There was also the stillroom with its cupboards of jars and narrow deal worktable, the servants' hall with its long oak table and two settles by the fireplace, the butler's pantry with the safe for the plate, the housekeeper's room with its writing desk and little grate, and the wine cellar reached by twelve steps of worn stone down into cold and dark. On the floor above lay a warren of small chambers for the upper servants, the linen presses, the sewing room, and a locked lumber room at the end of the passage that Mrs. Peele had once said was not opened in her time. Above that, under the slates, were the attics where the maids and boys slept on iron bedsteads under sloping ceilings that stained with damp when the roof failed.
Mary walked the whole wing on her second morning with the ring of keys and a stub of chalk and marked in a little red memorandum book the state of each room. The kitchen range, a large closed iron range of about 1830, had not been black-leaded in a year and its flues were choked. The oven door hung on one hinge, the scullery drain smelled of old fat and required lye, and the larder shelves bore grease rings the size of dinner plates while the ceiling above them was spotted with black mold. Three of the great copper stockpots were verdigris-green at the rims and would need retinning by a traveling brazier.
The dairy setting pans were cracked in two places. The servants' hall table had knife marks and beer stains and a long split down one board where damp had opened the grain. The wine cellar held nine dozen bottles, mostly ordinary port and claret, and a great deal of dust; its ledger had not been kept since 1856. The stillroom, which had been Mrs. Peele's kingdom, was the least neglected room in the wing, and its cupboards still held jars of dried lavender, tansy, horehound, marshmallow, and yellow beeswax that Mary had helped to lay in the summer before.
The linen press held sixty-two pairs of sheets, of which nineteen were past mending, forty-one pillowcases, and twelve damask cloths gone yellow at the folds. The flagstones of the back corridor were slick with damp because a gutter above had failed and water was running down inside the wall. Beneath all of it, beneath the neglect and the mold and the smell of cold fat, Mary saw what she had known she would see: the wing had been built by careful men in good stone for hard use, the beams were sound, the ranges were still whole, and all that was needed was hands and time and management, and a very great deal of hot water.
She began with the stillroom because it was the room she knew best and because she wanted, before the others came, one clean and orderly room in the wing that she could point to and say, "This is what we are working toward." She washed the shelves, wiped the jars, swept the flags, and set a fresh candle in the sconce. It was on the third afternoon, while she was moving the deal worktable out from the wall to sweep behind it, that she found the loose board.
It was in the corner nearest the stillroom press, a floorboard of about four feet in length, oak, cut narrower than the boards around it. It lifted with only a little prying from the point of Mrs. Peele's chatelaine scissors. Beneath the board, in the shallow space between the joists, lay a tin box of the sort in which biscuits came from the grocer at Ashwell village, painted dark green and lettered in gold with a name half worn away. Mary lifted it out. It was heavier than a biscuit tin ought to be.
She carried it to the deal table, set it down, and stood a moment looking at it before she opened the lid. Inside the tin, wrapped in a piece of oiled linen, lay a small canvas purse tied with a bootlace. Inside the purse were forty-seven sovereigns and six half-sovereigns, and a little heap of loose silver, being in all just above £50. Beside the purse lay a folded sheet of writing paper, yellowed at the edges, and beneath the paper lay a worn silver thimble and a pressed sprig of rosemary tied with a scrap of blue thread.
Mary sat down on the stillroom stool and opened the paper. In a careful upright hand she read:
"To whoever finds this, I am Sarah Ren, stillroom maid and later cook's helper at Ashwell Court from the year 1809 to the year 1841, being here two-and-thirty years. I came to this house at fifteen, and I never married, and I had no child of my own, though I had a little sister I raised, who died at nine of a fever the year I came into service. I have put by from my wages sixpence and a shilling at a time this money that lies with this paper, which is £50 and some over, and I have hid it under this board because I have no one of my blood to leave it to, and I do not trust the parish.
"If you are the one who lifts this board, then you are working in this room as I worked, and you have looked into this corner as I looked. I hope you are a young woman as I was, and I hope this house has used you better than it used some of us. Take the money and do not be ashamed of it. Spend it on what you need.
"The thimble was my sister Anne's, and the rosemary is from her grave in Nether Ashwell Churchyard. I ask only that you leave them together somewhere quiet. I have been happy in this room more days than not. God keep you. Sarah Ren, this 11th of March, 1841."
Mary read it once and read it again. Then she set the paper down on the deal table and put her hand flat upon it. She did not weep, but she sat a long while in the stillroom with the rain against the little window and the smell of lavender in the cupboards, and Sarah Ren's £50 on the table before her. She understood that she had been given, from a woman long dead who had walked these same flags, exactly the thing she needed to begin.
She wrapped the thimble and rosemary together in a fresh square of linen and set them in the stillroom cupboard behind the marshmallow jar, where she could reach them and no one else would think to look. She took the canvas purse to the little housekeeper's room and locked it in the writing desk with Mrs. Peele's chatelaine key. She did not tell the others what she had found.