Netherwood (43 page)

Next to the tap room at the Hare and Hounds was the snug, and in here, unseen by anyone, sat Harry Tideaway. The Hoyland Arms was closed for business, pending the arrival of a new – as yet non-existent – landlord. Harry and Agnes still lived above, but their days there were numbered. The business had failed when Netherwood closed rank on him, encouraged by Jem Arkwright to sup elsewhere. The earl’s land agent was second on Harry’s list of most-hated men. Top of it was Amos Sykes, so right now he could barely contain his glee. He had slipped in through a back entrance just before the meeting started, alerted to some irregular activity by the unusual number of men filing in to a rival pub, and what an edifying evening it had proved to be. He
stood, and with his head down and his hat pulled low, he skirted the tap room and left the pub. He felt like a man with a keg of dynamite. It was simply a question of when he would light the fuse.

E
ve woke early the morning after her arrival at Fulton House. This was largely because she had put herself to bed just before six o’clock the previous evening, worn out with wretchedness. But it was also force of habit; she opened her eyes every day in time to get Arthur up for the day shift.

For a short while she lay still, stunned into inactivity by the strangeness of her surroundings. It was a pretty room, and she was alone in it – the first time in her life that she had slept unaccompanied by the sound of another person’s breathing. The walls were decorated with heavily patterned paper, pink cabbage roses on a background the colour of buttermilk. The bed was brass, and the linen on it was crisply laundered. A small bedside table bore a green glass jug of water and a tumbler, and, on a shelf below, a black leather-bound edition of the King James Bible. A pale-green satin eiderdown was folded on a chair in the corner of the room, but its extra weight hadn’t been needed. The early morning sun streamed into the room, because Eve hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains. Nice clean windows, she thought now, with her perfectionist’s eye for detail. Not a speck of muck or a rain mark on them. Fancy
that – getting a ladder all the way up to the attic. She mentally applauded the effort.

Her spirits were restored by the good night’s sleep and, it was true, by the clean window panes. Something about their sparkling clarity was uplifting and promising, and she climbed out of bed and crossed the room with a proper spring in her step. There was a small bathroom for her use just across the way from her bedroom door, with a sink and a flushing lavatory. Impossible luxury, this – no shameful chamber pot beneath the bed, no dash across cobbles to the privy. The footman who had brought her here from the kitchen had said that this floor was always used for visiting staff, and the last occupant of Eve’s room was lady’s maid to a dowager duchess of somewhere-or-other. He had told her this as if she should be grateful and, actually, she was; if she’d expected anything of her sleeping quarters, it was to have been sharing a chilly garret with a half-starved scullery maid who cried herself to sleep every night. But then, she told herself, she’d also imagined plague-infested rats in the streets and the heads of Catholics impaled on pikes. Instead, she had found Fortnum & Mason outside, and inside the novelty of privacy with a modicum of luxury. Of course, if someone offered her the chance to go home right now, she thought, she’d snatch it and run.

She used her bathroom, jumping with shock when hot water came out of the tap, then dressed quickly from the trunk at the foot of the bed. There’d be time enough to unpack later; she needed to assert herself in the kitchen first. Anna had run up a few more bias-cut skirts and elegant white blouses so that Eve needn’t feel like a country bumpkin among the London household staff; the sleeves, which were full, ended in a deep cuff just above the elbow. Pastry-making sleeves, Anna had said. And there were new aprons too, in blue and white ticking with deep waistbands, capacious front pockets and long, wide ties behind, because a generous bow was a thing of beauty, in
Anna’s view. No plain old pinnies for her. Eve smiled when she saw them; her friend had perfected the art of reinventing the ordinary.

It was just as well Eve was feeling positive, for there was no good cheer below stairs. The maid instructed by Mrs Carmichael to give Eve a brief tour of the Fulton House kitchens was no more than chief vegetable peeler, yet she clearly deemed the current task beneath her.

‘Scullery, pantry, cold store, meat larder, wet larder, vegetable store. Down there’s the still room, but that’s of no account to you. Main kitchen, back there. Small kitchen, through there. Small kitchen’s bigger than the main kitchen, but that’s of no account either. That’s just the way it is.’

She had a peevish expression, her face pursed and tight around the lips and eyes. Eve was tempted to suggest she loosen her bun to relieve the tension.

‘Thank you,’ Eve said instead. ‘And where will I work?’

‘Pardon?’

Eve’s question was perfectly clear, but the maid had done this every time she spoke, as if she was using a strange new language.

‘Where will I work?’ Eve spoke slowly, with exaggerated patience.

The maid feigned bafflement, then said, ‘Ah, where will you work!’, as if the mist had cleared and a translation had suddenly become possible. It really was very impertinent, Eve thought, particularly since each time the girl repeated her words she made subtle adjustments to the pronunciation, correcting any dropped aitches or flat vowels.

‘Yes,’ said Eve. ‘That’s what I said.’

The maid huffed a little and indicated a room off the
not-so-small small kitchen. ‘Through there. Pastry room. Is that all clear? Only I have other things to be doing.’

She really was beyond the pale, standing there with that bored, exasperated expression on her pinched little face, offering unsolicited elocution lessons.

‘Well, don’t let me keep you,’ Eve said with studied cheerfulness. ‘I can easily see what’s what by walking around the rooms myself.’ She smiled benignly, correctly judging that of all responses, this was the one most likely to thwart the snippy little madam. Given, that is, that a good slap was out of the question.

Anyway, though she’d been here less than twenty-four hours, Eve was already inured to off-hand behaviour and bad manners. Even the little terrier, clearly a resident of the kitchen, seemed to have switched sides, no longer deeming her worthy of attention. Meanwhile Mrs Munster, the ghoulish housekeeper, didn’t seem to have a kind word for anyone; the cook, Mrs Carmichael, was still being exceptionally chilly; the staff in the kitchen, knowing what was good for them, took their lead from Mrs Carmichael; and a brief encounter with the butler, whom Eve had almost literally bumped into while trying to find the kitchens that morning, had been far from pleasant. If she’d realised he was Mrs Munster’s other half, she wouldn’t have bothered asking him anything at all. But she knew nothing about anything in this monstrously snooty household, and Mr Munster had visibly recoiled, distaste and disdain battling for supremacy in his features, when she made a breezy request for directions. There were so many stairs, doors and corridors between the kitchen and her bedroom, she’d said, that she could’ve done with leaving a paper trail. His answer, when it came, contained the bare minimum of necessary information and was delivered through an apparently closed mouth, as if he had mastered the trick of speaking through his flared nostrils.

Still, while a friendly smile would have been nice, Eve had
decided she couldn’t really care less what anyone thought of her. She wasn’t here for long, and she wasn’t here to make friends. She had plenty of those at home, and anyway she could always nip out and find Samuel Stallibrass if she wanted amicable conversation. Meanwhile there was work to be done. Not in a begrudgingly yielded corner of the main kitchen, but in the pastry room, no less. It was a source of some relief that she’d kept her poor first impressions of the kitchen to herself, for here she was now, standing on the threshold of a cool, clean room with smooth stone floors and long marble worktops, beneath which were neatly stored all the paraphernalia of pastry-making. This’ll do, she thought.

Working alone, with no one giving her the time of day, she made a batch of sweet shortcrust pastry to acquaint herself with the kitchen, gauge the heat of the oven and – more than anything, if she was honest – keep herself occupied. Her first culinary assignment was to be in three days’ time, when the countess had arranged an evening party – a
soirée,
as Eve kept trying, and forgetting, to call it. In the meantime she was supposed to be settling in, which she would clearly have to try and do alone.

Mrs Carmichael, in Eve’s opinion, seemed under-employed. There was a variety of kitchen staff busy at the worktops, but the cook sat in splendour on the large wooden carver at the head of the pine table, entering something into a vast black ledger in an extremely leisurely manner. Eve decided to ignore her until she was approached, and gathered together the ingredients she needed without bothering anyone. Her marathon stint in the Netherwood Hall kitchen all those months ago had given her a fair idea of what would be kept where in a grand house: flour sacks and sugar with the dry goods, lard
and butter in the cold store. Alone in the pastry room she busied herself with the task in hand; with her hands in a bowlful of flour and fat, she was at home anywhere.

The batch of sweet pastry had to chill before she could work with it, and she put it on a platter, covered it with a muslin cloth and placed it in the cold store. With half an hour to kill before she could pretend once again to be busy, Eve ventured back through the main kitchen and into the small kitchen which was empty of hostile maids and, indeed, larger than its name implied, though furnished not with stoves and sinks and butcher’s blocks, but with fine oak furniture, great dressers and cabinets, laden with china cups and plates and a mesmerising variety of copper vessels and moulds. Nice shine to them, Eve thought, as she peered closely at a row of immaculate little copper saucepans. No verdigris. Back home in Netherwood, there was a woman who’d died from verdigris poisoning. Lottie Naylor, her name was, the vicar’s housekeeper before Mavis Moxon. She ate the leftovers of a beef stew that had been kept for three days in a copper dish. Every so often, Lottie’s wretched fate passed through Eve’s mind, just as it did now. What a shame, she thought, to be known for how you’d died, not how you’d lived.

Next to the dresser was a large linen press, and Eve peeped inside, feeling obscurely guilty. The top section bore piles of blue linen tea towels, white napkins and tablecloths in a range of colours, washed, starched and pressed. Below, in the lower cupboard, were laundered kitchen uniforms, grey dresses and white aprons and, on a shelf of their own, a selection of mob caps. So orderly, and such a gratifying sight, like a pantry full of pickle jars or a cellar full of coal.

‘Does it meet with your approval?’ Mrs Carmichael’s tone was sardonic. Eve jumped to her feet like an inept thief, caught in a bungled criminal act. The cook stood in the open doorway between the two main rooms; her expression was not conciliatory.