OCT-The Duke Gave Her 5 Old Servants to Be Rid of Them — By Christmas His Own Mother Had Moved In

The Duke Gave Her 5 Old Servants to Be Rid of Them — By Christmas His Own Mother Had Moved In

The Duke’s steward set five old servants out on the hall steps on Miklmus morning, their [snorts] boxes in the rain beside them, and told Kate Rowley she might have the gardener’s cottage rentree for as long as she kept them off his grace’s books. Kate had buried her husband on the Tuesday. The oldest of the five had cooked for that house for 41 years, and the Duke did not come down to see them go.

A footman in New London livery pushed the cook’s tin box out through the door after her, and it caught her at the back of the knees, and the old woman’s feet went from under her on the wet stone. Kate was on the steps before she knew she had moved, and she caught her by both arms, and held her, and felt how little there was of her under the wet wool. Mr.

Chver, the new steward, stood on the top step under the portico, where it was dry, and watched her do it without coming down a step. His grace has no further use for any of you, he said in a voice that did not rise. The late Duke’s promises were the late Dukes. There will be no pensions. The old cook began to shake in Kate’s arms, and Kate held on and looked up past him at the tall, wet windows of the hall.

Nobody behind them thought anything would come of it. By Christmas, the Duke’s own mother would be sleeping under that cottage’s thatch, and the Duke himself would be standing at Kate’s door with his hat in his hand, asking for his mother. The rain had not stopped since first light. The five stood in a row at the foot of the steps with their boxes at their feet, and the water ran off the brim of their hats and the edges of their caps, and not one of them spoke.

“There was Mrs. Twig, the cook, stout and white capped, whom Kate had just caught. There was Dogget, the old coachman, bent nearly double over his stick, who had driven the late Duke to his wedding and to his grave. There was M. Darl, in black, with a carpet bag held in front of her in both hands, who had been ladies maid to the Duchess, now the Daajagger, for 30 years.

There was theress, her hands red and swollen from a lifetime at the tubs. And there was the old footman, taller than any man in the county, standing as straight in the rain as if he were still behind a chair at dinner. The late Duke had promised each of them £12 a year for life when they could work no longer. It had been said at his table and at his deathbed, and now it was said to be nothing at all.

Kate had come up to the hall that morning, the 29th of September, 1826, only to give back her husband’s keys. He had been head gardener at Stall for 6 years, and they had lived in the good cottage by the glass houses, and at Mikkelmas, a tide cottage goes to the man who takes the post. The new gardener was already carrying his furniture in. She was 27 years old.

She had nowhere to go. And Mr. Chver knew it. “There is the old gardener’s cottage at the bottom of the kitchen garden lane,” he said. “It has stood empty these nine years. You may have it for nothing, Mrs. Rowley. So long as these five are kept by you and not by his grace.” He did not wait for her answer.

The door closed behind him, and the rain went on falling. draw your chair a little nearer the fire with us and write a line below to say what corner of the world you are hearing this from tonight. So Kate picked up the cook’s tin box because it was nearest, and the old footman picked up two more, and they went round the side of the hall and through the door in the garden wall, and along the lane between the bare fruit trees, in a slow line, at the pace of the slowest.

The mud was deep and it sucked at Kate’s boots, and she looked down and saw that there was still yellow clay on them from the churchyard. She had not cleaned them since the Tuesday. She had not had the heart. Now the rain was softening the clay again, and it was running off her boots into the lane. And she thought of her husband under that same clay in the cold three days down.

And something rose in her throat so hard that she had to stop walking. She did not cry. There were five people behind her in the rain who had less than she had, and she would not cry in front of them. Mrs. Twig came up beside her and said nothing at all, only put a hand on her arm, the way you would steady a horse, and left it there until Kate could walk again.

The cottage stood against the old orchard wall, low and gray of rough stone, with a thatched roof sunk in the middle like a tired back and a single squat chimney at the end. From its gate, you could look straight up the lane and see the whole west front of Stol Hall. Window upon window rising over the garden wall.

Dogit, who had not said a word all morning, went in first and found some dry sticks in the corner of the hearth, and struck a light with his old tinder box, and after a long time, and a great deal of smoke, a thin gray thread went up out of the chimney. That afternoon, while they were still carrying the boxes in, the Duke himself came walking down the lane.

He was not coming to see them. He was going to the stables by the back way with Mr. Chver a step behind him, dressed for riding in a navy coat and white gloves. A tall, dark man of 38, with his father’s heavy brows and none of his father’s easy mouth. Mr. Chiever gave him a folded paper with a red seal on it, and the Duke stopped and held the paper out across the gate towards Kate.

He did not look at her. He looked past her at the thatch as a man looks at a roof he has decided not to mend. “The terms,” he said, “keep them warm if it amuses you, Mrs. Rowley. Only keep them off my books.” Kate reached for the paper. Behind her, the five had stopped in the mud of the lane, in a line, as they had stood on the steps.

The cook in her white cap, the coachman on his stick, the lady’s maid with her carpet bag, theress, the tall old footman, and the thin smoke went up from the chimney behind them into the gray sky. Then Miss Dorl made a small sound, and Kate glanced up at the hall. High on the west front at an upper window, a gay-haired lady in black was standing with one hand against the glass, watching them.

Her grace, Miss Dorl whispered. The Duke did not turn his head. He let go of the paper as soon as Kate’s fingers touched it and walked onto his horses. Kate broke the seal standing in the lane. The cottage was hers rent-free, while the five persons named below were kept by her, and made no further claim of any kind upon the estate.

Below it were their five names in Mr. Chver’s neat hand, written out like a list of old furniture to be carted away. She folded it inside her shawl and went in. She saw it all properly that evening [snorts] by the light of the one fire, going from room to room with Mrs. Twig at her elbow. The thatch over the back room had rotted clean through, and the rain came down in a long, thin rope onto the flags, and had worn a hollow there.

The bread oven beside the hearth was stone cold, and when Kate put her hand into it, she drew out twigs and old feathers, for the jack doors had built in its flu. The copper in the wash house was green and furred with a dead mouse in the bottom of it. One pane of the front window was gone, and the wind came through the hole with a thin whistle.

The wellroppe had rotted, and the bucket lay somewhere down in the dark water where it had dropped years ago, and the floor of every room was damp to the touch and smelled of cold earth and mold. There was one bed, a sagging frame with no mattress. They gave it to Dogit because his back could not bend to the floor, and the rest of them slept on straw from the orchard barn in their coats in the one room where the roof held.

That night, when Kate was sure the old people were all asleep, she turned her face into the straw and wept for her husband. She wept for his hands and his laugh, and the way he whistled going out in the mornings, and for the child they had wanted and never had, and she wept as quietly as she could, with her fist against her mouth, until her whole body shook with it. She felt the straw move. Mrs.

Twig had got down beside her, slowly with a grunt on her bad knees. The old cook did not say a word. She only put one warm, heavy arm over Kate in the dark and kept it there until the crying stopped, and the two of them fell asleep like that, with the rain still falling in the next room. In the morning, nobody spoke of it, and they began.

The copper came first because theress would not rest until it was done. She took the mouse out with two sticks and threw it over the orchard wall. Then she scoured the copper with wet sand from the stream and wood ash from the hearth and a little vinegar from Mrs. Twig’s box. Round and round with a rag for the whole of that day and half the next. Her mouth set hard.

By the second evening it shone like a new penny. They lit a fire under it and filled it bucket by bucket from the stream, and the steam rolled out of the wash house door into the cold air, and every one of them washed properly for the first time since Miklmass, and all their clothes were boiled and hung along the orchard wall to dry.

Theress stood over the steaming copper with her swollen hands on her hips. There, she said. Now we are not beggars. Beggars do not have clean shifts. The bread oven was harder. The old footman, who was the only one of them who could reach, lay on his back on the hearth with his long arms up the flu, and pulled down the jack door’s nest in armfuls, twigs, and wool, and feathers, and years of soot until he was black to the shoulders, and the whole kitchen was gray with it.

For 3 days after that, Mrs. twig lit only small fires in the oven, a handful of sticks at a time. To draw the damp out of the stone slowly, because an oven dried too fast will crack, she said, and a cracked oven is no oven at all. On the fourth morning she swept it out and tested the heat with her bare arm, the way she had tested the ovens at the hall all her working life and put in six loaves made with flour Kate had bought with the last of her husband’s wages.

The smell of that bread went out of the cottage door and up the lane and through the gaps in the orchard wall. Kate stood in the kitchen with her eyes closed and breathed it in. It was the first warm good thing she had smelled since the funeral. When the loaves came out, brown and hollow when you knocked on them, Kate and the five sat down together at the scrubbed table and broke the first one with their hands.

And nobody said grace, and nobody needed to. It was a week after that at dusk in a thin rain that the knock came. Kate opened the door and found a small old lady in black on the step in a hooded cloak soaked through with her gray hair coming loose and her shoes ruined with mud. She had slipped out of the hall by the garden door in the half dark alone.

Behind Kate, Miss Dorl stood up so fast that her chair fell over. The Daaja Duchess of Stell was 68 years old. She stood on that step and looked past Kate at her own lady’s maid, and her mouth trembled. “Dorl,” she said, “they told me you had all been pensioned. They told me you had gone to your families.” “We have no families, your grace,” Mr.

Dorl said we had the house. Kate brought her into the fire, and Mrs. Twig sat her down and put the heel of that morning’s loaf in front of her with butter and a cup of hot milk. And the daager ate every crumb of it without a word, the way a hungry child eats. Then she looked round at the five of them and at the straw beds and Kate saw her understand it all at once.

The pensions, she said, my husband’s £12. Stopped at Miklmus, your grace, said Dogat from the bed. The old lady sat very still. She told them then in a low voice how it was up at the hall. Her son had brought his London people down in the summer and put her in the da wing on the cold north side out of the way of his guests.

He had cut her coals to one scuttle a day. Her own maid had been taken from her. Nobody from the new household came to the da wing unless she rang, and very often not then. I have nothing to give you, she said to Kate. Do you understand me? My son manages every penny I have. I cannot pay you for them.

I cannot even pay you for the bread. You did not come for the bread, Kate said. The daager looked at her for a long moment and then asked in a small voice whether she might come again. The door is not locked, Kate said. Kate went into the village on the next market day with the laress’s washing money in her purse to buy flour and lamp oil and a new rope for the well.

The square was full of carts and pigs and farmmen at the hiring. Outside the stell arms, the landlord’s wife was leaning in the doorway with her arms folded, and she saw Kate crossing the square and called out in a voice meant for the whole street. Here she comes, Rowley’s widow. I hear the Duke has made her keeper of his old folks home.

Five of them and all his leings. What do you feed them on, Kate? grl and prayers. The men outside the inn laughed, and one of them shouted something about the workhouse, and the laughing went round the square and followed her all the way to the baker’s door. Kate did not answer. She bought her flour and her oil and her rope, and walked the two miles home, with her face burning under her shawl.

When she came round the corner of the orchard wall, she stopped. Dogget was sitting on an upturned bucket, holding the foot of a long ladder with both his old hands. The footman was at the top of it on the roof with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, laying bundles of reed along the sunken place in the thatch.

They had cut it that morning from the bank of the millstream and carried it home on their backs, and he was pegging it down with hazel spars, beating each one in with the flat of a mallet, slowly and carefully, as if he were setting silver on a table for 40 guests. That night the wind came round to the west and the rain came hard and they all sat in the kitchen and listened to it drumming on the new reed and not one drop came into the back room.

Mrs. Twig had heard about the square before Kate had got her shawl off. It had come home with the baker’s boy. She said nothing about it until supper was eaten. Then she put down her spoon and looked across the table at Kate with her small shrewd eyes. Let them laugh, lass, she said. You can tell what a house is by what it does with the ones who cannot work anymore.

That hall has told the whole county what it is. This one is only just beginning to say. Kate never forgot it. The work went on through October, a little every day. Kate stopped the broken pain with a sheet of paper rubbed with lamp oil, so that the light came through yellow and the wind stayed out. She let the new rope down the well and fished with a hook until she had the lost bucket up.

And she dug the cottage garden bed by bed, the way her husband had taught her, and planted it with winter greens from the seed he had saved in twists of paper in his coat pocket, on her knees in the cold earth, with her hands black and her back aching. She felt closer to him than she had at his graveside. And every Thursday at dusk, the daagger slipped down to them.

She never brought anything because she had nothing to bring. She sat with Miss Dorl and mended stockings or shelled beans with Mrs. Twig or sat with her wet shoes steaming on the fender while Dogat told how her husband’s carriage once lost a wheel on shap fell. Once with her hands full of bean pods, she began to laugh and could not stop.

All my life in that house, she said, and nobody ever once let me shell a bean. In the second week of November, Mr. Chver appeared at the gate. He did not come in. He stood there in the cold drizzle in a good gray coat and asked for Mrs. Rowley, and Kate went out to him. His grace is informed that his mother has been walking down to this cottage after dark.

He said, “His grace does not wish it. The garden door has been locked, and the key is with me.” Then he nodded over Kate’s shoulder at the woodpile along the orchard wall. The five had gathered it all October, fallen branches from the park, one armful at a time. And that is his Grace’s timber, he said, taken from his Grace’s park without leave.

It will be fetched back this afternoon. A cart came at 3:00 with two of the new London men, and they loaded every stick of it and drove it away. And Dogget stood at the gate on his stick and watched it go, and did not say a word. The frost came 4 days later. It came in the night hard and white and still, and it killed half of Kate’s young greens where they stood, and it froze the water in the bucket by the door, and it found out every one of the old people. Dogget’s cough grew worse.

Theress’s hands cracked and bled. Mrs. Twig could hardly get up from her chair in the mornings. There was no wood but what they could pick up in the lane and no coal at all. Kate took down her husband’s silver watch from the nail above the hearth. He had wound it every night of their marriage sitting on the edge of the bed and she had lain and listened to the small sound of the key turning.

She held it in her hand for a long time. Then she wrapped it in a handkerchief and walked the seven miles to the market town and sold it to a man in a back street who turned it over in his fingers and offered her half of what it was worth. She took the money. She bought a cart load of coal and flour and goose grease for the laress’s hands, and she rode home on the coal cart with her empty hands in her lap.

That night the fire was high and red, and the cottage was warm right through, but no one came down to them on Thursday or the Thursday after. Miss Dorl went out to the gate at dusk each time with her shawl over her head, looking up at the dark bulk of the hall until Kate brought her in. The snow came in the middle of December.

It fell soft and heavy for 3 days. until the lane was buried to the tops of the gate posts and the whole world had gone white and silent. The baker’s boy brought word that the Duke had gone up to London with his guests and most of his household and would not be back before Christmas Eve. On the third night, Miss Dorl came in from the gate with her face as white as the snow.

There is no light in her window. She said there has been no light for three nights. She always has a candle. She has been afraid of the dark since she was a girl. Kate looked at her and then at the others and then she took down the lantern. They went up together, Kate and Miss Dorl, wading through snow to their knees, with the lantern swinging and throwing wild shadows on the white.

The garden door was locked, as Mr. Chver had said. But Miss Dorl had been 30 years in that house, and she led Kate round by the old laundry yard to a low door on the north side that nobody had used since the late Duke’s time, and it opened to her key. Inside the daer wing was as cold as a church in January. Their breath went up white in the lantern light.

Kate’s heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat as they climbed the back stairs and her hands were shaking so that the lantern rattled. The dowager was in her bed in the dark. The fire was dead in the great, the ashes cold to the touch. The water in the jug on the wash stand was frozen solid, and the old lady lay under two thin blankets with her eyes half open, burning with fever, her lips cracked, her breath short and rattling, and she did not know them.

“I rang,” she whispered when Miss Dorl took her hand. “I rang and rang.” Kate stood in that freezing room and was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. And she knew in the same moment that she was not going to leave her there. We cannot carry her by ourselves. Mr. Dorl said, “No,” Kate said.

“But we are not by ourselves.” She went back down through the snow alone as fast as she could flounder and burst in at the cottage door and told them. And the five old servants who had been turned off to be rid of them got up from the fire without a word. Everyone Dog knew where the old sedan chair was kept.

at the back of the coach house under a sheet, the chair the late Duchess had been carried to church in long ago. The footman and Kate dragged it up through the drifts, and Dogget came behind them with the second lantern, falling and getting up, falling and getting up. Theress stayed to heat bricks in the fire and wrap them in flannel, and Mrs.

twig, put a pot of broth on, and built up the bread oven until the whole kitchen roared with heat. They wrapped the daagger in every blanket in the daer wing, and in Kate’s own shawl overall, and lifted her into the chair, and the tall old footman took the front poles, and Kate took the back.

It was the longest walk of her life. The snow was over her knees, and the chair was heavier with every step. And twice her feet went out from under her on the buried terrace steps, and she went down hard, and twice she got up with her shoulders screaming, and took up the poles again.

Ahead of her, the old man went on through the drifts like a ship, never once stopping, his breath going up in great clouds. And at every step, he said very quietly, “Nearly there, your grace. Nearly there.” They came down at last towards the one lit window in all that white darkness, and the door flew open, and the heat and the smell of broth and fresh bread came pouring out to meet them.

They put her in Kate’s own bed with hot bricks at her feet and at her sides, and Miss Dorl sat up with her, and Mrs. Twig spooned broth between her lips a little at a time, and Kate kept the fire going all night long. Towards dawn the fever broke, the old lady slept properly, and her face lost its terrible flush.

When she woke in the full light of morning, she lay looking at the low ceiling and at the five old faces leaning over her and at Kate, and for a long time she said nothing. “I shall not go back up that hill,” she said at last. “Not to that cold, and not to be forgotten. If you will have me, Mrs. Rowley, I shall stay here with my own people.

You are welcome here. Your grace, Kate said. So the Duke’s mother moved in. She had one box sent down from the daer wing with her night gowns and her Bible and a miniature of her husband. And she took the little room over the kitchen where the warmth came up through the floor from the bread oven.

And she said it was the first room she had been warm in since the summer. The Duke came home on Christmas Eve. He walked into the daer wing with a present for his mother and found the room empty and the great cold, and the jug on the wash stand split by the frost. Nobody in his new household could tell him where she had gone.

It was an old groom in the stables, who told him at last. He walked down to the cottage in the dusk through the melting snow without Mr. Chver. He came to the gate where he had stood at Mikkelmas and held out the paper without looking and he opened it himself and walked up the path and knocked. Kate opened the door.

He had his hat in his hand. “Mrs. Rowley,” he said, “I have come for my mother.” Kate stood aside and let him in. They were all at supper. Mrs. Twig had a goose in the bread oven that the baker had sent down for nothing, and the kitchen was full of the smell of it, and the copper was shining on the wall behind the fire, and the five old servants were in their places along the benches, in their clean clothes.

At the head of the table, in the one good chair, sat his mother with a shawl around her shoulders and a color in her cheeks, and Miss Dorl beside her. The room went quiet. Nobody moved. The Duke stood just inside the door, too tall for the low ceiling, with the snow melting off his boots onto Kate’s clean floor.

And he looked at his mother and at the people he had put out on the steps in the rain. Mother, he said, “Come home.” The carriage is at the top of the lane. The dowagger did not get up. “I am home,” she said. You gave these people away to be rid of them, and you shut me up in the cold with nobody to answer my bell, and I lay three nights in the dark. It was Mrs.

Rowley who came for me. Mrs. Rowley and my own maid, and a coachman of 74, who fell in the snow a dozen times, and got up every time. They carried me down that hill in the middle of the night. Your people did not even know I had gone. She said it quietly in front of them all, and the Duke’s face went white, and then red, and then white again.

He looked at Dogget, sitting on the bench with his stick between his knees. He looked at the cracked hands, and at the old footman, and at Mrs. twig who had made his birthday cakes every year of his childhood. And he looked at last at Kate. “I did not know what I gave you,” he said. “I did not want to know.

I am sorry for it, Mrs. Rowley. I am sorry to every one of you.” “Sorry does not warm a room, your grace,” Kate said. “But it is a beginning.” The Duke took a heavy purse from inside his coat and set it down in front of the cook. “My father promised each of you £12 a year, for as long as you lived,” he said.

“It is paid from Mikkelmas, every penny, and it shall be paid on every quarter day after this into your own hands at this store. The wood shall be brought back tomorrow, and more with it.” and your mother,” Kate said. The Duke looked at his mother, and his mother looked back at him. “My mother stays where she chooses,” he said.

“And if she chooses this house, I shall ask this house to let me come and see her. So on Christmas day, they sat down to dinner in the old gardener’s cottage. The snow lay white on the new thatch, and a thread of smoke went straight up from the chimney into a still blue sky. Inside the copper shone, and the bread oven glowed, and the broken pane was mended with real glass.

At the head of the table sat the daagger, with Miss Dorl at her right hand. Along one bench sat theress, and doggot with his stick hooked on the table’s edge, and the tall footman, who would not sit until everyone else had. Along the other sat Mrs. Twig, with her white cap on, and her face red from the oven, and her 12b tucked safe in her box.

At the foot of the table, on a kitchen stool, with his knees nearly up to his chin, sat the Duke of Stell carving the goose badly, while his mother told him how to do it. And among them all, with flower still on her sleeve, sat Kate Rowley, a widow 3 months, who was not alone. When they had eaten, the Duke raised his glass to her and looked at her properly for the first time.

the way he had not looked at her across the gate at Mikkelmus. And Mrs. Twig reached over and put one warm, heavy hand on Kate’s arm, just as she had in the lane in the rain, and left it there. Who in your life kept a place at the table for you when you could do nothing for them in return? We would love to hear about them.