by Robin Paige
It took several moments for Bess to drag herself out of the ditch and scramble to her feet in the lane. She found her basket, retrieved what she could of its contents, and started off toward Sarah’s kitchen, muttering. A half-mile farther on, as the moon was casting a pale light over the way, she stumbled onto Old Jessup’s body, lying in the grassy ditch, at the gate to Bishop’s Keep.
2
The hour before dinner, while we wait for late-arriving guests and for the announcement that the table is ready at last, gives us time to tell our friends grand tales about our lives.
—JENNIFER LASHNER
Our Victorian Grandmothers
“Lord Marsden, the Honorable Mr. Charles Rolls, and the Honorable Miss Patsy Marsden,” Mudd announced from the drawing room door.
Lady Kathryn Ardleigh Sheridan stood and took her husband’s arm as they went out onto the terrace steps to greet their guests. The open windows had admitted the clackety-clank of Bradford Marsden’s Daimler pulling up the gravel lane and his sister’s fresh laughter as the trio alighted, and Mudd’s announcement was entirely superfluous. But announcing guests was Mudd’s job, and Kate did not interfere. When she had inherited Bishop’s Keep from her aunt Sabrina Ardleigh several years before, she had determined that she would change only what was unjust or just plain unacceptable to her American sensibility, and would accommodate herself to the rest.
But when she and Charles Sheridan were married three months ago in a private ceremony in the village church, Kate discovered that she had much more to accommodate than she had reckoned with—a disconcerting discovery, to be sure, for Kate loved her new husband deeply. She must love him, she reasoned to herself, to be willing to give up her freedom, her hard-won independence, and become the wife of a man who (upon his brother’s shortly expected death) would inherit his father’s peerage, his family’s estates at Somersworth, and the dependency of his mother and his brother’s wife.
At the thought of her mother-in-law, Kate flinched. She had wanted Charles’s family to attend their wedding, but he had dissuaded her. Kate was anxious to meet her new family, so a few days later, they traveled to Somersworth. But when the dowager baroness learned that her son had not only married without her knowledge but had chosen a wife who was both American and Irish, she became hysterical. Dinner that evening was an agony, and Charles and Kate had left the next morning.
“I’m sorry,” Charles had said miserably, as they drove away in the carriage. “I thought she would take it with a better grace. I hoped—” He took her hand. “But she’ll come round. She will come to love you, as I do.”
Kate hardly shared his confidence, but she managed a smile. “Until she does, we have our home at Bishop’s Keep.”
“Then you don’t mind staying there, my dear, until all this is sorted out?”
Kate thought of the moldy old pile that was Somersworth Castle and the angry old woman who ruled there, and nodded vigorously. “As far as I am concerned, we can live at Bishop’s Keep forever. It suits me perfectly.”
Bishop’s Keep seemed to suit Charles, too. He had spent most of his time in the last few months modernizing the old Georgian house, installing water pipes and plumbing and gas lighting and an electric dynamo which (he claimed) would eventually power all manner of mechanical appliances. There was even talk of adding a telephone as soon as the Exchange came to Dedham.
Charles’s innovations did not always work the way he anticipated, however. The pipes clanged as if a dozen smiths were pounding on them. And Mrs. Pratt was so afraid of the new gas cooker that she refused to touch it until Charles himself demonstrated its safety features. But Charles was so proud of these improvements that Kate scarcely had the heart to criticize, or even to remark that she herself was rather fond of paraffin lamps, however old-fashioned they might be.
Kate pushed aside these ungrateful thoughts and welcomed their guests, who were still goggled, capped, and coated. “Please,” she said to Patsy, “let me help you with your things,” and stepped forward to unwind her pretty young friend, the daughter of Lord Christopher and Lady Henrietta Marsden, from the heavy veil that covered her elaborate ash-blond coiffure. When the layers of motoring apparel had been removed, Bradford Marsden, Patsy’s elder brother and a close friend of the Sheridans, introduced Charlie Rolls.
Unencumbered of cap and goggles, Rolls was revealed to be a darkly handsome young man of nineteen or so—just Patsy’s age—with deep-set eyes, dark brows, and a rakishly devil-take-it air that owed something to the alertness of his look and the willful, almost arrogant lift of his firm chin. Kate had understood from Patsy that he had just completed his first year at Cambridge.
“He’s the third son of the first baronet of something-or-other,” Patsy had confided, revealing in those words his lowly social status. “But Charlie’s position scarcely matters. I don’t intend to marry him, or even to fall in love with him—just to enjoy his company. Whatever Mama says,” she had added defensively.
Kate did not reply, although inwardly she applauded Patsy’s independence. Several years before, Lady Henrietta had arranged the marriage of her eldest daughter, Eleanor, to a wealthy candy manufacturer—a marriage that had proved disastrously unhappy. Kate knew that Lady Henrietta intended her youngest daughter to wed Squire Roger Thornton of Thornton Grange, the stern, dry offshoot of an old county family whose extensive lands adjoined Marsden Manor. She would be aghast at Patsy’s friendship with the brash young man from Cambridge, whose father, Lord Llangattock, had only recently been admitted to the peerage. Charlie Rolls might be handsome as a lord, but his lack of title and fortune made him practically unmarriageable.
However, Lord Christopher and Lady Henrietta had taken themselves (and Eleanor and her infant son) to the south of France on extended holiday, leaving their younger daughter under the watchful eye of Patsy’s spinster great-aunt, Miss Penelope Marsden. Great-aunt Marsden was not the vigilant chaperon that Lady Henrietta imagined her to be, however, for she retired at an early hour with her lapdog and a box of sweetmeats, leaving her niece to her own entertainments.
Currently, Patsy was entertaining herself with the Honorable Charlie Rolls, who was the houseguest of her brother Bradford. She was also spending a great deal of time at Bishop’s Keep, where Sir Charles was teaching her the craft of photography. He had instructed her in the fine points of darkroom practice and had ordered two cameras for her from the London Stereoscopic Company, in Regent Street: a lightweight, pocket-size Vesta folding camera and a Frena Number One, which took lantern-size plates. Patsy seemed talented, and Kate hoped the girl would pursue photography half as enthusiastically as she was pursuing the young Mr. Rolls.
The last guest arrived a moment later. He was Barfield Talbot, the vicar of St. Mary’s the Virgin, a stooped, elderly man with pale blue eyes deeply set in an aquiline face, beneath a mane of white hair. The good vicar was dressed carelessly, his cravat askew, coat missing a button, and hair as wild as if he had just that moment dismounted from the safety bicycle that he rode on his parish rounds. He hadn’t, of course; he had been fetched by Pocket in the pony cart.
“Ah, Kate, my dear,” he said, with special affection, and bent low over her hand in an old-fashioned, gentlemanly way. “It is good to see you looking so well. Marriage clearly agrees with you.”
Vicar Talbot, who had performed the Sheridans’ wedding ceremony, had been a friend of Kate’s Aunt Sabrina. He had generously made himself her friend since her arrival from America—a friendship Kate welcomed, for it made up in part for the family she had lost.
Kate’s father, Thomas Ardleigh, and her Irish mother, Aileen O‘Malley Ardleigh, had both died when Kate was a child. The orphan had been raised by her uncle and aunt O’Malley, he a policeman on the streets of New York, she the mother of six other children whom she fed, clothed, and educated, for Aunt O’Malley was determined that all her children should go to school. Kate expected to make her own way in the world and labored hard at her lessons. When she was old en
ough to seek employment she worked first as a governess, then as a private secretary, and then—a fate at which Kate still often marveled—as an author. To supplement her meager income, she had written a story, and then had been fortunate enough to find a publisher who was willing to gamble on her work. Before she knew what was happening, her fictions, written under the pen name of Beryl Bardwell, had been accepted by an enthusiastic reading public. Beryl’s earliest stories were of the sensational variety, penny-dreadfuls with such titles as “The Rosicrucian’s Ruby” and “Missing Pearl,” suitable for Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, in which they appeared. “Our readers take great delight in exotic murder and its detection,” Mr. Leslie had remarked as he handed Kate the payment for Beryl’s third thriller. “I advise you, young lady, to continue to dip your pen in blood, and you shall do quite well indeed.”
For a time, Kate had been glad enough to dip Beryl’s pen in blood, and to trade her lurid tales for the independence money brought. But as she became more skilled as a writer, she grew increasingly weary of the frenzied drama that Mr. Leslie and his readers demanded. She particularly objected to the succession of bloody killings that substituted for plot in such novels, for her own inclination was rather to the subtler violence of the heart.
Hence, when Aunt Sabrina Ardleigh (Kate’s father’s sister, hitherto unknown to her) had surprised her with an invitation to come to England as her private secretary, Beryl took a brief holiday from sensational fiction. When she returned to her pen—or rather, to the new Royal typewriter Aunt Sabrina had purchased for her—she began to experiment with a different kind of writing: detective stories of a more psychological bent, with a deeper exploration of motive and feeling, stories in which the female characters were portrayed not as victims or the objects of men’s fascination, but as free and independent women who made their way in the world by their wits. Mindful that the greatest number of her readers were women, Kate took care to create adventuresome heroines fired with spirit and determination. And mindful that the most powerful fictions are those that portray life realistically, she began to incorporate real people into her plots, disguising them as necessary to preserve their privacy.
This new interest required Beryl Bardwell to yield up her place as the Queen of Sensation Fiction (as Frank Leslie had crowned her) and look for a more congenial publisher. About this time, though, Aunt Sabrina, and her sister, Aunt Jaggers, died in a truly horrible way, poisoned. Kate (who had been instrumental in discovering their killer, and in fact formed her attachment to Charles during his investigation of the deaths) discovered to her surprise that Bishop’s Keep and a modest fortune were hers. No longer compelled by financial exigency to tailor her fiction to tastes not her own, she could now write exactly as she chose.
The change had fired Kate with a new kind of creative energy. Recently, several of her stories had appeared in Blackwell’s Monthly, and had been widely praised. The pseudonymous Beryl Bardwell was being hailed as a “female Conan Doyle,” a compliment that first brought Kate a great deal of amusement, to which was quickly added an equal measure of apprehension. She had not disguised some of her characters or events as thoroughly as she might have done. What would happen if the identities of these real people were discovered? What would happen if she were discovered?
Indeed, Kate’s private life as a writer had nearly prevented her from marrying Sir Charles Sheridan. She had loved him with a growing passion for months but had been reluctant to admit her feelings even to herself, knowing that her Irish blood and American upbringing made her unattractive to a member of the landed gentry, and believing that her writing (which she fully intended to be her life’s work) would make her positively undesirable to any man.
But Sir Charles, when he learned of her covert occupation, was warmly supportive—all the more, perhaps, because his fascination with the new sciences of criminal detection coincided with her interest in fictional crime. In fact, their engagement had occurred in the midst of his investigation of several murders at Easton Lodge, during a weekend house party where the Prince of Wales was also a guest, and their hostess, the Countess of Warwick, a chief suspect. Together, Sir Charles and Kate had brought the inquiry to a successful conclusion, to the grateful relief of His Highness and the countess.
With a flourish, Mudd opened the double doors to the stately dining room and stepped through. “Dinner is served,” he announced.
Charles turned to Kate, a smile crinkling the corners of his sherry-brown eyes. “Well, my dear,” he asked, “shall we see what surprises from the kitchen await us this evening?”
The vicar raised his shaggy white eyebrows. “I do hope you have not lost your cook,” he said earnestly. “Sarah Pratt is among the finest in the county.”
“Mrs. Pratt is still with us,” Kate replied. “Charles has presented her with a new challenge, however, and she has not quite mastered it. Last night’s dinner,” she added to the vicar, in a low voice, “was a culinary catastrophe. I hope we fare better tonight.”
“A new challenge?” the vicar asked, and chuckled. “You cannot be suggesting that there is something in the line of cookery that confounds Mrs. Pratt.”
Kate gestured at the gaslight that illuminated the drawing room. “You noticed, perhaps, that we are modernizing Bishop’s Keep. Charles has piped water to the kitchen and installed a gas cooker. The water is welcome, but Mrs. Pratt is in mortal fear of a gas explosion.”
She glanced down the mahogany table, which was covered with damask and decorated with clusters of green smilax interwoven with stephanotis and rosy-pink lapageria. The silver gleamed, the crystal epergnes sparkled, and the new gas wall sconces cast a golden glow over the room. But Kate shook her head with all the apprehension of a hostess who has good reason to fear the worst.
“I do hope,” she said prayerfully, “that things are going well in the kitchen.”
3
God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.
—THOMAS DELONEY
Works, 1600
But in the kitchen, things were not going well at all.
Sarah Pratt was rushing to assemble the lobster bouchées —cooked lobster and mushrooms stirred into a Mornay sauce and piled into delicate pastry cases. The sauce had scorched, in consequence of the gas jet being turned too high. Worse, Mrs. Pratt’s hand was trembling so violently from nerves (the gas, after all, might explode at any moment) that she had snipped a great deal too much fennel into it. And there was Harriet the kitchen maid, standing beside the cooker, weeping, her finger in her mouth. She had carelessly stuck it in the gas flame when she attempted to remove the kettle.
“I don’t care tuppence fer yer finger, Harriet,” Sarah Pratt snapped. “The soup’s already gone up an’ the lobster must follow without delay. Put these pastries into that miserable oven to brown. Five minutes only, not a minute more.”
Sarah spoke with greater certainty than she felt. Five minutes would have been quite adequate in her steady, predictable coal range with the capacious oven, which had been a fixture in her kitchen for over two decades. But the new gas cooker, which Sir Charles had installed in place of the dependable iron range, was of an unknown temper. Perhaps the cases should be browned for seven minutes, or ten, or even more.
“Watch,” she commanded. “Don’t let’em bum on their bottoms!”
“Yes, mum,” Harriet said, eyeing the cooker as if it were the devil. Sarah turned to the next task, preparing the hollandaise sauce that would go up with the salmon, after the joint. Then there were the carrots to cream and the peas to be cooked with lettuce and tiny onions, and the sweet to send up—a gooseberry fool, ready and waiting in the galvanized box under the ice tray. And then the savory—ham croquettes wrapped in bacon and fried—and to finish off, the black currant ice, which had been worked in the ice-pail that afternoon by Harriet and Nettie. It was a menu of which Sarah might be proud. And yet she trembled, remembering the charred roast pork of the previous evening and the cheese soufflé that had emerged, crate
red, from the gas oven.
Disaster was doomed to be revisited on Sarah Pratt’s kitchen, however, for the bottoms of the lobster bouchées turned black, rather than brown. The hollandaise curdled, the vegetables were cooked to a pulp, and the savory was as soggy as old sponge. When the black currant ice went up and Sarah could at last lower her stout frame into her chair, she was near tears.
“ ’Tis that cursed cooker,” Bess Gurton said darkly. “A tool of the devil himself.” She spoke from the opposite side of the fire, where she sat with her injured ankle propped on a stool, the cat on the floor beside her, and her wet and muddy cape spread over a chair.
“We both bin cursed,” Sarah said. “If ‘twould of bin a carriage instead of Lord Marsden’s motorcar that come round the corner, ye could’ve got out o’ the way wit’out mishap.”
“An’ pore Old Jessup,” Bess Gurton muttered, reaching down to stroke the cat. “Give me quite a start, y‘know, findin’ ’im like that, face up i’ the ditch. Stark starin’ dead, ’e was.”
“But it wa‘n’t Lord Marsden’s motorcar that kilt ’im,” Harriet reminded her, wringing out the washing-up cloth. “Ye said ‘e di’n’t bear a mark.”
“Ye-es,” Bess replied slowly, “but it might still of bin the motorcar. Say ‘e died o’ fright at bein’ near run down. ’Oo kilt ‘im then, I’d like to know? Young Jessup, ’oo come along not two minutes after I found ‘is old dad, ’e was askin’ that question. ‘ ’Spose me dad died o’ fright,‘ ’e sez. ‘ ’Oo kilt ‘im then?’ ”
