Chapter Ten
“The forks do not match. Two of them. I have decided no one will remark it, because the alternative is to send to the village at five on the hour for forks, and I would sooner serve the soup in my two hands.”
“No one will be looking at the forks.” Beatrice considered the long table from the doorway.
“They will be looking at you, and at whether this house has the nerve to give a dinner at all. That is the entire reason I am making it give one. A house that entertains is a house that means to go on. A house that hides is a house with something to hide, and the county can smell that difference at a hundred yards in a fog.”
“I am aware of the reason, Lady Beatrice. I have been polishing the reason since six this morning, alongside the forks that do match.”
“Then you understand the evening rather better than half the people coming to it.” Beatrice moved a wine glass a quarter of an inch and left it improved. “Shall I tell you who comes, and why I chose each of them, since you are the one who must feed the consequences?”
“Please. I prefer to know the weather before I am standing out in it.”
“The rector, Mr. Dabney, because he is kind and foolish in equal and will say warm things at the top of his voice without being asked. That is worth two good courses on a difficult night. Sir John Pelham, because he is honest and his good word travels. His wife, because she is poison and her bad word travels twice as fast, and a dinner that converts only the friendly has converted nobody.” Beatrice ticked them off against her fan.
“And old Lady Carbery, who is half deaf and wholly grand and knew everyone worth knowing forty years ago, and whose approval, if we can win it, settles the question for every hostess in three counties.”
“You have seated a friend, a witness, an enemy, and a judge.”
“I have seated the county in miniature, child. It is the only honest way to find out what the county will do. Now. The economy of your evening.” She turned from the table.
“You will run it from the wings, flawlessly, and not one soul will know that the reason their fish arrives hot is the woman they intend to spend the soup course pitying. You will get no credit. The house takes the credit, and you are handed the privilege of watching it spend yours, and you are expected to find the spectacle nourishing.”
“I made my peace with that economy three years ago, over colder forks than these and worse company. Feeding is not what I require tonight. I require eleven covers and a kitchen that does not catch fire, and I have arranged for both.”
“Then we shall do very well, since I have never set a kitchen alight, whatever my late husbands reported to the contrary.” Beatrice paused at the door. “Who goes on the door?”
“Finch. He is the only one of them who can take a wet cloak from a countess without looking as though he has been handed a fish. He does not drop things, he does not gossip in the hall where the guests can hear, and he does not sulk when corrected. Together that puts him three full counts ahead of any footman I have managed.”
Beatrice’s brow rose. “High praise, from you, who hoards it.”
“Earned praise. It is the only sort I keep in the house. The other kind spoils in a week and makes the entire place foul for a fortnight together.”
Annie came up the passage with the warming pans, wide of eye at the number of places laid. “Eleven, ma’am? We’ve not laid eleven since I came to the house.”
“Eleven, Annie, and every one of them come to watch whether we can. You will carry, you will not speak unless you are spoken to, and if Lady Carbery lets fall her glove you will have it back into her hand before she has finished deciding to be vexed about it.”
Annie’s chin came up a little. “I can try, ma’am.”
“You can do far better than try. Trying is the thing we do when we have not practised, and we have practised. You will do it as though you had done it a hundred times before, for no guest alive can tell the difference between competence and confidence. We are selling them the second tonight at the price of the first. They will go home having dined on both and able to name neither, which is exactly how a good evening is meant to feel.”
She found Finch already at the side table, polishing the last of the glasses against the light, and he set one down and took up the next without being told. That, entire, was Finch.
“They will come in cold and leave warm, Finch, and the warming is your work as much as the kitchen’s. A guest with a full glass forgives a wide field of sins. A guest with an empty one begins to count the cracks in the plaster.”
“Then no glass goes dry under my very eye, ma’am.
I’ll keep them so well topped they’ll not recall what the house looked like sober.
” He came as near to a smile as Finch ever came, which was not very near.
“It’s a fine thing to see the place full again.
It hasn’t been, not since before Mrs. Bellamy went.
Feels like a house tonight, instead of a tomb that someone keeps dusting. ”
“Mind you still feel that at midnight, when your feet have lodged a complaint.”
“My feet have been overruled before, ma’am. They know their place better than some upstairs do.”
She let that pass, because a housekeeper who laughs at every footman’s cleverness soon has a kitchen full of comedians and no dinner, and she went on to the kitchen where Mrs. Croft stood guard over a sauce in a copper that could have armoured a small ship.
“You’ve the look of a general who has already won the battle and is only waiting on the other side to notice.”
“I have done this from the other chair, Mrs. Croft. It comes far easier from this one. No one expects the housekeeper to be winning. They expect the sauce, and the sauce I can guarantee with my life.”
“They’ll have the sauce, and be glad of it, and thank the kitchen for none of it.
” She gave the copper a turn. “Which is as it should be. A thanked cook is a cook who has begun to slip. Send them in hungry and leave the rest to me, and I’ll have the lot of them loyal by the savoury, whether they care to be or no. ”
***
The guests came at seven, and Renae received them through other people’s hands, as a housekeeper must, by glances and the smallest movements of two fingers from the edge of the candlelight where the edge of the candlelight was meant to keep her.
Her fish came up hot. The wine arrived at the temperature wine is meant to arrive at, and the talk had begun as stiff as a new collar and forgot, after the second remove, that it had ever doubted the house at all.
“I will say it, since no one else has had the courage.” Mr. Dabney beamed down the table, being too kind a man to sit in a thawing room and not fan the fire.
“This is the most cheerful this house has been in a twelvemonth. One had begun to fear, with the duke so low, that cheerfulness had been packed away with the summer things.”
“It is being unpacked,” Beatrice said drily. “Slowly, and against the family’s settled inclination. It is the only way this family has ever learned anything worth knowing.”
“Whoever has the running of it has a gift.” Sir John turned in his chair, looking for someone to credit and finding only servants, and the search puzzled his honest face into a frown.
“My own house cannot manage soup and conversation in the same hour. We attempt the one or the other on alternate Thursdays and call it economy.”
“You must send Lady Pelham to take instruction,” Beatrice said pleasantly. “Though I warn you the instructress is greatly in demand and does not travel.”
“A pity,” Sir John said comfortably. “Though I have always suspected a house runs best on a secret it declines to advertise. Ours runs on my wife’s temper, and we do not advertise that either.”
“Sir John.”
“My dear.”
Renae kept to the shadow and let the credit pass over her head to the house, where Beatrice had told her it belonged, and she had very nearly let herself believe the evening would close clean when Lady Carbery set down her glass on the certainty of a thing remembered.
“I know that face. I have been turning it over since the second course, and I have it now.” The deaf and the certain make their voices carry, and hers carried the length of the table. “Come into the light, girl, where an old woman may be sure of you.”
Renae came, because there was nothing else a servant could do, and stood where the candles could reach her.
“Good heavens. You are Whitmore’s daughter. Renae. You came out the same season as my granddaughter. You wore your mother’s pearls, and you danced twice with a man your father could not abide, and the whole room remarked it for a fortnight after.”
“Lady Carbery. You have a formidable memory.”
“I have a formidable memory and very little else left to me, in the cruel order these things are taken from a woman. The face is the first thing the world admires and the last thing it returns.” She turned the glass on the table, on the silver, on the woman in plain stuff standing beside it.
“Whitmore’s girl. Carrying the dishes. Well.
The world does pick a person up and turn her over like a glass, only to see what runs out of her. ”
“Very little runs out, Lady Carbery. I learned early to hold what I was given. There was never much of it, and what there was, I kept.”
“Spoken like your father, who held a grudge as other men held land, and farmed it quite as carefully.” Lady Carbery’s face softened into something that had once been beauty.
“He was proud past sense and poor past mending, and he cherished you a sight more than he ever found the words for. It is the common failing of proud men, and the one I have forgiven most in my life.”
“You are kind to say so, Lady Carbery.”