Kept Page 14

  “What are these?” Esther wondered, running the faded paduasoy and the rags of taffeta through her hands.

  “Why, they are dresses great ladies wore. A hundred years or more since, I should say, that the mice have eaten. Did you ever see such things?”

  “And what is this? It looks like the stuffing of a horsehair sofa.”

  “I believe it is a wig!”

  Doubtfully—for it seemed to her that they were certain to be spied upon and rebuked—Esther allowed the ruin of false hair to be smoothed down over her head. It smelled of dust and decay.

  “There! You see. You look like a duchess.”

  “I look very foolish, I am sure,” Esther replied. Nonetheless, she was not displeased. They spent an hour trying on first one dress and then another, walking up and down the room and bowing to each other as they passed.

  “What would Mrs. Wates say, I wonder, if we came down to supper wearing these dresses?” Sarah said.

  “We should lose our places, I am sure we should,” Esther said. “Listen! That is the church clock. It is five already.”

  And so the dresses were folded up and put back into the box.

  (V)

  Hollo, Esther, is that you? It seems an age since we ran into one another.”

  Esther, on her way from the back lawn to the kitchen, her hands clasped around a bundle of folded washing, a heap of clothes pegs balanced upon the top, regarded William neutrally.

  “An age you say?” She made to edge past him through the open door, but he lounged before it, one hand plunged into his trouser pocket, the other stretched out to halt her progress.

  “Do stop now, do. There is something I badly want to ask you.”

  Esther looked carefully around her. It was four o’clock on an autumn afternoon with the light beginning to fade above the peaks of the elm trees and a damp chill, a chill that seemed to come from the very depths of the earth beneath it, pervading the air. There was no one about, either in the kitchen or in the servants’ hall beyond. Cautiously, she placed the washing basket on the step at her feet.

  “What is it then?”

  In the time since Esther’s arrival at Easton Hall she had learned a great deal. Nothing very much, perhaps, in point of view of the world and the manner of its working, but in her own private imaginings a great deal. Under Mrs. Wates’s direction she had learned how to make quince jelly and construct a hollandaise sauce (“That is a sure sign that she likes you,” Sarah had admiringly explained. “Usually she is afeared that the kitchenmaid is after her place.”) She had also, through chance remarks let fall at the supper table and in the servants’ hall, heard something of her employer’s circumstances. The Dixeys were an old Norfolk family, it appeared, of immense antiquity—so old that they might have come over with William the Conqueror or have even regarded that gentleman as a usurper. A Dixey, it was said, had been barber-surgeon to the Confessor and perished at Hastings. Their good fortune, unhappily, had not endured so long. There had been a great many Dixeys—lord lieutenants, Cinque Port wardens and ladies of the bedchamber—and now there was only one. Thirty years or more ago a Dixey had fought a lawsuit against a neighbour, a lawsuit which, beginning in a quarrel over a covert, extended into every avenue that the law allows, fought it tenaciously and with no regard to expense, fought it and…lost. Another Dixey, a cousin of the litigant, had spent ever so many thousands of pounds opening up a mine in Cornwall which was found, at the conclusion of this labour, to contain nothing but water. And so thirty years later the fruit lay and rotted under Mr. Dixey’s apple trees, and the farmers of the district came over his fields to shoot such pheasants as lingered there on the excellent grounds that he did not preserve.

  The late afternoon sun was receding in flames above the elm wood. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. Across the horizon, where the wood descended into fields of scrub and pasture, a wagon came trundling along the rutted path, and Esther watched a ray of sunlight catch off the carter’s whip. Caught up in this picture, her gaze ranging far beyond the tall figure poised at her side, conscious of the pressure of his hand on her arm, she allowed a sharper note to come into her voice than she intended.

  “What is it then?” she repeated.

  “Gracious, Esther, you will bite a man’s head off. It is just that we seem to have got out of the habit of talking to each other. Well then, there is a subscription dance at the hall in Watton next Saturday and a party being got up to attend. Do say you’ll come.”

  “A dance?”

  “In aid of the Volunteers, or some such. With a buffy and a string band promised. The master is a patron of the Volunteers, you know, so it’s all regular and aboveboard. Even old Randall don’t mind a dance, for all that he’s such a down on folk enjoying themselves, and we are to have a wagon to go in. Come now, what do you say?”

  Immediately there flew into Esther’s head a vision, or rather several visions: of a dress, as yet unbought, in red merino and a pair of soft slippers rather than the boots she customarily wore; of gentlemen in stiff black coats standing up to dance. At the same time, there came a sensation of horrible uncertainty. Still she continued to stare into the further distance, where great streaks of sunlight lay in bars across the indigo of the sky. The carter and his wagon had all but reached the line of the horizon. Soon they would disappear.

  “Come, Esther, say you will. It will make a change from sitting in the back kitchen listening to a sermon.”

  Looking at him as he pronounced these words, still leaning negligently against the door frame but with his hand now detached from her sleeve, Esther acknowledged that she was grateful for the offer. Easton Hall she had quickly divined to be a solitary house. Mr. Dixey himself she could not claim to have seen more than a dozen times. Visitors there were, but of a peculiar kind: a pair of rough-looking men, once, who were closeted with the master in his study; an old gentleman in black whom Mr. Randall bowed to as “Mr. Crabbe” and who might, she thought, have been a doctor or a lawyer. Mrs. Wates pined over her receipts for French sauces and sugared creams, for, as she put it, “If there is to be no entertaining, what is the point of anything?” Neither, it transpired, was the Hall a place where the servants were accustomed to fraternise. “Indeed,” as Sarah tartly remarked, “I daresay it will take an earthquake before anyone talks to his neighbour at supper.” Mr. Randall was cut off from the others by virtue of his religion; he could be seen each Sabbath forenoon walking demurely to his chapel in drab garments appropriate to the day. Margaret Lane occupied her spare time in cutting out pictures of great ladies from the illustrated papers and pasting them into an album. Only with Sarah, consequently, did Esther believe that she had established something amounting to friendship.

  Once, at a time when the master was away and things grown slack, they had contrived to conjoin their free afternoon. They had wandered into Easton, patronised the village’s solitary shop and taken tea in the parlour of the inn. Later they had stolen up the great staircase, turned along a corridor and stood on the threshold of the master’s study regarding the stuffed bear and the great display cases whose polished surfaces gleamed through the dusk. This, Esther thought, had been a very pleasant time. And yet even Sarah’s friendship came at a price. There were evenings in the tiny attic when she flung her face beneath the coverlet as soon as the candle was extinguished with a declaration that she didn’t “care to talk.” Thinking that she knew the source of Sarah’s melancholy, Esther decided to widen her attack.

  “I think you will find Sarah in the drawing room.”

  “Now that’s underhand of you, Esther, I declare it is. You know there’s nothing between Sarah and me. Now, say you will come to the dance.”

  From within the kitchen there came a sound of heavy but haphazard footsteps, which signalled that Mrs. Wates had arrived to commence her preparations for supper. Esther retrieved her washing basket from the step and began to count up the pegs.

  “Very well then.”

  “Now, Esther,” c
ame Mrs. Wates’s mournful voice from inside the house. “Half past four and not a morsel ready for tea. You had better look sharp, my girl.”

  And Esther looked.

  (VI)

  One raw November morning, when a fine dusting of hoarfrost lay upon the stable roofs, Esther looked up from her work and found Sarah standing silently before her.

  “Esther! Sam Postman has brought me a letter!”

  “Has he now?”

  Esther put down her paring knife, washed her fingers in the bowl of chilly water and wiped them on her sacking apron. She was tired, having been up at six to light the drawing-room fire and sweep the hall, Margaret, whose duties these were, being confined to bed with a quinsy. Nevertheless, she regarded her friend with interest.

  “Who is it from?”

  “I—that is to say…” Sarah hung her head. “Would you do me a great kindness, Esther, and read it for me?”

  “We had better go into the drawing room, where there is a light. Is the master at home?”

  “No, no. He has gone out with William in the dogcart.”

  The letter lay unopened in its stout white casing. Reaching the drawing room, where the fire she had laid five hours before blazed cheerfully, Esther busied herself with the paper knife.

  “Who is it then?” Sarah wondered in a paroxysm of nervousness. “It cannot be from Joe, for I know his hand. Oh do tell me, Esther!”

  Esther scanned the single piece of foolscap beneath the glare of the gas lamp. Written in the flowing copperplate of an official hand, it begged to inform Miss Sarah Parker that her brother, Lance-Corporal Joseph Parker of the——th Regiment, had died at Canton on the twenty-ninth of August, of enteric fever, that the Secretary of the Army Office had heard of this sad fact with regret, as he was sure would Miss Parker, &c., &c.

  “Oh, Esther,” Sarah said. “It is bad news about Joe, I know it is. He is dead in battle or crushed by an elephant, I know it.”

  For some reason that she could not fathom, Esther hesitated.

  “No, he is not dead. But he has been injured.”

  “Thank God for that. Poor Joe. Poor boy. But what else does it say?”

  “Only that he is recovering, though not fit to write himself. That is why you have been sent this letter.”

  “I see. Thank you, Esther.”

  When she had gone, Esther sat and looked at the letter, which in her excitement Sarah had forgotten to take with her. The words burnt into her brain. She could not imagine why she had done this thing, other than that in doing so she hoped to spare her friend pain. But what should she say if another letter came, or, worse, no letter at all? Her mind could frame no answer. She sat brooding in an armchair for a long while, as the wind rattled the panes in their sockets and the ivy beat upon the glass, until William, coming into the room with a sherry decanter and a tray of glasses, found her there staring into the depths of the fire.

  “Here, Esther,” he said, “this won’t do. The master will be back in a moment. Besides, Mrs. Wates is wondering where you are.”

  Esther made to rise up from the chair, taking care to conceal the letter in the folds of her dress. William stared at her keenly.

  “Is there anything the matter, Esther? You look as if you had seen a ghost.”

  Esther shook her head. Silently, she allowed herself to be escorted back to the kitchen and the righteous wrath of Mrs. Wates. “Well,” that lady remarked, “I never knew such girls as there is these days. There is Margaret Lane ill in bed and the doctor to be sent for and Her Ladyship here taking her ease in the drawing room by all accounts.” Knowing that there was little point in defending herself, Esther merely bobbed her head and retired to the scullery, where last night’s crockery lay in an accusing pile. Not, however, before she had crushed the letter into a tiny ball and cast it into the depths of the kitchen fire.

  (VII)

  Winter came early to this bleak hinterland. Each morning Esther awoke to find a thin blanket of mist extending beyond her window to the tops of the trees. Laying the fire in the kitchen grate, her hands grew stiff with cold. Once, while she was hanging washing to dry, a gust of air plucked a kerchief from her fingers and sent it flying fifty feet above her. The wind blew down from Jutland, Mr. Randall said, and there were no mountains to take the edge off its chill; certainly not the fields of the West Norfolk plain, full half of which lay below the level of the sea. Though the house was perched on a hill, their lives seemed governed by water. Moisture dripped ceaselessly off the gables of the house. Fish and elvers, caught in the great dykes to the west, were brought up for them to eat. The pond beyond the kitchen garden swelled to such a size that it was no longer safe for the keeper’s children to splash through it in their long boots. It would be a hard winter, Mr. Randall said, for the rain presaged it. A travelling packman, speaking a dialect that could scarcely be understood, came and spread his wares on the kitchen table: handfuls of pins, green and yellow embroidery thread, an illustrated Bible over whose garish leaves Mr. Randall shook his head (here Jonah clamoured vainly from the whale’s mouth, and the sun smote off Abraham’s dagger as he bent to murder his son). It was but blasphemy, Mr. Randall said, to treat the Lord’s devisings in this way. “Ef ’n’ your honour says,” the packman demurred, “and yet them gays is onnerful instructive. Look, there’s the Devil a-temptin’ of Ave, and Balaam’s dicker a crunching of his master’s fut.” The maids bought cotton reels and ivory combs, and Mrs. Wates, as a preventative against indigestion, a tincture of peppermint oil that smelled suspiciously of gin.

  In the evenings the old people sat by the fire in the servants’ hall and talked of past times.

  Mrs. Finnie said: “When I was a girl I was kitchenmaid to Lady Ardley. This was in King William’s time, you understand. Half a dozen footmen, and venison sent up each day from the estate. But gentlefolk were gentlefolk in those days. It is all very different now.”

  Mrs. Wates said: “In my young days a girl that went into service wouldn’t think to get wages. No indeed. Her father would pay money himself for the comfort of knowing she was well apprenticed. There was a nursemaid at my first situation who had been with the family sixty years and remembered seeing the German king in his coach.”

  Mr. Randall said: “My father was pantryman to a duke, and that is the truth. But I thought I could do better, fool that I was. I was apprenticed to a seedsman in Waterloo year, set up my own shop and failed. Times were hard in those days. Many’s the day I worked eight hours for a plate of bread and cheese and been thankful for God’s good mercy that I should get it.”

  After this all the old people felt better. And Esther, sitting silently on the great window seat with only her face palely visible in the shadow, thanked providence that she lived in an age of railways, Miss Nightingale, Viscount Palmerston and Lord John.

  Once, as they sat in the inglenook of the kitchen fireplace, Sarah said, “Did you ever think, Esther, that you should wish to be married?”

  “It is what every girl wishes, I suppose.”

  “I used to wish it. More than anything.” Esther noticed that Sarah’s fingers gripped white on the flat stone as she said this. “But now I think I shall be a companion or a cook. Indeed I shall have the best of both worlds, for cooks are Mrs. by courtesy, you know.”

  “I should not care to spend all my life in service, I think,” Esther said seriously.

  “And yet you may do so and not like it.”

  Remembering the crushed ball of paper in the kitchen fire, Esther said nothing.

  It would be a hard winter, Mr. Randall said.

  (VIII)

  Only once in these first months did Esther see her employer for any length of time. One autumn afternoon as the twilight fell over the wood, she was standing in her scullery with her hands plunged in a basin of dirty water when she heard Mr. Randall’s voice in the hall. Seeing her through the open door, he came rapidly into the room, clasping and unclasping his hands as he walked.

  “Esther, is that you?
Where are Sarah and Margaret?”

  “It is Sarah’s afternoon off, Mr. Randall. The last I saw of Margaret Lane she was at the linen cupboard with Mrs. Finnie.”

  “Well, it cannot be helped. You had better bring a brush and pan and come with me now.”

  Wondering at his agitation, Esther supplied herself with these items and followed the butler up the great staircase and along the corridor where she knew lay the master’s study. Halfway through its half-open door, Mr. Randall stopped and addressed her nervously.

  “There has been an accident. A great deal of smashed glass. You must take care, Esther.” And then, raising his voice as they came into the room: “Here is Esther, sir, who can help set things to rights.”

  Standing in the doorway, Esther saw immediately what had happened. A display case resting on one of the brass cabinets had become dislodged and crashed to the floor. Pieces of broken glass lay everywhere about with, here and there, the stuffed birds that the case had contained. Mr. Dixey stood a little way off with his back to the window. When he saw her he said, “You must take great care. Randall, we shall need a broom. You had better fetch one.”