National Trust

by Philip Ardagh

  70 In most households, a maid could not marry and remain a servant. This meant that they’d usually need a husband who earned enough money to support them. They still end up doing all the housework, and the cooking too, AND have children, so quitting service didn’t mean an easy life!

  This morning, when I were feeding Plump some tasty crumbs I’d saved for him, we talked about the necklace.

  “You’re the clever one,” I says. “Any more of your detective-type thoughts?’

  “Well,” says Plump, “I reckons the thief stuck the necklace up the chimney in an ’urry, plannin’ to go back to it as soon as possible. But never did.”

  “What stopped ’em?”

  “That’s the important question,” says Plump, his beady eye looking into mine, unblinking. “If it were Nelly, she’d have ’ad no trouble takin’ it another day.”

  “So it’s someone what was able to go into the room that evening but ain’t been able to go into it since…” I says.

  And I thought. And I thought. And I thought some more.

  “JACK!” says me and Plump at the exact same time.

  “What if it ain’t nothing to do with not being able to get in that particular room but not bein’ able to get nowhere?” I says. “What if Jack slipped into the room, hid the necklace plannin’ to come back for it later… but went and broke his leg that same evening? He can hardly climb the stairs, walks at a snail’s pace, and could never explain why he was in that part of the house if he was caught!”

  “Ssssh!” said Plump from his window-ledge perch. “Keep yer voice down. If anyone hears you they’ll think you’re natterin’ to yourself like an inmate in Bedlam!71”

  I sighed. “But I can’t imagine Jack bein’ no thief.” I couldn’t. I really couldn’t.

  “It’s a good thought, though,” Plump says. “And the thing about being a good thief is not lookin’ like a thief. If you looked like a thief then you wouldn’t be a very good one.”

  I weren’t about to argue with a pigeon. Not one as smart as Plump!

  “I suppose,” I says. “But if it were Jack what took the necklace, why didn’t he just slip it in a pocket and then hide it somewhere out of the room?”

  Plump bobbed his pigeon head a few times. “Footmen’s clothes are tight,” he said. “I’ve watched them in the driveway. Nowhere to hide a necklace in them knee-britches of theirs. Under the tailcoat, perhaps?” He ruffled his feathers. “Who knows?”

  But I reckon he’s wrong. I reckon Jack’s a good sort through and through.

  There’s extra work today because we have visitors at Lytton House. The master’s brother, a major in the Indian army72, has arrived with his wife and children – two daughters, Miss Anuria and Miss Jade. What’s most exciting, though, is the manservant travelling with them. He is quite the tallest man I’ve ever seen and he has a turban on his head – more impressive than any mind-reader’s73 at the music hall74 – what makes him even taller still. His skin is the colour of tea and his eyes are a gold brown. And his clothes? They ain’t like the clothes of any servant I’ve ever seen. They look like they’re made of the finest silk with threads of many different colours. He looks like a maharaja in a fairy tale. His name is Mahesh.

  He ate with us in the servants’ hall this evening, but didn’t eat what we ate. Cook told me that he is something called a vegetarian. That’s someone who don’t eat meat. Not because he can’t afford it, like many folks I know, but through choice. Imagine that? His religion, says Cook, means that eating animals is wrong ’cause they start off as living beings like you and me. When Mr Pritchard said grace before we ate, Mahesh had his head bowed, all polite like, out of respect for us Christians, but he did not say ‘amen’. Mr Harris, the master’s gentleman’s gentleman, sat next to him and tried to engage him in polite conversation, but Mahesh spoke very little. He wasn’t rude, like, just a very still and silent kind of man.

  I ain’t seen the master’s brother, Major Kirby-Trott, ’cause my job is to get me work done out of the way of the family, but Long Johns says he was actually wearin’ his uniform when he arrived, and has a moustache like that of a walrus he once saw at the Zoological Gardens in London!75 He sounds VERY grand. (The Major, I mean, not the walrus.)

  71 Bedlam was the nickname for the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, a lunatic asylum. It had a terrible reputation for the treatment of its inmates. By Victorian times, efforts were made to treat them more like patients but it was still a shocking place. The word ‘bedlam’ has come to mean ‘a scene of uproar and confusion’.

  72 India was described as ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire; its greatest prize. In fact, the Koh-i-Noor diamond – one of the biggest in the British crown jewels – actually originally came from India. Queen Victoria had it set in a broach. It was added to a crown after her death.

  73 Many Victorians performing mind-reading or magic acts would pretend to be from ‘mystical’ countries, such as India or China, dressing in ‘foreign-looking’ clothes and even colouring their skin and adopting fake accents.

  74 Music hall theatres had a whole variety of acts from comics, dancers and musicians to ventriloquists and contortionists. They were cheap to get into and (supposedly) not visited by ‘polite society’. The audiences would shout, jeer and even throw things.

  75 London Zoo, was founded in 1826, part of the Zoological Society of London. It opened to the public in 1847.

  This has been a most

  day. Mr Sherlock Holmes himself couldn’t have done better. The master’s brother, Major Kirby-Trott, has asked to use a certain room as his study while he’s here, not wanting to do his correspondence and suchlike in the family library. Apparently, he dictates his letters to Mahesh rather than writes them himself. ‘Dictates’ means that he says what he wants to say in his letters and Mahesh writes them for him – like I does with Plump for this diary. (Never knew I was dictating!) Turns out that Mahesh can write better English than what most of us downstairs can – except, of course, for Mr Pritchard – and in the most beautiful writing too. The only writing I’ve ever done is with chalk on a slate or in pencil on a scrap of paper, and once with a dip-pen76, but Mahesh uses something called a fountain pen77. It doesn’t spurt like a fountain – though I’d bet I’d get blotches and splodges and the like all over me AND the paper if I tried – but the ink flows regular from it and, in Mahesh’s hand, the end result is

  Anyways, I’m getting ahead of meself. I was ordered to assist Mahesh in preparing the room as a study. I was told to gather together any papers I found with writing on them and put them aside for the master, and to provide plenty of paper with the Lytton House letterhead78, as well as make sure that inkwells were full and the like.

  I wasn’t sure why me. I mean, yes, the room is on the ground floor where all the rooms what are my responsibility are found. But why couldn’t Mahesh do it? Not that I minded. I like a change. I heard poor old Jack use a word the other day when he were asked what it’s like being on unpaid light duties, what with his broken leg. He told ’em it was “monotonous”. And when I asked Cook what he meant, she told me it means doing the same boring stuff day in, day out… which just about describes me life.

  So there I was tidying away, when I noticed something odd about the fireplace. There was coal laid out and ready to burn should it be needed, but it had not been lit. But lying on top of the unused coal were a fragment of paper, charred at the edges. Someone musta set fire to a bigger piece and dropped it in the fireplace to burn and this was all that remained of it.

  I picked it up and on it were the words:

  and underneath were some numbers which I reckon to be a date.

  Now, as you knows, dear diary, reading ain’t my strong point, but I knows pounds, shillings and pence when I sees them, and I also likes looking in them department store catalogues of clothes, which has everything from our maids’ uniforms to the finest dresses79. So I knows the word lace and I knows the word neck… and I knows when you put them to
gether you get necklace. This burnt scrap of paper was about a necklace and not just any necklace, a jade necklace. (Spelled like Major Kirby-Trott’s younger daughter.) And the only jade necklace I’ve ever heard talk of in these parts is the missing one now found! And I knows the word soap well enough. I’ve seen it stamped on the great big bars that Ms McNamara has us slice into smaller cakes of soap. But put all them words together and what’s it all about?

  I slipped the paper in the pocket under me pinny. This was a

  if ever there was one!

  A moment later, Mahesh came in carrying a chair. He carried it by its back while remaining totally straight-backed and head front like them pictures of them guards what guard the Queen80.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Mahesh,” I says.

  “Just Mahesh, please Jane,” says Mahesh. He knows my name. I feel my face going pink.

  I wanted to say something. To talk to him. But I wasn’t sure what. “How d’ya like England?” I says.

  “This is my first time here,” he says. “It is very beautiful but most cold.”

  “Cold?” I says. “It gets much colder than this. Do you have trees in India?”

  He smiled and looked even more handsome. “We do, Jane. We have trees in the jungle and in the forests, and in the plantations to grow timber for the Empire. At the logging camps, much of the felled trees are carried by elephants.”

  My eyes widened. “Elephants? Have you seen an elephant?” I says.

  “Many elephants,” he says, “but only one tiger. It attacked my village when I was a boy.”

  I was about to ask him more when his master, the Major, came into the room. The Major totally ignored me as if I weren’t there.

  “Happy with the arrangement, Mahesh?” he says.

  “Most satisfied, Major. Jane has been most helpful.”

  “Good. Good,” said the Major, not even turning to look at me.

  Long Johns was right about that moustache. It looks like the brush from me dustpan-and-brush!

  I hurried back below stairs, the charred piece of paper safely tucked out of sight.

  When I had the chance, I showed the scrap of paper to Jack. I didn’t just show it to him ’cause he’s had more schooling than most, or better schooling at least. I showed it to him to prove to meself that I trusts him.

  “Whatcha reckon this is?” I says.

  He took the piece of burnt paper and studied it carefully.

  “It looks like the remains of a receipt to me,” he says. “That word opy is probably actually copy an’ I reckon rom is probably from.” His eyes widened. “You know what you’ve found, Jane?”

  I nodded, slowly. “Someone paid to have a copy of the jade necklace made out of something called soap stone!”

  “Which means that the necklace the sweep found up the chimney ain’t the original that was stolen!” says Jack.

  “Keep your voice down!” I urges him. “The thief musta stolen the jade necklace, had a cheap copy made, then sold the original and put the copy there to be found so the search is called off!”

  “That’s ingenious, that is,” says Jack. “But what do you do now?”

  I stuffed the charred receipt away again. “I ain’t got no idea!” I says.

  At supper in the servants’ hall that evening, I turned to Mr Pritchard, who was seated at the head of the table and says, “Mr Pritchard. Would you please tell me what soap stone is?”

  “Soap stone,” says Mr Pritchard, “is a pleasing greenish stone often carved into ornaments. Mr Kirby-Trott has a collection of such objects, of the smaller variety, that he collected in his childhood: carved frogs and the suchlike. I suspect you are familiar with it, Mahesh?”

  The beautiful Indian looked up and nodded, “Oh, yes, Mr Pritchard,” he says. “We have much soap stone in India, and some very fine carvers.”

  “Why do you ask, Jane?”

  “I’d heard talk of it,” I says, “and were wonderin’ if it ’ad to do with soap, Mr Pritchard.”

  Mr Pritchard smiled. “No,” he says, and the conversation turned to another matter.

  76 Quill pens, made from feathers, were still used in Victorian times, but less and less as her reign continued. Then came dip-pens, with nibs, at the end of a handle, which – like a quill – could be dipped in ink.

  77 Fountain pens (where ink could be sucked up into a little rubber reservoir in the pen itself, from which it flowed through the nib) were mass-produced by companies, such as Waterman, in the 1880s, but were not cheap.

  78 Victorian house guests in grander houses would be provided with headed stationary and envelopes.

  79 A huge number of household items and clothing could be bought from catalogues, from pots and pans to grass seed. These did not contain photographs but black and white drawings (etchings) of the items.

  80 Queen Victoria was guarded by the Queen’s Guard on foot, with their distinctive red uniform and tall bearskin hats called ‘busbies’, and by the Queen’s Life Guard on horseback. The same regiments guard Buckingham Palace today. (When the monarch is a king, they are called the King’s Guard and King’s Life Guard.)

  Today, all me detective work was thrown upside-down and inside-out. I were nowhere nearer knowing who the actual thief is, but at least I’d worked out what they’d done. At least, I thought I had. Until I saw Cook’s calendar on the kitchen wall. I don’t really pay much attention to dates. Every day’s the same to me except Sunday, when we go to church and have some time off, which is more than some servants get. But seeing them numbers made me think of the numbers on the bottom of the receipt. Not the pounds, shillings and pence, but the date. And when I looked at the date it looked like it was from a while back.

  I went and found Jack, his injured leg up on a chair, polishing silver napkin rings.

  “When were that?” I asks Jack, pointing at the date on the charred scrap of paper.

  He peered closely at the paper, the edge of the numbers blackened by burning. “Blimey!” he says. “That were over a year ago. Why didn’t I see that before?”

  “A year?” I says with a gasp. “That makes no sense! The necklace were only stolen a few weeks’ back!”

  Jack shook his head. “That’s beyond me,” he says.

  My head were in all of a spin. Turns out I ain’t such a good detective after all.

  I were dusting in the library this morning when I looked out of the window to see the Major’s wife and daughters playing on the top lawn. I did me best to keep busy and keep watching them at the same time. The girls look so pretty in their white, lacy dresses and their hair in ringlets. How grand it must be to be the daughter of a lady and a gentleman!

  Mahesh told Long Johns and Long Johns told the rest of us that the Major has two houses in India. A house in the hills which is cooler in summer and a house on the outskirts of some town or other what they live in the rest of the year. And they has an army of servants, all of them Indian except for a governess for the girls. Their governess is an Englishwoman called Miss Mummery. Mahesh ‘spoke in the strictest of confidence’ to Long Johns – who immediately told the rest of us – that Miss Mummery ain’t a lady suited to the Indian climate and has to change her wardrobe81 two or three times a day!82 Imagine that. To be honest, I CAN’T imagine such heat.

  I’m not sure what the Major’s girls will do with all that learning because he’ll want to marry them off to some rich gentlemen, where they can be showered with gifts and look pretty all day, and make daisy-chains and drink tea, while THEIR servants do everything for them from morning ’til night.83 Still, it must be good to read whole books and not worry about worldly things, I suppose.

  81 Not a wardrobe as in wooden cupboard, but her clothes!

  82 The suggestion is that she sweated badly, though it wouldn’t have been polite to say so in Victorian society. There’s a saying from the 1880s that ‘horses sweat, men perspire and women glow.’ (Scientists have proven that most men sweat more quickly than most women.)

  83 The la
dy of the house (in the case of Lytton House, Mrs Kirby-Trott) was responsible for discussing arrangements such as menus, which bedrooms to put guests in, choice of linen, and so on with the housekeeper. She may also have had an interest in household accounts.

  I heard the followin’ conversation not an hour since and had to make an excuse to go up to me bedroom to dictate it to Plump before it went out of me mind. It is

  important:

  “Sometimes,” says Mr Kirby-Trott to his brother Major Kirby-Trott, “the end justifies the means.”

  “It is a neat solution, I’ll admit,” says the Major. “But to upset Claire…”

  (Claire is Mrs Kirby-Trott, remember, dear diary?)

  “She’d be far more upset if we had to close off more rooms and let more servants go,” says the master.

  That, dear diary, is a conversation what I heard the two gentlemen have as they walked past me on the landing, as I stood back in an alcove to let ’em pass. That’s the thing about us servants, the family is so used to ignoring us they probably forget we has ears! And that is also why I am feeling so

  of myself and BURSTIN’ to tell someone.

  It’s like putting the final piece of one of Master William’s jigsaw puzzles into place, and getting the whole picture.

  Here’s what me DETECTING has led to.

  • Mrs Kirby-Trott don’t wear her jade necklace much because it is so valuable, so it’s locked away. (If it was mine, I’d wear it every day!)