Page 4 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #1)

Perhaps the person who most sincerely mourned the earl was his valet, Crooks.

‘Twenty years,’ the pudgy, watery-eyed manservant had been saying whenever two or three senior servants gathered together.

Moss, the butler, only nodded sympathetically, but her ladyship’s woman, Miss Taylor – grey of hair and mauve of face – found his moist self-pity irritating.

Years of biting her tongue in the presence of Lady Stainton had honed it to sharpness when talking to lesser mortals.

‘Twenty years or not, you’re superfluous to requirements now,’ she told him. ‘You’re like one of those Indian wives: when their husband dies they’re thrown on the funeral pyre.’

‘The settee,’ Moss murmured. He read encyclopaedias, and liked to appear omniscient.

‘ Sut tee,’ Mrs Webster corrected impatiently.

Moss caught up with what had been said. ‘But there’s no need to be talking so shocking, Miss Taylor,’ he said sternly. ‘There’ll be no emulation here.’

‘Immolation,’ said Mrs Webster.

‘Either way,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘a valet whose master dies is for the chop. It’s not as if there’s anything else he can do. And at your age,’ she added to Crooks, her voice brimming with malicious pity, ‘you’ll never get another place.’

Crooks had been saying the same thing himself, but he didn’t expect to be agreed with. ‘Perhaps his new lordship will need a man,’ he said in a wobbly voice.

‘Bound to have one already,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘He’s not a child. How old is he?’

‘Twenty-six,’ Moss provided.

‘But he may not have a man suitable for an earl,’ Crooks said. ‘Someone who knows what’s due to his position.’

‘Quite, quite,’ Moss said soothingly. ‘I believe he’s been living very modest. And abroad such a lot of the time.’

Mrs Webster asked, ‘You’ve known Lord Ayton longest, Mr Moss. What sort of a man is he?’ She had only been at the Castle six years.

Moss pondered. ‘He was very good-natured when he was a boy. Unusually so, given he was the heir – no side to him. But who knows how he’ll change when he takes on the mantle, if I might speak poetical?’

‘There’s bound to be changes,’ said Mrs Webster. ‘He’ll have his own ideas. We’ll all feel it.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Crooks. ‘It’s her ladyship runs the house. A gentleman wouldn’t trouble himself about domestic details.’

‘If she’s still here,’ said Mrs Webster.

‘What can you mean?’ said Miss Taylor stiffly. ‘Her ladyship is in perfect health.’

‘But she’ll be moving to the Dower House, won’t she?’

Moss and Miss Taylor exchanged an amused glance. ‘Have you ever seen the Dower House, Mrs Webster?’ Moss enquired.

‘Of course I have. Pretty little square house at the end of the village.’

‘Little’s the word,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Her ladyship couldn’t stick it.’

‘And I believe it’s in poor repair,’ said Moss.

‘No-one’s lived there in – well, it must be fifty years.

His lordship’s mother – his late lordship’s mother, I should say – didn’t care for it.

’ The fourth earl had caused a scandal by bringing home from his travels a lively Frenchwoman, Victoire Ballancourt, for a bride.

She had found the English countryside too cold and English country houses too damp, and as soon as she was widowed had decamped to London and a cosy house in Bruton Street.

‘Besides,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘his new lordship’s unmarried so she’ll have to stay and run things for him.’

‘ I run the house, Miss Taylor,’ said Mrs Webster, ‘so there’s no need for her to stay.

Her ladyship can go to the Dower House any time she likes.

And you’ll go with her, of course. I’m sure you’ll love it there – once essential repairs have been carried out.

’ She had no personal spleen against Miss Taylor, but she liked to keep the balance of power in the house, and Taylor had been bullying poor old Crooks all day.

‘We’ll see,’ said Miss Taylor, her nostrils flaring. ‘And if I might venture an opinion, Mrs Webster, some changes might be welcome in this house. I think you’d hardly claim that everything is entirely as it should be.’

Mrs Webster reddened, but with vexation rather than embarrassment. ‘I do the best I can with what I have. I’ve asked and asked for more staff—’

‘I’m sure I wasn’t blaming you,’ said Miss Taylor meaning exactly the opposite. ‘And we all know that fool in the kitchen isn’t up to the job. That pork last night – practically raw! I cannot and will not eat raw meat.’

‘Indeed, it’s true, pork should always be well cooked,’ Moss ruled ponderously.

‘And chicken, and game also. It’s acceptable for lamb to be pink, however.

And roast beef, now that can be rare – gentlemen often prefer it that way.

His lordship’s father, I believe – his late lordship’s father, I should say—’ he corrected himself with a quiver, ‘liked it bloody.’

‘I will not have blood oozing out of my meat,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I am not a vampire.’

‘Come, come,’ Moss said, disturbed. ‘There’s no need for that sort of talk. You can’t be calling his lordship’s father—’

‘The fact is,’ said Miss Taylor, impatiently, ‘neither the earl nor her ladyship ever cared a jot about food, or they’d have done something about it and sent that cook packing.’

‘Well, perhaps his new lordship will have fresh ideas about food, having lived away for so long,’ Mrs Webster said.

‘He might have London tastes. He might even want foreign dishes prepared.’ Which, she thought, might make Mrs Oxlea uncomfortable enough to leave of her own accord.

Modern cooking was beyond her – she was fit only for roasting vast joints, as if they were still living in Tudor times with spits and cauldrons.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘when he gets married, there’ll be a new mistress. Then there really will be changes.’

Crooks groaned, ‘I hate change. I wish we could just go back to the way things were. Twenty years I was with his lordship. Twenty years!’

Miss Taylor ignored him. She was thinking, and the fruit of her thoughts she offered to Mrs Webster, being of the opinion that Crooks and Moss were both fools. ‘It occurs to me,’ she said slowly, ‘that he might not settle here at all.’

‘What do you mean?’ Webster asked, intrigued.

‘He’s never shown any liking for the Castle, and he’s lived abroad whenever he’s had the chance. He might just close the place up.’ She smiled maliciously. ‘Then you’ll all be out of a position.’

‘So will you,’ Mrs Webster pointed out.

‘Her ladyship needs me. Even if it’s in that nasty Dower House, I’ll keep my job.’

Mrs Webster shrugged. ‘Well, I can always get another place. I’m young enough. And most of the servants will be all right. It’s Mr Moss and Mr Crooks who are most at risk.’

Moss was looking from her to Miss Taylor and back, trying to follow their argument. ‘Surely you don’t think—’

‘Has to be considered,’ Mrs Webster said unkindly.

‘Twenty years!’ Crooks bleated.

*

In the formal dining-room at Holme Manor, in Frome Monkton, Dorset, Linda, Lady Cordwell faced her husband down the length of the table.

Even with as many leaves as possible taken out, it was still uncomfortably long for dining à deux , and the room itself was too big, difficult to heat.

But the smaller dining-parlour’s ceiling had come down when the roof leaked last winter, and there had been no money yet to repair it, and Lord Cordwell refused to dine in the morning-room, even when it was only the two of them.

Which, his lady reflected, was all too often these days – and if you didn’t entertain, you tended to not be invited back.

We really must do something about having a dinner-party, she thought.

Invite twenty or thirty people. It would be a large expense, but it would be good for reciprocal invitations for months.

Dining out at other people’s houses, while saving the equivalent expenditure at home – and winter was the time to do it, when need was greatest – they might be invited to hunting and shooting parties, Saturday-to-Mondays, the house all but shut up for three whole days!

If you caught the right party to start with, the invitation train could carry you right through until the Season started.

She’d have expressed all this to Cordwell, but the effort of speaking down the table was too much for anything but short sentences.

She addressed herself instead to the minuscule fillet of fish on her plate, with its dab of sauce.

Like her mother Lady Stainton, she was not greatly interested in food, but she was always hungry, these days, and knew from her looking-glass that she was getting gaunt.

Really, when they were alone, they should go back to nursery food, cheap and filling – big plates of mutton and potatoes followed by rice pudding – but Cordwell clung to the refinements due to a viscount.

She had always thought it admirable that he would not lower his standards, but lately she had come to think it more foolish than noble.

She had not known – her parents had not known – when she married him how impoverished his estate was.

Times were hard, particularly in the West Country, rents had fallen, and returns were low.

Gerald Cordwell had been saddled with his father’s debts when he came into his inheritance unexpectedly young.

His father had died in a shooting accident – Linda secretly suspected the old viscount might have blown his own brains out in despair at his financial condition, and she wondered sometimes whether Gerald suspected it too.

Her dowry had floated the ship off the rocks, but with expenditure stuck at the ‘twenty pounds aught and six’ mark, they were bound to sink again.

And there were two children now to provide for, Arabella and Arthur. It was annoying, Linda thought, that she had got a girl first time round. If Bella had been a boy, she could have stopped at one and saved half the expense.