‘Yes, and fortunately I put a few bottles of the Madeira and port into the baggage that is on the chaise. The rest will be coming with the carrier.’
Bless John for having left her his wine cellar. An unconventional thing to leave to a woman, but they had enjoyed a glass of wine together so often. Of course, it was only one of the numerous scandalous things that could be laid at her door. And his relatives had not hesitated to enumerate every one.
This time it was Jethro who pulled her out of painful reverie. ‘What gentleman is it, Miss Hester?’
‘No mere gentleman…an earl, no less.’ Hester pushed the card across to him. Jethro read it, eyes wide.
‘You won’t have Susan answering the door, will you, Miss Hester? Not in the afternoon?’
‘No, Jethro. A female servant in the afternoon? That would never do.’ Hester repressed a smile. ‘I shall require you to put on your best suit and be the butler.’
His wide grin was not in the slightest reduced by the intelligence that, as well as setting the bedchambers and kitchen to rights today, they must all work tomorrow to clean the hall and make one of the front reception rooms decent before their visitor arrived.
‘It will take all the furniture we can find to furnish up the one room.’ Hester bit her lip thoughtfully. ‘The carrier’s cart will not arrive tomorrow and what there is here is sparse, to put it mildly.’
‘And old-fashioned.’ Jethro’s ambitions in life caused him to be surprisingly aware of such details.
‘Good quality, though, and very feminine. Perhaps the last person to live here was an elderly single woman, or a widow.’
Further speculation was cut short by the arrival of the post chaise in the yard. Susan Wilmott—plump, good natured and just now looking delighted to have arrived—jumped down and held up her hands to assist an older woman. Miss Prudhome, Hester’s companion of two weeks’ standing, and decidedly green in the face, tottered from the vehicle and into Hester’s arms. ‘Never again, Hester dear, not if I have to walk a hundred miles! Never again in one of those yellow bounders.’
‘There, there.’ Hester patted her back while trying to ignore the postilion’s rolling eyes. ‘You made very good time considering,’ she added placatingly to the man. ‘Jethro, show the postilion where he can water his horses while we unload the chaise.’
Hester placed her companion firmly in a chair in the kitchen with a glass of water and joined her two staff to bring in the contents of the post chaise.
Susan dumped an armload on the table and looked around her with interest. ‘Nice house, Miss Hester, but it’s awful big for just two staff. Are you going to hire in anyone else?’
‘I hope so, Susan.’ Hester lowered her end of a hamper of house wares. ‘But I need to find out how much I must spend to get the house in order first and then I will see what we can afford. Until then we will just keep the downstairs and three bedchambers in order.
‘Now, you find yourself some luncheon and then we will decide what to do first.’ She regarded Miss Prudhome dubiously. ‘Do you think you could manage a little luncheon, Prudy?’
A pitiful groan greeted the question. Miss Prudhome was thin, forty-eight years of age and, Jethro was unkind enough to remark, closely resembled a hen. ‘One of those worried-looking brown ones, you know, Miss Hester.’
Hester did know, and unfortunately could not get the image out of her head whenever she looked at her recently engaged companion with her pointed nose and anxious little eyes behind precarious pince-nez.
She was, in fact, a governess but, as Hester’s limited budget had ruled out all the superior companions who presented themselves in answer to her advertisement, she was the only affordable candidate. Her halting tale of being dismissed from her employment of ten years because the youngest boy had gone to school wrung Hester’s kind heart and she had accepted her application against her better judgement. She had even yielded to Miss Prudhome’s wistful request that she call her ‘Prudy’.
Jethro marched in, arms loaded with broom, mop and bucket and clanked past. ‘I’ll just get the worst of the mess sorted upstairs, Miss Hester, and light the fires.’
By seven o’clock the four of them were collapsed in a semi-circle of chairs by the range, which Jethro had managed to keep going, although with an ominously smoky chimney. ‘Full of nests, I guess,’ he observed. ‘I’d better find a sweep tomorrow and have all the fires done.’
‘Never mind,’ Hester said cheerfully. ‘We each have a comfortable bed to sleep in and a clean kitchen to cook and eat in. And tomorrow we can see to the hall and front room.’
Prudy twittered nervously, Susan sighed gustily and even Jethro looked a little daunted, presumably at the thought of all the other rooms, to say nothing of the garden, the stable yard and the outbuildings. But Hester felt nothing but peace and a sense of home. If she had been a cat she would have turned round several times and curled up in front of the fire with her tail over her nose; as it was she got to her feet, rolled up her sleeves and reached for a saucepan.
‘Dinner and bed for all of us. If we do not eat soon, we will be beyond it,’ she said bracingly. ‘You peel the potatoes, Jethro. Susan, shred some of that cabbage and slice the onions and I will fry up those collops of veal. Prudy, please lay the table and put some bricks in the lower oven to warm up for the beds.’
The meal was good, filling and savoury, and the eyes of her three companions were soon drooping. Hester sent Susan and Prudy to bed, each clutching a flannel-wrapped brick, assuring them she had no further need of them that night, and even Jethro was persuaded to take himself and his lantern off to his bed over the stables after faithfully checking the windows and front door.
Hester twisted the key in the back door after him, dragged the bolts across and gave the fire a final riddle before taking a chamber stick and making her way through the now-silent house.
The darkness closed in behind her softly like a velvet curtain as she climbed the stairs. There was no light from the other rooms. She hesitated on the threshold of her chamber, her eyes on the door leading to the dressing room. In the firelight it seemed to move.
The silence enclosed her, friendly no longer. ‘No,’ Hester said firmly. ‘This is my room and I am not going to be frightened by some broken glass and a stain on the wall.’
She marched over to the table by the chaise-longue and lit the candles in the three-branched stick that stood on it. Her own face reflected in the panes of glass in the unshuttered windows. It was the dark of the moon and only lights from the houses and cottages around the Green punctuated the night.
As she tried to pull the silk curtains closed they crumbled in her hands, rotten from years of neglect. On one window the shutters unfolded and closed easily enough, but on the other they would not shift, even at the cost of a broken fingernail. Hester shrugged; she would undress on the screened side of the room.
In her nightrail and shawl she bent to blow out the branched candlestick and found herself staring at that door again. Was she going to sleep or was she going to lie awake, staring at it in the dark and imagining goodness knows what?
Slowly Hester walked towards it, the single chamber stick in her hand, and finally turned the handle. ‘Oh, bless the boy!’ Jethro had swept and dusted. The glass was gone, the stained patch of wall gleamed newly white. The pearls had been collected up into a bowl on the dressing table and the doors of the presses were shut. He had even opened the window an inch and the chill air had driven away the musty smell. It was an empty, unthreatening room once more. He was a good lad, sensitive beyond his years sometimes. Hester smiled, recalling John’s doubts when she had returned home with her filthy waif. ‘You will regret it,’ he said, studying the lad with a cynical soldier’s eye, but she never had.
She drifted back to bed, reassured and suddenly too tired either to plan or to remember. As she snuggled under the sheets