that the short bread was Hollis and never once her hand.” She reached for paper and a pen.
“Have his man wait in the yard. I will write the letter that goes back with him. It will be perfectly civil, and it will end his custom in this house by Thursday.” She looked up. “Who else in this county buys of him?”
“The Marsdens have him, Your Grace, the dowager at Ferrers, and two or three of the smaller houses out beyond Ashe. He carries that whole road.” Denholm’s voice had changed register entirely.
“I have offered these keys to no one since Her Grace died, and you have refused them twice in a week. They will not be offered a third time.” She laid the ring flat on the table.
“I have kept this house nine years. It was robbed under my own hand, and I never saw it. The woman who caught it in eleven minutes is standing in my kitchen telling me she will not touch the household. I do not understand you at all, and I am beginning to want to.”
“The same page goes to the Marsdens, then, and to the dowager at Ferrers, whose invitations I declined on Tuesday and whose corn-chandler I have just costed for them. They may call it a wedding gift.” A short, cold turn of the mouth.
“And that is the most dangerous sentence anyone has spoken to me since I crossed your threshold, Mrs Denholm. Do not make a habit of it.” Theodora sealed the letter.
“I am not to be understood. I am to be left alone with a weigh-beam when a man is thieving. Do not mistake the second for an invitation to the first.”
“You would do that? For the kitchen?”
“Eighty-four pounds of flour and a frightened woman are reason enough. Do not make it fine, Mrs Denholm. I have no use for it made fine.”
She wrote the letter at the kitchen table because the household books were in the library and she had told the truth about not touching them.
When it was sealed and gone with Hollis’s white-faced man, she found she was, absurdly, a little out of breath.
It only ever came on her once the thing was already safe.
She turned to go before anyone could make a speech.
“Your Grace.” The Cook had come up from the larder, red-eyed, twisting her apron, an old woman called a cheat in her own kitchen for weeks together and swallowing it to keep her place.
“I do not have the words for it, Your Grace. I have come up to say thank you, and I’d not have come at all only Bett said I was to.
” She got her breath. “Nobody has ever taken my part in my own kitchen in all my years here, and I have been here since before the old duchess died. I have done nothing wrong, Your Grace. I want that said out loud. I have done nothing wrong.”
“You have nothing to thank me for. I have not done you a kindness. I have corrected a figure.” Theodora said it fast and hard because a kindness offered to her still arrived with a barb somewhere in it, and she would not be caught in the kitchen turning soft over a sack of flour.
“It is my husband’s coal, my husband’s corn and my husband’s money the man was eating.
I have protected his interest. It has nothing to do with you at all. ”
But the cook was not listening to the words, only to the fact of the letter gone and her name given back to her. She caught the duchess’s hand in both her floury ones before Theodora could get it out of reach, pressed it, and said thank you a third time into it, and held on.
And Theodora, who had refused a house, a wardrobe, a county’s worth of invitations, and every soft thing offered her since she crossed the threshold, stood still in the warm kitchen and let the old woman hold her hand.
Since the wedding she had wished herself elsewhere in every room she entered, but she did not wish it here, and the only person in Calder House who had brought her to it was the one nobody had thought to thank.
She took her hand back gently, and told the Cook to go to bed.
Then she went up the great stair to the blue rooms and the door that locked from the inside.
She did not test the key that night, and could not afterwards have said why.
At the turn of the staircase, she looked back down into the hall.
The duke was standing in the doorway of the small library with a candle watching her climb, but he had been standing there long enough to have decided against speaking.