by Hill, Fiona
The housekeeper having extended this invitation, the ladies had perforce to second and urge it upon him; but the gentleman declared repeatedly that he was not the least tired, neither the dark nor the rain distressed him, and he would not stop. Miss Veal, who had evidently a great liking for him, protested vigorously; but in the end he was allowed to depart. Bowing, he vanished into the night. Miss Veal, loudly tsk-tsking (“As if we had sent him away by force,” Anne indignantly commented to Maria the next morning), took a candle and led the ladies up two pairs of oaken stairs to their bed-chambers.
These were across a corridor from one another. Miss Guilfoyle doubted from their size and their furnishings if either was the one her great uncle had inhabited; but she was in no mind to quarrel, so long as there was a bed to climb into. As there was—a large four-postered one—she meekly thanked and dismisssed Miss Veal for the night, asked Lizzie to unbutton her dress and sent her off to bed, wriggled out of the rest of her damp clothes and crawled under the covers.
She slept a long time, and woke sneezing. The spiritual mortifications of the previous night, then the fleshly ones of the day that preceded it, flooded painfully into her memory even before she could fumble for the handkerchief (Mr. Highet’s—she reminded herself to hand it to Lizzie directly she came) on the night-stand. She lay back upon the pillows and shut her eyes. Henry Highet’s stupidly smiling face appeared before her. A new sneeze welled from the back of her throat. “Devil fly away with you,” she muttered, whether to the face or the sneeze was not clear. She sat up, reopened her eyes, erupted explosively, then found a bell-pull over her head, rang it, and sat back.
The rain had stopped (“It would, now,” she thought) and strong sunlight brightly edged the heavy brocaded curtains hung over her windows. The chamber, now she could see it, was large and rather bare, with a plain wooden floor over which a few Turkey carpets had been scattered. A huge country cupboard stood in one corner, a deal wardrobe in another, and a small vanity table (too small for the seriously vain, she considered) in a third. A blue-and-white porcelain washbasin sat upon this table, with a white ceramic pitcher. The room was scrupulously clean, and when (Lizzie duly arrived, also sneezing) the curtains were opened, sunlight poured into it through three large, diamond-paned casement windows.
“Good morning, Lizzie. I see that you also kept a souvenir of last night?” Anne observed in heavily nasal tones.
“Yes, Miss. I’m afraid so, Miss.”
Exploding again, “You have my deepest commiseration,” Anne told her. “Are you well armed with handkerchiefs? Take some of mine, if not. And please see that this one is laundered and returned to Mr. Highet,” she finished, distastefully holding out the crumpled linen square. “I think there is a pile of fresh ones in that portmanteau, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Lizzie opened the portmanteau, located the needed reinforcements, and supplied Miss Guilfoyle with them. “I’ve fetched your lap-desk up, ma’am,” she said, disappearing into the corridor momentarily, then returning with the desk. She set it on the bed and stood back.
Since it was Miss Guilfoyle’s habit to write three or four letters each morning from her bed, and since each morning Lizzie fetched her lap-desk to her for that purpose, it seemed no strange thing that the desk should be brought to her this morning. Yet Anne lay contemplating it as if it had been a meteor dropped from the sky. “Thank you, Lizzie, you may go. Keep warm to-day. Ask for my chocolate, if you please,” she added rather dreamily, her eyes still fixed and vacant.
Lizzie curtsied—she had a long-legged, loping gait and a curiously jaunty curtsy—and departed. Her mistress’ gaze did not shift. She lay many moments in silence, then said at last, “Do you feel as foolish as you look, I wonder?”
It was true the desk looked foolish. It was an ebony desk elaborately inlaid with brass scrollwork. Its clasps imitated the talons of a hawk, its hinges two fantastical birds in profile. Inside, the polished ebony writing surface was bordered with a vine of nacre, and a jade oak cluster embellished each corner. The compartments below, where pens and paper and ink were kept, were lined in green velvet embroidered with silken birds and flowers. It had been made to Miss Guilfoyle’s specifications in happier days. In this plain, light-swept, cheerful room, it looked as ridiculous as a bishop in a donkey cart—or, thought Anne bitterly, a bluestocking at a farm.
There was a tap on the door. Maria, wearing a grey day dress, came in. Her eyes and nose were red, and in the draught made by the opening and closing of the door, both ladies sneezed mightily.
“You too?” was Anne’s greeting.
Mrs. Insel took the ladder-backed chair from the vanity table and sat down. “Yes. Minna also, and Mrs. Dolphim, from what I hear.”
“A flush,” said Anne, who despised cards but knew the rudiments of play. She blew her nose; at the same moment came a knock on the door. A young girl with ginger hair walked in, bearing a tray.
“Your chocolate, Miss. My name is Susannah. It’s a lovely day out. I feel quite cheerful after all that rain.”
“No one asked your name or your opinions,” thought Anne automatically, waving her to set the tray on the bed, but saying nothing. She gave a cool nod of dismissal. “What did my great uncle do, do you suppose, to encourage the servants to confide in one so?” she demanded of Maria as the door closed. “We have not been here fourteen hours, and already I know more of Miss Veal’s ideas, and Miss Susannah’s biography, than I feel the slightest need to know. Have you been out into the house at all?” she went on before the other could answer. “Is it this all over? Deal tables and chintz counterpanes and sunshine?”
Maria, understanding at once, gave a sorrowful, sympathetic nod. “I fear your lovely parcel-gilt suites will suit Linfield but ill. It is a comfortable house, only—”
“Painted shutters?” Anne broke in.
Maria nodded.
“Delft fireplaces? Cambric curtains?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Anne shook her head. “I shall not tell you,” she said, “for fear of breaking your heart, how much money exactly we spent to remove our eight Venetian chandeliers, my mother’s Chippendale settees, the Aubusson carpets, and the other three waggon-loads of furnishings from London to this place; but let me assure you, my dear, that if I did tell you, we should both be here weeping till Tuesday. Still”—she straightened and poured a cup of chocolate with an air of resolve—“it is done. And what is done, as Mrs. Macbeth so pithily and incontrovertibly observed, is done. I’m sure there is some barn or other where they can be kept. Now, what shall we do today? Mowing? Sowing? Rearing? Shearing? Till? Mill? Drill—”
“I believe Miss Veal wishes to speak with you,” Mrs. Insel interrupted, noticing the increasing asperity in Anne’s tone. “And I know Mrs. Dolphim will like to be told what her duties are. Then there is the steward, Mr. Rand. Surely he will wish to take you over the estate. And we ought to thank—”
“Stop, stop,” cried Anne, who heard Mr. Highet about to be mentioned. She gulped what remained of her chocolate in one swallow, flung off the bedclothes, and leapt up. “You persuade me: A day of adventure and obligation awaits. I shall make haste.” She rang the bell for Lizzie. Mrs. Insel stood to go.
“You will not forget—” she began hesitantly, from the doorsill.
“To thank Mr. Highet again,” Miss Guilfoyle finished. “No indeed. We shall send him a brace of cheeses, or a golden fleece, or whatever is best from Linfield—”
“An invitation to dine, I should have suggested.”
Anne flashed her a dark look but yielded. “Or an invitation to dine.” She winced, as if the idea crushed her somewhat.
Maria smiled, opened the door, and was going out when she added over her shoulder, “And his mother, of course.”
Her look ever darker, “And, God bless us yes, his mother; a poor party we should make without his mother,” Anne said, suppressing a sneeze. “Now do go away before we are to invite little Joan as well.”
M
aria went.
“Rand, Veal. Veal, Rand. Farm, household. Household, farm. Can’t decide,” Miss Guilfoyle muttered under her breath as, dressed and determined, she made her solitary way down the staircase some half hour later. “They both sound so utterly fascinating, that’s the deuce of it—Oh!” she suddenly broke into her own remarks as she rounded a corner and nearly collided with Charlotte Veal. “Forgive me, I did not see you. I was just hoping to find you. Is there an office where we might discuss the household?”
“There is the housekeeper’s room,” Miss Veal replied, with more emphasis on the penultimate word than Anne could quite account for. “But—are you alone, ma’am? I did hear you speaking to someone, I think?” She squinted on this side of the corner and that, as if there might be someone only faintly visible still lingering in the air.
“Speaking, yes. To someone, no,” Miss Guilfoyle said cheerfully, taking Miss Veal rather firmly by her muslin sleeve and making an inquiring gesture at random. “This way? That way? It is my lamentable habit to apostrophize myself aloud. Ah, thank you, this way after all. I cannot say, truthfully, at what epoch of my life I first fell into this custom…Oh, the dining-room is this?” she inquired, as they passed through a spacious, airy room furnished with a stout, well-worn oaken table suitable for, perhaps, the family of a yeoman farmer. “Very pleasant, very tidy. Thank you. I see evidence of your good management every where. I take it this is a sort of pantry, and— No, thank you, the kitchens will wait till later. Yes, very clever indeed, building the kitchens and dining-room so close to one another. A hot dish is a good dish, is not it, Miss Veal? At any rate, pray do not be alarmed by my little soliloquies. Merely the afterclap, the bilge if you like, of a somewhat overbusy mind. Which— Ah, down here? Thank you, Miss Veal.” The ladies descended a half-flight into a small, panelled study furnished with a large walnut library table and little else. The windows of this chamber gave onto a small, artless flower garden, beyond which a lawn, and in the distance fields, could be glimpsed.
Miss Veal drew a chair up to the desk for Anne, then one for herself. When she had settled herself—with a brief, catlike switching of skirts—she opened, in a silence rather solemnly ceremonial, a very large, leather-covered ledger.
“These are the household accounts,” she intoned. She began to turn over page after page filled with (Anne presumed) her own, neat hand in brown ink. “Every thing that is used in the house is written in here. If it comes from the farm, the value lost by not selling it is inscribed. If it comes from Outside”—Miss Veal’s manner of saying Outside capitalized and made it sound quite terrifying—“the price is inscribed. Household wages are similarly noted in these pages”—her old hands, wrinkled and spotted, but with the nails still white and carefully shaped, reverently turned to a different section in the ledger—“here. It is the method devised and prescribed to me by Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle,” she said quietly, then looked sharply into the eyes of that gentleman’s great niece and demanded, “I do not suppose you know a better system?”
Miss Guilfoyle, mastering an impulse to smile, meekly confessed that she did not.
“Good.” Charlotte Veal returned her gaze to the ledger. Her eyes seemed to linger lovingly on a notation of one pound six pence paid as quarterly wages “to Susannah D.” while she said slowly, “Mr. Guilfoyle and I examined these books every Wednesday morning between ten o’clock and eleven. I do not suppose”—again she glanced abruptly up and fixed her stern regard on Anne’s face—“you know a better hour?”
“Scarcely,” said Anne.
“Good.” Miss Veal looked quietly down again and seemed as lost in her ledger as if it were a Psalter. Anne felt she had been forgot. She blew her nose, and when this failed to attract Miss Veal’s attention asked (mostly to assert herself about some one thing at least): “Is not one pound six pence rather a high wage for a country maid?” She pointed to Susannah’s name in the still open book. “I seem to recall that at my friend Lady Drayton’s seat in Hereford the maids are given—”
Charlotte Veal stood. Her brow was dark, her hands clenched. “Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle set that wage,” she declared, the grey locks on her neat head trembling with suppressed indignation. “Mr. Guilfoyle believed in high wages. Of course it is high. Mr. Guilfoyle believed that a labourer lives up to the value put upon him by his employer. I do not suppose…” She paused; Anne perceived there were tears of anger in her eyes, “I do not suppose you know a better wage?”
After a moment, “No,” Anne said. “A higher or a lower one, perhaps I do know. But not a better. Pray sit down, Miss Veal.”
Miss Veal obliged her.
“Now I must speak to you about Mrs. Dolphim, and my own staff,” said Anne, already thinking how she would describe this comical scene in a letter to Ens—well, perhaps to Celia. “As you are surely aware by now, I have brought a whole household of my own servants—”
But Miss Veal had popped up again (“A perfect Jack-in-the-Box,” Anne wrote in her imaginary letter) and was freshly a-tremble. Her frail hands clutched each other; her voice shook as much as her curls. “Miss Anne Guilfoyle,” she commenced, and it was clear from her tone she thought that to be Miss Anne Guilfoyle was a pretty mixed honour, “your great uncle brought me into this house thirty-four years ago. I have prepared tea for him some twelve thousand four hundred times. Under my supervision, twenty-four thousand eight hundred breakfasts and dinners have been cooked for him. I have filled thirty-three ledgers before this one”—she smacked the open album demonstratively with a good deal more vigour than Anne would have thought was in her—“and sat across thirty-three Christmas geese from him. If you imagine he intended—”
“Miss Veal.” Exasperated, Anne stood too. “For heaven’s sake calm yourself. I have no intention of turning you off, if that is what you are building to, or of turning anyone in the house off who does not wish to leave.” She wondered as she spoke, however, just how she could retain such a superfluity of servants—for at the wages her great uncle had fixed, surely none of the present ones would go. Still, she was not about to unhouse and impoverish an aging, obviously devoted (for all she knew, very tenderly devoted to the bachelor Mr. Guilfoyle) retainer. “I merely wish to discuss with you some means by which my own housekeeper, Mrs. Dolphim, can profitably employ herself—if there is not some means of sharing out your tasks,” she extemporised, realizing that it would sow a fatal discord to suggest the sensitive Miss Veal merely assist Mrs. Dolphim, yet knowing from long acquaintance that Mrs. Dolphim (whose greatest, and justifiable, pride was the faithful service she’d given to the Guilfoyles) would equally contemn a demotion to the position of helper to Miss Veal. “This we must consider and resolve.”
She sat, and suggested the other lady sit as well. It was clear to her now that the slight forwardness she already thought to detect in Miss Veal, and in Susannah as well, was no illusion. Her great uncle’s servants were accustomed to be treated in a wise quite different from the ordinary. Remembering his eccentricities, she was not surprised. Reluctantly, but with a sense of having little choice, she engaged the housekeeper in an earnest colloquy whose end was to discover some equitable means of sharing the responsibilities and privileges of Housekeeper at Linfield. The discussion, which must needs touch upon such details as who was to precede whom to the servants’ dining-table, who to keep the books, who to reprimand the lesser staff, who to order from the dairy, and so on, continued some hour and a half and left both participants exhausted. Miss Veal went immediately to her room to lie down. Miss Guilfoyle was not so fortunate: Quitting the housekeeper’s little office she came directly upon Mr. Rand—just on his way, he declared imperiously, to find her.
Mr. Rand, she found, was a brisk, dark, sturdy man of no great stature, well muscled, brown from the sun, and with a very noticeable pugnacity in his bearing. Whether this last was habitual with him, or on the contrary was assumed for her benefit, Anne could not yet tell. That he was suspicious of her, and (looking her over) thought her a
paltry replacement for his late master, she guessed at once. “I shall be very much obliged,” he said, after a curt, rough bow, “if you will come with me.” She could hear the country in his accent, but also that he had had some education. “There is a deal of going-over to be done in the office, and then you’ll be wanting to ride out with me and see the place,” he informed her.
“Perhaps you will allow me to make that decision, Mr. Rand,” Anne replied sharply. “I can meet with you in an hour and a half, after I have had some nuncheon.”
But Mr. Rand shook his head. “In an hour and a half they’ll be gone,” he said. “You can’t expect them to wait.”
Anne counted to ten. “Who will be gone?” she inquired.
“The people to cut the hay. They want one shilling two pence and beer—six pence and beer for the women. Does that sound fair?” he asked, then folded his arms and stood back a little. He had intercepted her in the corridor between Miss Veal’s room and the pantry. Anne, worn out by her long closeting with the housekeeper, her eyes rheumy, her head heavy and thick, longed to sit down, but Mr. Rand was watching her with a gaze that glittered coldly. She knew he had no opinion of a woman running an estate—and a London woman at that—and was only waiting for her to say something idiotic. The knowledge piqued her. She straightened and rallied herself.
“Since I have never hired a man to cut hay, I can have no idea,” she said crisply. “Does it sound fair to you?”
“Middling fair,” Mr. Rand allowed after some thought. “And how many must I hire?”
“As I have no knowledge of how many acres of hay are to be cut, I can form no very good notion of that either, Mr. Rand,” she replied.
