The service wing at Ashwell Court in that first week of May was in a condition that would have shamed any careful housekeeper alive. The kitchen range had not been properly black-leaded in a twelvemonth. The scullery drain smelt of old fat, the larder shelves bore rings of grease where jars had stood untouched since the previous autumn, and three of the copper pans hanging on the wall had gone green at the rims for want of scouring. The servants' hall table was scored with knife marks and beer stains, and the flagstones in the back corridor were slick where damp had risen through the mortar.
Mary walked the length of it that first morning with the keys at her belt and made a list in her head of what needed doing. The list ran to sixty items before she reached the stillroom door. Then, on the sixth of May, four days after she had taken the keys, a second letter came from London. Mr. Hollis carried it down to her himself in the small parlor that had been Mrs. Peele's sitting room and was now Mary's, and stood with his hat in his hand while he read the relevant portion aloud because he wished her to understand that the order came from His Grace directly and not from him.
The Duke had written that, as economies must be made and good servants were dear, he had arranged with several houses in the county to take on their unwanted staff at Ashwell. The wings stood half empty and wanted filling, and Miss Turner had been reported as capable and could no doubt make what she would of them. A list followed: seven names. There was a former cook lately turned out of Lord Meridale's establishment for reasons unstated, a kitchen maid dismissed from the rectory at Hencham after a matter concerning a broken dish, a footman put out at Bramworth for insolence, a dairy woman from Witcom let go after a quarrel with the mistress, a scullery boy of fourteen who had been at three houses in two years, a laundress no one would name a reason for, and a stillroom maid whose last place had ended in whispers that Mr. Hollis, folding the letter, declined to repeat.
They would arrive, he said, on the carrier's cart from Ashwell village over the course of the following week, one or two at a time, as their old houses could spare the trouble of sending them. Mary asked in the same steady voice whether she might refuse any of them. Mr. Hollis said she might not. The Duke had given his word to the other houses. It was, he added, not quite looking at her, a kindness on His Grace's part.
Mary said she understood, and she thanked him. When he had gone, she sat for a long while at Mrs. Peele's small deal writing table with the letter open in front of her and the chatelaine cool against her palm. She did not weep, because weeping was a thing her mother had told her was to be done alone and at night, and because she had work to do before the first of them arrived. She took a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer and wrote in the careful round hand Mrs. Peele had taught her a list of the beds that must be aired in the servants' attics, the ticks that must be beaten, the blankets fetched from the linen press, the candles allocated, the soap portioned, the tea and sugar weighed out, and the places to be laid at the servants' hall table for a household that had shrunk to four and was about to grow to eleven.
She wrote until the candle guttered. Then she banked the fire the way her mother had shown her, went to bed in the little housekeeper's room off the stillroom, slept four hours, and rose at five.
The first of them came on a Tuesday in a fine gray drizzle that had been falling since dawn. Mary went out to the yard at the sound of the carrier's cart on the gravel, with a shawl over her head and her boots wet through before she reached the gate. The cart was old Ned Hawker's, and he had carried goods between Ashwell village and the Court for thirty years. He touched his cap to Mary now as though she were already Mrs. Peele, which she was not and would not be for a long time yet.
Down from the back of the cart climbed a woman of perhaps fifty in a black stuff dress that had seen better houses, carrying a canvas bag and a wooden box tied with twine. She stood in the wet yard looking at the servants' door as though she expected to be told to go round the back of that as well. Her name, she said, was Mrs. Agnes Douty, lately cook at Meridale, and she waited without speaking for Mary to decide what should be done with her.
"Come in out of the rain, Mrs. Douty," Mary said.
She took the woman through the scullery into the kitchen, set her by the range, and put the kettle on herself because there was no one else to do it. Mary noticed that Mrs. Douty's hands, though red and roughened, were the hands of a woman who had spent forty years handling knives and pastry and hot pans, and that she held them folded in her lap the way a person holds something they are afraid will be taken away. They drank tea together in the kitchen with the rain running down the leaded panes of the yard window, and Mary asked no questions about Meridale, while Mrs. Douty offered nothing.
After a quarter of an hour of civil silence, Mrs. Douty stood up and said, "If you'll show me the larder, miss, I'll see what's wanted." Mary showed her the larder. The two of them stood in the cold flagged room looking at the ruinous shelves, and Mrs. Douty drew in a long breath through her nose and said only, "Well."
The others came over the next four days, one and two at a time, in the same fine drizzle or under skies of low pearl-gray cloud. Each stepped down from Ned Hawker's cart with a bundle or a box and the same watchful look of people who had learned not to expect kindness at a strange door. Mary met each of them at the yard gate, learned their names, showed them their beds in the attics under the slates, where she had made up the ticks herself with fresh straw, and hung a sprig of lavender at each pillow from Mrs. Peele's stillroom stores. She walked each of them in turn through the damp, neglected wing that was, from that week onward, the place they would all have to make into a house.
The service wing of Ashwell Court had been built in 1738 as an addition to the older Jacobean house, and it ran along the north side in a long, low range of local greystone under a slate roof. In the spring of 1858, that roof was missing eleven slates on the yard side and four over the laundry. It was two stories with attics, and on the ground floor stood the great kitchen with its wide flagged floor of Yorkshire stone worn into hollows in front of the range, the scullery with its two shallow stone sinks and brick copper for boiling, the larder with its slate shelves and small north-facing barred window, the game larder with iron hooks in the ceiling beams, and the dairy with its marble slab and four earthenware setting pans.