"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 4
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"The agent, miss. The steward. He come after the old duke died, and old Mrs. Pettifer, that was housekeeper, died the winter after, God rest her. And there's been no housekeeper since—only Mr. Grimshaw that has the running of everything and the keys of everything.""There is no housekeeper?" Juliet looked at the smoking range, the green beef, the two overworked maids. "In a house this size?""There's Mr. Grimshaw," said Mrs. Tolley, as though that were the same thing or the opposite of a thing; she could not have said which.Juliet was a companion, not a housekeeper. Her whole employment was to sit with an old woman four hours a day. But she had been raised to run a household: a small one, a manor of no account, but run it she had from the age of 14 after her mother died. She knew what a linen press should smell like; she knew that beef should not come in green; she knew, above all, that a house where one man held all the keys and answered to no one was a house being robbed.She said none of this. She was here to be invisible. She folded her hands and learned the names of the servants and sat with the Dowager Duchess and held her tongue.Holding her tongue lasted until the third week.The Dowager Duchess of Northwell was named Petronella, and she was 81, and she missed nothing. She sat by the fire in the small south parlor, which was the one warm room in the house, with a shawl the color of a pigeon's breast and a spine like a poker. Her hands had gone to knots with age; her eyes had not gone anywhere at all.On the first afternoon, she looked Juliet up and down for a full half-minute, and then said:"You are not what I expected.""I am sorry to disappoint, Your Grace.""I did not say I was disappointed. I said you were not what I expected. There is a great difference, girl, and if you mean to get on in this world, you had best learn to hear it." She tapped the arm of her chair. "Sit. Not there. There, where I can see your face. My grandson tells me you gentled the gray in the rain on your first hour.""The mare was only frightened, ma'am.""The mare," said the dowager, "has put two grooms to bed since Michaelmas and was to be shot on Tuesday. Do not tell me she was only frightened as though you had picked up a dropped glove." She studied Juliet with those unclouded eyes. "That mare belonged to my granddaughter, to Cecily—my grandson's sister. She is dead."Juliet went still. "I am very sorry, ma'am."