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He nodded slowly. ‘Very well. I understand. However, in a few weeks’ time Sir Randolph will be married, and the new Lady Hyde’s maid will join our ranks. I’m sure Miss Dunn will appreciate having a nice sitting room, away from the lower servants. Presumably her presence will reassure you?’
It would do nothing of the sort, but Kate was outmanoeuvred. After a moment’s hesitation she managed a nod of acquiescence.
‘Excellent.’ Retrieving his hat, Henderson sauntered to the door, spinning it rakishly on one hand, like a variety show performer. ‘Oh, and a tip, Mrs Furniss. You’ll find that I make a far nicer ally than adversary. Bear that in mind.’
He winked. He actually winked. And when he left the room, his smile seemed to hang, Cheshire Cat–like, in the cloud of hair oil he left in his wake.
June 28th
The weather is making us all restless. In spite of the rain it’s stiflingly hot, and the air is heavy, so you feel you can’t breathe. We haven’t seen the sun for days.
One of the men said that he couldn’t remember a summer like it.
But I can.
Chapter 15
It was a summer like no other.
In the cool of the marble-floored hallway the barometer’s needle had edged round to fair and remained stuck there, unmoving, despite Mr Goddard’s daily tap on the glass. As the long August days passed and still no rain came, Coldwell’s park shimmered in the heat and the surrounding hills changed from green and purple to brown as the heather and bracken crisped into premature autumn.
In the kitchen garden, the dipping pond was reduced to a few inches of brackish water, and the river that twisted along the western edge of the park dried up to a brown trickle over baked stones. Gatley, fretting over his wilting lettuces, sent the garden boys to fill their pails from its shallows, and Johnny Farrow took the cart down to the ford by the home farm and pushed it in up to its axles, to soak its shrunken wheels.
The newspaper boy still toiled up the drive on his bicycle every morning with The Times, though Sir Randolph had left for Scotland (taking his valet and chauffeur with him, thank goodness) and wasn’t there to read it. Along with letters from Mrs Bryant in Portman Square and Miss Addison in Shropshire, it provided Kate with a link to the world beyond the parched hills. Mr Goddard commandeered it first, so the news was a day old by the time it reached the servants’ hall, but in that slow, sweltering summer it hardly mattered. The hot days melted together, separated by sultry, sleepless nights.
While Sir Randolph slaughtered grouse on a Scottish moor, in Shropshire Miss Addison busied herself with wedding preparations and her new role as mistress of Coldwell. Mr Fortescue had authorised her request for new livery for the footmen; and one afternoon a cart appeared over the crest of the drive (unannounced by Davy Wells, who had abandoned his lookout post for the shade of the woods). Dust ballooned in its wake and coated the carrier, so when he pulled up in the stable yard and wiped the sweat from his face, his handkerchief left smears of dirt.
Kate signed the receipt, running her eyes down the list of items: braided cutaway coats, striped waistcoats, moleskin knee breeches, silk stockings, and neckties.
‘It’s all right for some,’ Abigail remarked sourly as she stood in the doorway of the footmen’s wardrobe and watched Jem and Thomas unpack it all. ‘You lads get kitted out in livery costing a king’s ransom, and what do we get? A bolt of cheap cotton as a Christmas box and the job of making it up ourselves.’
‘Yes, well, now the house is being smartened up the new Lady Hyde isn’t going to want a pair of scruffs in the dining room, is she?’ Thomas said, picking at the knotted string on one of the parcels. ‘We footmen have to look the part. Doesn’t look like there are any wigs. I think I’m going to get on with the new her ladyship.’
Kate stood at the table with the invoice, waiting to mark off the items as they were unpacked. The cupboards had been thrown open and Jem was sorting through the old uniforms, making space for the new ones. Joseph perched on a stool in the corner, eating the stale end of yesterday’s loaf (since he returned from London he’d been perpetually starving), and Abigail shuffled a little farther into the small room to make way for Eliza and Susan, who crowded into the doorway to watch.
Kate bit her tongue against the urge to snap at them to go away. With Sir Randolph absent there wasn’t much for them to do in the afternoons, but their chatter and clumsy flirtation grated on her taut nerves.
It was hardly their fault. Everything grated on her taut nerves.
‘Look at that,’ breathed Susan, as Thomas folded back brown paper and held up a livery coat. ‘Those cuffs…’
The coat was the same dark green used by the Hyde family to mark ownership of their carriages and menservants since the creation of their baronetcy. The deep cuffs were crimson velvet, banded with gold braid top and bottom, finished with a row of four crested buttons. In the dingy basement, the brass gleamed with the incongruous opulence of a miser’s hoard.
Jem moved behind Kate, leaning past her to lay the old uniforms on the table. The gap between the table and the countertop behind was narrow, and his nearness was like a static electrical charge. It took all her concentration to keep her face neutral and to resist the invisible, instinctive forces pulling her towards him. The lines of elaborately looped handwriting on the invoice swam meaninglessly before her eyes.
It was almost unbearable, sometimes.
She thought their conversation in the laundry had settled the matter. If neither of them spoke of what had happened—if she made it absolutely clear that it had been a moment of madness—it would be possible to return to how things had been. Outwardly she supposed they had: they each moved through the days as they always had, going about their work in their respective parts of the house, sitting at the servants’ hall table at mealtimes, addressing each other only when necessary, and in the most impersonal terms.
Outwardly, it was all perfectly respectable and correct.
No one would guess that her blood raced when she passed him and that the incidental touch of his fingers when she took a tray from him in the scullery sent sparks up her arm. No one would suspect that she went over every glance, every word, every casual touch as she grated sugar or stared at columns of figures in her ledger. And relived his kiss as she lay in her tangled sheets at night.
She might have made it clear to him that it had been a regrettable mistake. It seemed she had yet to convince herself.
Abigail picked up one of the old garments from the table. Against the opulence of the new ones, it looked shabby and threadbare, its colour faded. ‘You’d hardly know them for the same livery,’ she said, examining it disdainfully. ‘I wonder how old these are.’
‘Almost as old as Mr Goddard, I’d wager,’ Eliza muttered. She was leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest, her face sallow and shiny with sweat. Kate should have reprimanded her, but she let it go. The weather was getting to them all.