Kept (7 page)

There was no one in the servants’ hall. The maid who had been bringing in the washing was still outside, with her laundry basket. In the distance the noise of the dogs came borne on the wind towards them. Dewar saw that twilight was stealing up through the tall trees.

“Cheerful kind of place, ain’t it?” Dunbar remarked again. He hunched his shoulders more tightly into his greatcoat. “Ugh, but this Norfolk air chills the bones. I could not stay a week here. Let us be away.”

Dewar stared back over his shoulder. Something in the appearance of the dismal house, its outlines now settling into the darker space beyond, caught his eye, and he rested his gaze on the row of windows, some lighted now against the encroaching dusk, others gathered up in shadow. The place, he now saw, was not quite devoid of activity, for a woman’s face—at this distance he imagined it to be the housekeeper’s—could be seen at one of the upper windows. It looked out for a moment or two and was then withdrawn. The noise of the dogs came up again on the wind. Dunbar pressed his arm, and they set off hastily through the trees.

She stood in the gathering twilight, on the wet grass. Behind her the men’s voices receded into the shadow of the wood, dark now and silent but for the cries of the dogs. Through the lighted window before her she could see William, his jacket half pulled onto his shoulders, moving through the house to answer a summons from some distant room. The sight cheered her, and she bent to retrieve the wicker clothes basket: heavy and unwieldy, but no trouble to her for she was a strongly built girl and relished the work that was put before her.

The voices had altogether disappeared, and she lingered for a moment with the basket balanced on her hip, watching the last streaks of daylight diminishing over the far-off plain. Some arrangement of the drifting clouds, some gleam of the fading sun briefly issuing out
of the dusk, awakened in her the memory of a time when Easton Hall had not been her home, its secrets not hers to speculate on, when all that she now saw with the eye of half a year’s experience was novel to her, quite fresh and full of wonder. She brooded on these phantoms for some time, as the streaks of light faded almost to nothing, leaving only a vast diffusion of variegated shade.

Then the sounds from the house—sounds of tea things jangling, low voices and slammed doors—woke her from her reverie and, clutching the basket in her outstretched arms, she went inside.

(
I
)

S
he stood on the station platform, watching the receding train. The white steam curled above the few bushes that hid the curve of the line, evaporating in the pale evening air. A moment more and the last carriage would pass out of sight, the white gates at the crossing swinging slowly forward to let through the impatient passengers.

There were but few of these. A labourer with a pair of kids, one lodged under each of his elbows, their startled faces peering uncertainly out into the light, attested to the agricultural character of the place. A young clergyman, bespectacled and high-foreheaded, with a superfluous umbrella dragging at his feet, directed the passerby’s attention to a church—round-towered and built of miscellaneous stone—poking up above a file of distant elm trees. Behind them came a girl of perhaps twenty, stumbling over an oblong box, rust-coloured and bound with twine. This she was attempting to propel before her, rather in the way that a brewer’s man drives a barrel. She wore a faded brown dress and a calico jacket too warm for the day, and her burden, together with a faint nervousness about her face and in the movements of her hands, suggested a servant bidden to her new situation. It was a plump face, rather pinched at the nose and with wary eyes, a trifle sullen when in repose yet capable of a warm expressiveness when brought to laughter. She was laughing now, the porter having asked if she wished to leave the bundle she carried strapped around her shoulders with her box. Both, he ventured, could travel in the donkey cart that came down from the Hall each evening to fetch parcels.

“Is it far?” she asked. “Only I should rather walk than wait for the cart.”

The young man regarded her favourably out of pale, watery eyes.
“Not what you would call far. That is, if you are used to walking and don’t mind keeping off the roads.”

“I am used to walking,” the girl replied, with an odd solemnity not perhaps demanded by the question.

“Two or three miles, then, if you keep your wits about you.”

He would have spoken further, but the stationmaster, who stood taking tickets along the platform, had his eye upon him, so he contented himself with a vague little gesture of his hands in the direction of the church. “There’s a gate beyond the trees.”

She thanked the man and strolled along the platform, gazing across the low-lying fields and the strew of houses from the nearby town, still deliberating whether she should leave her bundle with the box. The last of the passengers had by now departed—she could see the figure of the clergyman hastening along the upland path towards the trees—and the stationmaster, his duty all done, stood almost forlornly by the platform’s edge, his eye fixed on the horizon of pale sky and far-off hedgerows. Unfamiliar with her surroundings, her sensibilities yet more aroused by the novelty of her position, she was struck by the silence of the place, the low, brooding hills before her and the faint oppressiveness of the early evening heat. There was dust in the air, borne from the chalk road that flanked the station approach, and she stopped for a moment feeling the motes rise against her skirts. Only the church clock, striking the hour across the empty fields, stirred her from her reverie. Seven o’clock! And the letter bidding her to arrive by eight! She must make haste. Abruptly, she swung the bundle down from her shoulders and, settling it in her arms—these were muscular and spoke of much early labour—set off in the direction recommended by her guide.

She was twenty years old and coming to Easton Hall. Of these facts she was sure, the one through frequent study of the dates inscribed on the flyleaf of her mother’s Bible, the other through Lady Bamber. Of Easton Hall she knew nothing, as this was not a subject Lady Bamber had wished to pursue. For a moment Lady Bamber’s face—aquiline and with infinitely wrinkled skin—drifted into her imagination, only to be gathered up and lost in the dust motes that beat against her skirt and the flat horizon. She was beyond the level-crossing now and approaching the incline over which the clergyman had hastened five
minutes before. To her right lay a row of houses, newly built, with uniform gardens and gates looking out onto the unmade road. These finally conquered her confusion of spirit, banished all thoughts of Lady Bamber and the three hours’ journey she had just accomplished, and brought her mind back to earth. She knew these villa houses, for she had worked in others like them. They were the kind of houses in which only one servant is kept, to whom, consequently, all the duties of the establishment are devolved. Unsummoned, the voices of half a dozen of her former mistresses rose to clamour in her head. “Esther! Have you nothing better to do that you should sit there in idleness?” “Esther! There is Mr. John calling for his shaving water, surely?” “Esther! Be quick and take this letter to the post.” Esther had not resented these intrusions on her time, for she knew that they were occasioned by necessity and that the women drove her hard because they were driven hard in their turn. Nonetheless, she was glad to be rid of them.

But Easton Hall! Easton Hall would be different. And its vast remove from any situation she had yet occupied awakened in her both an unwonted confidence and an instinctive dread. There would be a butler, she supposed, and a cook, and a parlourmaid who dressed in the zenith of fashion, walked with the footman to church and looked with scorn on a kitchenmaid with twelve pounds a year. And yet twelve pounds a year was a fabulous sum of money to one who had worked for seven and been grateful for eight, and again, unbidden, the image of a dress rose before her, to be bought with the surplus of her first quarter’s wages, once the greater part had been remitted home.

Comforted by these thoughts, Esther wandered on through a sombre, tree-lined avenue that skirted the back of the church. The bundle, which contained two or three books given to her by her mother, a pair of pattens and her second-best dress, had already become irksome to her, and she put it down at her feet and rested for a while, casting her gaze through the trees to the fields and hummocks of land beyond. A black, ugly bird, whose true name she did not know but called a cadder, flew out of a hedge, and she followed the line of its flight with her eye. She had come, she saw, to a point in the path at right angles to the churchyard, and some instinct prompted her to step inside the wicker gate and examine the stones.

There was not, indeed, a great deal to see—a fresh grave newly dug by the sexton, in the shadow of the tower, with the digging tools still laid out on the grass, and a few bunches of parched flowers—but the place had an attraction to the girl and she roamed here and there for a moment or two, remarking such peculiarities in the names of the deceased as took her fancy. Seeing that the hands of the church clock had now reached a quarter past the hour, she seized her bundle once more and marched back fiercely to the avenue, where the path veered round to the right and a tall young man lounged by the fence palings smoking a pipe.

“Please, sir, is this the way to Easton Hall?”

“Certainly it is. Through the stables over there, and beyond the trees.” Glancing down, his eye took in her perspiring face, the shabby dress and the squat bundle clasped in her arms. “But see here! I’m going that way myself. You must let me carry your things.”

Esther gratefully surrendered her load, which the young man swung over his shoulder with no apparent effort. In doing so he rose up to his full height, which, she saw, was even greater than she had first thought.

“Gracious, but you’re a tall one.”

The young man smiled at the compliment. “Six feet two in my stockings. But then footmen’s always tall, ain’t they?”

“Are you one of the footmen at the Hall?”

He smiled again, but less humorously. “
The
footman. There’s only one. Though old Randall, the butler, will wait at table sometimes when there’s company. But it’s a poor thing to be in a house where only one footman is kept. I shall be off presently, I daresay, to London or somewhere. Mr. Dixey knows my feelings and says he won’t stand in my way, which is decent of him, I must say, for there’s some masters you know as will move heaven and earth to keep a footman in his place.”

Awed by this display of vigour and, it seemed to her, sophistication, Esther said nothing. The footman—his name was William, he allowed—she judged to be a year or so older than herself. Looking at him now, she saw a sallow, bony face, a shade too small for the broad shoulders on which it sat, with a pair of dark eyes whose glint suggested that you would do very well if their owner were friendly but less
so if he had cause to distrust you. They were walking now across a long, low hillside path, where amidst gaps in the trees the flat Norfolk plain ran on in the distance, the air growing cooler and with a faint intimation of approaching dusk. As they went, William pointed out various sites of interest to those who worked at the Hall: a certain meadow in which a servants’ picnic had taken place the previous summer, a stream from which capital perch could be taken, a particular field in which Sarah the parlourmaid had fallen into peril with a bull. “It was a sight to see,” William explained, laughing. “Her running off over the grass with her skirts pulled near unto her ears!” Not quite liking this exultation in another’s misfortune, but perceiving that he meant only to be friendly, Esther smiled gravely back.

“They said at the station that the cart would bring up my box later on.”

“The cart isn’t going to the station tonight—that is, I don’t believe so. But Sarah will help you make do. She’s a good sort, is Sarah. But what brings you to Easton, eh?”

His interest was of such a frank and ingenuous kind that her natural reserve was swiftly conquered.

“It was Lady Bamber that got me my place.”

“Lady Bamber! I knows that name. An eye that you could take out and hammer on an anvil if so that you had a mind. Comes to stay in the winter and makes no end of trouble. Tips bad, too.” He bent down to prise out a stick from the hedgerow and balanced it thoughtfully on his palm. “Can you read, Esther?”

“Certainly I can.” The thought that he might be making fun of her caused her to knit her brows in anger. “Why should I not?”

“I meant no offence. Truly now.” He flung the stick high in an arc above his head and watched it fall. “Sarah can’t read. She can’t, though. She sits and looks at the stories in
Bow Bells
, but it’s all shamming, really it is. She can’t read no better than one of Mr. Dixey’s dogs. Sarah and me are great friends,” he went on, in answer to Esther’s speculative glance. “Friends, that is—and no more. But if you can read you will be starting on the right foot, for Mrs. Wates, the cook, is always wanting the maids to read to her.”

This glut of information—Sarah the parlourmaid, Mrs. Wates the
cook, Lady Bamber’s visits—served to depress Esther’s spirits, for the protocols of which they spoke seemed altogether beyond her understanding. Yet they awakened in her a curiosity about her new situation which she was anxious to satisfy.

“Who is Mr. Dixey?”

“Mr. Dixey? Why…Mr. Dixey is the squire. Owns all the land hereabouts.” He swept his arm over the plain visible beyond the hedge. “But you mustn’t fear about him. Regular recluse he is. Shuts himself up in his room for weeks on end. Or wanders about the grounds as if there were no one there but himself.”

Young as she was, Esther had distinct ideas as to how gentlemen should manage their estates. “Don’t he take no interest in the place then?”

“Not he! There’s an agent to manage it, you know. They say he has lost ever so much money, but that’s not footman’s business. Old Randall would know, I daresay. He and the master is very thick, sometimes.”

But Esther was still puzzling over the notion of a squire who took no interest in his land. “But what does he care about then?”

“Oh, he’s a great naturalist, you know. There’s a stuffed bear in his study and cases full of eggs and such things, and none of the maids likes it a bit. I shouldn’t care to go in there myself after dark, when the lamps are out. Here! We’re coming to the house right enough.”

She saw that the hedge path whose line they had been following for the past half hour had now begun to descend through high banks of summer foliage, knots and clumps of tall trees beyond which outbuildings and stable yards could now be glimpsed. After the heat of the level path, this downward progress was very pleasant to her: there were great outcrops of swollen ferns that seemed to conceal sunless woodland glades, dense interiors far below the tree canopy. The effect of this new landscape, and of William, who continued to talk of Mr. Dixey’s dogs, of a great hound he had bred for the chase in Europe, four feet high, of all kinds of things both strange and familiar, was to produce in her a sense of dissociation, so that she might have been walking into some magical faery land altogether detached from the world she knew. The sensation was such that she clutched anxiously at the rough cloth of her dress and the pointing
of her calico jacket as if to reassure herself that some vestige of the old world had come with her.

But it was so: the man at her side was simply another servant from the hall; her mother’s books were in the bundle that he carried; the railway station lay three miles down the path behind her. There was no mystery, except that she comprehended that a certain part of her life—the life of nagging women in suburban villas, her mother’s cottage and her brothers and sisters—was at an end, and that a new one whose lineaments she could barely discern was about to begin. Humbled by this realisation, she found herself taking a sharp, obtrusive interest in the unfamiliar territory into which they now passed, in the curve of the tall poplar trees that hung over the path and the plumes of smoke rising from unseen chimneys in the middle distance.

“What are those sheds beyond the stable yard? There seem a great many of them.”

“Them? That’s where Mr. Dixey keeps his dogs. You’ll hear them in a moment, I daresay, as we go past. But it’s not a place to linger. Jack Barclay, as was footman before me, lost his place on account of interfering with the master’s dogs. But look here, it’s past eight, and Mrs. Wates is just the sort to make trouble over a lost half hour. You had better say the train was late.”