"Thriving, madam. She has discovered the flue ledge behind the scullery and sleeps on it like a duchess."
"Impertinence. Duchesses sleep cold at Ottershaw; it is the fashion."
The paring-knife wit, always, and always used kindly, or at least used on the deserving. Jacintha had learnt to know the mornings when grief had got in before breakfast and the wit came slower for it. She had been mistress of this house for fifty years. They had been good years and she said so plainly, which took more courage than mourning ever did: he had made her laugh in 1767 and was still doing it in December last, and a woman who had been laughing for fifty years did not intend to stop merely because the cause of it was gone. She wore her black straight-backed. She asked after the cat daily while officially deploring it.
It was Jacintha, setting down the saucer one bright morning, who gave the animal her standing in the household.
"No lodger stays at Ottershaw without paying rent, madam. You are three weeks in arrears."
The Dowager received this gravely. "Has she offered a note of hand?"
"She offered a dead shrew, madam. I declined it."
"Then the arrears mount."
And thereafter the arrears were inquired into at breakfast, solemnly, as an item of business, and the cat paid not a farthing and was kept anyway, and neither woman remarked on what that proved.
What the house itself was kept on was less comfortable. The old Duke had died in January, and the will Mr. Farrant produced was dated 1809, eight years stale. Title and entailed land to Clifford, as the patent and the family settlement required, and beyond the reach of any will. Every farthing the old Duke had been free to give — the funded money, the personal fortune, the unentailed farms — to his sister's son Mr. Cyril Farrant, the new Duke's first cousin, named sole executor into the bargain. His widow was left her jointure and that alone: the sum her marriage settlement had fixed on her in 1767, modest, fixed, and all she had. The dower house went to Cyril with the rest, and so did every shilling that had kept her household on its legs. On paper the widow of fifty years held a small fixed income and lost her establishment, and the man of business was master of the purse.
Griselda gave her verdict early, flatly, and to Farrant's face, which was her style. "The will is genuine, Cyril. I watched my husband sign things for fifty years and that is his hand. And the will is wrong. He had grown cool to you by Michaelmas last — I sat at table and watched him grow cool — and cool men do not leave fortunes. That paper misreads a man I knew better than his tailor did. You will tell me the law cares little for an old woman's reading of her husband, and you will be right, and we will both remember that I said it."
Farrant took it beautifully. He was eight-and-thirty, near-black hair, blue-black superfine cut in town, and a face that promised courtship and would read, much later, as a creditor's. "Dear aunt," he said, "grief must be allowed its arithmetic. Mine is humbler: the household must be put on a footing."
His cruelties all dressed as economy and walked abroad in daylight: the fires, the closed rooms, the pensioners struck off. At Michaelmas, he said, naming the quarter-day aloud at her own table, he would take the Home Farm under the will; the dower establishment would be consolidated; the resident companion reviewed.
"Reviewed," said Griselda, when he had bowed himself out. "I have been fifty years a duchess, child, and I have yet to be reviewed."
"Madam," said Jacintha carefully, "might the Duke—"
"My son," said the Dowager, "is the best man in this county. He has been shot at by the French and buried his dearest friend, and he cannot at present carry his voice across a room full of chairs. Those three facts live in the same house, child, and Cyril knows it better than anyone. Pour the tea."
Three parcels in a month had made silence feel less like tact than like taking, and so Jacintha thanked the cook that week, in passing, for the trimmings. The cook looked at her with honest bafflement, said the game larder was locked and Mr. Farrant kept an eye on the very bones of it, and asked what parcels. Jacintha begged her pardon and spoke of something else.
Someone provisioned the saucer; someone with keys, or standing, or nerve. She turned it over that night and then, deliberately, put it down. Some mercies die of being asked after. She let this one live.
In that cold-shouldered establishment there were two creatures fed by stealth and belonging nowhere: the cat at the scullery step, and the master of the house, who took his meals on trays in the west wing and was seen at windows. Kindness done in secret is still seen. The unwanted keep watch for one another, and always have.
The Duke began to be wrong about his hours. He had walked his lavender at six because he could not sleep, once; then it became twice; then it became a custom that neither of them named. Jacintha would come out with the saucer and find him at the far end of the rows, hat in hand; by the third week he came nearer, and by the fourth he stood over the flagstone while Gooseberry ate, ignoring them both magnificently.
"She has robbed the still-room again," Jacintha said one morning, by way of a state of the nation. "Half the box of spills gone since Sunday. The housemaid has laid an information against the mice."