Chapter 13
She did not cry in the gallery, which she counted afterward as one of the better decisions of her marriage.
She gave herself as far as the bottom of the stairs, then she took the baby down to the nursery, washed the pear out of her hair, put on the plainest gown she owned, and went to find the housekeeper.
“Mrs. Pike, I would like to look through the household ledger.”
Mrs. Pike had been counting linen. She put down the sheet she was holding. “Your Grace?”
“The ledger. Wages, stores, the tradesmen’s accounts, whatever there is.
” Leonora sat down at the table in the stillroom without being invited, which she had worked out was the only way this was going to happen.
“And I would like to know the name of every person in this house, what they do, and how long they have been here.”
“His Grace keeps the accounts himself.”
“His Grace is up in a tree.”
There was a pause of about two seconds, and then Mrs. Pike laughed so hard that she had to hold the edge of the dresser.
She handed her the ledger. It was in Colin’s hand, which Leonora had not seen before.
Small, upright, beautifully regular—the hand of a man who did his sums at four in the morning and made no mistakes.
She went through the records of the past two years with her chin in her palm and learned more about her husband in forty minutes than she had learned in nine days.
The tenants’ rents had not been raised since the year the old Duke died. Three cottages had new roofs. There was a line, twice a year, for a widow in the village with no other label attached to it. And every quarter, a large sum went out to an address in Italy.
“He pays his brother’s debts before he pays his own coal merchant,” Leonora noted.
“He does, Your Grace.”
“And nobody knows about the roofs.”
“The men who put them on know.”
“Nobody in London knows about the roofs.”
“No, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike agreed. “That’s how he likes it.”
The names took another half hour, and Leonora wrote them all down on the back of an old invitation because there was nothing else at hand.
Mrs. Pike, housekeeper, thirty-one years in the house since before Colin was born. Bess, Sarah, and Peg, housemaids. Peg was seventeen, hired five months ago, and was the girl whose name Colin could never remember, and whose mother kept the alehouse at Thorton Green.
Then there was fourteen-year-old Tom, who did the boots and the coals and the errands.
Ferris, who had painted a door shut in a hurry nine years ago and had never been forgiven for it, and who was footman, valet, and anything else that was wanted.
Wilkes at the stables and a boy under him.
Two women who came up from the village three days a week for the rough work and were not, Mrs. Pike said firmly, to be counted, and were counted anyway.
And Mrs. Rowe, the cook, who had been sending up the same eleven dinners in rotation for six years because nobody had once commented on any of them.
“Eleven dinners.”
“Eleven, Your Grace. Not the hall dinners, which are what they are and always have been. Eleven dinners for the dining room, sent up in their turn, and when she comes to the end of them she starts again at the beginning.”
“For six years.”
“His Grace has never remarked upon it. He eats what’s in front of him and thanks the maid who brings it, and Mrs. Rowe considers that sufficient.” Mrs. Pike’s mouth had gone tight. “You’ll have had the turbot on Thursday, Your Grace. The one at the dinner.”
“I did.”
“That is the third of the eleven and she has been sending it up since before the old Duke died, and nobody has said one word about it in six years, and she trained under a Frenchman in Bath. She can cook a turbot that would make you weep.”
“Then she may do one on Thursday,” Leonora decided. “I shall weep, and I shall say so at some length, and you may tell her I said it in those words.”
Mrs. Pike wrote it on the slate.
“Thirty-one years,” Leonora murmured.
“Your Grace?”
“You have been in this house for thirty-one years. You came before he was born.”
“I came at nineteen as a nursemaid.” Mrs. Pike kept her eyes on the slate.
“His mother was five months pregnant with him. She was frightened of the whole business and hadn’t a soul in this county to say it to, and I was the youngest maid in the house, so she said it to me.
We were friends, which we shouldn’t have been. ”
Leonora put the pen down. “What was she like?”
“Small. Fair. She sang all the time and none of it in tune. And she couldn’t manage the ton; they terrified her.
” Mrs. Pike’s mouth moved. “She had this house lit like a fair. That’s the thing nobody remembers.
Every candle in every room and the shutters open all winter, because she refused to live in a place that looked like a ‘family vault.’”
“And the old Duke?”
“Loved her past all sense,” Mrs. Pike answered. “Which people call a fine thing when they’ve not watched it.”
She put the slate down and straightened its corner, which did not need straightening.
“He gave me this hip, since you’re asking.
Not on purpose. It was three weeks after her funeral.
He had been drinking brandy since noon, and the boy had asked him a question about the baby.
I stepped between the two of them on the turn of the back stairs and fell down it.
His Grace was nine back then. He saw the whole of it, and he has never once mentioned it to me in twenty-one years.
Then, a fortnight after his father was buried, he came into this room and put a cane in my hands that he’d made himself, and went out again without a word. ”
The stillroom was very quiet.
“He was fifteen,” Leonora concluded.
“Indeed.” Mrs. Pike nodded. “He was fifteen, and he has been apologizing to the household ever since, in wood, because he cannot do it in words.”
The tenants came at four.
Leonora heard the noise from the stillroom and got to the front hall in time to see Bess trying, with enormous politeness and no success, to persuade a woman with a covered basket to hand it over and go away.
“I’ll not be leaving it on the step like a parcel.”
“Mrs. Hartley, I promise you it will be—”
“I left the last one on the step in March, and I’ve never known whether it was eaten.”
“Mrs. Hartley,” Leonora said.
Everybody stopped.
There were four of them on the gravel, and it was clear from the arrangement that Mrs. Hartley had been pushed to the front and was not enjoying it. She was the woman who had curtsied so low at the wedding breakfast that she nearly fell over. She did it again now.
“Your Grace. We would not have troubled you. Only there’s a hare pie, a jar of damson jam, and something my sister’s daughter embroidered for the baby. And we thought…”
“You thought you would come and see me,” Leonora said.
There was an appalled silence.
“Which is quite fair,” she continued, “because I have seen you all from the chapel door and none of you got to look back. Bess, would you take these to the kitchen and fetch Mrs. Pike, and ask her to have the drawing room opened and tea sent in? As for the four of you, come and sit down, because I have been in this house since yesterday morning and I still do not know your names.”
Nobody moved.
“Come in,” Leonora urged.
They came in.
Word spread through Thorton Green in about forty minutes, which Leonora had not anticipated.
Two more came at half past four with cheese.
A woman called Ivy Dunn came at five with three of her children and an apology.
By half past five, there were sixteen people in the front hall of Thorton Manor, and Bess had been sent twice for more tea.
It took them ten minutes to stop perching on the front six inches of the chairs and sit back in them like people who had been asked. It took Katherine, who was brought down and passed along the row like a subscription plate, about four.
By six, Mrs. Hartley had explained the entire feud between the Thorton Green alehouse and the vicar, her sister-in-law had asked whether it was true that Leonora had a twin, and a small round man called Beddoes had told Leonora, in the voice of a man confessing to a crime, that the north field had flooded three years running and nobody had wanted to mention it.
“Why did nobody want to mention it?”
Sixteen people looked at each other, and then, by some arrangement Leonora never saw made, they all looked at Beddoes.
“Well,” Beddoes said, turning his hat over. “You don’t, do you?”
“You don’t what?”
“You don’t go up to the treehouse, Your Grace.”
Leonora set down her cup. “Mr. Beddoes, my husband has not raised the rent in fifteen years and has put roofs on three cottages out of his own pocket without telling a living soul about it, and you are still frightened of him?”
“He’s a very quiet man,” Mrs. Hartley remarked, with feeling.
“He is. He is the quietest man in England, and it has done him no good whatsoever.” She cleared her throat.
“So, here is what will happen. You will come to the house when the north field floods, you will come when the roof leaks, and you will come at Christmas, and if he growls at you, you will remember that he made an old woman a cane with his own hands and you will growl back.”
There was a long, doubtful pause.
“He did make her that cane,” Beddoes acknowledged. “I saw him cutting the wood.”
It was nearly eight before she went upstairs.
She crossed the gallery because it was the shortest way to the nursery… and stopped, because the curtains she had opened that morning were still open, and the last of the light had spilled across the far wall onto sixty Walfords who had not been looked at in six years.
At the north end, the black Holland cover had not moved.
“I’ll have them shut, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike called from behind her.
“No.”
“He’ll notice.”
“I know,” Leonora said. “That’s rather the point.”
She went to the window. Below her, the lawn ran down to the yew walk, and past the yew walk to the dark shape of an old beech. Thirty feet up in it, small and yellow and perfectly steady, a lamp was burning.
She stood there and watched it for a long moment.
I have opened your curtains and fed your tenants and read your accounts and learned the name of the girl you cannot remember, and you are up in a treehouse, and neither of us has the first idea what to do with each other.
Then the lamp went out.
Leonora stayed at the window, her pulse loud in her ears, and waited to hear the side door.
The house stayed quiet.