"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 6
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
Juliet knew of the wager within three days, because a woman who has been invisible all her life hears a great deal that louder people miss. She did not resent it; she thought it, on the whole, a very sensible bet. She had made it herself, in a manner of speaking, when she signed her false direction and came north with 15 shillings and a snaffle bit.She did not mean to win it by argument; she had never in her life won anything by argument. She meant to win it the only way she trusted: that way was to be, quietly and without fuss, indispensable. One morning, the house would wake and find it could no longer remember how it had managed before her. The wager would be forgotten because the question it asked had stopped meaning anything at all.So she did not scold, and she did not command, and she did not once remind anyone that the Dowager Duchess had given her authority. She simply took hold of the things nobody else would touch, one after another, and did them well, and let the doing be its own argument.She began with the still room, because a still room is a house's honesty in miniature: she scoured it; she turned out three years of spoiled preserves and mouse-fouled flour. At the very back stood a set of shelves that had plainly been Cecily's own—neat labels in a young woman's round hand, cordials and rosewater, all gone to ruin now, all untouched since April. Juliet cleaned each jar and kept the labels; it seemed to her a small wrong to throw away the handwriting of the dead.She moved to the linen: she had the maids strike every press, then wash and turn and mend the whole of it. Where sheets had rotted through, she cut them down for bandages and dusters, so that nothing was wasted.She had the flue swept, which cost eight pence, and stopped the kitchen smoking for the first time in a year.She sent the green beef back to the butcher in Marrow with a note in her own hand—courteous and immovable—and the next beef came in red.And she began quietly to keep the kitchen book herself.It was a small book, a cook's book: what came in at the door, what was paid for it week by week. The dowager had given her that much authority, and no more. But a house is a single body, and if you have your finger on one vein, you can feel the whole heart.Juliet wrote down what the butcher was truly paid, and what the fishmonger was truly paid, and what the chandler and the corn factor were truly paid, in the plain figures that the tradesmen gave her at the door. And she noticed, within a fortnight, that her figures did not agree with the house.