by D. J. Taylor
“You are very punctual, Dunbar,” Mr. Dixey said. “It is not a week since I received your letter.”
“When goods are procurable, why, they should be delivered,” Dunbar remarked. “That is a principle for the retail trade, I take it.”
Pressing closer to the desk, Dewar gazed wonderingly at the paraphernalia that surrounded it. The bear he had anticipated and regarded only cursorily, but the great cabinets—some displaying pieces of stone, others with stuffed birds and animals set up in what seemed to him the most lifelike attitudes—captured his attention and he began to inspect them out of the corner of his eye. The movement drew Mr. Dixey’s gaze upon him for the first time.
“This gentleman is not your brother, Dunbar? I don’t believe I ever saw him before.”
“No indeed, sir. Why, William is laid up at Twickenham with a hacking cough. This is Mr. Dewar, as came recommended to me by an attorney with whom I have dealings, and has given great satisfaction.”
There was a small grey object on the desk, nestled in the delta formed by a pair of randomly cast books, which, as Dewar watched, came to life and, now revealed as a mouse, ran off towards Mr. Dixey’s bony hand, was scooped up by it and deposited in his pocket. Dewar was conscious that something in the room—he could not tell what—oppressed him, and to counter this feeling, perhaps even to distance himself from the transaction on which they were engaged, he found himself placing the casket squarely down on the lip of the desk. Picking up a pair of spectacles that lay atop a third book and settling them on his nose, Mr. Dixey bent forward to examine it. There was an eagerness about him, Dewar saw, that contrasted very markedly with the diffidence of his greeting.
Rolling the eggs from side to side in their bed of moss, he balanced one finally on the palm of his hand and balanced his forefinger upon it: “There are only two?”
“Two is difficult enough, sir,” Dunbar observed. “It is indeed. Why, there were two fellows, to my knowledge, that spent a week in Easter Ross not long back and came away with nothing. Besides, the folk there have turned cunning. They know the value of the things. The help’s not gratis, if you take my meaning.”
Looking at the old man as he peered over the desk, the spectacles balanced on the bridge of his nose, the egg in his hand, the light in his eyes, Dewar was aware that what oppressed him was Mr. Dixey. He looked out of the window, where a faint greyness had begun to fall over the late-afternoon sky and a wind had got up above the tops of the trees, and then back at the tuft on Mr. Dixey’s chin. There was a pat-pattering of footsteps above them and a noise that might or might not have been laughter.
“These will do very well,” Mr. Dixey said. “I am obliged to you, Dunbar.”
“When goods are delivered, they should be settled for,” Dunbar rejoined, in a tone that suggested there might previously have been some slight oversight in this department.
“And so they shall. See, the note is here in my hand. But there is another commission I should have you execute, if you are agreeable.”
“Oh, I am always agreeable. What is it?”
“Did you ever see a wildcat in these islands?”
“I saw one took in Lincolnshire twenty years ago. A great thing that fell out of a tree and set the keeper’s dog yammering into the bushes. The keeper himself, who was a man six feet tall, said he would not have cared to get in the way of it. And when we laid it out, it measured thirty inches from nose to tail. There are none of your farmyard tabbies that size, I’ll guess. But there are no wildcats left in Lincolnshire, nor anywhere else that I heard of.”
“But they could be looked for? In the Scots forests, say?”
“Oh, they could be looked for. Like the wolves. Looked for and not found. There was a gentleman shot a bustard the other day in Suffolk, and everyone said it was the last to be seen.”
Mr. Dixey nodded. If he was displeased by this impediment, he did not say so, but contented himself with removing his spectacles and polishing their lenses with a handkerchief. The tall footman that Dewar had seen on the stairs came beckoning at the door.
“You must excuse me. There is an urgent matter to which I must attend.”
Dewar found that the feeling of oppression had left him, that he stood not in the premises of some sinister theatrical showman but in a spare, angular chamber tenanted by an old man in black with a grey head who wheezed as he passed on his way to the door. Mr. Dixey and the tall footman disappeared immediately into the upper parts of the house. Dewar had a last glimpse of a pair of oddly truncated legs vanishing into shadow. Dunbar whistled crossly to himself as they negotiated the lower staircase and came again into the great hall.
“He’ll find no great cats in Lincolnshire. Not if he drew every wood from the Wash to the Humber, for they are all gone.” Thinking that some explanation was required for this access of temperament, he remarked, “A man gets tired of this work. I have been too long about it, I daresay.”
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.
V
ESTHER’S STORY
(I)
She 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 chu
rch—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 prev
ious 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.”