Page 46 of The Mistress of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #3)

Rose was walking slowly and thoughtfully along the high street.

The sun was almost vertical and the shadows sharp.

Midday traffic passed briskly, carts and horses running on their own black silhouettes.

The Crown had tubs of geraniums to either side of the main entrance, and their scarlet burned like flame against the whitewashed wall.

Mr Millet’s daughter Polly had just come out to water them, and raised a hand to Rose as she passed on the other pavement.

The bar dog, Watch, a big hairy black mongrel, was lying in the meagre strip of shade along the base of the wall, his pink tongue unfurled, and his wolf-yellow eyes followed her incuriously.

She was returning from visiting Mr Moss at the cottage hospital, had taken him a bunch of marigolds, with a message of goodwill from all the servants.

Rose had been for taking him lilac, seeing it was still plentiful everywhere and it smelt nice.

She reckoned any hospital smelt like a hospital so the relief was to be desired.

But there had been a long and tiresome discussion over breakfast about whether it was unlucky to take lilac indoors or not.

Some said it was only white lilac that was unlucky, others that it was any colour; someone said it was a funeral flower and foretold death, and someone else said no, that was chrysanthemums. Then Mildred claimed that her gran said when an owl perched on your roof it meant someone was going to die, and Tilda had said stoutly, no, it was three crows on a fence, everyone knew that.

The argument had wandered off into obscure ornithological byways, and Rose had decided quietly to take marigolds, because they were cheery and she knew where she could get some.

As far as she knew, there were no myths attached to marigolds.

But, as it turned out, she might as well not have bothered, because Mr Moss seemed to clutch the flowers without seeing them.

It was a strangely shrunken and diminished Mr Moss, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, no longer the potentate of below-stairs, whose word was law.

His voice was no longer orotund; his vocabulary no longer baroque.

He thanked her with tears in his eyes for coming to see him, and when she unthinkingly put out her hand to him, he did not haughtily rebuff the touch as he once would have, but clutched it in both his, like a man hanging off a cliff.

She had dredged about for simple items of news to tell him, things that would not precipitate more tears.

Her young ladyship was home, and seeming very well; the dowager was still in London with Lady Rachel.

Lady Linda was there too. Wilfrid had got bitten by a stray dog and the bite had gone septic.

Ida – Mrs Terry as she now was – had made a tray of Bachelor’s Buttons and Brigid had upset her by saying they should have had shredded coconut in them.

A horseshoe had fallen off the wall in the tack-room and hit Mr Archer on the head – luckily he’d still had his bowler on, so he wasn’t hurt, but he’d fetched Oscar such a clout for fiddling with it that he’d got a bad earache and had to go home.

There was a new under-gardener called Allsuch that Daisy was making eyes at.

Doris had pretended she thought his name was Allsorts, and Daisy had slapped her and accidentally scratched her cheek with a rough fingernail. Miss Taylor—

At which point, Mr Moss had interrupted, and with yearning eyes fixed on her face had asked, ‘How is Ada?’

‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Rose said.

‘Does she – did she – has she asked after me?’

Rose pushed down the pity she felt and the exasperation that went with it, and the result was a tone of steady matter-of-factness.

‘She hasn’t mentioned you at all, not in my presence.

She seems to be in good spirits. In fact, she’s started sparking with young George from the stables.

He’s a good lad, and it seems to be going well.

’ She had hoped her suspicions were unfounded, but she saw Mr Moss’s lip tremble, and his hands clasped each other as if for comfort.

‘Why did you take her to the zoo?’ she asked, quite kindly.

Moss sighed and shook his head, unable to answer.

‘Was it because you thought she was a bright girl and could get on? You wanted to give her a bit more of an education so she could better herself? Just a fatherly interest?’ she suggested helpfully.

Moss looked at her with misery, and didn’t answer yes or no.

Rose leaned forward a little, and fixed him with a commanding eye.

‘There is a rumour that you were sweet on her, and that’s why you took her out that Sunday.

But I know that’s not true, Mr Moss. As if a man in your position would dally with a housemaid barely half his age!

Why, you’d never in a million years contemplate such a shocking thing – that’s what I tell them. ’

There was a silence while Moss tried to reassemble his thoughts and construct a sentence. ‘Who – where does the rumour come from?’

She shrugged. ‘I have my suspicions but I won’t repeat them.

Anyway, I know there’s nothing in it. and I stamp on it whenever I hear it.

Because you don’t want the maids’ fathers and brothers coming up to the Castle, thinking their girls aren’t safe.

What would that do to our reputation?’ Tears were seeping from Mr Moss’s eyes by that point, and she changed the subject firmly and asked about the hospital day, and was the food all right and were the nurses kind.

Now, on the way home, thinking about all this, she was so preoccupied she didn’t notice Miss Eddowes on the other pavement beckoning to her – the shadow was so dense in contrast to the bright sun that, in her customary black, she didn’t show up at all.

A passing boy was sent across the road to jog Rose’s attention.

She crossed over between two drays and a one-horse gig, and Miss Eddowes said, ‘I’m sorry to break into your reverie, but I heard you had been to see poor Moss in the cottage hospital, and I wondered how he was. ’

‘He’s doing all right,’ Rose said, ‘but he’s not at all like his old self.’

‘Oh dear. What’s the prognostication?’

‘The what, miss?’

‘How is he going to be in the long run? What do the doctors say?’

‘Oh, I asked him that. Well, he said they told him he’s coming along all right, and should be fit to leave hospital very soon.’

‘That is good news. Then he’ll be going home – back to the Castle? To his old position? Poor man, he must hate the enforced idleness.’

Rose shook her head. ‘That’s where it is, Miss Eddowes.

The doctor doesn’t think he should go back.

Apparently, when you have an attack of that sort, there’s always a chance it’ll happen again, and usually worse the second time.

He told me the doctor said he shouldn’t do a job that causes him strain or worry.

Well,’ she added, ‘it doesn’t worry me to work at the Castle, but I suppose a butler’s job is a lot of responsibility.

And it would be terrible for everyone if he was to go back and then suddenly drop down dead in the middle of a big dinner, say, with a lot of important people round the table. ’

‘That would be embarrassing,’ Miss Eddowes said. ‘And the worry that it might happen would not do him any good – might even bring on the very thing he feared.’

‘That’s it,’ Rose agreed. ‘Doctor says he’s not to have any worry.

But he wants to go back. He said to me he was feeling much better.

Only tired, a bit, but that would pass, he said.

And he can’t wait to go home. But he’s afraid the doctor will say the same thing to her ladyship – the dowager, I mean – and that she’ll decide he can’t. ’

‘The dowager Lady Stainton still decides such things?’ Miss Eddowes queried.

‘Well, miss, you know how it is,’ Rose said circumspectly.

‘She’s bound to have an influence. Poor Mr Moss,’ she went on.

‘I don’t know what will happen to him if he can’t go back.

He hasn’t got any family. He’d have to get another job, but he’d hate to go down in the world.

Even if such a job was to be found. You can’t see him a footman, or working in a shop. ’

‘No, indeed,’ said Miss Eddowes, thoughtfully. ‘He is quintessentially a butler.’

Rose didn’t know what quintessentially meant, but she perceived the sympathy in the voice. ‘And if there wasn’t a job, it’d be the workhouse. So if you should happen to hear of anything, Miss Eddowes, any position that might suit him . . . ?’

‘I shall certainly listen out. I might even be able to make some enquiries.’

‘That would be kind, miss.’

‘I think I might go in and visit him, see if I can cheer him up.’

‘I’m sure he’d like that, miss,’ said Rose. Though, in fact, she wondered if he would. He might feel it humiliating to be discovered in such circumstances. It was bad enough Rose seeing him without his uniform, but a member of the gentry, and a lady at that . . .

As Hook walked along Piccadilly with his customary stiff-legged stalk, the maids he passed shrank back against the wall and averted their faces, and the men and boys eyed him warily.

He smirked to himself. He had thought being his lordship’s valet was tops, but he saw now it was only halfway up the ladder.

It was the butler who had it all. The whole house was under his control, and all the servants had to do exactly what he told them. As to the perks . . .