Authors: Martine Bailey
‘Oh, it’s you.’ It was only the widowed char, her withered cheek bent low as she stood as still as stone, catching her breath at the top of the stairs. Bony hands, speckled with age, clutched the broom that she rested upon. Poor creature, I thought, reduced to this labour, when her gown showed signs of better days and her hair was wiry with silver threads.
‘I wondered who it was,’ I explained gently. ‘Carry on.’
She lifted her face to mine; her features indistinct beneath the great glass lantern that crowned the staircase, for no one had yet had the courage to tackle its decades of cobwebs. Then she smiled, a complicit smile, lit by a meagre warmth behind her colourless eyes. After that I often heard the steady swish of her broom across the boards outside my door, and left her in peace to her work.
*
At that time, a gloriously bright day tempted me outdoors to explore the park. It could have been May-time and not October, as ragged white clouds chased across gillyflower blue. To wander amongst such beauty and yet have no resolved existence left me aching with exquisite pain.
I was glad of distraction when I came upon Nan, a wicker basket strapped to her back like a pedlar-woman’s. She was collecting a bounty of rosehips, sloes, and brambles that she showed me with pride. We fell into step together as she chattered in her homely manner.
‘Down there’s a good spot for codlins,’ she told me, and so I followed her curious hunch-backed figure through dripping glades that might have been undisturbed for centuries.
It was short work to pick a vast heap of hard green fruit, so I offered to help her carry them home, bundling them up in my shawl. As we wended our way, I asked her where Lady Blair was buried.
‘Down in’t crypt in’t village church. So ’ow she’s supposed to rise and walk about I cannot say.’
Though I knew I risked frightening myself, I asked, ‘Was she truly so dreadful, Nan?’
Nan halted to investigate a clump of stinking leaves, her gnarled fingers pinching out a few seed pods. Raising herself with a sigh, she said, ‘She were brung up like all rich folks in them days, to do as she pleased. All these lands was her own little kingdom. We ’ad a household of twenty servants then, and I were a hale woman in me prime. We ’ad our jests and jokes behind her back, mind. We ’ad to, for she were as miserable as sin. No man would take her on, rich or poor, she being such a hately creature.
‘So it were just a lark to us, when Mr Ashe come here, him being not yet thirty, and she more ’n sixty. He could charm the birds from the trees, that one. Soon enough the old witch were like a chick in ’is hands. It were a kind of madness come on her, from being so long a maid.
‘First she thought she could buy ’im. She had her testament drawn up making ’im, her only heir – he would’ve got the Hall and all her fortune. We servants watched it happen like scenes of a doom play, rolling fast on to the road to Judgement. You see, it were no secret to us that Mr Ashe was romancing another young woman, a Miss Hannah who were biding here too. What did them two young lovebirds care if a laundry maid passed ’em in the long grass, or a gardener saw them in the summerhouse?’
Nan paused and turned her rheumy eyes to mine with a malicious gleam of pleasure. ‘The old ’un found ’em out. There were such rantings and screamings that the Hall itself seemed to shake. Next, Miss Hannah says she’s with child.’
‘Poor girl,’ I said with sympathy. By now we were at the kitchen door, and when Nan beckoned me inside to see her workplace I followed, having little else to do but hear the end of her tale. Peg was not about, only the two powerfully-built sisters employed as maids-of-all-work, stood scouring copper pans.
At the far end of the kitchen stood a low, iron-barred door. Picking up lanterns, we passed through it and clambered down chilly steps to a warren of larders and cold stores. In the lantern glow, our giant shadows danced and rocked about us, revealing the start of a tunnel dug into the rock ahead. We passed a few of the village women cleaning by lamplight: the stout, strong-looking char washing down shelves, and the widow-woman moving wine bottles. I thought the caverns marvellous; quite worthy of one of Mrs Radliffe’s tales.
‘Don’t you fret, I know these passages backwards and forwards – even in the pitchy dark,’ Nan’s thin voice called. ‘I never had no candles, all these years. Nowt to be scared of down here but a few rats and beetles.’
I peered warily at the floor at Nan’s mention of rats. We moved on, past a dry larder filled with net cradles hanging from the ceiling, and a cold larder hung with grisly carcasses and stiff birds.
‘Here we are, mistress.’ I had to crouch to enter a barrel-vaulted cellar crammed with dusty bottles and sheaves of herbs and twigs.
‘This were the old cook’s ’stillery,’ said Nan, lighting more candles from her lantern. I looked about myself with pleasure; fitted with a burner, glassware and funnels, the chamber had all the romance of a necromancer’s lair.
‘You sit down, mistress.’ Nan tipped the contents of her basket across the table. ‘I just ’ave to start these drying before they lose their virtue.’
As I waited, I picked up a receipt book, and idly flicked through the pages. It was no witch’s
grimoire
, for it opened at a method for a homely apple pie.
Nan trailed about the shelves in search of her drying pans. ‘
She’s
gone and started moving my stuff. I could allus find it before.’
‘Mrs Blissett, do you mean?’ I remembered Peg’s kindness in keeping the old woman on; her insistence that such an unfortunate must not be turned from our door. ‘It is a new order now, Nan, and it is best to adapt to it. She has her reasons for making all these changes.’
I couldn’t see Nan’s face, but her voice was disgruntled. ‘Oh, aye, mistress. She has them all right. I’ll make do with this.’ Settling down at the table she began to pick over her harvest, and recommenced her tale.
‘Right-oh, well when the mistress heard ’ow Miss Hannah were breeding, she got a wicked notion in her head. She told Mr Ashe he could have no inheritance unless he got the child signed over to herself. She would give Miss Hannah money, plenty of it, in return for the bairn being kept here as her own. Us downstairs reckoned that way she’d not only hope to keep Mr Ashe by her side, but have a new line of heirs for Delafosse, too. Miss Hannah were to be kept here until her time come. That’s how I got right friendly with ’er, for I often took her a bite and had a tattle with her.’
‘She must have been frightened, here alone?’
‘Aye, but she were that lovelorn over Mr Ashe, she hung on his every word. Then, bless ’im, next we knew he smuggled his lass out of here to another place. Mr Ashe had found his Christian conscience see, and wouldn’t let a mother be parted from her child.’
‘Bravo for him,’ I said with feeling.
‘Aye, but when the mistress found the pretty bird had flown, there were such a how-row! But Mr Ashe stood his ground, he was young and hot-blooded, and that night he went off to be a soldier. As for her ladyship, her heart was broke in two. Within the six-month, a letter come to say poor Mr Ashe were slain, sliced through in that battle across the ocean. She got a sort of brain-fever then, pacing the house, never resting. I grew afeared of her, for she’d come up behind you and grasp your shoulder and fix on you with frantic eyes. “Where’s my baby child?” she’d ask. “I heard him crying but I lost him just now. Where have you hidden him?”
‘Poor Dorcas, we called her. Her soul-case were cracked, it were a half-life she were living. Wandering and searching for that baby she were, till the day she fell dead. Then the bailiff come and told me the Hall were to go to some sort of high court, and I could stay on to keep an eye on it. And only this summer it were put to rent.’
I tried to banish this nursemaid’s nonsense and said, ‘To think, if Mr Ashe had agreed to be her ladyship’s companion in her final years, perhaps even married her, all could have turned out well.’
Nan turned to me, gape-jawed. ‘Perhaps I din’t make meself clear, mistress. Mr Ashe were Lady Blair’s sister’s son. He were her blood nephew. The scriptures don’t allow such unnatural connections.’
I wondered how I had misunderstood so much. ‘No, Nan, I’m sorry, I had no notion.’
‘No matter, mistress. Here now, you’ll like this, I’ve kept a chest of all them old confects and devices . . .’
Just then a powerful notion of being observed made me look over my shoulder. I got up to look outside, and there stood Peg at the threshold, as if just arriving in her cloak and bonnet, with a bundle in her hand.
She bobbed at me and laughed. ‘Pardon mistress. I never expected to find you down here. It gave me a little fright, seeing you.’
‘Yes, and you surprised us, too. I was – well, helping Nan carry her garden stuffs.’ It was ridiculous, but I felt the need to explain my presence to Peg.
‘You mustn’t take notice of old Nan’s maunderings,’ she said lightly, setting her bundle down. ‘You don’t know fact from fable, do you, pet?’
The old dame nodded. Comprehending that I was preventing them from getting to work, I rose to return upstairs. As I left, Peg quickly gathered up her receipt book and hugged it to her breast. It was odd that I recalled the title a twelve-month later, when I had the chance to look at it more closely. Back then I had glanced at the flyleaf and seen
Mother Eve’s Secrets
written in Peg Blissett’s lady’s hand.
14
Delafosse Hall
October 1792
~ Of Red, and How to Make It ~
Boil an ounce of cochineal in half a pint of water for about five minutes; then add half an ounce of cream of tartar, and half an ounce of alum; boil on a slow fire about as long again. You will know your colour is done, by dipping a pen into it, and writing therewith on white paper; for if it writes as clear as ink and keeps its colour, it is done. Take it off the fire, add half a quarter of a pound of sugar and let it settle. Keep in a bottle well stoppered.
Charlotte Spenlove’s way of making Red, copied from a book of French Receipts
‘
Did you find them?’
Nan pushed the rattling seed heads towards Peg. She peered at them and saw the queer ragged crowns to their tops.
Peg jerked her head towards the door. ‘Off you go.’
Nan scuttled past her, not even daring to look in her face. Alone, Peg beat her fingers slowly against her mouth, looking into space, cogitating. Well, the old mopsy’s patter had made mighty interesting listening from behind the door.
First of all, she found the right page in
Mother Eve’s Secrets
for what she wanted to make. Mrs Croxon had been touching it, idly turning the pages. Yet what did it matter? She was just a flat, who couldn’t see what stood before her, even if it jumped up and bit her nose.
It was while she was assembling her ingredients that she started to tidy away the small chest Nan had pulled out to show the mistress. ‘Confects’, was what she’d called them. Lifting the lid it looked to be only broken china, a tarnished spoon, a piece of dried up marchpane. The small parcel in the corner had a musty look, but she opened up the stiff paper to find – what in damnation was that? The cake itself was dust, but the device had survived. Carrying it in her palm to the lamp, she spent a while studying it closely. It was a figure of a swaddled baby the size of a thumb, laid inside a miniature rocking cradle. Lifting it to her lips she set the tip of her tongue against its underside. The pleasant tingle told her it was made of sugar.
Placing it back in its bundle of paper she saw the inner sheet was a letter. Laying the stiff parchment flat on the table, she read it with growing fascination. It was written by the soppy article Nan had talked of, the one with a jack-in-the-belly. It amused her that the writer had not even inquired if Nan could read:
My dear Nan,
My friend, after all your great kindness, as I promised I am sending word of how matters stand for me. Last month I was took to bed of the most beautiful fair little babe and the baptism just being performed, I am sending you a piece of the Christening cake for you to raise a toast to my bonny – and new liberated – baby. I am indeed fortunate to hold my precious infant in my arms, for the news of my darling Ashe’s loss almost took my own life from me, from the desperate shock to my body.