National Trust

by Philip Ardagh

  Cook seemed more worried about finding another tureen, what with this one being smashed to smithereens, but she seemed to have plenty more soup to make up for that poured all over poor Jack.

  It’s not that Cook doesn’t care – she do – it’s just that her job is to get the right amount of food out there and hot. Mr Pritchard and the footmens’ is to get it up there and served. She daren’t keep the master and mistress waiting. It’s a funny old world where soup matters more than an injured man, ain’t it?

  Once we managed to move Jack, his face twisted in pain, Mrs McNamara had the stairs mopped clean as quick as a flash, so no one else might slip, and first footman, Long Johns, was back downstairs, taking up the replacement soup.

  It was felt there was no need for a doctor.

  “The good ones are too expensive49,” says Mrs McNamara, “and the cheap ones know little or less than we do!”

  It was clear that Jack had broke his leg so Tench, the stable master, was called for. As well as caring for the master’s horses when they’re injured, it turns out Tench has also looked after those who’ve fallen from horses or even been kicked by one.

  Tench appeared and the first thing he did was order that the ‘poor lad’ be given a nip of brandy from Mr Pritchard’s supply, but Jack gulped down a lot more than a nip, I can tell you. Tench then went about setting the bone back in the correct position, tying it to a piece of wood, which he called a ‘splint’, and then wrapping bandages, provided by Mrs McNamara, around it to hold it all tight. Miss Annie (the lady’s maid), meanwhile, was saying soothing things to Jack while she bathed his head-wound with a cotton rag she kept dipping into a bowl of water.

  “My job,” groans Jack. “What about my job?”

  I reckons we were all wondering that. If you can’t work, you don’t get paid.50 You might even end up in the poorhouse.51

  There was no supper to prepare for the master and mistress today, because they are dining out this evening. Mr Pritchard did have to go into the strong room off the kitchen, though. This is a place were the most valuable items in the house (which ain’t out on display) are kept, including the best silverware.52 It’s like a giant safe what you can walk into, like a big cupboard or a small room, with a thick metal door and a key what Mr Pritchard ‘keeps about his person at all times’.

  But it weren’t no silver salver53 or knife and fork I saw him take out. It was a flat square box, and he handed it to Miss Annie, Mrs Kirby-Trott’s lady’s maid.

  “Thank you, Mr Pritchard,” she says, and hurried off upstairs with it.

  In the background I could hear Cook fumin’ that someone had put a lead soldier54 in the bread dough! I tried not to giggle, honest I did. I mean, lead is poisonous and all!

  The back stairs are dry now, and you’d never have known that poor Jack had taken such a tumble if you hadn’t seen it or heard it for yourself.

  49 Doctors were seen as gentlemen and could even dine upstairs with the family in an upper-class home. Often their fee was wrapped up and left on a table nearby rather than handed to them directly, because taking payment was not seen as a gentlemanly thing to do. Many doctors did offer free surgeries for the poor once a week, but did not do free house calls. There were other types of cheaper ‘doctors’ but they were not qualified and often offered ‘quack’ (false or unproven) remedies.

  50 There were no worker’s rights. A servant could be dismissed for no reason, and there was every reason to replace a footman with a broken leg.

  51 The poorhouse or workhouse was where the destitute would be housed (often in overcrowded and appalling conditions) and fed (often meagre and inadequate meals) in return for (often back-breaking) work. Seen as ‘charity’, it was a hard life for those put in them.

  52 Some houses locked their silverware and valuable china in the butler’s pantry. Others had walk-in safes like this one.

  53 A tray.

  54 Lead soldiers, about two inches high and painted with brightly coloured uniforms, were expensive toys for the well-to-do. Lead is poisonous, so, in the twentieth century, lead toys were eventually outlawed.

  It’s one disaster after another. And this is an even bigger one. Who’d have thought that poor Jack’s fall would be pushed out of the limelight55 so quick? This morning, I was up in the beautiful drawing room56, cleaning the fire grate on me hands and knees, when in bursts Nelly, one of the chamber maids what cleans the bedrooms upstairs. We’ve become friends since I came here.

  “Nelly!” I gasps. “You startled me.” She’d made me drop me brush in surprise! “What you doin’ in ’ere? You knows this is no place for a chambermaid. You could land us both in trouble!”

  “Trouble!” she cries, “I couldn’t be in worse trouble!”

  I could see now that she’d been crying and, before I knew it, she burst into floods of tears again.

  I put my soot pan and brush neatly to one side by the fire irons and steered poor Nelly out of the drawing room and down the stairs57.

  Once we were in the kitchen, I sat her at the big table, where others were already busy preparing food for the master’s luncheon, even though breakfast weren’t long since ended.

  “What is it, Nelly? Tell me,” I says, once I’d got her a glass of water from the kitchen tap and she’d had a gulp of it or two.

  “It’s the mistress!” she says. “Her jade necklace has gone missing!”

  There was a gasp from Lizzy, one of the kitchen maids, who stopped chopping carrots, dropped her knife and dried her hands on her apron. “She told you that?” she gasps.

  “Of course she didn’t!” says Nelly. “As if the mistress would talk to me. She don’t even know who I am! It was Miss Annie who told me.”

  Like I said before, dear diary, Miss Annie is the lady’s maid. In the same way that the master, Mr Kirby-Trott, has a gentleman’s gentleman, Mr Harris, to help him wash and dress and the like, the mistress, Mrs Kirby-Trott, has Miss Annie. She gets to dress Mrs Kirby-Trott, lay out her clothes and brush her hair, draw her bath and be at her beck and call. She’s probably the servant the mistress knows best of all – maybe after Mrs McNamara and Cook – and probably the one who knows her most secret secrets.

  And I knows what you’re thinkin’. Why can’t a grown man and a grown women dress their selves, seeing as how the rest of us can do it, no trouble? Well, the answer is that rich folk aren’t like the rest of us. They are, me gran once told me, a race apart. That’s race as in human race, not race as in egg-and-spoon race, by the by.

  “What happened, Nelly?” I says.

  And she told us her tale.

  Last evening, Mrs Kirby-Trott had decided to wear a special jade necklace that Mr Kirby-Trott had given her a few years back. They would be dining out with a General Gurton, who’d travelled much in China and is a lover of jade, collecting little carvings and such like. Miss Annie told Nelly and Nelly told us that jade is a blue green stone which ain’t valuable like diamonds or rubies, except that this particular necklace is very old and made for some Empress of China, or something, which makes it VERY valuable indeed. That musta been what was in the box I’d seen Mr Pritchard give Miss Annie from the safe!

  Miss Annie had brought up the necklace in its red-velvet lined box and helped her mistress put it on in front of her dressing table mirror so that she might admire it, holding up in front of her the dress she would wear later that evening. Mrs Kirby-Trott had been pleased with how it looked, but when her husband, Mr Kirby-Trott, walked into their bedroom, he suggested her emerald necklace would suit her choice of eveningwear even more than the jade.

  “So the mistress had Miss Annie take off her jade necklace, return it to the box, place it on the dressing table, and bring out the emerald one, which she keeps in her jewellery box in their room,” says Nelly.

  “This story’s getting nowhere!” says Lizzy the kitchen maid.

  “Be patient,” I says. “Go on, Nelly.”

  “With the carriage not due to take them to dinner for a while, th
e master and mistress go about their business elsewhere in the house until it is time to change,” says Nelly.

  Miss Annie told Nelly and Nelly told us that, come time to leave, Mrs Kirby-Trott says to the master that she would still rather wear the jade, but when Miss Annie opens the red-velvet-lined box – which ain’t been returned to the safe in the meantime but left on the dressing table – it ain’t there. The box is EMPTY. The mistress gets in all of a fluster and Miss Annie could have sworn she put it back in there… but it’s nowhere to be seen.

  Mr Kirby-Trott is much more practical and matter-of-fact about it. He says not to worry, that she should wear the emeralds – for they must leave now so as not to be late for their dinner with General Gurton – and that he’s sure Miss Annie will find the missing necklace in the meantime.

  So off go the master and mistress, and Miss Annie turns the bedroom upside-down but she can’t find the jade necklace nowhere.

  At this stage of the telling, Nelly burst into tears again, so I gives her a hug.

  “Then, not half an hour ago, Miss Annie comes to me, and she says I’m the only servant who went in the room between when the necklace was taken off and then looked for again,” she says.

  “She finks YOU took it? She finks you’re the thief?” says Lizzy, all wide-eyed now.

  “Y-Y-Yes,” says Nelly, all blubbering again.

  “Are you sure Miss Annie thinks you stole it?” I asks. “That don’t sound like Miss Annie to me.” I likes Miss Annie and she don’t seem the type to be quick to accuse another.

  “She says that I’m a suspect,” says Nelly. “The mistress likes Miss Annie and trusts her, but she don’t know me.”

  “If Miss Annie really thought you’d done it, she’d ’ave come to you last night, not waiting till morning,” I says. “It’ll all come right. You’ll see.”

  But I’m not so sure it will.

  I’d like to have stayed with Nelly but I had to get back up to the drawing-room to clean that fireplace, or I’d find myself in an ’eap of trouble too.

  Master William went charging past me, shouting “Horsey!” with a panting Nanny Brown in ’ot pursuit.

  55 The term ‘limelight’, meaning centre of attention, comes from the type of lighting used at the front of Victorian stages to light performers.

  56 The drawing room was the living room, one of the main reception rooms in the house.

  57 There would only have been ‘backstairs’ (servants’ stairs) to the basement, but there would also have been backstairs to all other floors of the house. Only the family and most important members of the household would have been allowed to use the main staircase.

  This afternoon, Mr Pritchard gathered all the household staff together below stairs in the servants’ hall. He looked even

  stern if that’s possible, his eyebrows like angry caterpillars. (I’ve never seen a caterpillar, angry or not, but knows what they looks like for sure, having seen them eyebrows.) Mrs McNamara stood next to him, facing us all.

  “As some of you already know,” he said, “a jade necklace belonging to Mrs Kirby-Trott has gone missing. Mr Kirby-Trott has, most generously in my opinion, delayed going to the police58. He is giving the thief the opportunity to return it. They shall, of course, be dismissed from the house without reference, but without a criminal record to their name. Again, I consider that most generous59. Should you not come forward and you are found to have taken the necklace, the full force of the law will be brought upon you, and you will not only disgrace yourself but your family. Anyone knowing anything about the matter should either come and see me or Mrs McNamara. Let me add that I have had the honour and privilege of serving the Kirby-Trott family for over thirty years and this is the first time that such a stain has been put upon us. I am both saddened and outraged that one of you should darken the reputation of the servants. May God forgive you. That is all.”

  The effect of Mr Pritchard’s words seemed to weigh heavily on all of us. I felt bad and I’ve done nothing wrong!

  The meeting broke up with us all chatting in small groups. Because Lizzy’d had the full story from Nelly, she was talking like a right expert to Long Johns, the footman.

  ’Course, anyone could ’ave gone in the master and mistress’s bedroom between the time Mrs Kirby-Trott first tried on the necklace and came back later when ready to wear it for the evening, but – apart from Miss Annie – Nelly was the only one supposed to be in there and definitely had been in there, when just about everyone else could be accounted for. We all has strict tasks to do and times to do ’em in, so it’s not as if any one of us could swan around the house and risk being seen. It’s not like a guttersnipe on the street, taking jobs when he can find them.60

  Plump suggested that I do a bit of investigating of me own. He flew around to take a look at the outside of the house and told me that there’s a drainpipe outside the Kirby-Trotts’ bedroom window.

  “So what?” I says. “It still rains on toffs’ houses, you know.”

  “I weren’t thinking about the drains,” he says. “I was thinkin’ a necklace thief coulda climbed up and down the drainpipe.”

  Me heart skipped a beat.

  I’d have given Plump a kiss and a hug if he’d let me. (I tried that once and he ruffled his feathers and gave me the longest of pigeon stares. And if you’ve never seen a pigeon stare, you ain’t never seen a proper stare.)

  “What you need to do,” he goes on, “is look in the flowerbed at the bottom of the drainpipe and see if there’s any footprints in the soil.”

  “’Cause if there are, that might

  someone’s climbed it!” I says, me eyes widening. Plump’s not only smart for a pigeon but also smarter than most people I know. Including meself.

  “And,” says Plump, “you might be able to tell from the footprints whether the thief’s a man or a woman AND how big their feet are.”

  “You’re a proper Sherlock Holmes!61” I says.

  I didn’t get a chance to go out into the garden until gone four o’clock, and I had to be quick about it because Mrs McNamara keeps a beady eye on us all. I’d just worked out which window must be the master and mistress’s bedroom when a deep voice behind me says:

  “What you playin’ at, girl?”

  I nearly jumps out of me skin and turned to find Davey, one of the assistant gardeners, trying not to laugh.

  “That weren’t funny,” I says.

  “You should see your face,” he says in his normal voice. “THAT’S funny.”

  Davey ain’t much older than me. More boy than man. He told me once that he started here as an apprentice gardener when he was twelve and, by the muscles on him, I’d say they have him working hard.62

  “Well,” I says, pretending not to be all embarrassed. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people.”

  “You’re not people, you’re a maid,” says Davey with a cheeky grin. “And you shouldn’t be sneakin’ round the garden.”

  “I’m doin’ important work,” I says. “I am detecting!”

  “Detecting?”

  “Like Scotland Yard.63”

  I think Davey was about to make another joke at my expense but stopped himself when he saw how serious I looked. I quickly told him about checking footprints and he was impressed. I couldn’t very well tell him about Plump, so I said it were me own idea.

  At that moment, I thought back to one of them very particular servants’ rules I’d been made to learn by heart: Any maid found fraternising with a member of the opposite sex will be dismissed.

  That meant talking to a man. That was all right in the servants’ hall all right, but probably not out here on our own when I shouldn’t even be there.

  But still. Too late to turn back now.

  Me and Davey looked at the flowerbed together.

  Nothing.

  The soil at the bottom of the drainpipe was undisturbed.

  I was really disappointed as I hurried back indoors to return to me duties. I could feel Davey’s eyes wa
tching me as I went.

  At supper in the servants’ hall this evening, Mrs McNamara told a story about a missing jewel where the thief turned out to be a magpie – one of them fancy blue ’n’ white birds what struts around like a haughty footman in his fine livery. Mr Harris, the master’s gentleman’s gentleman, said that in the version he knew it was a jackdaw what was the thief and, anyways, it would have to be a bird as big as an albatross to be able to fly off with a jade necklace!

  Mr Pritchard frowned at him from the head of the of the table, with his caterpillar eyebrows, as if to say that the theft were no laughing matter, so Mr Harris quickly changed the talk to an albatross in some poem full of gloom and doom.64 It were right dreary.

  The only poem I knows even a part of is The Charge of The Light Brigade65. Me dad used to love quoting the line “Into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred!” all dramatic like, though I reckon that was the only line of it he knew. Come to think of it, it’s the only line I knows too.

  58 Britain’s first proper police force was created in Victorian times by Sir Robert Peel. This is why early policemen were called ‘Peelers’ and, later, ‘Bobbies’ (Bob or Bobby being short for Robert).