Chapter Nine
For several days, Elowen was perfect.
She came up to the estate office with the books balanced to the farthing.
She answered what she was asked, asked what the work required, and offered nothing that was not wanted.
The ball was nearly upon them, and the cards were written, and the musicians engaged, and the question of the supper settled, and all of it passed across the long table between them in sentences with no loose ends, like parcels handed over a counter.
The Duke was civil. She was civil. The clock on the mantel did most of the talking.
It was, she told herself, exactly as it ought to be.
He was her employer, bought and paid for through Lady Day, and an employer was owed good work and a smooth face, and he had both of hers.
If the room had used to hold something else when she brought the books up, something that had made her take more care over the dressing of her hair than the dressing of a column of figures, then the room had been mistaken, and so had she, and several days was long enough to be done being mistaken.
She no longer went into the Blue Morning Room.
The fire was still laid there daily, on no order she had given; she supposed it was on no order he had given either, and that the housemaids simply went on doing what had been done.
So the prettiest room in the house stood warm and lit and empty all day, like a quarrel nobody would pick up, and she went past its door with her eyes on her list.
Then the weather turned.
It had rained for three days, the soft, patient, soaking rain of the West Country, and then, late in the afternoon, the wind came round to the south-west and brought the rest of it.
By dusk, the gutters were roaring. By dinner, the wind was getting into the chimneys, and the candles ducked in their own draught, and Lady Seraphina looked at the streaming windows and said, “Somebody’s hay will be in the sea by morning. ”
It was not hay.
At nine o’clock, a boy came up from the village half drowned on a borrowed horse, and the word he brought was that the river was over its banks at the low end, the mill row was flooding, and the water was still rising. Mr Coker’s land lay along the bottom there. So did six cottages.
After that, nobody at Marcombe Hall remembered to be careful of anybody.
Elowen heard the Duke’s voice in the hall giving orders: the carriage horses to be taken down with the wagon, lanterns, ropes, Felton to knock up the home farm.
She did not wait to be sent for, because nobody would think to send for her, and there was no time to mind it.
She went down to the kitchen and started the campaign at the other end.
“Susan is at Wrenfield,” she said to herself, once, absurdly missing her old lieutenant, and then she took the maids she had.
Fires to be lit in the laundry and the servants’ hall, the coppers filled and set to heat, every kettle in the house put on.
Cook, grey with sleep, set to soup as if soup were a siege engine.
“Bread, butter, and all the cheese we have. They will be cold before they are hungry, and hungry before they are dry.”
“The blankets, miss,” said Patty, wide-eyed. “There are not blankets for six houses of folk, not made up.”
There was a knock of a stick on the floor above them, through the boards: Mrs Pike, who could not lift a kettle, had heard the house wake and wanted news.
Elowen went up herself and gave it in twenty words, and the housekeeper lay in her bed with her dropped hand curled on the counterpane and her eyes sharp as ever in her tired face.
“The French blankets,” said Mrs Pike. “Old His Grace bought a bale of them off a prize cargo in the war, and they have never been out since. Third attic, cedar press, the key is the long one on my second ring. They will smell of cedar, and they will be the warmest thing in this house.”
And then, as Elowen turned to go: “Miss Vane. The mill-row women will not take charity easily. Say it is the Duke’s orders and they are lent, mind, not given. They will take a loan.”
“Thank you,” said Elowen, and meant more by it than the blankets, and saw the old woman hear that too, and scowl, and look pleased.
By midnight, the laundry was a dormitory.
They came up from the village in the wagon in twos and threes, mill-row families with their children done up in oilskins and tablecloths, an old man clutching a clock, a girl with a cat in a basket that yowled the whole length of the avenue.
Elowen stood at the door of the warm room with her lists and her lent blankets and turned chaos into beds.
She was good at it. She had always been good at it; it was the first time in days that being good at it had made her feel anything but tired.
Amabel appeared at her elbow at half past twelve in a dressing gown and cloak, carrying a tray of bread and butter, chin set for battle. “Aunt said I was to go back to bed, and I am not going to. You cannot make thirty beds alone, and Lucian is down at the river, and somebody must carry things.”
“Then carry them to the children first,” said Elowen, “and learn their names while you do it. A child who has been named is half warm already.”
Amabel carried, and named, and by one o’clock had a small wet court of admirers around her on the floor of the servants’ hall, and was telling them, with enormous authority, that the water would go down because water always did.
Elowen, passing with the soup, thought that the girl’s mother would have been proud, and that the girl’s brother, who would never say so, would be prouder, and felt the thought catch somewhere, and put it away with the others.
A little later, she saw him. The wagon had come up with the last of the mill row, and she had gone out to the yard door with a lantern to count heads, and he was there in the rain at the tail of the wagon, lifting the children down.
He did it the way he did everything, without ceremony and without waste, two hands under the arms and swing and set down and next, but he said something to each one as he set it on its feet, too low for her to hear, and each child went past her into the warmth less frightened than it had been in the wagon.
The old man with the clock would not give the clock up to be carried and could not climb down holding it.
She watched the Duke of Marcombe stand in the pouring dark being argued with by an eighty-year-old about a clock, lose the argument, and take the old man down instead, clock and all, like a piece of furniture, with the rain running off both of them.
He did not see her. She told herself she was counting heads, and counted them, and went in.
The Duke came back to the house at two.
She heard the horses first, and then the men’s voices in the yard, and then he was in the kitchen passage with the rain still running off him, hatless, filthy to the thigh, giving the end of an order to Felton over his shoulder.
The mill row was empty, every soul of it accounted for; the water had crested; Coker’s cattle were got up to the high ground, and Coker’s new drains, the ones he had been cutting in the bottom field all autumn, had taken the worst of the flood off his neighbour’s land as well as his own, and the man had worked four hours in the dark up to his waist like a unit of the Royal Engineers.
All of this Elowen had from the underkeeper, in pieces, while she made the Duke’s men eat. The Duke himself she did not approach. She sent hot soup down the passage to him by Patty and kept to her side of the night.
***
At three, when the laundry was quiet at last and the children asleep in rows like loaves set to prove, word came down that His Grace wanted Miss Vane in the estate office, if she was not gone up.
The fire there had burned to its last logs.
He had changed his coat but not, she thought, troubled to do more; his hair was still damp, and he stood at the table over the estate map with the look of a man holding himself upright by the work.
The lamp made the room small and brown and warm, and the rain had slackened at the windows to an ordinary rain, a rain that was only weather.
“Six houses,” he said, without preamble, which was a mercy, because preamble was the thing neither of them had survived lately.
“Four will dry. Two are off their footings and must come down. I will rebuild in the spring, higher up the row. Until then, I have two families with no roof, and I am told the laundry cannot be a dormitory above a week without the whole house going to ruin.”
“Five days,” said Elowen. “The washing is patient, but it is not infinite.”
“Five days.” He looked at the map. She watched him find the empty lodge at the east gate with his finger, and the rooms over the stables, and the gardener’s bothy, all the places a duke could put two families by pointing at them.
Then she watched him stop, take his finger off the map, and look up at her instead.
“Where would you put them, Miss Vane?”
It was asked plainly, as a man asks who wants the answer. But she had been several days learning the cost of his decisions and half a lifetime learning the cost of everyone’s, and she heard what it was, and what it had cost him, and she had the sense not to show that she heard it.
“Not the east lodge,” she said. “It is a mile from the village, and the Tremlett girl is near her time; she will want the midwife and her mother within a street of her. The rooms over the stables for the Hockadays; they have boys, and boys and horses will keep each other out of mischief. And I would ask Mrs Pendarvis to take the Tremletts into her back rooms, with payment for the trouble. She is a widow with too much house and too little company, and it is easier for a proud woman to accept money for a kindness than to receive kindness for nothing.”
“You had that ready.”
“I had it ready an hour ago. I did not know that I would be asked.”