Kept (14 page)

(
III
)

L
ater Esther would remember her time at Easton Hall as being hedged about by numbers.

Fifty-six
was the extent of the pieces of cutlery in the great mahogany canteen kept upon the sideboard in the dining room. Viz.: a dozen bone-handled knives, curved like scimitars and rising to sharp points at their ends; a dozen ancient two-pronged forks of a kind she had never glimpsed before; a dozen soupspoons with the Dixey crest engraved upon their backs; a dozen dessert spoons so small that you could lose one in the folds of a dishcloth and spend an hour searching for it; a half-dozen serving spoons, a great carving knife and fork full eighteen inches long. These must be cleaned each week with knife powder and polished with an apron end, for if the master found that one was not to his liking he would send it back.

Seventeen
was the number of keys that hung from the brass ring in Mr. Randall’s pantry. A key for the front door; a key for the back. A key for the pantry itself, and a key for Mrs. Finnie’s storeroom. A key for the wine cellar and a key for the dairy. A key for the strongbox that lay in the master’s study and contained the title deeds to the house. Keys for the laundry cupboard and the two glass-fronted bookcases in the drawing room and the box in the pantry where Mr. Randall kept his religious books and his copies of the
Missioner’s Gazette
. A key for the lid of the drawing-room piano. A key for the empty parrot cage that hung in the hall. A key for the cover of Mr. Dixey’s field glasses, and a key for the cover of the great family Bible. A butterfly key for the grandfather clock in the hall. And a final key, of which no one, not Mr. Randall, not the master, not anyone else in the household seemed to know the use.

Twelve
was the number of copper saucepans that hung on great hooks from the scullery wall. A great boiling cauldron in which Mrs. Wates made preserves. Nine for the cooking of vegetables, steak puddings and the like. Two for the boiling of milk. These must be scoured on the inside and burnished on the outside until their surfaces glowed, for a dull saucepan was ill luck to a kitchen and those that worked in it, Mrs. Wates said.

Nine
was the number of engravings, each a foot square, that hung on the wall of the servants’ hall. They showed ladies in voluminous dresses with their hair
à l’impératrice
and gentlemen with periwigs and knee breeches and square-buckled shoes, the ladies riding sidesaddle on great horses or being handed down from their carriages; the gentlemen walking together with their dogs or engaged about their occupations. And Esther wondered at them: in what century they lived, and how their hair was kept in such a way; and what the gentlemen talked about, their right hands kept carefully on their sword hilts, their square toes pointed neatly before them.

Six
(this information came from Sarah) was the number of kitchenmaids that had come and gone during Mrs. Wates’s time as cook at the Hall, having excited that lady’s displeasure.

(
IV
)

T
he thing that Esther fancied above all that she would find in the country proved not to be there. That thing was silence. Easton Hall was a house filled with noise. The wind blew against the windowpanes. The carriage horses stamped their feet upon the gravel. A woman’s voice laughed somewhere in a room far off. At night came ominous creakings and patterings and the sound of trees blown against each other in the wood beyond. With the noise, though not always a part of it, came movement: a fox stealing away from the corner of the kitchen garden in the half hour after dawn; a stoat bounding across the path at her feet as she walked with Sarah in the orchard; the rooks soaring above the elms. Amidst the noise and the movement lay things that were silent and solitary: a kitchen drawer pulled open to reveal a nest of squirming field mice; an earthenware
pot a thousand years old and a handful of silver coins dug up by one of Mr. Dixey’s men in a ditch; a signet ring glimpsed between the flagstones of the kitchen floor and brought winking into the light. Once, on a grey afternoon when Mrs. Wates and Mrs. Finnie were in Watton and Mr. Randall sat asleep in the pantry chair, Sarah took her to a room under the roof where there was a trunk full of high-waisted dresses with hooped skirts and tiny slippers that might have been worn by Cinderella.

“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
)

H
ollo, 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,” came 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
)

O
ne 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.”