Instead, on the following morning, gathered in the servants' hall around the long oak table with its knife marks and split, she told them they would begin with the range and the larder and the drains. There would be money enough for what was needed because, she said, she had spoken to Mr. Hollis and the estate would advance against the quarter. This was not quite true, and it was not quite false, and she had already written to a traveling brazier at Marshham asking his price on three copper stockpots.
Mrs. Douty, the cook from Meridale, listened with her hands folded on the table and said only, "Then we shall want lye and sand, and a bucket of black lead, and a boy for the flue." Mary wrote each item in the little red book.
The scullery boy, whose name was Peter Small and who was fourteen, was set to the flue with a length of holly branch and a sack tied over his head. He came out coughing and black and grinning, and the range drew for the first time in a twelvemonth. The kitchen maid from Hencham, Betsy Row, who had broken a dish and been sent away for it, proved to have a hand for scouring and took the larder shelves down to bare slate with lye, sand, and hot water over three days. Mary watched her lay the shelves fresh with clean paper cut to size and set the jars back in order of use, and said nothing, but wrote a good mark against Betsy's name that night.
The laundress, Mrs. Ellen Kite, whose reason for dismissal had not been given, was found on her second morning in the laundry yard mending the copper's brickwork with a trowel and a pail of mortar she had mixed herself from lime and sand out of the stable. Mary asked no questions and set her to the sixty-two pairs of sheets. The footman from Bramworth, whose name was John Aers and who was said to be insolent, turned out to be a man of thirty with a soldier's back and a habit of speaking his mind once and then holding his tongue. Mary set him to the gutter above the back corridor with a ladder from the coach house and a length of lead flashing from the estate stores, and the flags in the corridor were dry within a week.
The dairy woman, Hannah Bly, who had quarreled with a mistress at Witcom, mended the two cracked setting pans with white lead, set the marble slab to rights with vinegar and salt, and had the dairy sweet again by the tenth day. The stillroom maid, whose last place had ended in whispers and whose name was Louisa Marsh, was found by Mary at the stillroom cupboards on her second afternoon quietly relabeling every jar in a small clear hand. Mary asked where she had learned it. "At Lady Hencham's, ma'am, before the trouble," Louisa said. "Then keep on," Mary replied.
Ned Hawker brought lye and sand and black lead from the village on his cart and refused payment the first time and took it the second. Mrs. Douty in the great kitchen took the range in hand as though it had been waiting for her these six months. By the end of the second week she was baking bread in the oven that had hung on one hinge, and the smell of it went along the stone passage and up the back stairs and out into the yard, where Peter Small stopped with a bucket and closed his eyes.
The traveling brazier came from Marshham and retinned the three copper stockpots in the yard over a charcoal fire for one pound six shillings, paid from Sarah Ren's purse in the housekeeper's room. Mary wrote the sum in the little red book under a private column she had marked with Sarah's initials. Mrs. Douty went with Mary through the kitchen garden, which had gone half to nettles, and named what could still be had of it: rhubarb by the wall, sorrel in the corner, a row of last year's leeks running to seed but usable, mint and thyme in the herb bed, and two old apple trees that would bear if pruned.
John Aers pruned them of a Sunday afternoon with a saw borrowed from the head gardener, who had watched the wing from a distance for a fortnight and now came down to look and stayed for tea. Mary sat each evening at Mrs. Peele's small deal writing table with the little red book and Sarah Ren's purse and the accounts of tallow and beeswax and blue. She planned a week ahead and a month ahead and a season ahead, as she had been taught.
The servants' hall table was scrubbed with sand and rubbed with beeswax and turpentine mixed as her mother had shown her. The long split was pegged and glued by John Aers with a wedge of oak from the coach house. By the end of May, eleven people sat down together to a supper of mutton broth, new bread, and stewed rhubarb with cream from Hannah Bly's dairy. No one spoke much because there was no need. Mrs. Douty said grace in a low voice, Peter Small ate three helpings, and Mary looked down the length of the oak table at the faces of the servants no house in the county would take and saw a household.
By the middle of June, the wing was another place. The kitchen range was black and drew clean, the copper pans hung bright above it, the larder was cold and sweet and full with slate shelves scrubbed white and labeled jars in order of use, the scullery drain ran clear, the back corridor was dry, the dairy was sweet, the servants' hall floor was scoured every Saturday, and the linen press held fifty-eight pairs of sheets mended and folded with lavender laid between them from Mrs. Peele's stores.
Mrs. Douty was cook. Betsy Row was kitchen maid under her and did not break dishes because she was watched by no one and trusted by everyone. Mrs. Kite ran the laundry with two village girls she had chosen herself out of Nether Ashwell, and the sheets came back so square and white that Mary had them counted against the list twice. The footman, John Aers, waited at table when there was a table to wait at and mended what needed mending the rest of the time, and had stopped being called insolent because no one now had cause to call him anything but useful.
Hannah Bly's butter was set in half-pound pats stamped with a wheat-ear mold she had brought in her canvas bag from Witcom. It went up to the house table when the Duke came and down to the servants' hall when he did not, and it was the same butter in both places. Louisa Marsh had the stillroom in an order Mrs. Peele herself would have approved and had begun to teach Peter Small his letters of an evening by the housekeeper's grate because he had asked.